Product Description: Athletic contests are nearly as old as human society itself. They have grown and flourished across the millennia and around the world, and today form the basis of a global industry worth in excess of six hundred billion dollars. And such games are not just for the players: audiences' fascination with sports also make them a productive sphere through which to consider questions of spectatorship, tribalism and belonging...read more

Product Description: The cultural, social and scientific management of death--how to postpone it, how to prepare for it, what to do with remains, how to remember the deceased--forms the rarely acknowledged framework for the formation of society. Community is only possible if its members avow and disavow, the fact that every one of them will die...read more

Product Description: Rome was not built in a day, but can an issue of a quarterly magazine be produced in 24 hours? This is the question that this issue of Cabinet attempts to answer. Inspired by the resourcefulness of the bricoleur making do with what is at hand, Cabinet issue 44, with a special section titled “24 Hours,” sees writers and artists across the world respond to assignments in the space of one day...read more

Product Description: Derived from the Latin “forensis,” the word forensics refers to the “forum” and designates the practice of making an argument by using objects before a professional, political or legal gathering. Cabinet issue 43, with a special section on “Forensics” edited by Eyal Weizman, features Weizman on the changing role of forensics following the discovery of the body of Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele; Lawrence abu-Hamdan on the use by the British police of minute shifts in electrical signatures to precisely date recorded phone conversations; an interview with legendary forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow; and artist projects by Hito Steyerl and Fareed Armaly...read more

Product Description: Invisible but indispensable, infrastructure is the unsung hero of modernity. A term originally coined in the early twentieth century to refer to the combination of logistics and material necessary for any military operation, the word has come to encompass all the various physical and organizational systems necessary to maintain urban environments, transportation and communication networks, and global commerce...read more

Product Description: As Roland Barthes observed of Abbé Pierre's "zero" haircut, even the most neutral of hairstyles offers a forest of signs. The capacity of hair to attract and radiate meaning permeates not just the history of hairstyles--from the Pharaonic beard of the Egyptians to the ironic mullet of the hipster--but also the rituals, technologies and products that define the world of hair...read more

Product Description: What is learning? An excruciating struggle with techniques and facts? A sensation of joyful encounter with the hitherto unknown? The very notion of the pedagogical conjures a whole range of emotions, and its implications are evident throughout society--for what is culture, after all, but the transmission of knowledge? The thematic section of Cabinet 39 features an interview with John Haynes, pioneer of the modern instruction manual; Jeff Dolven outlining the theater of pedagogy; Elaine Traub tracing the history of distance learning; Sina Najafi tracking the development of the A-F grading system; and an interview with Zoë Readhead, principal of Summerhill, the world's first "free school...read more

Product Description: The seclusion of islands has long made them ideal screens for our fantasies and terrors, choice locations for military and scientific assays, and perfect settings for escapes, incarcerations and battles for survival. In consideration of these dynamics, Cabinet 38 features Julia Wolcott discussing islands in science fiction; Jeffrey Kastner on being marooned; Janet Connelly on West Berlin as an island; Simon Rezak on island penal colonies; the story of the "Chinese Princess" Der Ling, a onetime student of Isadora Duncan who set up court on a Mexican island in the 1920s; and an artist project by Jeremy Drummond...read more

In Moby-Dick, Ishmael declares, "Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned ground that a whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me." Few readers today know just how much argument Ishmael is waiving aside. In fact, Melville's antihero here takes sides in one of the great controversies of the early nineteenth century--one that ultimately had to be resolved in the courts of New York City. In Trying Leviathan, D. Graham Burnett recovers the strange story of Maurice v. Judd, an 1818 trial that pitted the new sciences of taxonomy against the then-popular--and biblically sanctioned--view that the whale was a fish. The immediate dispute was mundane: whether whale oil was fish oil and therefore subject to state inspection. But the trial fueled a sensational public debate in which nothing less than the order of nature--and how we know it--was at stake. Burnett vividly recreates the trial, during which a parade of experts--pea-coated whalemen, pompous philosophers, Jacobin lawyers--took the witness stand, brandishing books, drawings, and anatomical reports, and telling tall tales from whaling voyages. Falling in the middle of the century between Linnaeus and Darwin, the trial dramatized a revolutionary period that saw radical transformations in the understanding of the natural world. Out went comfortable biblical categories, and in came new sorting methods based on the minutiae of interior anatomy--and louche details about the sexual behaviors of God's creatures. When leviathan breached in New York in 1818, this strange beast churned both the natural and social orders--and not everyone would survive.

Product Description: Book by Burnett, D. Graham

Product Description: Read by the author5 CDs/approx. 5 hoursJury duty happens to everyone. When the call came to Graham Burnett—a young historian and literary journalist—he had a shock in store. A Trial by Jury is his startling account of how performing this familiar civic duty turned into one of the most harrowing experiences of his life...read more

Product Description: Chronicling the British pursuit of the legendary El Dorado, Masters of All They Surveyed tells the fascinating story of geography, cartography, and scientific exploration in Britain's unique South American colony, Guyana. How did nineteenth-century Europeans turn areas they called terra incognita into bounded colonial territories? How did a tender-footed gentleman, predisposed to seasickness (and unable to swim), make his way up churning rivers into thick jungle, arid savanna, and forbidding mountain ranges, survive for the better part of a decade, and emerge with a map? What did that map mean?In answering these questions, D...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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