“What makes the sketch’s autonomy fantastical is the reciprocal sense in which formalizing and circulating itself as the process of its production reconstitutes its process as a commodity—indeed, as the commodification of the resistance to the commodity’s reification.”

Daniel Fulton Cheung on the “autonomy imperative”

Does the agonistic ritual of the potlatch—identified as “primitive” by some—only belong to the past or does it appear in the so-called modern world?

Carl Friesenhahn looks at three ways of answering this question.

The posters on my wall are meant to evoke a vintage style, but they are really artistic echoes of centuries of attempts to catalog the world, from book lists to agricultural pictures to Sears’s grandiosity.

Carl Friesenhahn on trade catalogs as maps of modernity

For more seasoned readers, these chapters also uncover the feline motifs that, like medieval marginalia, are everywhere on the edges of this history but have mostly escaped notice until now.

Caroline Hovanec reviews Marx for Cats

How can we help locally, but in a way that works economically?

An interview with Sara Horowitz

Winthrop’s remarkable sermon outside the distorting lens of contemporary American exceptionalism might just help us see that a new way forward—a way of love—is perhaps just a really old way forward.

Douglas Sikkema responds to the Genealogies of Modernity podcast

[T]he decline of sickness funds and early community-rated plans transformed a system rooted in voluntarism and mutual aid…

Grant Martsolf on the transition from industrial sickness funds to insurance plans in the United States

Rosenberg reminds us that we can't assume modernity means a sundered sacrality. Rather, our discovery that we can produce the sacred means there is potentially more of it than ever before.

Lyle Enright reviews The Rise of Mass Advertising

Ideas have afterlives: they live on in subcultures that intentionally preserve them, in practices that have long lost their justification, and in our contradictions and nagging doubts.

John Buchmann offers a genealogy of balance and economics.