Social Science

Finding Joy and Wisdom in the Unexpected: Raising a Child with a Disability

Follow @yaleSCIbooks Read a post by Rachel Adams on the New York Times “Motherlode” blog!   Rachel Adams held a long-time fascination with freaks and admired those who embraced their otherness by resisting attempts to be normalized by society. But after years of studying freaks—many of whom today would be

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The Voice in My Head: Steve Wasserman on Susan Sontag

By Steve Wasserman Among the first books I’ve acquired for Yale University Press, just now being published, is a valentine to my late and beloved Susan Sontag.  For decades, she was something of an Auntie Mame figure for me.  We spent years haunting used bookstores in Berkeley, Los Angeles, and

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Placing the Placeless: A Conversation with Rodrigo Rey Rosa

This interview by Jeffrey Gray was originally published in vol. 4, no. 2 (2007) in A Contracorriente. Placing the Placeless: a Conversation with Rodrigo Rey Rosa1 Jeffrey Gray, Seton Hall University Rodrigo Rey Rosa was born in Guatemala City, Guatemala, in 1958.  As a young writer, he lived for several years in Tangier,

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In Conversation with Susan Sontag: A Window to 1970s Gender Politics

A writer, novelist, filmmaker, and activist, Susan Sontag was an engaged intellectual for whom thinking was a form of feeling and feeling a form of thinking. One of the most influential critics of her generation, she was widely admired by many women and something of a contested figure within the LGBTQ communities,

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David Lesch: The Westerner Who Knows Assad

Watch David Lesch on C-SPAN2’s Book TV Around a year ago, David Lesch settled on a subtitle for his new book on the ever-changing Syria. He called it Syria: The Fall of the House of Assad. He admits to realizing, midway through the publishing process that Assad may not have fallen

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A Conversation with Rachel Adams on Raising Henry and a Book Giveaway

Publishing this month, Rachel Adams‘s Raising Henry: A Memoir of Motherhood, Disability, and Discovery gives a deeply moving and honest account of welcoming a baby born with Down syndrome. Adams, a professor of English and American studies, is also director of the Future of Disability Studies Project at Columbia University. In the interview below,

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“Mannequin Parade”—The First Fashion Models

Today the idea of fashion modeling is a part the general cultural consciousness, with many famous icons and a reality television show. In the early 1900s, however, it was a new concept to preview clothing on a live model. Leading fashion historian, Caroline Evans, explores the development of fashion modeling

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Albers App Colors Interaction on Facebook and Pinterest

“The gateway to an entire way of thinking. . . .It will blow your mind.”—Liz Stinson, Wired The Interaction of Color App for iPad has captured the attention of artists, designers, and color geeks of all sorts in the two shorts weeks since its launch. Twitter has gotten much more colorful

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Stumbling Giant: Why China Will Not Be The Next Superpower

Many argue that China will soon overtake the United States and become the next superpower. Timothy Beardson, author of Stumbling Giant: The Threats to China’s Future, disagrees, asserting that confronted with myriad problems and the inadequacy of response to these problems, China will not become the next superpower. Beardson does

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Democracy in Retreat: A Divided Egypt

Democracy has long been upheld as the ideal way to run a country. America, “land of the free” is revered for its representative government elected by the people for the people, and the US has committed to a mission of spreading and supporting democracy worldwide. In Joshua Kurlantzick’s newest book

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