Blog

On our Front Table this week, expand your conception of the natural, from the pre-human beginnings of the internet to the man-made contours of viral history. Find the following titles and more at semcoop.com

Phantom Plague: How Tuberculosis Shaped History (PublicAffairs)
Vidya Krishnan

It killed novelist George Orwell, Eleanor Roosevelt, and millions of others—rich and poor. Desmond Tutu, Amitabh Bachchan, and Nelson Mandela survived it, just. For centuries, tuberculosis has ravaged cities and plagued the human body. In ...

On April 11th, The Institute on the Formation of Knowledge will present "Immerseless Media: Climate Models, Science Fiction, and the Experience of Planetary Change" as part of the Cultures & Knowledge Workshop Series. This workshop will be presented by Katherine Buse.

This presentation will take place online, as well as in person at the Institute on the Formation of Knowledge (5737 South University Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637).

REGISTER FOR THE ONLINE EVENT HERE
REGISTER FOR...

On our Front Table this week, look backward to look forward, from the evolutionary origins of bird and whale songs to the diversity of thought and form in the oldest Qur'anic manuscripts. Find the following titles and more at semcoop.com

A Childhood: The Biography of a Place (Penguin)
Harry Crews

Harry Crews grew up as the son of a sharecropper in Georgia at a time when “the rest of the country was just beginning to feel the real hurt of the Great Depression, but it had been living in Bacon County for years.” Yet what he conveys in this moving,...

What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape (New Press)
Sohaila Abdulali

A beautifully written, deeply intelligent, searingly honest—and ultimately hopeful—examination of sexual assault and the global discourse on rape told through the perspective of a survivor, writer, counselor, and activist. Drawing on her own experience, her work with hundreds of survivors as the head of a rape crisis center in Boston, and three decades of grappling with rape as a feminist intellectual and writer, Sohaila Abdulali tackles some of our thorniest questions about rape, articulating the confounding way we account for who gets raped and why—and asking how we want to raise the next generation. In interviews with survivors from around the world we hear moving personal...