Böcker utgivna av University of Chicago Press

"Our teenage years are a uniquely vulnerable and formative time as we lay the foundations for the people we will become. Our relationships with our peers, our families, and our mentors all shape these critical years, but one institution looms large, shaping our days and guiding our futures: school. This achingly sensitive book from sociologist Nora Gross examines what happens in a group of young men's lives after three of their peers die by gun violence. Looking to their interactions at and beyond school, as well as their vibrant lives online, Gross shows what happens when a school with the mission of supporting young Black men into college confronts the realities of their living amid gun violence. Initially, the school administration and teachers responded both through personal outreach (cookies, hugs, and memorials) and institutional resources (more lenient policies and two therapists from an anti-violence organization). This, Gross tells us, is the "easy hard." When pain is fresh, so is empathy. But as the immediate shock began to fade, teachers and administrators were faced with mandated testing on the horizon and the school's charter on the line, pushing a return to normalcy. Collective mourning was no longer a school-sponsored activity, and the initial sense of community gave way to factions: those teachers who made space for grief, and those who pushed for a return to normal. These are the days Gross calls the "hard hard." As the school year wore on, routines of daily life did resume, inaugurating a period Gross calls the "hidden hard," when students' unresolved grief is pushed into private spaces by the expectation of normalcy and the mythology around the boys' resilience. Most students continued to grieve silently and on their phones, with social media as their primary space for self-expression. These students were checking out through substance use, unable to plan for the future, and seeking solidarity through posts expressing their grief and checking in on each other-all reactions that their teachers and administrators failed to register. From these moments of pain and comfort, Gross highlights meaningful ways we can support young people as they navigate loss"--

"Our civilization has the odd habit of printing books full of lines. We call these notebooks "ruled". It's an orderly, lawful word, as befits an orderly, lawful document. Of course, in a ruled notebook, the rules are there to invite writing, drawing, and thinking. The rules are riverbanks, and the river flowing between them is whatever you want it to be. How might changing the lines change the flow of thoughts between them? What if the straight parallels gave way to curves, clusters, and criss-crosses? What if the once-identical pages began to individuate and develop personalities? What ideas might come to life, if the rules grew unruly? Mathematics, liked line notebooks, does not enjoy a reputation for playful spontaneity. If you want to create an unruly notebook for nonstandard thoughts, it might seem that algebra is the last place you'd turn. But creativity is not (as we sometimes imagine) a matter of shaking off all constraints. It is about playing against them. We need rules, if only for the sake of breaking them. Plotted, written, and overruled by mathematicians, educators, and popularizers Tim Chartier and Amy Langville, and with a foreword by Ben Orlin, this book reveals math's creative side. We will see how straight lines can form fractal crenelations; how circles can disrupt and unify; how waves can create complex landscapes and famous faces. The rules of mathematics, this book shows, are like the rules of a notebook: invitations to play"--

"Gioia Diliberto's fresh and timely take on the history of Prohibition focuses on four women who played central roles in promoting, enforcing, profiting from, and repealing the Eighteenth Amendment: Ella Boole, the head of the Women's Christian Temperance Union; Texas Guinan, a star of silent films and vaudeville who ran glitzy speakeasies; Mabel Walker Willebrandt, a genuine trailblazer tasked with enforcing Prohibition in the Department of Justice; and Pauline Sabin, a Chicago socialite who led the drive toward repeal. Cumulatively, Diliberto creates a varied and dynamic portrait of women in power, as both activists and institutionalists, in both politics and culture"--

"Postpartum depression and mental illness were long considered unfit for the public, psychological, or political discussion. Women were typically told their "baby blues" weren't important-or that they were failing as mothers. As Rachel Louise Moran shows, bringing these serious and common challenges into the open didn't just happen. It took activists, medical professionals, and countless everyday mothers to speak the unspeakable: motherhood is hard, and its burdens are often both heavy and unfair. Moran's groundbreaking work situates the changing cultural understanding of postpartum within larger women's health movements in America--a discussion that has constantly shifted amid the country's broader cultural and political transformations"--

