Beth Barton Schweiger— The power of literacy’s hold on the modern imagination cannot easily be measured. One way to begin to comprehend it is to pose a question: who is against it? From local school boards to Capitol Hill to the United Nations General Assembly, the consensus that literacy empowers
Joe Moran— Unlike Scandinavians or Southeast Asians, Americans have no carefully calibrated language for describing different kinds of embarrassment. They have a reputation for seeing shyness as unAmerican. Their cultural heroes are seemingly self-sufficient, outdoorsy types: pioneers, backwoodsmen, cowboys, baseball players—men living what Theodore Roosevelt called “the strenuous life.” But
Interview with Terry Eagleton by David Ebony
David Ebony— So much in the news these days refers to culture, culture clashes or culture wars, cultural identity, and cultural purity. The meaning of “culture” seems to be expansive and flexible, applied to just about any and every human gesture, expression, or endeavor. Terry Eagleton, the brilliant and often
Follow @yaleRELIbooks Jennifer Michael Hecht, author of Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It, felt the terrible effects of suicide twice in two years. The loss of two friends and fellow poets, the second of which seemed prompted by the first, inspired Hecht to write a column for The Best American
What does it mean for a Muslim woman to wear a veil? What is the role of women in Islam? What is the relationship between culture and faith? Leila Ahmed, an author and professor at Harvard Divinity School, investigates these topics most recently in A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence,
Take our Posen Library Survey and get 15% off Yale University Press books! This fall, Yale University Press and the Posen Foundation will launch The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, a ten-volume series that collects more than 3,000 years of Jewish cultural artifacts, texts, and paintings, selected by
Fiestas abound in Cuba year-round, and July is no exception. This month is particularly fiesta-centered in the nation’s second-largest city, Santiago de Cuba, where the Fiesta del Fuego has just wrapped up and the Carnival de Santiago de Cuba is about to begin, overlapping with the national celebration of Fidel
Following the success of The Craftsman, the renowned Richard Sennett further explores craft in Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation, addressing how we can create a better society by learning to truly listen and cooperate with others, even when our interests are conflicting. Salon.com ran an excerpt from
Spanning four centuries of fashion and art history, Aileen Ribeiro’s Facing Beauty: Painted Women and Cosmetic Art, illuminates shifting perceptions of female beauty through works of art and the evolution of cosmetics. This new book explores everyday perceptions of beauty in the Western world and the ways in which women utilized
Follow @yaleSCIbooks In the past weeks, we covered the deaths associated with a book on childrearing, bringing it into conversation with Childism: Confronting Prejudice Against Children, a new book by psychoanalyst and writer Elisabeth Young-Bruehl. All too sadly, it was not long before we shared the news that Young-Bruehl passed