Product Description: From the precincts of the vanitas to the black banner of the Jolly Roger to children's Day of the Dead sweets, the human skeleton is suffused with surprisingly diverse and nuanced cultural significances. Subject of science both legitimate and spurious, material of archaeological scholarship and political controversy, bones suggest the permanence of certain inviolable aspects of personal and social identity, even as they bluntly signify the transience of the individuals with whom such identities were associated...read more

Product Description: Site of hidden infrastructure, source of material and energy, home to clandestine activity, buried landscape of darkness and silence: the physical and emotional space of the underground is at once prosaic and uncanny, rich with both functional potential and metaphorical meaning...read more

Product Description: We have been living through boom times for the future. Even during the relative calm before the escalating storms of 2001, our cultures and industries collaborated in a remarkable proliferation of words and images about this impossible entity, the future...read more

Product Description: The countless relationships, real and metaphorical, between humans and the sea reflect our dependency on, and anxiety over, its unfathomable power and vastness. The ocean is the primary medium for global trade, but the lair of lurking monsters; it is the site of swashbuckling adventure, but also of shuffleboard-and-bingo cruises; and, it is also the subject of Cabinet 16...read more

Product Description: An uninhibited guffaw or a nervous giggle, a derisive snicker or the malign “bwahahaa” of the comic strip villain--each form suggests that laughter has many sources of inspiration. This issue of Cabinet addresses the cultural history of laughter through a sparkling mix of essays, interviews and artist projects...read more

Product Description: The idea that our time is obsessed with the modes and methods of security is by now a commonplace, yet behind this familiar syndrome lies a less-examined array of social and psychological phenomena--not just related to the nature of the threat faced (whether real or simply perceived) but also to the fundamental notions of stability and integrity these perils are understood to jeopardize...read more

Product Description: The sheer numbers are staggering: scientists estimate that at any one time there are ten quintillion (10,000,000,000,000,000,000) individual insects alive on the earth, the group's more than 900,000 different known types accounting for some 80 percent of the world's total species...read more

Product Description: "Secular magic," in the words of historian Simon During, is a category designed to differentiate the activity of the modern stage magician from the classical alchemist or occultist. Yet an appraisal of these non-supernatural forms of magical entertainment nevertheless provides the chance to trace the complex network of social and cultural forms to which secular magic owes a debt--from pioneering theatrical devices, novel approaches to stagecraft, and the harnessing of scientific principles in the service of trickery to modes of discourse and performance that draw heavily upon traditional religious, folkloric or shamanic prototypes...read more

Product Description: One of the seven deadly sins, sloth has long been reviled in the Christian world. But as capitalism appropriated the Christian tradition of work and recast it as the ethical imperative of its own secular new world order, laziness was revaluated by philosophers, writers and artists as a means of resisting the prevalent social order and its gospel of profit-driven hard work...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: 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: 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: 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: In the nineteenth century, Marx rejected the notion of homo sapiens, offering instead homo faber to indicate how consciousness follows from the primary activity of making. Against this, a certain ludic tradition has imagined a homo ludens, humans defined through their relationship with games and play...read more

Product Description: Love was classically thought to come in four distinct varieties--agape (spiritual love), eros (physical passion), philia (friendship) and storge (familial affection). It might be argued that with modernity, one of these--eros--has come to dominate our landscape, where romance and its obstacles inform so many of our cultural narratives and consumer fantasies...read more

Product Description: The theorist Fredric Jameson once wrote that it has become easier for us to imagine the world ending than to imagine a society not built around capitalism. As scenarios forecasting the collapse of social and ecological systems become increasingly credible, our answers seem confined to taking measures within the very logic that is the cause of our predicament...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: On the theme of "the Doppelganger," Cabinet collaborates with Kabinet, a Russian journal of art and cultural theory based in Saint Petersburg. The collaborative themed section includes a comparison of American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts; Josiah McElheny on the cultural history of glass mirrors; Joseph Grigley on what trout fishing teaches us about mimetic theories of representation; and an interview with Viktor Sukhodrev, who was, for 30 years, the top diplomatic translator in the Soviet Union, present in conversations between Khruschev and JFK, Carter and Brezhnev, etc...read more