That Most Dangerous, Sacred American Space, the Bathroom

uncommon sense Spoiler alert: In Hitchcock’s masterpiece Psycho, Janet Leigh was not savagely murdered in the living room, but we’ll get to that. Culture wars can erupt anywhere, including in the bathroom. These spaces are personal. They really can be dangerous, nerve-wracking and threatening, but not for the reasons we hear on the media. Today’s […]

Labor Day

Krystal D’Costa writes in Scientific American about Labor Day: There’s no question that technology has helped to create a safer workplace. But there’s also no question that technology is changing the workplace—as well as the laborer. In the coming years, we’ll have to redefine what it means to work because there is no question that […]

Binge Watching

Grant McCracken discusses binge watching at wired.com Why do we binge watch? One way to answer this question is to say, well, we binge on TV for the same reason we binge on food. For a sense of security, creature comfort, to make the world go away. And these psychological factors are no doubt apt. […]

Jews in Bukhara

Alanna E. Cooper, an anthropologist and a Jewish cultural historian, began her research on an old Central Asian Jewish community because of a small and curious dictionary:  I don’t remember the name of the man who sold the dictionary to me. He was one of the many people I met in the 1990s who was […]

Motherhood Across Cultures

The Toronto Star discusses the research of Jennifer Lansford, a professor of psychology and cultural anthropology at Duke University.  Lansford conducts cross-cultural research on motherhood.   “Universally, one of the key tasks of motherhood is to make children feel loved, accepted and valued, and that’s regardless of cultural context…Mothers who are able to do this successfully […]