"Of the Americans who have died of COVID-19, 20% have been elderly people residing in nursing facilities--even though they make up less than a percent of the overall US population. Throughout the pandemic, several argued that there was nothing to be done about the people dying in these facilities; they felt that, given the higher likelihood of serious disease and death among that population, younger, able-bodied, and more economically productive members of society should be prioritized instead. Meanwhile, elderly folks continued to be neglected. As Margaret Morganroth Gullette shows, nothing about this tragedy was inevitable. Gullette, an activist and scholar, argues that it was our collective indifference, fueled by ageism, that killed our elderly population, compounded by our fear of and disgust toward aging and our cultural enshrinement of youth-based decisions about life-saving care, even before sufficient data was available. Walking us through the decisions that lead to such discrimination, revealing how governments and media reinforced ageist biases, and collecting the ignored voices of the elderly, Gullette helps us understand the makings of what she powerfully calls an "eldercide." A chronicle of how ageism turned lethal, this book is an act of remembrance and a call to action that aims to prevent a similar outcome in the next pandemic"--

"Jolanda Insana (1937-2016) is a Sicilian poet who has long been under-recognized outside of Italy, and Catherine Theis's stellar translation of Insana's first full collection, Slashing Sounds, is the first book-length English-language edition of the poet's work. Originally published as Fendenti fonici in 1982, these poems channel an idiosyncratic, albeit carefully curated, Sicilian dialect that Insana used to capture the vernacular life and street-level spirit of the region. Through this specific voice, Insana nevertheless finds a full spectrum of possibilities for human expression-the vulgarity, hilarity, intimacy, and outrage of a population expressed through its slang, obscenities, and terms of endearment. Insana's daring, fiercely embodied work pushes the boundaries of the notion of poetry as an elitist institution. What makes Slashing Sounds so immensely satisfying is its irreverence toward all forms of literary piety whatsoever: these poems are as subversive, snarky, and funny as they were over forty years ago, and the result is a book that feels utterly and perennially contemporary"--

"The technology at the center of this book marks a milestone in computing history. Until the late nineteenth century, naval gun crews aimed and fired at virtually point-blank ranges, but as warship speeds and battle ranges grew, it became necessary to predict where the target would be when a projectile landed. Two British civilian inventors, Arthur Pollen and Harold Isherwood, insisted that the only way to predict with sufficient speed and accuracy to enable hits in battle was to incorporate all the relevant variables into mathematical equations and to develop instruments for solving them instantaneously and continuously. This insight led them to build an integrated, gyro-stabilized system for gathering data, calculating predictions, and transmitting the results to the gunners. At the heart of their system was the most advanced analog computer of the day. In addition to being a landmark technological achievement, Pollen and Isherwood's invention also took on legal significance. Its value was so evident that first Britain's Royal Navy and then the US Navy paid them the compliment of pirating it. The inventors' attempts to gain compensation in the courts had rippling effects on how the two leading liberal societies of the modern era struggled to reconcile their ideological commitment to private property rights with the perceived imperatives of national security. Their story shows that the modern American national-security state and secrecy regime, which are often associated with atomic energy during the mid-twentieth century, had longer, trans-Atlantic roots. It also shows that the United States, in its rise to global hegemony, relied heavily on the acquisition of British technology by fair means or foul-much as Americans accuse China of doing to the United States today"--

"On November 22, 1947, a fifteen-year-old prodigy from colonial Algeria named Baya exhibited her paintings and clay sculptures at the Parisian gallery of the art dealer Aimâe Maeght. Her opening attracted some of the most influential cultural figures of postwar Paris, including Albert Camus, Andrâe Breton, Henri Matisse, and Georges Braque. Alice Kaplan's biography begins on that November day, in that gallery, then moves from Baya's beginnings as a farmworker to her Parisian triumph, through her death in Algeria in 1998, by then a cultural icon of independent Algeria. Orphaned at age nine, Baya was working on a flower farm when she caught the eye of a French woman, Marguerite Caminat, whose interest in the girl changed her life. The relationship of support and affection between the indigenous Algerian artist and her French mentor was fraught with ambiguity. Baya worked as Caminat's maid but came to see herself as the woman's adoptive daughter; Caminat nurtured Baya's gift and saw the child as the artist she herself once aspired to be. The French press of 1947 celebrated the young artist with all the predictable clichâes: the orphan rescued by the white fairy godmother, the wild child civilized, the ignorant genius on display. In Seeing Baya: Portrait of an Algerian Artist in Paris, Kaplan considers the differences that Baya makes to the stories we have told about modern art and postwar culture in France. She unravels the human sentiments at play in this history, from the noble to the venal to the obscure, and probes the motivations of the characters surrounding Baya, scrutinizing them from different angles as they respond to the singular itinerary of the young artist. Seeing Baya reveals a fascinating and significant life, one of survival, resistance, and irrepressible talent"--

