“There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it” (Shapin 1996, 1). So began Stephen Shapin’s The Scientific Revolution, a work, con-cise and smart, that embodied an approach to the history of science termed “the social construction of science.” Shapin argued that if we are going to talk about a “scientific revolution,” then we need to see it not …
Thailand’s Bhumibol Adulyadej, the only king ever born in the United States, came to the throne of his country in 1946 and at the time of his death, in October 2016, was the world’s longest serving monarch. The King Never Smiles, the first independent biography of Thailand's monarch, tells the unexpected story of Bhumibol's life and sixty-year rule—how a Western-raised boy came to be seen…
In classical mythology, Atlas carries the weight of the world and the star-studded sky on his shoulders. Much like his brother Prometheus, Atlas, a Titan, is punished by the victorious Olym-pian gods, led by Zeus, for siding with Kronos and the humans created by the Titans in the war against them. Prometheus is also notorious for having given humanity fire. Consequently, he…
The term "gender" was first distinguished from "sex" in the 1950s, when psychologists began to discuss the idea of "gender roles"--behaviors and responsibilities given to people by a society rather than flowing from their biology. Over the last two decades, transgender people have expanded our understanding of gender even further, introducing to the mainstream the concept of "gender identity," …
While politicians, entrepreneurs, and even school children could tell you that sustainability is an important and nearly universal value, many of them, and many of us, may struggle to define the term, let alone trace its history. What is sustainability? Is it always about the environment? What science do we need to fully grasp what it requires? What does sustainability mean for business? How ca…
Digital spaces are saturated with metaphor: we have pages, sites, mice, and windows. Yet, in the world of digital textuality, these metaphors no longer function as we might expect. Martin Paul Eve calls attention to the digital-textual metaphors that condition our experience of digital space, and traces their history as they interact with physical cultures. Eve posits that digital-textual metap…
An unexpected and enviable problem has emerged in the US: the existence of an excess of quality television series sometimes known as ‘peak TV’. The year 2015 beat the previous record with the transmission of more than four hundred titles. It is no wonder, then, that the special issue of Entertainment Weekly dated 18 September of that year, which provides a preview of t…
It should be more widely appreciated that literature is a kind of scientific tool that can be used to shed light on consciousness. The argument is that the richest description of the phenomenon of human experience come from our finest writers, who are capable of capturing moments in time in exquisite detail from multiple perspectives. In this view, there is no …
Since 1948, the study of human rights has been dominated by legal scholarship that has sought to investigate the development of human rights law, emerging jurisprudence, regional systems, the decisions and recommendations of human rights mechanisms and institutions and to a lesser extent the ‘compliance gaps’ between state commitments and actions. Even so, in all of these spheres there are …
Maya Puspa steps out of her home and salon with confidence and grace, narrowly avoiding the puddles that have transformed her lane into a muddy track. She smiles, arching her thin, penciled-on eyebrows as she turns to a group of elderly men gathered over a chessboard. It is her evening walk and, cheerily greeting the men, Maya strides out of her lane and onto a city street. Maya li…