In 1956, Harry Belafonte's "Calypso" established a historic landmark in becoming the first LP to sell more than a million copies. For a few fleeting months, calypso music was the top selling genre in the US – it even threatened to supplant rock and r...

Within the past forty years, the field of phonology – a branch of linguistics that explores both the sound structures of spoken language and the analogous phonemes of sign language, as well as how these features of language are used to convey meaning...

"There are two schools: one that sings the sheen and hues, the necessary pigments and frankincense while the world dries and the other voice like water that seeks to saturate, erode, and boil... It ruins everything you have ever saved". "Spill" is a...

When we look at the cultural public sphere through the lens of digitalization, a paradoxical picture emerges. In some ways, the digital age seems to have brought the goals of the Enlightenment to their fullest fruition, giving us boundless and instan...

What does it mean to contemplate? In the Middle Ages, more than merely thinking with intensity, it was a religious practice entailing utter receptiveness to the divine presence. Contemplation is widely considered by scholars today to have been the hi...

In New York and London during World War I, the performance of lieder – German art songs – was roundly prohibited, representing as they did the music and language of the enemy. But as German musicians returned to the transatlantic circuit in the 1920s...

Sophie Taeuber-Arp was a quiet innovator whose fame has too often been yoked to that of her husband, Jean Arp. Over time, however, she has slowly come to be seen as one of the foremost abstract artists and designers of the twentieth century. The Swis...

The widespread understanding of language in the West is that it represents the world. This view, however, has not always been commonplace. In fact, it is a theory of language conceived by Plato, culminating in "The Sophist". In that dialogue Plato in...

Since it first appeared in 1960, "The Supreme Court Review" (SCR) has won acclaim for providing a sustained and authoritative survey of the implications of the Court's most significant decisions. SCR is an in-depth annual critique of the Supreme Cour...

From the minute it opened – on Christmas Day in 1865 – it was Chicago's must-see tourist attraction, drawing more than half a million visitors each year. Families, visiting dignitaries, even school groups all made trips to the South Side to tour the...