Clutter and Stress

Jeanne Arnold talks to the Boston Globe about cluster, stress and he latest book: With the 21st century’s constantly evolving technological innovations and the wild success of bulk-shopping stores, our hoarding habits have gotten worse. Some of us feel like we’re drowning every time we take a moment to look around our homes. A recently […]

Images and video clips from the religious ritual at MetLife Stadium

Kieran Kesner, a photographer, attended the Jewish ritual at the MetLife Stadium. You can view his beautiful images and video clips at AMAGANSETT. I had never heard of Siyum HaShas. After a 6 hour drive on the morning of from Boston to NJ, I found myself immersed in the collective gathering of nearly 100,000 Jews. […]

Solidarity and Redemption at MetLife Stadium

Dr. David J. Landes is an anthropologist studying Orthodox Jewish culture. Last Wednesday David joined 90,000 orthodox Jews in a spectacular religious ritual at the MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. He shared his fascinating field notes with The Talmud Blog: Over the past several decades a new ritual has taken hold within the Orthodox community, […]

China and the Olympics

Anthropologist Susan Brownell studies sports and the Olympics: My question, "will the Olympics change China, or will China change the Olympics?" was really an attempt to prod my audiences to think about the bigger question of the implications for the developed West of China's rise, because Westerners seemed so concerned about the question of whether […]

The Lily-Pad Strategy

Check out David Vine’s groundbreaking piece at TomDispatch.com: "The Lily-Pad Strategy, How the Pentagon Is Quietly Transforming Its Overseas Base Empire and Creating a Dangerous New Way of War." Anthropologist David Vine, author of Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia, has spent the last three years exploring the […]

Dangerous Mountains

Dr. Peter Wynn Kirby, an anthropologist at the University of Oxford, wrote an op-ed for The Japan Times and makes some thought-provoking observations about the connections between the stockpiling of whale-meat, plutonium and policiy making in japan: OXFORD, England — Mount Fuji stands as a powerful eco-symbol in Japan, invoked frequently to describe elements of […]

Family Stuff

From 2001 to 2005, a team of social scientists studied 32 middle-class families in Los Angeles, a project documenting every wiggle of life at home. The study was generated by the U.C.L.A. Center on the Everyday Lives of Families to understand how people handled what anthropologists call material culture — what we call stuff. These […]

Capitalism and Intuition

Grant McCracken, an anthropologist, provides some business and management advice at Forbes.com: For decades, the mandate of successful executives was to set a plan and stick with it. Those days are gone, says Grant McCracken […] “Capitalism used to be so analytical, precise, and rule-oriented,” he says. “The whole job of management was staying away from what […]

The Ball

John Fox, a Harvard Ph.D. anthropologist, talked to CNN about his new book, The Ball: Discovering the Object of the Game   CNN: Your book starts with a basic question from your son, "Why do we play ball?" Did you find an answer? Fox: I wouldn't say I found an answer. It's a philosophical question […]