Shannon Mattern, "A City Is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences" (Princeton UP, 2021)
Computational models of urbanism—smart cities that use data-driven planning and algorithmic administration—promise to deliver new urban efficiencies and conveniences. Yet these models limit our unders...
3 Jan 202541min
Fernando Domínguez Rubio, "Still Life: Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
How do you keep the cracks in Starry Night from spreading? How do you prevent artworks made of hugs or candies from disappearing? How do you render a fading photograph eternal—or should you attempt it...
3 Jan 202559min
Swethaa S. Ballakrishnen, "Accidental Feminism: Gender Parity and Selective Mobility Among India’s Professional Elite" (Princeton UP, 2021)
In India, elite law firms offer a surprising oasis for women within a hostile, predominantly male industry. Less than 10 percent of the country's lawyers are female, but women in the most prestigious ...
3 Jan 20251h 4min
Shannan Clark, "The Making of the American Creative Class: New York's Culture Workers and 20th-Century Consumer Capitalism" (Oxford UP, 2020)
During the middle decades of the twentieth century, the production of America’s consumer culture was centralized in New York to an extent unparalleled in the history of the United States. Every day te...
2 Jan 20251h 3min
Joanna Mizielińska, "Queer Kinship on the Edge?: Families of Choice in Poland" (Routledge, 2024)
Queer Kinship on the Edge? Families of Choice in Poland (Routledge, 2024) explores ways in which queer families from Central and Eastern Europe complicate the mainstream picture of queer kinship and f...
1 Jan 202544min
Oskar Jensen, "Vagabonds: Life on the Streets of Nineteenth-Century London" (The Experiment, 2024)
London, 1857: A pair of teenage girls holding a sign that says "Fugitive Slaves" ask for money on the corner of Blackman Street. After a constable accosts them and charges them with begging, they end ...
31 Des 20241h 27min
Ágnes Györke and Tamás Juhász, "Urban Culture and the Modern City: Hungarian Case Studies" (Leuven UP, 2024)
When consulting key works on urban studies, the absence of Central and Eastern European towns is striking. Cities such as Vienna, Budapest, Prague, and Trieste, where such notable figures as Freud, Fe...
30 Des 202452min
Marc Schuilenburg, "Hysteria: Crime, Media, and Politics" (Routledge, 2021)
According to the medical world, hysteria is a thing of the past, an outdated diagnosis that has disappeared for good. Hysteria: Crime, Media, and Politics (Routledge, 2021) argues that hysteria is in ...
29 Des 202439min
