What does it actually mean to say baseball "means" something? A case for dropping the tired clichés about national character and instead treating the game as an object of inquiry—one whose meanings accumulated over time, across North America, East Asia, and the Caribbean, and alongside every other form of modern mass entertainment.

How does a humble crop, scraped by hand in the fields of central India, connect overdose deaths in America to the development dreams of newly independent states? Following the poppy across the century between empire and epidemic, a historian of agriculture uncovers the people and systems that quietly supplied the world’s pain relief—and the pride of families still producing a drug the world has almost stopped buying.

The lives of statues then can take unexpected twists. While some are ready to write the obituary of the public statue, the appearance in many places of new monuments to honour modern-day heroes, whether the leaders of independence struggles or top-flight football players, demonstrates that the genre continues to thrive.

Textiles and immigrant justice grew up side by side — a seamstress mother in a dry cleaning store, a childhood in the Central Valley where the labor was visible and the inequality was not. When the two finally met, the result was a practice of communal making where impacted people are centered, stories surface over slow stitching, and the finished work goes on to march: over 4,000 protest banners, checked out like library books and carried into the streets.