A quarter-century after it was written, Hervé Guibert’s Cytomegalovirus reads both as a vital document of a particular moment in the history of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and as a wonderfully spare account of the banal humiliations and little triumphs of hospitalization in the shadow of a then-terminal illness. Republished with a luminous Introduction by David Caron and a wide-ranging and
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Sabine Arnaud’s On Hysteria: The Invention of a Medical Category Between 1670 and 1820 focuses on the socio-medical category before its better-known (and more heavily studied) late nineteenth century instantiations, not to trace the prehistory of hysteria from the seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries, but in order to demonstrate how hysteria takes unexpected form during these earlier epochs. The …
For the first “Top of the Heap” of the new year, we spoke to Angela Garcia, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University. Here is her list:
Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil (M Boyars, 1973 [1957]).
…My daughters are suddenly passionate about vampires. They read books and watch movies about vampires. They delight at the
January, 2525. Below ground. Chemical fumes and white walls. A barely functional weblink with the following webpage, read to the sound of steady beeping:
The science of reading the electrical activity in the cerebral cortex is called encephalography; the material representation of the different electrical folds of the brain an encephalogram.
A biosignal like no other, the EEG is used …
Sleep has been in the news for the past decade or so as a matter of growing concern. Along with this popular, medical and scientific attention, social scientists have been increasingly interested in sleep as an object or process of study. The first major sociological book published on sleep was Simon Williams’ Sleep and Society (Routledge, 2005), after which …
This has been amply covered by the New York Times and Mind Hacks, but it fits so nicely into the interests of many of our contributors and readers, that I couldn’t resist mentioning it here: in the latest issue of n_1, Marco Roth has an excellent essay on “The Rise of the Neuronovel.” In it he traces …