On Photography: Walter Benjamin

Interview with Walter C . Willett Conducted by Benjamin C . Williams

Walter C. Willett MD, DrPH, is Fredrick John Stare Professor of Epidemiology and Nutrition and Chairman of the Department of Nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health as well as a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He studied food science as an undergraduate at Michigan State University, obtained a medical degree from the University of Michigan Medical School and a Doctorate in...

Walter Benjamin and the Tectonic Unconscious: Using Architecture as an Optical Instrument

The writings of Walter Benjamin include appropriations and transformations of modernist architectural history and theory that offer an opportunity to broaden the interpretation of how the relationship between the 'unconscious' and technologically aided 'optics' is figured in his commentaries on cultural modernity. This essay focuses on three moments in his writings, each of which touches on thi...

Racial aura: Walter Benjamin and the work of art in a biotechnological age.

Benjamin Rush on cancer.

It is f i t t ing in this b icentennial year of the United States, for the ed i f i ca t ion of oncologists, to cast a glance at what physicians o f the American Revolut ion though t and practiced about cancer . There is no better source of such en l igh tenment than the wri t ings o f Benjamin Rush (1745-1813) of Phi ladelphia. Of English Quaker stock, born in Pennsylvania and educated at Pr i...

Sketch : W Grey Walter 1 Walter

Nobel-winning Sir Winston Churchill in his history of the Second World War wrote a chapter on the "wizards" who had helped Britain win the war in the air by the development and use of radar. William Grey Walter (1910-1977) was one of those young wizards. He used his experience to design and construct a life-like robot with a nonlinear dynamic brain, which offered an existence proof that brains ...