What can be learned from the history of US disaster relief in Ethiopia, Mexico, El Salvador, Armenia, and Haiti? Alexander Poster has written about the role disaster aid has played from the Reagan administration to the present and the opportunity crises have afforded the United States, via USAID and private agencies, to exert economic and political influence on devastated countries.

Over five years into one of the most serious crises of the capitalism system, how should we understand its underlying causes and contours? Radical geographer David Harvey presents a conceptual and historical framework for understanding how urbanization and cities feed into capitalism's inbuilt need to accumulate evermore -- and the role that cities play in the attempts to resolve the periodic crises of capitalism.

After the lawsuits of the last fifteen years, most people assume that Big Tobacco was dealt a mortal blow. Yet the 21st century is poised to see ten times more deaths than the already mind-boggling number of people who died from cigarettes in the 20th. Historian of science Robert Proctor discusses the contents of cigarettes, which may include arsenic and radioactive polonium amongst other bizarre ingredients, the strange episode of Nazi research into tobacco, and the ways that academics have been bought off by America's most powerful industry.

The student movement of the 1960s and 70s demanded the inclusion of women's and ethnic studies by universities, the broadening of the canon, and the hiring and admission of previously excluded groups.  But to what extent were those demands absorbed and capitalized on by academia, the state, and corporations?  Race and critical theory scholar Roderick Ferguson discusses the convoluted journey of so-called minority inclusion.

Several highlights from the past year, including David Hawkes on money, symbols, and magic; Julie Guthman on the alternative food movement; Eric Keenaghan on Emerson and "creative reading"; Suzanne Guerlac on Henri Bergson and the “open society”; and Jessica Henry on “death-in-prison” sentences.

Migrations have been a constant of human history, but migration under the conditions of modern empire, and postcolonialism, is something quite distinct and fraught. Performance artist and poet Shailja Patel discusses the experience of migration and empire, as refracted through her own life and that of her family, Kenyans of South Asian descent -- from the Mau Mau Uprising to Idi Amin's expulsion of Ugandans of South Asian heritage, from Kenya to the UK and the US.