With the advent of urbanization in the early modern period, the material worlds of children were vastly altered. In industrialized democracies, a broad consensus developed that children should not work, but rather learn and play in settings designed and built with these specific purposes in mind. Unregulated public spaces for children were no longer acceptable; and the cultural landscapes of children's private lives were changed, with modifications in architecture and the objects of daily life.

In Designing Modern Childhoods, architectural historians, social historians, social scientists, and architects examine the history and design of places and objects such as schools, hospitals, playgrounds, houses, cell phones, snowboards, and even the McDonald's Happy Meal. Special attention is given to how children use and interpret the spaces, buildings, and objects that are part of their lives, becoming themselves creators and carriers of culture. The authors extract common threads in children's understandings of their material worlds, but they also show how the experience of modernity varies for young people across time, through space, and according to age, gender, social class, race, and culture.

Designing Modern Childhoods: History, Space, and the Material Culture of Children

Modern city-dwellers suffer their share of unpleasant experiences—traffic jams, noisy neighbors, pollution, food scares—but urban nuisances of the past existed on a different scale entirely, this book explains in vivid detail. Focusing on offenses to the eyes, ears, noses, taste buds, and skin of inhabitants of England’s pre-Industrial Revolution cities, Hubbub transports us to a world in which residents were scarred by smallpox, refuse rotted in the streets, pigs and dogs roamed free, and food hygiene consisted of little more than spit and polish. Through the stories of a large cast of characters from varied walks of life, the book compares what daily life was like in different cities across England from 1600 to 1770.

Using a vast array of sources, from novels to records of urban administration to diaries, Emily Cockayne populates her book with anecdotes from the quirky lives of the famous and the obscure—all of whom confronted urban nuisances and physical ailments. Each chapter addresses an unpleasant aspect of city life (noise, violence, moldy food, smelly streets, poor air quality), and the volume is enhanced with a rich array of illustrations. Awakening both our senses and our imaginations, Cockayne creates a nuanced portrait of early modern English city life, unparalleled in breadth and unforgettable in detail.

Have you seen Perfume?

Hubbub: Filth, Noise, and Stench in England, 1600-1770

Although it sounds bizarre, the case touches on a serious issue that has bothered scholars and scientists in recent years — namely how to estimate the risk of new groundbreaking experiments and who gets to decide whether or not to go ahead.

Asking a Judge to Save the World, and Maybe a Whole Lot More

"Justice delayed is justice denied" is a guiding principle of the American criminal justice system. The Bush administration has ignored this principle with impunity, and America's image abroad has suffered greatly as a result.

Have you seen Taxi to the Dark Side?

Forever Guantánamo

The Democrats didn't expect so much pain.

Molehill Politics

From the bold to the beautiful, from the wicked to the wise, every day the Wikipedia team relegates possibly "inappropriate" submissions to the garbage dump of time. Here, we make selected rejects immortal and preserve them for posterity.

From earlier this month:

It's like some vast aerial city with people walking briskly to and fro on catwalks, carrying picnic baskets full of nutritious snacks and puppy smoothies.

The Wikipedia Knowledge Dump

Comcast announced Thursday an about-face in its stance and said it will treat all types of Internet traffic equally.

Comcast said it will collaborate with BitTorrent to come up with better ways to transport large files over the Internet instead of delaying file transfers.

Comcast to Stop Hampering File-Sharing

Anthony Cordesman:

Is the end result going to be good or bad? It is very difficult to tell. If the JAM and Sadr turn on the US, or if the current ISCI/Dawa power grab fails, then Shi'ite on Shi'ite violence could become far more severe. It is also far from clear that if the two religious-exile parties win, this is going to serve the cause of political accommodation or legitimate local and provincial government. It seems far more likely that even the best case outcome is going be one that favors Iraqracy over democracy.

Current Iraq fighting not good guys vs bad

The Darwinian "theory of everything" has always stood above its presumptive competitors because it came packaged with several "big problems," which could just as easily have been the theory's undoing as its vindication: altruism, sociality, organs of extreme perfection, and animal-built structures. With respect to the last one, the basic problem is that when we build, we act as purposeful, intentional and designing agents. Yet it is Darwinism's core assumption that such agency has no place in guiding evolution.

When animals build things, sometimes appearing to anticipate, match or exceed our own capabilities as architects, what are we to think? Do we conclude that other creatures can also act as intentional agents? In that case, the Darwinian vision of a world without such agency is undermined. Or do we conclude that our own intentionality is a quality apart, with no precedent in the living world from which we sprang? Drawing such a conclusion would be tantamount to succoring Darwin's bête noir, Platonic essentialism. This problem is not trivial: Indeed, it drove a wedge between Darwin and his "co-Darwinist," Alfred Russel Wallace. Yet Darwin himself, confronted with the magnificent structures built by bowerbirds, resorted to attributing them to the birds' pursuit of "pleasure"—a purposeful agency if ever there was one.

Nature's Awful Beauty

A systems scientist looks at virtualization, scalability, and Ruby on Rails.

A Conversation with Jason Hoffman