What We Are Reading Today: Fellow Wanderer: Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Travel Albums

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Updated 07 April 2023
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What We Are Reading Today: Fellow Wanderer: Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Travel Albums

Edited by Diana Seave Greenwald and Casey Riley

In 1865, art collector and philanthropist Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840–1924) lost her only child to pneumonia at less than two years old. In an effort to rouse her from depression, Gardner and her husband, Jack, traveled to northern Europe and Russia. It was the first of many trips abroad that would eventually take her from the Middle East to Asia—trips that she documented in exquisitely crafted collaged travel albums. “Fellow Wanderer” brings together nearly 30 of Gardner’s striking travelogues, spanning some 39 countries and offering invaluable perspective on the global influences on this legendary collector and patron of the arts.

This book features beautiful facsimiles of Gardner’s travel albums—largely unpublished until now—along with essays by leading scholars who place these diaries and sketchbooks within the context of the art and culture of Europe, the Middle East, and Asia in the nineteenth century.


What We Are Reading Today: The Ticos

Updated 28 June 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: The Ticos

Authors: Mavis Hiltunen Biesanz, Richard Biesanz

Written with the perspective of more than half a century of first-hand observation, this unparalleled social and cultural history describes how Costa Rica’s economy, government, education and health-care systems, family structures, religion, and other institutions have evolved, and how this evolution has affected and reflected people’s daily lives, beliefs, and their values. 

The authors are particularly concerned with change since the economic crisis of the early 1980s and the structural adjustment that followed.

The book provides a comprehensive introduction to a country the writers know well, according to a review on goodreads.com.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Private Finance, Public Power’

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Updated 27 June 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Private Finance, Public Power’

  • Public-private negotiations over financial governance has evolved into an essential ecosystem of banking risk management

Authors: Peter Conti-Brown and Sean H. Vanatta

Banks in America are private institutions with private shareholders, boards of directors, profit motives, customers, and competitors. And yet the public plays a key role in deciding what risks are taken as well as how, when, and to what end. Public-private negotiations over financial governance has evolved into an essential ecosystem of banking risk management.

In “Private Finance, Public Power,” Peter Conti-Brown and Sean Vanatta offer a new history of finance and public policy in the US by examining the idiosyncratic way the nation manages financial risk across the public-private divide.

Covering two centuries, from the founding of the Republic to the early 1980s, Conti-Brown and Vanatta describe the often-contested, sometimes chaotic, engagement of bankers, politicians, bureaucrats, and others in the overlapping spaces of the public-private system of bank supervision.

 


What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Anxious Generation’ by Jonathan Haidt

Updated 26 June 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Anxious Generation’ by Jonathan Haidt

In “The Anxious Generation,” Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults.

He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Standard Model’

Updated 25 June 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Standard Model’

Authors: Yuval Grossman and Yossi Nir

“The Standard Model” is an elegant and extremely successful theory that formulates the laws of fundamental interactions among elementary particles.

This incisive textbook introduces students to the physics of the Standard Model while providing an essential overview of modern particle physics, with a unique emphasis on symmetry principles as the starting point for constructing models.

“The Standard Model” equips students with an in-depth understanding of this impressively predictive theory.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Dynamics and Astrophysics of Galaxies’

Updated 24 June 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Dynamics and Astrophysics of Galaxies’

Author: Jo Bovy

This book provides an in-depth introduction to the dynamics, formation, and evolution of galaxies.

Starting with the basics of galactic structure and galactic dynamics, it helps students develop a sophisticated understanding of the orbital structure of spirals, ellipticals, and other types of galaxies.

The book demonstrates how observations led to the discovery that galaxies are dominated by dark matter and explores in detail how structure evolves from the primordial universe to form the halos that host galaxies.