On our Front Table this week, unstable rationalities, including an artist's passages between Dada and Constructivism, and an argument highlighting the romantic dimensions of Kant, Weber, and Benjamin. Also find reflections on statecraft, from the ethics of economic sanctions to a longue durée history of intelligence. Browse these titles and more at semcoop.com.
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Eugene Thacker is the author of Cosmic Pessimism, and of the Horror of Philosophy Trilogy (In the Dust of This Planet, Starry Speculative Corpse, and Tentacles Longer Than Night), among many other titles. In his newest book, ...
On our Front Table this week, new accounts of the reproduction of racism: from the ways that liberal white families unintentionally socialize children into forms of prejudice and inequality, to a critique and subversion of representations of blackness in popular media. Plus, philosophers on the critique of institutions, including Agamben on the Catholic Church and an Hegelian account of civil society and the state. Browse these titles and more at semcoop.com.
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On our Front Table this week, find exemplars of modernism, including a beautiful new presentation of Mallarmé's "Un coup de dés" (lately cited as the beginning of twentieth-century modernism); a reissue of a Russian masterpiece (one of Nabokov's...
When her parents took away her candles to keep their young daughter from studying math...nothing stopped Sophie. When a professor discovered that the homework sent to him under a male pen name came from a woman...nothing stopped Sophie. And when she tackled a math problem that male scholars said would be impossible to solve...still, nothing stopped Sophie.
For six years Sophie Germain...
On our Front Table this week, examine the politics of population management, including the control of the homeless through strategies of urban design, the scalar manipulation of belonging and citizenship through architectural form, the use of voter suppression to dismantle progressive traditions, and feminist ecological critiques of biopolitical tactics like natal policy. Browse these titles and more at semcoop.com.
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On our Front Table this week, explore the imagery of political mobilization, from the prints of slave ship cargo holds that became symbols for black resistance and identity, to a new collection on the aesthetics of protest. Also recover histories of remarkable women like Nur Jahan and Mrs. K, and find contributions to the struggle of science against political reaction. Browse these titles and more at semcoop.com.
Dolly Parton isn’t just a country music superstar. She has built an empire. At the heart of that empire is Dollywood, a 150-acre fantasy land that hosts three million people a year. Parton’s prodigious talent and incredible celebrity have allowed her to turn her hometown into one of the most popular tourist destinations in America. The crux of Dollywood’s allure is its precisely calibrated Appalachian image, itself drawn from Parton’s very real hardscrabble childhood in the mountains of east Tennessee.
What does Dollywood have to offer besides entertainment? What do we find if we take this remarkable place seriously? How does it both confirm and subvert outsiders’...
Steve Brusatte is a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh. A graduate of the University of Chicago, he completed his doctorate at Columbia University. He writes frequently for Scientific American, including the May 2015 cover story on the evolution of tyrannosaurs. His academic research has been published by leading journals including Science and Nature (“Untangling the dinosaur family tree,” November 2017), and he authored a leading paleontology textbook, Dinosaur Paleobiology. He is also the “resident paleontologist” for BBC’s Walking with Dinosaurs program. A native of the Chicago area, he now lives in Edinburgh with his wife, Anne. ...
On our Front Table this week, collections of objects and documents reveal fields of cultural meaning: the Middle Ages expressed through 50 of its artifacts; paintings on ceramic bowls encode the Mimbres worldview; a classic of cultural studies that launched the study of popular arts; a collection of puns sent as holiday mailings subverts meaning and confounds translation; and the internal documents of Bataille's secret society reveal the crisis of European civilization. Browse these titles and more at semcoop.com.