"LeRoy Neiman's story cuts a fascinating swath through the highs and lows-personal, professional, and cultural-of America over 90 years. He became a household name, his artwork saturated American culture for decades, and he rose high enough to be a pop culture punchline. Neiman was a keen self-promoter, saying later in life that even he didn't know who the real LeRoy Neiman was, but that all the fame and money that came his way was worth it. In this first biography of this captivating and off-putting man, Travis Vogan hunts for the real Neiman amid the America that made him"--

"In this book, historian Rosemary Wakeman brings to life the frenzied, crowded streets, markets, ports, and banks of Bombay, London, and Shanghai, cities that, in the early twentieth century, were at the forefront of the sweeping changes taking the world by storm as it entered an era of globalized commerce and the unprecedented circulation of goods, people, and ideas. Wakeman explores these cities and the world they helped transform through the life of Victor Sassoon, who in 1924 gained control of his powerful family's trading and banking empire. She tracks his movements between these three cities as he grows his family's fortune and transforms its holdings into a global juggernaut. Using his life as its point of entry, this book paints a broad portrait not just of wealth, cosmopolitanism, and leisure, but also of the discrimination, exploitation, and violence wrought by a world increasingly driven by the demands of capital"--

"In this book, historian Kate Merkel-Hess examines the lives and personalities of the wives of the warlords who held control over regional factions in China from 1916 to 1928. Posing for candid photographs and sitting for interviews, these women did not just advance their husbands' agendas. They advocated for social and political changes, gave voice to feminist ideas, and shaped how the public perceived them. As the first publicly political wives in modern China, the women close to Republican warlords changed how people viewed elite women's engagement in politics. Drawing on popular media sources including magazine profiles and gossip column items, Merkel-Hess draws unexpected connections between militarism and domestic life, and she provides an insightful new account of gender and authority in early twentieth-century China"--

"What do we mean when we talk about sea level? How and why did people begin to measure it? With Wilko Graf von Hardenberg as our guide, we follow these questions and more to the muddy littoral spaces of Venice and Amsterdam, the coasts of the Baltic Sea, the Panama and Suez canals, and through the expansion of European colonial empires and the science funding boom of the Cold War. This book is the first history of sea level as a concept and of its theoretical and practical uses. It breaks new ground by offering an innovative outlook on how human societies worldwide have revisited and reinterpreted the relationship between land and sea in modern times. What is more, as a conceptual history of one of the most widely used baselines of environmental change, Sea Level provides a much-needed historical contextualization of anthropogenic sea level rise and its impact on the global coast. By narrating how sea level has morphed from a stable geodetic baseline to a marker of anthropogenic change, von Hardenberg sheds new light on the Anthropocene itself"--

Novelist Ha Jin raises questions about language, migration, and the place of literature in a rapidly globalizing world. Consisting of three interconnected essays, The Writer as Migrant sets Ha Jin's own work and life alongside those of other literary exiles, creating a conversation across cultures and between eras. He employs the cases of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Chinese novelist Lin Yutang to illustrate the obligation a writer feels to the land of their birth, while Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov-who, like Ha Jin, adopted English for their writing-are enlisted to explore a migrant author's conscious choice of a literary language. A final essay draws on V. S. Naipaul and Milan Kundera to consider the ways in which our era of perpetual change forces a migrant writer to reconceptualize the very idea of home. Throughout, Jin brings other celebrated writers into the conversation as well, including W. G. Sebald, C. P. Cavafy, and Salman Rushdie-refracting and refining the very idea of a literature of migration. Simultaneously a reflection on a crucial theme and a fascinating glimpse at the writers who compose Ha Jin's mental library, The Writer as Migrant is a work of passionately engaged criticism, one rooted in departures but feeling like a new arrival.

