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In Defense of Equity
By Virginia Brennan, Ph.D., MA As society used to be, or as I used to understand it, equity shone brightly, a star that society reached for. The great machines of universal progress as seen during and after the Enlightenment—medicine, law, education—were to...
Consumption, Markets, and their Political Meanings
I began this project (The Trouble with Tea: the Politics of Consumption in the Eighteenth-Century Global Economy) more than a decade ago driven by an interest in consumerism, corporate culture, and the commodification of contemporary life. At that time, we saw...
In Memoriam: James L. Harner
By Gail Kern Paster and Barbara A. Mowat The news of Jim Harner’s death in May 2016 was distressing to any number of his academic and scholarly admirers—students, alums, faculty, and administrators at Texas A&M University; researchers and teachers who depend...
From Here to There: The Complexity of 1-Click Ordering
To the average consumer, Amazon appears Oz-like with its magical power of 1-click ordering. For publishers, authors, and distributors, we have glimpses of the shadowy figure behind the curtain. Instead of smoke and mirrors, we deal with inscrutable algorithms...
Pi day is just another Hallmark holiday
So, Johns Hopkins University Press asked me to write a blog post for Pi Day. Well . . . other than as a marketing tool for mathematics, Pi Day is a bit of a silly idea. So, I thought I'd tell you why, at least from the perspective of this pure mathematician...
Why Is Harriet Tubman on the $20 Bill?
The following is an adapted excerpt from Sharon Ann Murphy’s Other People’s Money: How Banking Worked in the Early American Republic. The decision to replace Andrew Jackson with Harriet Tubman on future $20 bills is laced with irony. Born into slavery in...
'Philosophy and Literature' for the Future
When Philosophy and Literature founding editor Denis Dutton died in 2010, his co-editor, Garry Hagberg, took over the reins of the influential journal. The journal recently released a new issue with a symposium on self identity and a collection of essays...
Reading Galileo: Policing Knowledge in 17th-century Europe
America is in an unprecedented era, or so many commentators claim. Nowhere is this uniqueness more apparent, some assert, than in the new administration’s attitudes towards climate and environmental science. Trump’s declaration that global warming is a hoax...
LARC, every woman’s right
International Women’s Day (IWD) is celebrated annually on March 8 throughout the world. The purpose is to honor women’s achievements throughout history and across nations. Although the beginnings of this celebration occurred among women’s groups over a hundred...
5 things you probably didn’t know about Ebola
1. At the start of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, a maternity hospital was forced to close. As one of the poorest countries in the world, Sierra Leone has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world; approximately 900 women die in childbirth...