Haiti—What is the lesson here?
Kevin Rosario, author of The Culture of Calamity: Disaster and the Making of Modern America has written an insightful piece for the Wall Street Journal on Haiti's recent tragedy. Drawing on the topic of his book Rosario's article offers a brief historical account of how Western culture has interpreted similar disasters in the past and details the rise of what he calls a "dominant narrative of disasters as instruments of progress"—a narrative which, in light of recent calamities like Katrina and Haiti, Rosario notes might itself be starting to fall apart.
Navigate to the Wall Street Journal website to read the article, or for a more thorough examination of how disasters have played out in the Western consciousness pick up a copy of The Culture of Calamity, or read an excerpt.
Did you catch the premiere Monday night of 
On a slow day in Northampton, Mass., after they had seen the only movie in town, Stephen Braude's friends convinced him to play "this game called table-up"—or, in other words, to have a seance. Thus began the "sordid and complicated tale" of Braude's exploration of the paranormal in everyday life—-a story whose most recent chapter is 
Tell someone unfamiliar with the business of book publishing (and this of course describes almost everyone you meet) that you work at a university press, and you almost inevitably hear: "Oh, you publish textbooks then?" Well, no, we don't—our scholarly publishing mandate is to publish new research, which rarely describes the contents of a textbook.
