Chrystia Freeland’s Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-rich and the Fall of Everyone Else (Penguin, 2012) was published to high acclaim and controversy in the fall. At the live Public Books panel in December, Freeland joined three distinguished scholars of economic inequality to discuss the causes and consequences of the new global super-rich and their ascent.

A visit to that marvelous Century of the Child design show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York last summer set me to musing all over again. Marvelous, I say, albeit a bit of a missed opportunity. And musing, as it happens, not so much about children past as about colleges future. Regarding that latter, as you will presently see, my musings have in the meantime grown somewhat ornately utopian.

In September 2011, a social worker I’ll call Roscoe Harris made his way to a plaza in lower Manhattan where he’d heard some activists had gathered to protest the greed of Wall Street. A soft-spoken education counselor who lived in Brooklyn, Harris did not think of himself as the protesting type. At the demonstrations he’d attended in the past, he’d always felt like he was being asked to raise his fist for someone else’s cause. But, like many people, he was angry—about the billions being spent on wars while schools were crumbling, about the bailout of the banks under Barack Obama, in whom he’d invested high hopes. And so, on a whim, he decided to find out what was happening in Zuccotti Park.

For a few years in the late 1990s, the myth of a New Economy was everywhere. The old economy, with its pesky booms and busts, was a thing of the past, replaced by a new era of infinite prosperity powered by globalization, the Internet, and—most of all—the stock market. Lured on by the promise of a market that would never fall, Americans played at becoming day traders, invested in mutual funds, piled into 401(k) plans. At the time, the idea of “risk,” popularized by economist Peter Bernstein’s 1996 book, Against the Gods, was ubiquitous.

A few years ago, during fieldwork I was conducting on an evangelically minded Christian charity in England, one of the managers told me about a peculiar issue the charity sometimes faced when it came to hiring new staff: job applicants felt emboldened to enlist the Heavenly Father as a reference. “God told me I was right for this job,” the manager would occasionally hear during an interview. “He may have told you,” the manager would say to herself, “but He didn’t tell me.”

For much of the twentieth century, the conjugation of “India” and “economic growth” invoked either despair or derision. The phrase “Hindu rate of growth”—coined by economist Raj Krishna to distinguish India’s nominal 3.5 percent average rate of growth between 1950 and the 1980s from that of the dynamic “tiger” economies, South Korea and Taiwan—captured both moods. Pressed into global circulation by Robert McNamara, the US Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson, the phrase came to serve as an all-purpose indictment of India’s mixed-economy socialist model and its willed placement on the wrong side of the Cold War.

Speaking to Occupy Wall Street protesters at Zuccotti Park in New York City last October, the Columbia economist Jeffrey Sachs placed himself squarely on their side, saying, “You are doing a magnificent job. This is how history is made. This is how this country is going to turn. Anything I can do, I’m going to be with you to support you.” Using the most popular slogan of that fall, he distanced himself from the wealthiest Americans, insisting, “They are the 1%. We’re the 99%.”

Autumn 2012 in Paris, la rentrée, and a host of new books dealing with the aftershocks of summer 2011’s biggest political scandal are piled up on bookstore tables. A novel by Stéphane Zagdanski, Chaos brûlant (Burning Chaos), is particularly sensational, featuring the spectacular demise of former International Monetary Fund (IMF) director Dominique Strauss-Kahn as seen through the eyes of a group of inmates in a New York psychiatric ward. For Zagdanski, the affair yielded a “providential” narrative not just of one powerful man’s downfall and sexual addiction, but of global financial crisis, late capitalist decadence, and an impending planetary combustion.

Much has changed in Britain since Queen Elizabeth’s coronation in 1953—decolonization, entry into the European Union, the expansion and contraction of the welfare state, the decentralization of government. However, few of these shifts were discernible in the toady treatment that the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee received in June. Then, as 60 years earlier, news commentators fawned over the Queen’s steadfastness and grace under pressure, and the tabloids dissected her sartorial choices. Books, too, contributed to the ingratiating atmosphere. This superficial approach to the Windsors has been long in the making.

Sujan Singh Park is a tiny neighborhood by Delhi standards—more of a large square than a full-fledged “colony,” as the upper-middle-class neighborhoods of South Delhi are called. But this one happens to be where the city’s linguistic, social, and architectural capitals meet. Madhu Jain, a chronicler of the Indian arts scene, describes Sujan Singh Park as forming “a golden triangle” with the India International Centre and the India Habitat Centre, two of the most well-known cultural venues for Delhi’s post-Independence elite and part of a larger area known as Lodi Estate.

Though published only a few months ago, it’s already clear that Robert J. Sampson’s Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect will rank among the most important works of urban studies in a generation. It’s the culmination of an extraordinary research project on Chicago’s neighborhoods and also a major theoretical statement about how to understand local life in a decidedly global age. We are delighted to offer reviews by two leading urban scholars—the historian Tom Sugrue and the sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh—here.

In our time, how many American critics have been celebrities? How many have had the kind of name recognition that allows them to be casually mentioned in a mainstream Hollywood movie, or enough star power to be featured (along with their apartments) in People, the magazine which pretty much invented today’s celebrity culture? Not many. Almost none. Maybe, when you get right down to it, only one. Susan Sontag.

In the summer of 1978, a trucking company illegally dumped 31,000 gallons of used transformer oil along hundreds of miles of roads in Warren County, North Carolina. The location was no accident: This was the poorest county in the state, and the majority of its residents were black. Adding insult to injury, the state decided to place a hazardous-waste landfill in the area that would store the used oil and also serve as a repository for toxins from other counties.

Didier Fassin is an anthropologist and sociologist from France (where, happily, the distinction between them matters less) and a professor at the Princeton Institute of Advanced Study’s School of Social Science. Trained as a physician and for long a practitioner of the political anthropology of health across the world, who worked for a time with Médecins Sans Frontières, he is now focusing on morals and, in particular, as he writes in Humanitarian Reason, on “the point where it is articulated with politics.”

“Every great city,” wrote Friedrich Engels, in The Condition of the Working Class in England, “has one or more slums, where the working class is crowded together... The streets are generally unpaved, rough, dirty, filled with vegetable and animal refuse, without sewers or gutters, but supplied with foul, stagnant pools instead.”

The Right to Look is a very different type of book than the anthologies, yet one that also responds to the every-which-way character of much recent visual culture studies, and to the fragmentation of Visual Culture as a quasi-discipline under duress from the established disciplines, not least from orthodox art history.

We have lots of explanations for why people do bad things to one another. Prejudice, insanity, bureaucracy, and self-interest, to name but a few. However, we are less able to offer explanations for why some people do try to do good in the world, often against extraordinary odds. Academics and journalists alike seem more attracted to studying vices rather than virtues. All too often we have looked for the authentically human in suffering, if not cruelty.

In a February 2011 interview, the United States Treasury secretary insisted that the future of the American economy depends upon the continued growth of its financial sector. “I don’t have any enthusiasm,” said Timothy Geithner, for “trying to shrink the relative importance of the financial system in our economy as a test of reform, because we have to think about the fact that we operate in the broader world.”