Can you imagine a scholarly press publishing a book about the Mona Lisa without a reproduction of the painting? Or, perhaps a more pertinent example, a book about anti-Semitic stereotypes without an illustration of them?
Brandeis professor and author Jytte Klausen was asked to sign what she called a “gag order” by Yale University Press.
by [...]

By Peter Walsh
Almost overlooked in the wider, world financial crisis this spring is the precipitous decline, and perhaps impending fall, of the American art museum. All of a sudden, the money just isn’t there for them any more.
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By Peter Walsh
“There’s a gude time coming.”
—Sir Walter Scott, Rob Roy (1817)
Americans, always attuned to the prices and classes of commodity, assume that the arts fall into the expensive luxury category: an ornament to good times but destined to wilt, like a hot house orchid, under the cold wind of recession. History suggests otherwise.

Federal [...]

by Peter Walsh
“Architecture is to make us know and remember who we are.”
—Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe (1989)

Harvard University’s Shad Hall: Can a building predict the future?

Twenty years ago, the completion of Shad Hall, on the Harvard Business School campus, created a stir. Even for Harvard, the place was shrouded in deep secrecy. Access to the building, [...]

By Peter Walsh

“But the trouble continued to spread over the country, and there were reports of big concerns, and even banks, in trouble.” — Upton Sinclair, Oil! (1927)
No doubt there are still those who think economics is a dull, plodding technical field, akin to accounting, which pale men in green eyeshades practice somewhere in the [...]

by Peter Walsh
“Collective intelligence has no relationship to the stupidity of crowd behavior.” — Pierre Lévy, The Collective Intelligence
The day before the New Hampshire primary, I went with a friend to hear George Packer, author of The Assassin’s Gate: America in Iraq, speak at Dartmouth College.
I knew George twenty years ago, when we both [...]