A compelling and pragmatic argument: solutions to yesterday's environmental problems reveal today's path forward. We solved planet-threatening problems before, Susan Solomon argues, and we can do it again. Solomon knows firsthand what those solutions entail. She first gained international fame as the leader of an expedition to Antarctica in 1986, making discoveries that were key to healing the damaged ozone layer. She saw a path--from scientific and public awareness to political engagement, international agreement, industry involvement, and effective action. Solomon, an atmospheric scientist and award-winning author, connects this career-defining triumph to the inside stories of other past environmental victories--against ozone depletion, smog, pesticides, and lead--to extract the essential elements of what makes change possible. The path to success begins when an environmental problem becomes both personal and perceptible to the general public. Lawmakers, diplomats, industries, and international agencies respond to popular momentum, and effective change takes place in tandem with consumer pressure when legislation and regulation yield practical solutions. Healing the planet is a long game won not by fear and panic but by the union of public, political, and regulatory pressure. Solvable is a book for anyone who has ever despaired about the climate crisis. As Solomon reminds us, doom and gloom get us nowhere, and idealism will only take us so far. The heroes in these stories range from angry mothers to gang members turned social activists, to upset Long Island birdwatchers to iconoclastic scientists (often women) to brilliant legislative craftsmen. Solomon's authoritative point of view is an inspiration, a reality check, a road map, and a much-needed dose of realism. The problems facing our planet are Solvable. Solomon shows us how.

An opportunity to experience the daily hustle and bustle of life in the late Middle Ages, A Day in a Medieval City provides a captivating dawn-to-dark account of medieval life. A visual trek through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries--with seasoned historian and expert on medieval iconography Chiara Frugoni as guide--this book offers a vast array of images and vignettes that depicts the everyday hardships and commonplace pleasures for people living in the Middle Ages. A Day in a Medieval City breathes life into the activities of the city streets, homes, fields, schools, and places of worship. With entertaining anecdotes and gritty details, it engages the modern reader with its discoveries of the religious, economic, and institutional practices of the day. From urban planning and education to child care, hygiene, and the more leisurely pursuits of games, food, books, and superstitions, Frugoni unearths the daily routines of the private and public lives of citizens. A Day in a Medieval City is a charming portal to the Middle Ages that you'll surely want with you on your travels to Europe--or in your armchair. "With its color illustrations of rare paintings and artifacts, this thoughtful and informative, elegantly fashioned excursion into the life of a medieval city is a veritable feast of information and visual delights. Frugoni is a marvelously experienced historical travel guide."--Choice "Stunningly beautiful . . . and a good read as well. . . . It's amazing how much wealth of detail and image Ms. Frugoni has packed into this delightful, relatively small book."--Steve Goode, Washington Times "Charming and insightful. . . .Written with exceptional grace and infused with a warm sense of humanity."--Library Journal

Hailed as one of the best contemporary poets writing in the English language, David Ferry meditates unsentimentally, in many of these powerful and often wrenching poems, on the dispossession of people afflicted by madness, homelessness, or other forms of "wildness." The voices in all the poems in this book demonstrate how, for each of us, there is no certain dwelling place. "David Ferry's Dwelling Places is a marvelous, extremely moving book, distinguished by Ferry's characteristic formal virtuosity, extraordinarily fresh and 'inner' translations, and a kind of driven anguished rage at both the social conditions in which human beings have to live and the mysteriously unchangeable tragedies of individual human lives. The translations amplify and deepen the contemporary scenes. I feel that in the future this will be perceived as a great book."--Frank Bidart "Not until I had read Dwelling Places several times did I see how ingeniously resourceful, ambitious, and admirably modest a book David Ferry has made."--Boston Review

Launched in 1999, Afterall is a journal of contemporary art that offers in-depth analysis of artists' work, along with essays that broaden the context in which to understand it. Its academic format differentiates it from popular review magazines. Afterall 44 focuses on indigenous contemporary art practices around the world. It explores the possibilities and potentialities of reinventing contexts and of speaking from within. An essay examines the Green Horse Society, an arts collective in Mongolia that has transformed its contemporary arts scene, and featured artists include Maria Thereza Alves, Pia Arke, and Hans Ragnar Mathisen. The issue is visually rich, with numerous accompanying illustrations.

A surprising study reveals a plethora of attempts to communicate with non-humans in the modern era. In Interspecies Communication, music scholar Gavin Steingo examines significant cases of attempted communication beyond the human--cases in which the dualistic relationship of human to non-human is dramatically challenged. From singing whales to Sun Ra to searching for alien life, Steingo charts the many ways we have attempted to think about, and indeed to reach, beings that are very unlike ourselves. Steingo focuses on the second half of the twentieth century, when scientists developed new ways of listening to oceans and cosmic space--two realms previously inaccessible to the senses and to empirical investigation. As quintessential frontiers of the postwar period, the outer space of the cosmos and the inner space of oceans were conceptualized as parallel realities, laid bare by newly technologized "ears." Deeply engaging, Interspecies Communication explores our attempts to cross the border between the human and non-human, to connect with non-humans in the depths of the oceans, the far reaches of the universe, or right under our own noses.

