Essay Power, racism, and the role of the university February 23, 2022 In October 2020, I sat down with historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad for an event about my book, The Campus Color Line. It was a lively conversation, ranging from discussions about reparations in higher education to questioning who should lead U.S. colleges and universities. Read More
Essay The physicality of life February 15, 2022 DNA is stuff: physical, tangible, material. We all know this; we can even picture in our minds its famous double helical form. Read More
Interview Nomi M. Stolzenberg and David N. Myers on American Shtetl February 10, 2022 Settled in the mid-1970s by a small contingent of Hasidic families, Kiryas Joel is an American town with few parallels in Jewish history鈥攂ut many precedents among religious communities in the United States. Read More
Essay A look inside The War That Doesn鈥檛 Say Its Name February 03, 2022 In early 2008, I set up my research base at the VIP hotel in downtown Goma, a trade hub in the eastern Congo nestled between the Nyiragongo Volcano and the shores of Lake Kivu. Read More
Interview Zeynep Pamuk on Politics and Expertise January 31, 2022 Our ability to act on some of the most pressing issues of our time, from pandemics and climate change to artificial intelligence and nuclear weapons, depends on knowledge provided by scientists and other experts. Read More
Essay Arnold Weinstein on The Lives of Literature January 29, 2022 The Lives of Literature: Reading, Teaching, Knowing as the subtitle suggests, is after large game: why we go to literature, what its value might be in a world increasingly devoted to 鈥渋nformation,鈥� and what a career in teaching has taught me, as well as my students. Read More
Essay Skill, power, and control in the world of Qatar鈥檚 migrant workers January 27, 2022 On the shoreline of Doha, Qatar, a tacky countdown clock, an enormous fuchsia hourglass cast in acrylic and sponsored by the luxury watchmaker Hublot, flashes the days, minutes, and seconds until the first ball of the 2022 FIFA World Cup is kicked at 6pm on November 21, 2022. Read More
Interview Daniel Jackson on The Essence of Software January 24, 2022 As our dependence on technology increases, the design of software matters more than ever before. Why then is so much software flawed? Why hasn鈥檛 there been a systematic and scalable way to create software that is easy to use, robust, and secure? Read More
Essay The pandemic has flooded the world with grief, but we鈥檙e not in a 鈥榞rief pandemic鈥� January 21, 2022 In a span of less than two years, Covid-19 infections have killed 4.5 million people worldwide. Experts estimate that each person who dies is significantly grieved by nine others. Read More
Essay Bambi: The lonely destiny of outsiders January 14, 2022 Today, almost all the animals in the world do not and cannot determine their destinies. It was not always like this. Before the emergence of human beings thousands of years ago, animals were free to roam the planet as they wished. Read More
Interview Meir M. Bar-Asher on Jews and the Qur鈥檃n January 12, 2022 In this panoramic and multifaceted book, Meir Bar-Asher examines how Jews and Judaism are depicted in the Qur鈥檃n and later Islamic literature, providing needed context to those passages critical of Jews that are most often invoked to divide Muslims and Jews or to promote Islamophobia. Read More
Interview Ideas and inspiration from 91桃色鈥檚 inaugural fellows January 06, 2022 In 2021, 91桃色 welcomed its inaugural Publishing Fellows. The Publishing Fellowship was created to address a lack of diverse representation across the publishing industry, as part of a Press-wide Equity and Inclusion strategic initiative launched in 2018. Read More
Essay Why are habits so sticky? December 23, 2021 Nearly all of us have habits that we would like to get rid of. It might be as innocuous as saying聽鈥渦m鈥澛爐oo often when we speak, or as serious as a pack-a-day smoking habit. Either way, we know that changing our behavior is really difficult, even when the stakes are high. Read More
Essay How does one communicate with colors? December 20, 2021 Architecture is represented not only with lines, figures, and words, but also with colors. What sounds like a truism today鈥攚hen colorful, computer-generated renderings of building projects dominate architectural media鈥攊s in fact a relatively recent phenomenon. Read More
Essay Jane Austen鈥檚 beginnings December 10, 2021 There is an excellent cartoon, first published in Punch magazine, that depicts Jane Austen sitting in her publisher鈥檚 office and getting what we might call some mixed feedback on her latest submission: 鈥榃e like the plot, Miss Austen, but all this effing and blinding will have to go鈥�. Read More
