March 22, 2013
For our fourth Women’s History Month post, we interviewed Janet Abbate, author of Recoding Gender: Women’s Changing Participation in Computing. Janet Abbate is Associate Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech and is also the author of Inventing the Internet.
March 21, 2013
Today is Slavoj Žižek’s birthday! We’re celebrating this famous philosopher-cultural critic by sharing a snippet from The Parallax View. This book not only expands Zizek’s Lacanian-Hegelian approach to new domains (notably cognitive brain sciences) but also provides the systematic exposition of the conceptual framework that underlies his entire work. In this brain “tickler,” philosophical and theological analysis, detailed readings of literature, cinema, and music coexist with lively anecdotes and obscene jokes.
March 16, 2013
Today, big-brand companies seem to be making commitments that go beyond the usual “greenwashing” efforts undertaken largely for public relations purposes. In Eco-Business, hot off the press, Peter Dauvergne and Jane Lister examine this new corporate embrace of sustainability. Here, they answer a few questions about their new book.
March 15, 2013
Our third post for Women’s History Month looks at Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran by Gohar Homayounpour. The book details Homayounpour’s return to Iran to practice psychoanalysis after a twenty year absence.
March 14, 2013
In honor of Pi day, here is a Q & A with Sanjoy Mahajan author of Street-Fighting Mathematics. Bonus: click this link to view the Creative Commons edition for free.
March 12, 2013
Now that the papal conclave is under way, we decided to take a look at the history of electing popes. Here’s an excerpt from Josep M. Colomer and Iain McLean’s chapter, “Electing Popes: Approval Balloting and Qualified-Majority Rule,” which is part of Robert I. Rotberg’s Politics and Political Change.
March 1, 2013
March is Women’s History Month. To celebrate, we’ll feature a few of our related titles each Friday through the end of the month. First up is an excerpt from Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection by Katharine Park (Zone Books, 2006). Park’s book Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (Zone Books, 1998), coauthored with Lorraine Daston, won the Pfizer Prize for the best book in the history of science. Park is Zemurray Stone Radcliffe Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University.
February 20, 2013
Happy National Engineers Week (February 17-23)! To celebrate, we interviewed Matthew Wisnioski, author of Engineers for Change: Competing Visions of Technology in 1960s America. Matthew Wisnioski is Assistant Professor of Science and Technology in Society at Virginia Tech.
February 15, 2013
Continuing with our series on Black History Month, we’ll take a look this week at African-American painter Jacob Lawrence who is featured in our own Exiles, Diasporas And Strangers, the fourth book in Annotating Art’s Histories: Cross-Cultural Perspectives in the Visual Arts, a series edited by Kobena Mercer.