3+ week, 4+ day ago   (144+ words) Author: Carla Hesse In “The People’s Justice,” Carla Hesse offers a sweeping reappraisal of political violence in the French Revolution. From Charles Dickens to Hannah Arendt, the Revolution of 1789–1799 in France has been depicted as the bloodiest of the 18th-century…...

1+ mon, 1+ day ago   (160+ words) The American legal system does not offer equal justice to all; we can see obvious racial disparities in sentencing, policing, and incarceration. In “Unlocking Justice,” Chad Topaz offers a concrete way forward, demonstrating how a candid dialogue between social justice…...

1+ mon, 1+ week ago   (268+ words) Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675) is one of the most beloved painters in the world. But when an enterprising French journalist and art critic set out to recover his work in the mid-19th century, both his name and achievement were virtually forgotten. “Vermeer’s…...

1+ mon, 1+ week ago   (169+ words) Andrea Wulf’s “The Traveler” steps into the life and times of George Forster, the young naturalist and revolutionary who journeyed to the far reaches of the known world and whose radical ideas about humanity and freedom made waves in eighteenth-century…...

1+ mon, 2+ week ago   (203+ words) Data from facial emotion recognition, brain-computer interfaces, virtual reality, global emotion surveys and sentiment analysis offer an extraordinary new terrain for scientific exploration. Emotion sensing promises to decode and even to augment and control the very essence of human experience....

1+ mon, 2+ week ago   (151+ words) Authors: David P. Billington and David P. Billington Jr. “Power, Speed, and Form” is the first accessible account of the engineering behind eight breakthrough innovations that transformed American life from 1876 to 1939—the telephone, electric power, oil refining, the automobile, the airplane, radio,…...

1+ mon, 2+ week ago   (146+ words) The traditional debate among philosophers of mathematics is whether there is an external mathematical reality, something out there to be discovered, or whether mathematics is the product of the human mind. This provocative book, now available in a revised and…...

1+ mon, 2+ week ago   (436+ words) Today’s travelers from Saudi Arabia approach trip planning with great attention to detail. Before even arriving at the airport in Riyadh, Jeddah, or Dammam, they have already booked their flights, selected the best hotels, arranged airport transfers, purchased travel insurance,…...

1+ mon, 2+ week ago   (160+ words) Eric Jay Dolin’s “The Wreck of the Mentor” tells the gripping saga of the American whaleship wrecked in 1832 on a remote reef in the western Pacific. With supplies dwindling, the eleven surviving crewmen face not only the miseries of shipwreck…...

1+ mon, 3+ week ago   (94+ words) Minor White, Aaron Siskind, and Harry Callahan carved out a new role for photographers and their art in the decades after World War Two. “Photography as a Way of Life” traces how these influential teachers and theorists reimagined the medium…...