“Lights, Camera … Money!”

At the center of almost every film is a cast of great actors. But it is money—its loss, gain, theft or lawful earning—that so often decides who gets cast.

Essay of the Month: Samuel Johnson’s 1750 Essay No. 58 From The Rambler

"It is certain that, with regard to corporal enjoyment, money can neither open new avenues to pleasure, nor block up the passages of anguish. Disease and infirmity still continue to torture and enfeeble, perhaps exasperated by luxury, or promoted by softness."

The Dharma of Dollars

The stereotype that Hinduism is less materialistically oriented than other religious traditions is clearly false. At the same time, to offer a definitive account of the connection between Hinduism and money would be deceitful and definitively incorrect.

Opening and Entering the World of Tap Dancing

The author is at his best when piecing together anecdotes about a particular dancer’s life experiences or performance/creation process. Countless examples of this are in his book, which is why the text is still worth reading and valuable to dance.

Root, Tree, and Branch

The ostensible arc of The Poison Tree takes us from a child’s domination by a ruthless, unyielding father to a successful adult’s enlightenment and forgiveness. But the actual course of the narrative is less straightforward and, as with the poem from which it takes its inspiration, far more unexpected in its outcomes.

Conservative Media Before Rush

Hemmer’s book is a fine scholarly study of rise of modern American conservatism, a more than twice-told story recounted through the less familiar frame of the rise of conservatism’s media.

List Serve

In first-person narrative, When Women Win tells the invigorating particulars of campaigns waged to get women into the halls of the U.S. Congress, and how EMILY’s list grew from “an annoying thorn in the side of the old boys’ network of the Democratic Party to a powerful and highly valuable partner that was absolutely essential to the party’s success.”

Pictures at a Scientific Exhibition

Zimmer's book documents well how green fluorescent proteins (GFPs) join (often, literally) a long line of ever-evolving visualization techniques and radiological innovation that continue to modify how we view ourselves, both in the pages of academic journals and in the vernacular.

The Absent Women of Jazz

Whether as audience members, scholars, or performers, women have been in short supply throughout jazz history. The representation of jazz in the films La La Land (2016) and Whiplash (2014), by director and writer Damien Chazelle, demonstrates this problem clearly.

The Musical World of Joan of Arc

The world that compositions about Joan of Arc evoke is filled with angels and demons, kings and clerics, bells and disembodied voices, and their musical interpretations reveal striking details about how the modern age looks back on the mysterious medieval world Joan inhabited.

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