Category
Think Piece
by contributing editor Brooke Palmieri John Dee (1527-1609) dreaded the loss of his library decades before he died. In a diary entry from 24 November 1582 he recorded a nightmare in which his books were burned by a jealous rival…. Continue Reading →
by guest contributor David Loner As the first and only official post-graduate advisee of the celebrated Austrian thinker and Cambridge philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, Alice Ambrose (1906-2001) typified in her 1932-38 Ph.D. course the complex social experience interwar upper-middle-class women underwent… Continue Reading →
by contributing editor Carolyn Taratko The image of the farmer tilling his field is an enduring one; it evokes meaningful labor, ties to the natural world, and self-sufficiency. However, such images were not always interpreted this way. When Jean-François Millet’s… Continue Reading →
By guest contributor Mia D’Avanza A screen-printed poster with the familiar Coca-Cola logo, reading “Enjoy AZT”, greeted visitors to the recent show positive/negative: HIV/AIDS at NYU’s Tracey/Barry Gallery. The poster, produced for AIDS activist group ACT UP, alters the Coke logo… Continue Reading →
by contributing editor Daniel London
by contributing editor Erin McGuirl The story of the Whole Earth Catalog begins with an annotation. During the flight home from his father’s funeral in March of 1968, Stewart Brand (b. 1938) covered the endpapers of the economist and writer… Continue Reading →
by Madeline McMahon In the fifteenth century, a rash of treatises were written by Italian clerics ascribing local icons of the Madonna and Child to St. Luke. Manuscript treatises such as that by the Roman canon Giovanni Baptista not only… Continue Reading →
by guest contributor Zachary Levine What should we do when brilliant thinkers push their ideas in strange directions? Should we try to interpret their later work in the context of their earlier work, or vice versa? Should we reject their… Continue Reading →
by guest contributor Cynthia Houng “So the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have a factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely,… Continue Reading →
by guest contributor Steven McClellan What’s in a name? When I began thinking about writing a dissertation on the history of the Verein für Sozialpolitik (Association for Social Policy), I assumed that the largest problem would be related to the… Continue Reading →
