Curious Behavior

Recent News

• WBUR’s Common Health blog featured a selection of photographs—including tree lichen, plankton from a Maine tide pool, and kombucha SCOBY—from Scott Chimileski and Roberto Kolter’s Life at the Edge of Sight.
• Mehrsa Baradaran, author of The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap, spoke with the The Intercept’s podcast Intercepted (at 48:05) about the ongoing impact of slavery on the economics of black communities, and with Splinter about “pure” versus “government-subsidized” capitalism—and black capital’s ghettoized experience with the former.
• At Salon, Brandon Garrett, author of End of Its Rope: How Killing the Death Penalty Can Revive Criminal Justice, discussed the “white lives matter more” effect—that the death penalty is sought more often in cases where the victim is white.
• At The Atlantic, Bernardo Zacka, author of When the State Meets the Street: Public Service and Moral Agency, explained why “bureaucrats don’t seem to care.”

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October 11: “Genius Grants” for Sunil Amrith and Viet Thanh Nguyen

Among the twenty-four members of the 2017 class of MacArthur Fellows—recipients of the so-called “Genius Grant”—are two recent HUP authors: Sunil Amrith, whose Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants we published in 2013, and Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of 2016’s Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War. Here’s the MacArthur Foundation’s clip on Amrith, who was recognized for “illustrating the role of centuries of transnational migration in the present-day social and cultural dynamics of South and Southeast Asia”: And their spot on Nguyen, best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Sympathizer,…