June 2017

Professor Denise Ho explains the historical context behind the recent controversy over Hong Kong’s Palace Museum, in Even Magazine, a new journal of art and culture

China’s Palace Museum has always been a symbol of political legitimacy, its art and artifacts a kind of currency. Making imperial treasures public to the new nation, it first opened its doors in the Forbidden City in 1925. But many of its finest pieces are no longer in Beijing — the Nationalist Party and its army took thousands of cases of art with them, first on retreat during World War II and finally into exile on Taiwan, where the collection is hosted in a second Palace Museum in Taipei.

Washington Post Perspective: "Violence against members of Congress isn't new" by Joanne Freeman

When House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) and four others were shot during baseball practice at a park in Alexandria, Va., on Wednesday morning, it was the third incident of violence involving legislators in recent weeks, and by far the most extreme.

Out of the Desert

In conversation: Joanna Radin on the ‘phenomenon’ of biobanking

When HIV/AIDS became a pandemic, epidemiologists wanted to know where it began. In the 1980s, they found their answer in a freezer filled with blood. This blood had been collected in the 1950s from members of indigenous communities in Africa as part of anthropological research on human variation. To this day, that sample is the oldest trace of HIV known to biomedicine. It is what launched Joanna Radin’s interest in the field of biobanking, a means of preserving blood and other tissues for future research.