Style and Polity in conversation with Benjamin A. Bross, an Assistant Professor of architecture and an urban historian at the University of Illinois, at Urbana-Champaign, discusses “Mexico City’s Zócalo: A History of a Constructed Spatial Identity,” San Martin de Hidalgo tequila’s featured title for the brand’s Fall 2022 Tequila Book Club. In his recently published...
A new analysis of NBA basketball broadcasts from 1998 to 2018 reveals a decline in acts of physical violence, such as pushing and elbowing, and a rise in acts of symbolic violence, such as shouting, trash talking, and menacing displays. Assaf Lev from the Department of Sports Therapy at Ono Academic College in Kiryat Ono,...
Gun violence and school violence have been on the rise since the pandemic, as have eating disorders and body image issues among adolescents — which includes an emphasis on muscularity as today’s body ideal for many boys. Now, a new study published in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence has revealed a link between the two....
While digital platforms like Uber continue to proliferate and expand the gig economy into new sectors of work, some industries, such as live music, have structural features that keep them from adapting well to online platforms. The difficulty of quantifying value, the complexities and contingencies of the task being performed and the fragmentation of the...
You are the one who soaks the malt in a jar, The waves rise, the waves fall. Ninkasi, you are the one who soaks the malt in a jar, The waves rise, the waves fall. This stanza, written down on a piece of clay in 1800 BC, is part of a curious hymn: part song,...
There are several subgroups of firearm owners, but despite their differences, these groups generally view family, law enforcement and suicide prevention specialists but not gun dealers or the National Rifle Association (NRA) as credible sources of information on safe firearm storage, according to a new Rutgers study. This study found that firearm owners are a heterogenous group,...
For 700 years, Mexico City’s public square, known as the Zócalo, has been the place where many of the nation’s most significant events unfolded. Benjamin Bross, an architecture professor and urban historian at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, wrote an urbanism-based cultural history of the Zócalo, using the public square and historic events that took place there...
As a child, I would wait with anticipation for my parents to return from trips to the Soviet Union. Often they brought gifts like a few loaves of hearty brown bread, or a wheel of briny, homemade cheese. Sometimes they also brought back notebooks, or bits of paper with verses scribbled in Ukrainian. These were...
Maybe she had so much money she just lost track of it. Maybe it was all a misunderstanding. That’s how Anna Sorokin’s marks explained away the supposed German heiress’s strange requests to sleep on their couch for the night, or to put plane tickets on their credit cards, which she would then forget to pay...
The long-held consensus that the more populated and “civilized” a society, the more complex their communication may be more nuanced than previously thought. After systematically analyzing written and otherwise recorded evidence of shared information in prehispanic Mesoamerica over 3,000 years, two archaeologists say governance appears to be a more influential factor than society size in determining the...