With Gracie Allen as their uninhibited Muse, Lloyd Schwartz's poems strike an unusual balance between comedy and pathos. His exuberant interest in the social world is qualified by a poignant sense of time and mortality, and of the interior, inaccessible zones of life. "Like a latter-day Whitman, an addict of contraries or its victim, Schwartz sets out to understand that network in as many ways as his imagination allows. Once you get the hang of what Schwartz is tuning into, you can't stop tuning into it yourself. . . .A master of timing."--Robyn Selman, Voice Literary Supplement "[Schwartz's] poems seem to think in musical structures; he hears those evanescent snatches of conversation that compose our emotional lives, recognizes their fluid importance, and organizes them for us."--Stephen Tapscott, Boston Phoenix

An ambitious study of the ways opera has sought to ensure its popularity by keeping pace with changes in media technology. From the early days of television broadcasts to today's live streams, opera houses have embraced technology as a way to reach new audiences. But how do these new forms of remediated opera extend, amplify, or undermine production values, and what does the audience gain or lose in the process? In Screening the Operatic Stage, Christopher Morris critically examines the cultural implications of opera's engagement with screen media. Foregrounding the potential for a playful exchange and self-awareness between stage and screen, Morris uses the conceptual tools of media theory to understand the historical and contemporary screen cultures that have transmitted the opera house into living rooms, onto desktops and portable devices, and across networks of movie theaters. If these screen cultures reveal how inherently "technological" opera is as a medium, they also highlight a deep suspicion among opera producers and audiences toward the intervention of media technology. Ultimately, Screening the Operatic Stage shows how the conventions of televisual representation employed in opera have masked the mediating effects of technology in the name of fidelity to live performance.

An insightful look at how avant-garde musicians of the postwar period in New York explored the philosophical dimensions of music's ineffability. The Musician as Philosopher explores the philosophical thought of avant-garde musicians in postwar New York: David Tudor, Ornette Coleman, the Velvet Underground, Alice Coltrane, Patti Smith, and Richard Hell. It contends that these musicians--all of whom are understudied and none of whom are traditionally taken to be composers--not only challenged the rules by which music is written and practiced but also confounded and reconfigured gendered and racialized expectations for what critics took to be legitimate forms of musical sound. From a broad historical perspective, their arresting music electrified a widely recognized social tendency of the 1960s: a simultaneous affirmation and crisis of the modern self.

An account of criticism as an urgent response to what moves us. Criticism begins when we put down a book to tell someone about it. It is what we do when we face a work or event that bowls us over and makes us scramble for a response. As Michel Chaouli argues, criticism involves three moments: Something speaks to me. I must tell you about it. But I don't know how. The heart of criticism, no matter its form, lies in these surges of thoughts and feelings. Criticism arises from the fundamental need to share what overwhelms us. We tend to associate criticism with scholarship and journalism. But Chaouli is not describing professional criticism, but what he calls "poetic criticism"--a staging ground for surprise, dread, delight, comprehension, and incomprehension. Written in the mode of a philosophical essay, Something Speaks to Me draws on a wide range of writers, artists, and thinkers, from Kant and Schlegel to Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard, Barthes, and Cavell. Reflecting on these dimensions of poetic experience, Something Speaks to Me is less concerned with joining academic debates than communicating the urgency of criticism.

