CONFERENCES
Upcoming Conferences

FIELD NOTES
Picket line of scrimmage/Credits at Christie's/
A Wolfe in Marxist clothing/and more

INSIDE PUBLISHING
Styron meets Genovese/
Joe McCarthy's metaphysics/Toga talk/The postman always brings vice, and more

BREAKTHROUGH BOOKS
The History of Death

HYPOTHESES
Jim Holt on the virtues of self-delusion.

It Takes a Village Healer
Medical anthropologists suggest an unlikely remedy for Africa's staggering AIDS crisis. Can herbalists and diviner-mediums succeed where Western doctors have failed?
BY MATTHEW STEINGLASS

Hurrican Hugo
University of Chicago president Hugo Sonnenschein insisted on making the Great Books accountable to the bottom line. Was he a sellout or a savior?
BY DAVID L. KIRP

Status Anxiety in San Juan
Viva las postmodernistas! The newest advocates of Puerto Rican statehood read Foucault and hail from the radical left. Don't talk to them about the purity of island culture.
BY CHRIS MOONEY

Bouncing off the Walls
Designing a concert hall is no mean feat. But does that make it a science? Acoustics is nothing so exact, say the skeptics.
BY PAUL MITCHINSON