Product Description: In the nineteenth century, Marx rejected the notion of homo sapiens, offering instead homo faber to indicate how consciousness follows from the primary activity of making. Against this, a certain ludic tradition has imagined a homo ludens, humans defined through their relationship with games and play...read more

Product Description: Rome was not built in a day, but can an issue of a quarterly magazine be produced in 24 hours? This is the question that this issue of Cabinet attempts to answer. Inspired by the resourcefulness of the bricoleur making do with what is at hand, Cabinet issue 44, with a special section titled "24 Hours," sees writers and artists across the world respond to assignments in the space of one day...read more

Product Description: When the current cycle of the Maya Long Count calendar concludes on 21 December 2012, the world will end. Of course, this is hardly the first time the planet s demise has been prophesied. And so Cabinet offers you, doomed reader, a guide to the brief time that remains...read more

Product Description: Derived from the Latin "forensis," the word forensics refers to the "forum" and designates the practice of making an argument by using objects before a professional, political or legal gathering. Cabinet issue 43, with a special section on "Forensics" edited by Eyal Weizman, features Weizman on the changing role of forensics following the discovery of the body of Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele; Lawrence abu-Hamdan on the use by the British police of minute shifts in electrical signatures to precisely date recorded phone conversations; an interview with legendary forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow; and artist projects by Hito Steyerl and Fareed Armaly...read more

Product Description: Across fields as disparate as historiography, psychiatry and anthropology, remembering was long considered primary and forgetting simply a malfunction of recall. But after figures such as Nietzsche and Freud, the act of forgetting has undergone a wholesale reevaluation; for many modern thinkers, active forgetting is the precondition for living...read more

Product Description: Invisible but indispensable, infrastructure is the unsung hero of modernity. A term originally coined in the early twentieth century to refer to the combination of logistics and material necessary for any military operation, the word has come to encompass all the various physical and organizational systems necessary to maintain urban environments, transportation and communication networks, and global commerce...read more

Product Description: As Roland Barthes observed of Abbé Pierre's "zero" haircut, even the most neutral of hairstyles offers a forest of signs. The capacity of hair to attract and radiate meaning permeates not just the history of hairstyles--from the Pharaonic beard of the Egyptians to the ironic mullet of the hipster--but also the rituals, technologies and products that define the world of hair...read more

Product Description: What is learning? An excruciating struggle with techniques and facts? A sensation of joyful encounter with the hitherto unknown? The very notion of the pedagogical conjures a whole range of emotions, and its implications are evident throughout society--for what is culture, after all, but the transmission of knowledge? The thematic section of Cabinet 39 features an interview with John Haynes, pioneer of the modern instruction manual; Jeff Dolven outlining the theater of pedagogy; Elaine Traub tracing the history of distance learning; Sina Najafi tracking the development of the A-F grading system; and an interview with Zoe Readhead, principal of Summerhill, the world's first "free school...read more

Product Description: The seclusion of islands has long made them ideal screens for our fantasies and terrors, choice locations for military and scientific assays, and perfect settings for escapes, incarcerations and battles for survival. In consideration of these dynamics, Cabinet 38 features Julia Wolcott discussing islands in science fiction; Jeffrey Kastner on being marooned; Janet Connelly on West Berlin as an island; Simon Rezak on island penal colonies; the story of the "Chinese Princess" Der Ling, a onetime student of Isadora Duncan who set up court on a Mexican island in the 1920s; and an artist project by Jeremy Drummond...read more

Product Description: A child's plaything and an object of study for scientists; a space of protection but also of isolation: the "bubble" has a cultural significance far more substantial than its fleeting form suggests. Bubbles percolate through the hydrology studies of Leonardo da Vinci, the optical experiments of Newton and the architectural theories of Buckminster Fuller...read more

Product Description: Dust is everywhere, a perennial presence in the corners of culture. Dust can be deathly (domestic dust is mostly desiccated human skin), deadly (poisonous dust is the product of industry and war) or beautiful (the dusty matte surface of make-up, a light dusting applied by the confectioner, glittering motes caught in a sunbeam)...read more

Product Description: Cabinet 34 puts our culture of constant examination, and self-examination itself, to the test, scrutinizing the historical conventions that have produced our contemporary obsession with quantifying and judging everything from aptitude and health to personality and durability...read more

Product Description: Man is purported to be the only animal that can lie by telling the truth. Whether we are dealing with the confidence games of cheats and forgers, with pranksters whose stunts reveal unacknowledged contradictions in society or with apparently simple ways of fooling the eye, deception remains a powerful way of showing a truth...read more

Product Description: One of the four classical elements, capable of both remarkable destructive and generative effect, the heat and light product of chemical reactions that we know as fire is one of the baseline phenomena of human experience. Harnessing and controlling fire is perhaps the single most important achievement of the human animal, and its use--from cooking fires that changed diet and hunting patterns of early man to the forges in which the Industrial Revolution was born--has shaped the development of our history like no other force...read more

Product Description: Shame, one of the fundamental emotions in the development of civilization, has recently begun to reclaim the critical attention it deserves. Increasingly attributed since the Enlightenment to more primitive societies, shame nevertheless remains a powerful element in many spheres of Western life-from penal and educational systems, where it acts as a regulating force, to popular culture, where the shame of others becomes a source of entertainment...read more

Product Description: Pablo Vargas Lugo is one of Mexico's fastest-rising contemporary artists, with an extensive resume of solo and group exhibitions there and abroad. This book, an artist's project highlighting a single installation--done for the ColecciAn Jumex and then reinstalled at the San Paolo Biennale--documents the sprawling city of over 16,000 pyramids of varying sizes that he reproduced at both sites...read more

Product Description: The world's smallest and most widely reproduced work of art, the postage stamp was an official vehicle for extraordinary visual work for more than 100 years before twentieth-century artists and activists began to appropriate the format as a potential venue for their own unsanctioned expressions...read more

Product Description: One of the seven deadly sins, sloth has long been reviled in the Christian world. But as capitalism appropriated the Christian tradition of work and recast it as the ethical imperative of its own secular new world order, laziness was revaluated by philosophers, writers and artists as a means of resisting the prevalent social order and its gospel of profit-driven hard work...read more

Product Description: From the precincts of the vanitas to the black banner of the Jolly Roger to children's Day of the Dead sweets, the human skeleton is suffused with surprisingly diverse and nuanced cultural significances. Subject of science both legitimate and spurious, material of archaeological scholarship and political controversy, bones suggest the permanence of certain inviolable aspects of personal and social identity, even as they bluntly signify the transience of the individuals with whom such identities were associated...read more

Product Description: Looming large in both geological fact and sociocultural significance, mountains promise grandeur, picturesque natural beauty, good health and the chance to literally rise above the everyday--yet they also menace our imaginations with their harsh conditions, dangerous terrain and deep sense of isolation...read more

Product Description: "Secular magic," in the words of historian Simon During, is a category designed to differentiate the activity of the modern stage magician from the classical alchemist or occultist. Yet an appraisal of these non-supernatural forms of magical entertainment nevertheless provides the chance to trace the complex network of social and cultural forms to which secular magic owes a debt--from pioneering theatrical devices, novel approaches to stagecraft, and the harnessing of scientific principles in the service of trickery to modes of discourse and performance that draw heavily upon traditional religious, folkloric or shamanic prototypes...read more

Product Description: The sheer numbers are staggering: scientists estimate that at any one time there are ten quintillion (10,000,000,000,000,000,000) individual insects alive on the earth, the group's more than 900,000 different known types accounting for some 80 percent of the world's total species...read more