The Power of Privilege - Yale and America's Elite Colleges
It is widely assumed that admission to elite U.S. universities is based solely on academic merit—the best and brightest are admitted to Harvard, Yale, and their peer institutions as determined by test scores and GPA, and not by lineage or family income. But does reality support those expectations? Or are admissions governed by a logic that rewards socioeconomic status while disguising it as personal merit?
Making Merit, Making Art: A Thai Temple in Wimbledon
Sandra Cate's pioneering ethnography of art-making at Wat Buddhapadipa, a Thai Buddhist temple in Wimbledon, England, explores contemporary art at the crossroads of identity, authority and value. Between 1984 and 1992, twenty-six young Thai artists painted a series of temple murals that continue to attract worshippers and tourists from around the world. Their work, both celebrated and controversial, depicts stories from the Buddha's lives in otherworldly landscapes punctuated with sly references to this-worldly politics and popular culture. Schooled in international art trends
The present book, stemmin g from the first four chap ters of the authors' Tensor Calculus (Moscow, 1969), constitutes a lucid and completely elementary introduction to linear algebra. The treatment is virtually self-contained. In fact, the mathematical background assumed on the part of the reader hardly exceeds a smattering of calculus and a casual acquaintance with determinants. A special merit of the book, reflecting its lineage, is its free use of tensor notation, in particular the Einstein summation convention.
Edgar Allan Poe is unique for being at once so firmly entrenched within the American literary tradition and yet so questionable in the eyes of the very critics whose attentions strengthened his position. Harold Bloom wonders if Poe's longevity suggests that literary merit and canonical status aren't inseparable.
