99 Poets/1999 presents the work of ninety-nine poets in dialogue with one another across the divides of language, culture, and temperament. With contributions from the Americas, Eastern and Western Europe, the Middle East, Australia, New Zealand, and China, the volume features responses to questions posed by the guest editor Charles Bernstein—responses that range from historical to imaginary and from philosophical to poetic.

Each poet was asked to ponder a series of questions: Is identity an important issue for your work, and, if so, in what sense? What do you see as the most urgent, yet insufficiently addressed or considered, issue or issues for poetry and poetics at this moment? Do you see your work in the context of a national state, or in the context of international capital, or in some other context?

After years of exchange between the artists—through translations, readings, and visits—the result is a collection of unique and significant literary works, one that is richly suggestive for the future not only of poetry but of literary and cultural studies as well.

The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle offer a window onto the lives of two of the Victorian world’s most accomplished, perceptive, and unusual inhabitants. Scottish writer and historian Thomas Carlyle and his wife, Jane Welsh Carlyle, attracted to them a circle of foreign exiles, radicals, feminists, revolutionaries, and major and minor writers from across Europe and the United States. The collection is regarded as one of the finest and most comprehensive literary archives of the nineteenth century.

America's prison population has quadrupled in the past two decades, with an enormous impact on families, communities, correctional officers, policy makers, and prisoners themselves. The use of imprisonment as a means of social control has come to the fore in many public debates—whether the issues be deterrence, incapacitation, public spending, overcrowding, or the effects of imprisonment on the offenders' later lives. Prisons addresses these and related topics, offering thought-provoking analyses of particular issues that deserve greater consideration, such as the effects of imprisonment on the children of inmates, the relationship between prisons and the surrounding communities, medical care in prisons, prisoner suicide and coping, adult correctional treatment, and prison management trends, and related topics.

Featuring articles by Alfred Blumstein and Allen Beck, Joan Petersilia, Anthony Bottoms, Douglas McDonald and others, Prisons provides reliable, up-to-date, and comprehensive overviews of policy issues and research developments concerning prisons and imprisonment. This timely collection of essays will benefit scholars, administrators, and policy makers alike.

Evidence: Its Meanings in Health Care and in Law examines the ways in which scientists, clinical practitioners, judges, legal scholars, and juries interpret and use evidence. The articles find that the concept and attributes of "evidence" depend on where one sits. They recognize the time-honored legal and medical science interpretation and operationalization of "evidence" while, at the same time, acknowledging that the health care system and the legal system would each benefit by sustained efforts of mutual education of practitioners in both fields. 

Historians use the phrase “the cult of the exotic” to describe the fascination with the foreign or strange that both led to and was intensified by the eighteenth century’s scientific and imperialistic ventures in the Pacific and elsewhere. This volume offers new historical contexts for encounters both real and imaginary and shows the evolution of Europeans’ ideas about themselves and those cultures they considered exotic. The essays draw on a wide variety of sources—art, architecture, scientific and literary works, journals and diaries, and the European popular cultural and political press—to explore eighteenth-century perceptions of the exotic and to demonstrate just how far-reaching “the cult of the exotic” was.

Contributors. Geraldine Barnes, Alexandra Cook, David Culpin, John Greene, Suzanne Kiernan, Christa Knellwolf, Adrian Mitchell, Lisa O’Connell, David Paxman, Ali Uzay Peker, Glynis Ridley, Nicholas Rogers, Walter Veit

This special issue of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law centers on Nobel laureate Kenneth J. Arrow’s seminal article "Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care." When the essay first appeared in 1963, health economics did not exist as an established field, and there was a professional and social bias against thinking about health care in economic terms. Arrow’s trailblazing article laid the foundation for modern health economics and has guided its direction for four decades.

Now the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law examines this legacy, opening with a foreword by Mark V. Pauly, one of the first to publish a response to Arrow’s original article and a major voice in health economics today. A reprint of the article itself serves as a springboard from which contributors assess the accuracy of Arrow’s portrayal of the United States health care system in the early sixties and evaluate how the system has progressed since that time. The contributors to this remarkable collection include some of the most distinguished scholars in the health policy field.

Designed to be an effective reference tool, this issue sets Arrow’s original article apart from the rest by printing it on tinted paper. The contributors’ responses to Arrow are divided into four parts—Part 1: Supply, Demand, and Health Care Competition; Part 2: Risk, Insurance, and Redistribution; Part 3: Information, Knowledge, and Medical Markets; Part 4: Social Norms and Professionalism.

“Climate is a rather elusive entity,” wrote Helmut Landsberg in 1950 as he sorted out some twenty or so competing definitions. This volume of Osiris explores the complexities in understanding what climate means from a historical perspective.  The title of this volume, Klima, evokes its Greek origins, κλίμα, meaning an extended period encompassing vast layers of different kinds of meteorological information.  The volume thus seeks not only to decouple Klima from its current exclusive association with atmospheric sciences, but also to re-visit the implications of an ancient vocabulary for medical, geographical, agricultural, economic, racial, and other “endemic” concerns. If climate is not just about the weather, what is it? The essays in this volume treat climate discourse as a framing device that makes explicit all social concerns arising from the anxiety over the sensible and latent experiences of living in an atmosphere of hunger and satiation, disease and health, poverty and wealth, isolation and community, angst and hope.

James Fleming is a historian of science and technology and Professor of Science, Technology and Society at Colby College, Maine. Vladimir Jankovic is a faculty member, at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester. He is a historian of atmospheric sciences, and has published in the history of meteorology, geography of environmental knowledge, and medical climatology.

Urban studies of the global South have paid particular attention to megacities, such as Mumbai or Johannesburg, while more peripheral urban landscapes—including small and medium-sized towns as well as the margins of megacities themselves—remain overlooked. Emerging from the work of the Shehr Comparative Urban Landscapes Network, an academic initiative that seeks to further a social-historical and critical understanding of contemporary cities and urban practices, this special issue of Social Text takes up the question of marginality in contemporary urban cartographies in the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa.

“Urban Margins” explores the complex processes through which citizens produce and negotiate these marginalized landscapes and in turn are informed by them. Focusing on Douala in Cameroon and Dakar in Senegal, one essay discusses how the state’s failure to provide for its citizens has led many to turn to informal networks and affiliations—whether kin-based, local, translocal, gendered, religious, or secular—for survival. Rendering the urban landscape of these cities in terms of these networks and the ways that they shape a citizen’s interaction with the city, the essay considers the political possibilities for African cities where diverse multilingual and ethnic populations face the challenges, pitfalls, and compromises of coexistence. Examining how female migrant workers negotiate various spaces within the urban landscape of the free trade zone outside of Colombo, Sri Lanka, another essay details how the city represents a site of personal autonomy and political possibilities for both women and men. One contributor addresses the city of Ramallah in the embattled West Bank—the de facto Palestinian capital and the only cosmopolitan space within the occupied territories—to consider how the Palestinian urban middle class remains haunted by the “unmodern” within its own history and present. Another surveys changes in the cultural significance of roads, forts, and town walls in Bahla, Oman, in the aftermath of the country’s 1970 coup d’etat.

Contributors. Kamran Asdar Ali, Allen Feldman, Sandya Hewamanne, Mandana E. Limbert, Rosalind Morris, Martina Rieker, AbdouMaliq Simone, Lisa Taraki