Highlights local history to tell a national story about the evolution of the women's health movement, illuminating the struggles and successes of bringing feminist dreams into clinical spaces. The women's health movement in the United States, beginning in 1969 and taking hold in the 1970s, was a broad-based movement seeking to increase women's bodily knowledge, reproductive control, and well-being. It was a political movement that insisted that bodily autonomy provided the key to women's liberation. It was also an institution-building movement that sought to transform women's relationships with medicine; it was dedicated to increasing women's access to affordable health care without the barriers of homophobia, racism, and sexism. But the movement did not only focus on women's bodies. It also encouraged activists to reimagine their relationships with one another, to develop their relationships in the name of personal and political change, and, eventually, to discover and confront the limitations of the bonds of womanhood. This book examines historically the emergence, development, travails, and triumphs of the women's health movement in the United States. By bringing medical history and the history of women's bodies into our emerging understandings of second-wave feminism, the author sheds light on the understudied efforts to shape health care and reproductive control beyond the hospital and the doctor's office--in the home, the women's center, the church basement, the bookshop, and the clinic. Lesbians, straight women, and women of color all play crucial roles in this history. At its center are the politics, institutions, and relationships created by and within the women's health movement, depicted primarily from the perspective of the activists who shaped its priorities, fought its battles, and grappled with its shortcomings.

A provocative study of contemporary Tantra as a dynamic living tradition. Tantra, one of the most important religious currents in South Asia, is often misrepresented as little more than ritualized sex. Through a mixture of ethnography and history, Hugh B. Urban reveals a dynamic living tradition behind the sensationalist stories. Urban shows that Tantric desire goes beyond the erotic, encompassing such quotidian experiences as childbearing and healing. He traces these holistic desires through a series of unique practices: institutional Tantra centered on gurus and esoteric rituals; public Tantra marked by performance and festival; folk Tantra focused on magic and personal well-being; and popular Tantra imagined in fiction, film, and digital media. The result is a provocative new description of Hindu Tantra that challenges us to approach religion as something always entwined with politics and culture, thoroughly entangled with ordinary needs and desires.

How art played a central role in the design of America's racial enterprise--and how contemporary artists resist it. Art has long played a key role in constructing how people understand and imagine America. Starting with contemporary controversies over public monuments in the United States, Rebecca Zorach carefully examines the place of art in the occupation of land and the upholding of White power in the US, arguing that it has been central to the design of America's racial enterprise. Confronting closely held assumptions of art history, Zorach looks to the intersections of art, nature, race, and place, working through a series of symbolic spaces--the museum, the wild, islands, gardens, home, and walls and borders--to open and extend conversations on the political implications of art and design. Against the backdrop of central moments in American art, from the founding of early museums to the ascendancy of abstract expressionism, Zorach shows how contemporary artists--including Dawoud Bey, Theaster Gates, Maria Gaspar, Kerry James Marshall, Alan Michelson, Dylan Miner, Postcommodity, Cauleen Smith, and Amanda Williams--have mined the relationship between environment and social justice, creating works that investigate and interrupt White supremacist, carceral, and environmentally toxic worlds. The book also draws on poetry, creative nonfiction, hip-hop videos, and Disney films to illuminate crucial topics in art history, from the racial politics of abstraction to the origins of museums and the formation of canons.

A new reading of Virginia Woolf in the context of "long modernism." In recent decades, Virginia Woolf's contribution to literary history has been located primarily within a female tradition. Elizabeth Abel dislodges Woolf from her iconic place within this tradition to uncover her shadowy presence in other literary genealogies. Abel elicits unexpected echoes of Woolf in four major writers from diverse cultural contexts: Nella Larsen, James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, and W. G. Sebald. By mapping the wayward paths of what Woolf called "odd affinities" that traverse the boundaries of gender, race, and nationality, Abel offers a new account of the arc of Woolf's career and the transnational modernist genealogy constituted by her elusive and shifting presence. Odd Affinities will appeal to students and scholars working in New Modernist studies, comparative literature, gender and sexuality studies, and African American studies.

Addresses the political and aesthetic evolution of African American literature and its authors during the Cold War, an era McCarthy calls "the Blue Period." In the years after World War II, to be a black writer was to face a stark predicament. The contest between the Soviet Union and the United States was a global one--an ideological battle that dominated almost every aspect of the cultural agenda. On the one hand was the Soviet Union, espousing revolutionary communism that promised egalitarianism while being hostile to conceptions of personal freedom. On the other hand was the United States, a country steeped in racial prejudice and the policies of Jim Crow. Black writers of this time were equally alienated from the left and the right, Jesse McCarthy argues, and they channeled that alienation into remarkable experiments in literary form. Embracing racial affect and interiority, they forged an aesthetic resistance premised on fierce dissent from both US racial liberalism and Soviet communism. From the end of World War II to the rise of the Black Power movement in the 1960s, authors such as Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Paule Marshall defined a distinctive moment in American literary culture that McCarthy terms the Blue Period. In McCarthy's hands, this notion of the Blue Period provides a fresh critical framework that challenges long-held disciplinary and archival assumptions. Black writers in the early Cold War went underground, McCarthy argues, not to depoliticize or liberalize their work, but to make it more radical--keeping alive affective commitments for a future time.

