My review of Niklaus Largier's In Praise of the Whip: a Cultural History of Arousal (Zone Books) has got some comment-box action at the New Statesman. And another great Zone book -- Who Are You? Identification, Deception and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe by Valentin Groebner -- is over at the Daily Telegraph.

The new issue of Cabinet -- the Magic issue -- is out now. It includes 'Talk to the Hand', my essay on early-nineteenth-century gesture manuals for public speakers. The most ambitious of these was Chironomia: Or a Treatise on Rhetorical Delivery by Gilbert Austin, published in 1806. These are the kind of antics he expected his students to replicate. Maybe while wearing a super-starched cravat, the tying of which required yet another set of convoluted instructions for the would-be gentleman.

A couple of frieze pieces that I neglected to link before: on Land, Art: A Cultural Ecology Handbook and Susan Sontag's journals.

A short history of hypochondria: part of Documenta Magazines Online Journal.