NBN Book of the Day

A study of how audiences of Shakespeare’s time understood the sensual world of his plays.
Could something as seemingly natural as a smell, taste, sight, or sound be socially constructed and change over time? Shakespeare and the Senses argues that understanding the original conditions in which Shakespeare’s plays were performed allows us to explore the senses as both visceral, bodily experiences and constructed, social phenomena. As Ben Jonson famously wrote in the First Folio of 1623, Shakespeare can seem to be “not of an age, but for all time.” While this is clever marketing, Shakespeare did write his plays in a particular time and place far removed from our own. Many of his most powerful metaphors rely on sensory details—Aaron’s black hue; Cleopatra’s strange, invisible perfumes; Fluellen’s Welsh accent; Lady Macbeth’s overly scrubbed hands; Malvolio’s yellow stockings—which Elizabethan-era audiences may have understood very differently from us.

Shakespeare and the Senses draws on interdisciplinary research methods in the new field of sensory studies to expand our understanding of what Shakespeare meant to his first audiences.
Open Access Link to Shakespeare and the Senses
Holly Dugan is an Associate Professor of English and Interim Program Head of Theatre and Dance at the Corcoran School of the Arts at GWU. Her research focuses on early modern English literature and culture, especially sensory history, embodiment, sexuality, and animal studies.
Elizabeth McQueen is an Assistant Professor in the College of Fine Arts at Florida State University. She writes about taste and performance, from contemporary performance art to wine fairs to sensory science labs.

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How has policing fundamentally shaped the Latinx experience? The history of Latinx groups in the United States has been marked, from the beginning, by experiences of criminalization and violence at the hands of law enforcement. Marisol LeBrón argues that policing has left an indelible mark on Latinx communities across the country and has come to shape our understanding of what it means to be Latinx. Spanning the nineteenth century to the present, Policed: A Latinx History of State Violence (U California Press, 2027) examines how policing became a key component in the formation of Latinx identity and political consciousness, and still lies at the heart of many pressing issues confronting Latinx communities today, including immigration, employment, health, and housing. More than simply telling a story of police brutality and harassment, Marisol LeBrón powerfully shows that Latinx people have continually resisted state violence and worked to build a more liberated future.
In this conversation, we discuss the violent formation of the border, the criminalization of Latinx youth, the surveillance of Latinx political activism, and the diversity schemes of twenty-first century police forces. Marisol LeBrón's Policed is a timely and powerful synthesis of the policing of Latinx peoples in the United States.
Dr. Marisol LeBrón is an Associate Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. LeBrón is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research and teaching focus on race, social inequality, policing, violence, and protest.

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In Good Vibes Only: Phenomenology and the Biopolitics of Algorithmic Legitimation, Robin James argues that “vibes” have become a way for how we see ourselves and understand our tastes, as well as how corporations and governments see us in order to categorize and control. Vibes, according to James, are an orientation that situate beings and things in space with others, closer to some things than others, facing is certain directions, and more likely to be grouped together. Drawing from a diverse set of theoretical and methodological perspectives, including continental feminist philosophy, critical philosophy of race, phenomenology, and popular music studies, James walks the reader through how vibes are understood, the mathematical models that vibes are based on, and how vibes function as a new form of biopower and therefore as a means of categorization and control.
You can find a transcript of our conversation here.

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Neither capitalism nor central planning, this is the future for socialism.
Capitalism isn’t working. But is there a plausible alternative? The Blueprint: How Socialism Can Work in the Real World (Verso, 2026) lays one out: a system where workers control every lever of production, and competitive markets and state planning coexist side by side. Drawing on the history of socialist experiments and the economic debate over planning and markets, The Blueprint confronts the hardest questions about what went wrong in the past—and why it can go right in the future. The result is a socialism worthy of the twenty-first century.
Mike Beggs is senior lecturer in political economy at the University of Sydney. His research focuses on the history of macroeconomic and monetary thinking and policy.
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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From maps of colonial empires to charts of national trade, data visualization has long been used to consolidate knowledge and power. But just as often, it has been used to uncover oppression and bring about change. Data by Design: Visualization and Power from Abolition to the Dawn of Data Science (MIT Press, 2026), journeys across continents and over centuries to expose the power of visualization—and to show how it can be wielded back. A group of British antislavery activists who created a diagram of captives in the hold of a ship, accelerating support for the abolitionist cause. A Ñudzahui (Mixtec) painter who designed a map for a king, testifying to his people’s sovereignty and claims to the land. These are but two stories of many, each expertly analyzed and illustrated in full-color detail, that confirm how visualization can lead to a more liberatory world. A set of new images, created by Lauren Klein and her research team—also viewable on an interactive website—further expands our sense of what visualization, when used with intention and care, can achieve. A book for those who love charts and graphs, and for those who create them, Data by Design offers historical grounding, ethical clarity—and the inspiration we need—to envision a more just future.

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