Acclaimed poet and critic Maureen N. McLane offers an experimental work of criticism ranging across Romantic and contemporary poetry. In My Poetics, Maureen N. McLane writes as a poet, critic, theorist, and scholar--but above all as an impassioned reader. Written in an innovative, conversable style, McLane's essays illuminate her own poetics and suggest more generally all that poetics can encompass. Ranging widely from romantic-era odes and hymns to anonymous ballads to haikus and haibuns to modernist and contemporary poetries in English, My Poetics explores poems as speculative instruments and as ways of registering our very sense of being alive. McLane pursues a number of open questions: How do poems generate modes for thinking? How does rhyme help us measure out thought? What is the relation of poetry to its surroundings, and how do specific poems activate that relation? If, as Wallace Stevens wrote, "poetry is the scholar's art," My Poetics flies under a slightly different banner: study and criticism are also the poet's art. Punctuated with McLane's poems and drawing variously on Hannah Arendt, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Roland Barthes, Bruno Latour, and other writers and poets, My Poetics is a formally as well as intellectually adventurous work. Its artful arrangement of readings and divagations shows us a way to be with poems and poetics.

A deep dive into the mechanics of national human rights institutions and the forces that make or break their success. In the years since World War II, the endeavor to promote human rights has gained momentum and become increasingly important within international relations. Yet these efforts often run into serious problems of enforcement. Many countries formed national human rights institutions (NHRIs) with independent mandates to support and monitor government compliance with international human rights law. Be they commissions, ombudsmen, or tribunals, these institutions vary in their power and impact. For this book, Corina Lacatus surveyed NHRIs in Europe and around the world to determine their effectiveness and explain why some succeed while others fail. The Strength of Our Commitments explores the relationship between the domestic and international support an institution receives and its ability to secure resources, credibility, and tangibly improve human rights conditions. Lacatus shows that NHRIs can be models of resilience, even in the face of opposition from political elites. Although their impact on human rights is difficult to measure, The Strength of Our Commitments shows how NHRIs' strength comes from clearly defined formal powers, strong institutional leadership, and independence from political interference.

Timely and authoritative research on the latest issues in tax policy. Tax Policy and the Economy publishes current academic research on taxation and government spending with both immediate bearing on policy debates and longer-term interest. This volume of Tax Policy and the Economy presents new research on important issues concerning US taxation and transfers. First, Edward L. Glaeser, Caitlin S. Gorback, and James M. Poterba examine the distribution of burdens associated with taxes on transportation. Replacing the gasoline tax with a vehicle-miles-traveled (VMT) tax would increase the burden on higher-income households, who drive more fuel-efficient cars and are more likely to own electric vehicles. User charges for airports, subways, and commuter rail are progressive, while the burden of bus fees is larger for lower-income households than for their higher-income counterparts. Next, Katarzyna Bilicka, Michael Devereux, and Irem Güçeri investigate tax shifting by multinational companies (MNCs) and the implications of a potential Global Minimum Tax (GMT). They find that MNCs shift intellectual property to tax havens, and that a large share of patenting activity takes place in tax havens where little or no R&D occurs. Tax havens are particularly important for MNCs with large subsidiary networks; such firms would likely be subject to a GMT. Mark Duggan, Audrey Guo, and Andrew C. Johnston study the role of experience rating in the Unemployment Insurance (UI) system and find that the current structure stabilizes the labor market because it penalizes firms with high rates of UI-eligible layoffs. In the fourth paper, David Altig, Laurence J. Kotlikoff, and Victor Yifan Ye calculate how retiring at different ages will affect Social Security benefit amounts, taking into account taxation and other benefits. They find that virtually all individuals aged 45 to 62 should wait until age 65 or later to maximize their Social Security benefits. Indeed, 90 percent would benefit from waiting until age 70, but only 10 percent do so. Finally, Jonathan Meer and Joshua Witter examine the potential impact of the Earned Income Tax Credit on the labor force decisions of childless adults who are eligible for a small credit after they reach age 25. Comparing labor force attachment changes just before and after this age suggests that the EITC has little impact on the labor force participation of this group.