American cities entered a new phase when, beginning in the 1950s, artists and developers looked upon a decaying industrial zone in Lower Manhattan and saw, not blight, but opportunity: cheap rents, lax regulation, and wide open spaces. Thus, SoHo was...

Improvisation rattles some listeners. Maybe they're even suspicious of it. John Coltrane's saxophonic flights of fancy, Jimi Hendrix's feedback drenched guitar solos, Ravi Shankar's sitar extrapolations – all these sounds seem like so much noodling o...

How to handle affirmative action is one of the most intractable policy problems of our era, touching on controversial issues such as race-consciousness and social justice. Much has been written both for and against affirmative action policies – espec...

"We're living in a sensitive age, Cuke, and I'm not altogether sure you're fully attuned to it". So says Irish-American politician Frank Skeffington – a cynical, corrupt 1950s mayor, and also an old-school gentleman who looks after the constituents o...

Since the founding in 1660 of the Royal Society, London, scientists engaging in experimental research have sought to establish a base for exploratory work in communities and their political institutions. This connection between science and the nation...

Long before Citizens United and modern debates over corporations as people, such organizations already stood between the public and private as both vehicles for commerce and imaginative constructs based on groups of individuals. In this book, John O'...

The concepts of gender, love, and family – as well as the personal choices regarding gender-role construction, sexual and romantic liaisons, and family formation – have become more fluid under a society-wide softening of boundaries, hierarchies, and...

Psychoanalysis and neurological medicine have promoted contrasting and seemingly irreconcilable notions of the modern self. Since Freud, psychoanalysts have relied on the spoken word in a therapeutic practice that has revolutionized our understanding...

Why must critics unmask and demystify literary works? Why do they believe that language is always withholding some truth, that the critic's task is to reveal the unsaid or repressed? In this book, Rita Felski examines critique, the dominant form of i...

After World War II, the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) began mass-producing radioisotopes, sending out nearly 64,000 shipments of radioactive materials to scientists and physicians by 1955. Even as the atomic bomb became the focus of Cold War anxi...