Rent Larson

Men and women have always bargained for sex. In Hard Bargains, philosopher-lawyer Linda Hirshman and legal historian Jane Larson provide the first complete analysis of power in heterosexual relationships, combining an eye-opening legal history of sexual regulation with thought-provoking predictions of what the future might bring. Hirshman and Larson tell a riveting tale that spans the centuries–from early accounts of adulterers hanging from the gibbet, to the impact of the Kinsey Reports and Hugh Hefner's playboy philosophy, to the 1960s judge who argued in favor of sex with eleven-year-olds. The book examines the factors that have shaped our notions of sex, from Catholic teaching to the theories of Sigmund Freud….

The heights referred to in the title of the Broadway musical In the Heights is Washington Heights, a neighborhood in Upper Manhattan adjacent to the George Washington Bridge largely occupied by working-class Hispanics, many of them from the Dominican Republic and other islands in the Caribbean. Lin-Manuel Miranda, who stars in the show and is also given a credit for conceiving it as well as writing the songs, clearly knows the neighborhood intimately. When, at one point, a character reminisces about the subway trains, the IRT 1 and 9, that serviced the area, his character, Usnavi, quickly points out that the 9 has been discontinued.

The Romantic myth of Bohemia originated in the early nineteenth century as a way of describing the new conditions faced by artists and writers when the previous system of aristocratic patronage collapsed in the wake of the Age of Revolution. Without the patron system, the artist was free to move around, to seek an audience wherever fortune beckoned. This marketing model likening the artist's vagabond career to the "gypsy" life helps to explain part of the bohemian myth, but not all of it. Most bohemians have scant interest in commercial gain and are not so itinerant after all, confining their movements to down-market urban neighbourhoods where the rent is cheap and the morals are loose.