What We Are Reading Today: ‘Yuan’ by Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt

What We Are Reading Today: ‘Yuan’ by Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt
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Updated 25 September 2024
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Yuan’ by Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt

What We Are Reading Today: ‘Yuan’ by Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt

The Yuan dynasty endured for a century, leaving behind an architectural legacy without equal, from palaces, temples, and pagodas to pavilions, tombs, and stages.

With a history enlivened by the likes of Khubilai Khan and Marco Polo, this spectacular empire spanned the breadth of China and far, far beyond, but its rulers were Mongols.

Yuan presents the first comprehensive study in English of the architecture of China under Mongol rule.


What We Are Reading Today: Air-Borne by Carl Zimmer

What We Are Reading Today: Air-Borne by Carl Zimmer
Updated 04 March 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: Air-Borne by Carl Zimmer

What We Are Reading Today: Air-Borne by Carl Zimmer

In “Air-Borne,” Carl Zimmer leads us on an odyssey through the living atmosphere and through the history of its discovery.

Weaving together gripping history with the latest reporting on COVID and other threats to global health, Zimmer leaves readers looking at the world with new eyes — as a place where the oceans and forests loft trillions of cells into the air, where microbes eat clouds, and where life soars thousands of miles on the wind.


What We Are Reading Today: A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah

What We Are Reading Today: A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah
Updated 03 March 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah

What We Are Reading Today: A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah

The book offers a devastating story of war through the eyes of a child soldier in Sierra Leone. Ishmael Beah tells how, at the age of twelve, he fled attacking rebels and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. By thirteen, he’d been picked up by the government army, and became a soldier.

The book focuses on like what war is like through the eyes of a child soldier, and how does one become a killer?

The book offers a first-person account from someone who came through “this hell” and survived.

This is an extraordinary and mesmerizing account, told with real literary force and heartbreaking honesty.


What We Are Reading Today: The Invention of International Order by Glenda Sluga

What We Are Reading Today: The Invention of International Order by Glenda Sluga
Updated 02 March 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: The Invention of International Order by Glenda Sluga

What We Are Reading Today: The Invention of International Order by Glenda Sluga

In 1814, after decades of continental conflict, an alliance of European empires captured Paris and exiled Napoleon Bonaparte, defeating French military expansionism and establishing the Concert of Europe.

This new coalition planted the seeds for today’s international order, wedding the idea of a durable peace to multilateralism, diplomacy, philanthropy, and rights, and making Europe its center.


What We Are Reading Today: The Chapter

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Updated 01 March 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: The Chapter

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  • Dames begins with the textual compilations of the Roman world, where chapters evolved as a tool to organize information

Author: Nicholas Dames

Why do books have chapters? With this seemingly simple question, Nicholas Dames embarks on a literary journey spanning two millennia, revealing how an ancient editorial technique became a universally recognized component of narrative art and a means to register the sensation of time.

Dames begins with the textual compilations of the Roman world, where chapters evolved as a tool to organize information. He discusses the earliest divisional systems of the Gospels and the segmentation of medieval romances.

 


What We Are Reading Today: The Real Economy:  History and Theory

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Updated 28 February 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: The Real Economy:  History and Theory

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  • Writing for anyone interested in the study of the economy, Levy provides an invaluable provocation for a broader debate in the social sciences and humanities concerning what “the economy” is

What is the economy, really? Is it a “market sector,” a “general equilibrium,” or the “gross domestic product”? Economics today has become so preoccupied with methods that economists risk losing sight of the economy itself.
Meanwhile, other disciplines, although often intent on criticizing the methods of economics, have failed to articulate an alternative vision of the economy. Before the ascent of postwar neoclassical economics, fierce debates raged, as many different visions of the economy circulated and competed with one another. In The Real Economy, Jonathan Levy returns to the spirit of this earlier era, which, in all its contentiousness, gave birth to the discipline of economics.
Writing for anyone interested in the study of the economy, Levy provides an invaluable provocation for a broader debate in the social sciences and humanities concerning what “the economy” is.