Essay Why economists鈥攁nd everyone else鈥攕hould care about hope April 13, 2023 The U.S. is experiencing a nationwide crisis of despair. Despair is not only linked with premature mortality, but with the vulnerability to misinformation that is plaguing our society, our health systems, and our democracy. Read More
Essay Tracing the global travels of Isabella Stewart Gardner April 12, 2023 To describe the fairy-tale effect of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum鈥檚 spellbinding interior is to verge upon the clich茅鈥攁nd yet, the historical bridge between its enchanting atmosphere and the global travels of the museum鈥檚 founder and namesake is a complicated one that needs restoration. Read More
Essay Reproductive justice includes the right to stop contraception April 04, 2023 Contraception rebellion is all over social media these days. Many people are going off of hormonal contraception, digging out their implants, foregoing injections鈥� and pulling on that little IUD string dangling from their cervix. Read More
Essay The origins and importance of talk March 29, 2023 I come from a family of talkers. The household in which I grew up was always noisy. My parents were loud and opinionated, and interrupted and quarreled boisterously with each other. Read More
Interview In dialogue: Writing women鈥檚 history March 27, 2023 We asked four of our authors the following question: What do we find when we read 鈥榳omen鈥� into histories that often exclude them? Read More
Interview Arthur V. Evans on The Lives of Beetles March 20, 2023 With some 400,000 species, beetles are among the largest and most successful groups of organisms on earth, making up one-fifth of all plant and animal species. Read More
Essay How to see the world, by Nathaniel Hawthorne March 15, 2023 Sitting before a lake one summer, Nathaniel Hawthorne took a newspaper from his pocket and began to read. His object was not to catch up on the news but to play a trick鈥攖o lull nature into a false sense of security, to make it think he was not perceiving the world around him, so he could look up suddenly and see the trees for how they really are. Read More
Essay Pi is magic March 14, 2023 Pi is magic. It is a number that is infinite, universal, transcendental, and irrational. It appears everywhere, and my mathematician friends tell me that Pi is as close to religion as you can get in math. Read More
Essay On spiny ants and the rising tide March 11, 2023 In the mangrove forest mudflats Down Under, a worker ant cautiously extends her antennae. What is the expansive substance before her? Tap, tap, tap. Water! Read More
Interview Laurence Packer on Bees of the World March 09, 2023 The archetypal bee is the western domesticated honey bee (Apis mellifera)鈥攚hich is just one among over 20,500 different species of bees.聽Few realize there are so many species or that our honey bee is such an unusual one. Read More
Interview What your publisher wishes you knew March 02, 2023 One of the scariest parts of the publishing process, at least for some people, is promotion, i.e., all the things that you and your press will do to make sure people are aware of your book when it鈥檚 published and hopefully read it. Read More
Essay Marion Turner on The Wife of Bath March 01, 2023 Medieval women led varied, interesting, risky lives. They worked in a wide variety of jobs, were economically active, and were often independent. This is the world in which Chaucer鈥檚 Wife of Bath鈥搊ne of the most famous and enduring female characters in English literature鈥搘as born. Read More
Interview In Dialogue: What is misunderstood about Blackness? February 27, 2023 For decades, 鈥楤lackness鈥� has been a crucial political and cultural category that grounds a public discourse on cherishing a robust historical tradition and systemically uprooting white supremacy. Read More
Essay Why democracy belongs in artificial intelligence February 21, 2023 Most of the real harms AI systems can cause鈥攂ut also the opportunities they can afford鈥攁re nothing to do with robots taking over the world or self-generating AI systems. They are to do with what, how, when, and why we should use powerful predictive tools in the decision-making systems of our political, social, and economic organizations. Read More
Essay Meaning and the hard problem of life February 21, 2023 In the middle of the twentieth century something happened to the meaning of 鈥渕eaning.鈥� Until then meaning had been associated with concepts, definitions, and language鈥攁nd so associated strongly with the human animals who hold concepts, define things, and speak. But now it came to be connected to a term, information, that was sponsoring revolutions in areas from computation to biology. Read More
