What do a dirty leather glove, tree pollen, the North American electrical grid, potato chips, and stem cells all have in common? To Jane Bennett, they are all essentially alive, pulsing and vibrating with a vital materiality that unifies all things - living and non-living, human and non-human. In her 2010 book VIBRANT MATTER, Bennett, a political theorist at Johns Hopkins, proposes a philosophy that ties the universe together not through an omniscient god or all-pervading spirit-soul, but by the very material stuff that makes up every thing, substance, place, and person in the world.