Roger Andersson's book Letters from Mayhem is an artist's book made of 26 duotone watercolors, ea...

Athletic contests are nearly as old as human society itself. They have grown and flourished acros...

Rome was not built in a day, but can an issue of a quarterly magazine be produced in 24 hours? Th...

A child's plaything and an object of study for scientists; a space of protection but also of isol...

One of the four classical elements, capable of both remarkable destructive and generative effect,...

This description of Cabinet issue 61 was written on 1 September 2015. Which also happens to be 17...

From the Biblical fruit that brought about the moral downfall of mankind to 'terminator' seed str...

Curiosity and Method

With the possible exception of the eyes, no other part of the face is as burdened with legend, my...

The cultural, social and scientific management of death--how to postpone it, how to prepare for i...

Electricity manifests itself in every facet of our lives--from the tiny shock received by touchin...

The idea of the North in modernity--its associations with sparseness and scarcity, to hardships a...

Every time you put a letter in the mail, every time you stop at a traffic light, a complex--and u...

Across fields as disparate as historiography, psychiatry and anthropology, remembering was long c...

One of only a handful of substances produced in nature expressly as food, milk is fundamental for...

Though most often thought of in prosaic terms--a spilled drink, a fender bender, a slip on an icy...

Dust is everywhere, a perennial presence in the corners of culture. Dust can be deathly (domestic...

The question of endings haunts human beings across all their endeavors, which is why the idea of ...

The common injunction 'Don't reinvent the wheel,' suggesting as it does the futility of attemptin...

The theorist Fredric Jameson once wrote that it has become easier for us to imagine the world end...

The seclusion of islands has long made them ideal screens for our fantasies and terrors, choice l...

Looming large in both geological fact and sociocultural significance, mountains promise grandeur,...

Man is purported to be the only animal that can lie by telling the truth. Whether we are dealing ...

Celebration--acting variously as a binding force for a community or as a self-congratulatory act,...

The desire to know everything is old.

'The lack of money is the root of all evil,' quipped Mark Twain in his recasting of the biblical ...

In the nineteenth century, Marx rejected the notion of homo sapiens, offering instead homo faber ...

Pablo Vargas Lugo is one of Mexico's fastest-rising contemporary artists, with an extensive resum...

A zone of deprivation and emptiness but also a space for adventure and even divine revelation, th...

Derived from the Latin 'forensis,' the word forensics refers to the 'forum' and designates the pr...

Just as the very first constructed containers emerged at a time when new techniques of food gathe...

Love was classically thought to come in four distinct varieties--agape (spiritual love), eros (ph...

The nature of friendship has been a subject of inquiry from the beginnings of the western philoso...

Among the largest and longest-lived of all terrestrial organisms, trees are not just an integral ...

The seventh publication in Cabinet's 24-Hour Book series, in which distinguished authors and arti...

The idea that our time is obsessed with the modes and methods of security is by now a commonplace...

A composite portrait of a wandering dandy scholar whose life and art merged in the margins of the...

Skin is both surface and container. It marks the absolute limits of organisms, but also functions...

The Stone Age is not over! Whether nestled in a dark corner of the gall bladder or hurtling towar...

Across history, the morality of taking what belongs to another has been of concern to both theolo...

Invisible but indispensable, infrastructure is the unsung hero of modernity. A term originally co...

Cabinet 34 puts our culture of constant examination, and self-examination itself, to the test, sc...

What is learning? An excruciating struggle with techniques and facts? A sensation of joyful encou...

Coined by the Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet in 1835, the term 'average man' evokes both c...

Dreams are some of the most private experiences humans know, and yet humans have long felt a need...

From the rule of 'an eye for an eye' in the Code of Hammurabi and the Old Testament to the rise o...