Essay On horses, goats, and writing October 02, 2020 My mother swears my first word was 鈥榟orsie鈥�. When other little girls were playing with dolls, I was snipping pictures of horses from newspapers and magazines, pasting them on poster board, and taping them to my bedroom walls. Read More
Essay Spinoza鈥檚 guide to life and death October 01, 2020 How should we face our mortality? Whether death is鈥攁s we all hope鈥攁 far off eventuality or, through age or illness, imminent, what is the proper attitude to take? Should we fear death? Read More
Interview Judith Herrin on Ravenna September 29, 2020 At the end of the fourth century, as the power of Rome faded and Constantinople became the seat of empire, a new capital city was rising in the West. Here, in Ravenna on the coast of Italy, Arian Goths and Catholic Romans competed to produce an unrivaled concentration of buildings and astonishing mosaics. Read More
Essay Notes on masks September 28, 2020 Last week I was about to enter a coffee shop in Berkeley, when a person came rushing out, mask-less and shouting. For a second I thought I could see her voice, showering the insidious droplets I have learned too much about. Read More
Essay Bob Dylan鈥檚 rowdy ways and American voice September 25, 2020 One of the great ironies surrounding Bob Dylan鈥檚 2016 reception of the Nobel Prize for Literature is that, at the time of the prize, the great songwriter had just released a pair of recordings that featured no compositions of his own. Read More
Essay Campus racism and how history can inform college leaders today September 24, 2020 College presidents have described the uncertainty within higher education due to the coronavirus pandemic and subsequent economic downturn as 鈥渦ncharted territory.鈥� Read More
Essay A virtual guide to Leaving Academia September 23, 2020 Two distinct challenges stood in my way when I began to consider leaving academia. The first was psychological. By that point in 2015, my entire identity was bound up in my scholarly work. Read More
Essay A long afternoon: Opposition, enmity, and Egyptian hieroglyphs September 18, 2020 In the summer of 1828, the natural scientist and physician Thomas Young spent an afternoon with Jean-Fran莽ois Champollion, the scholar who, six years earlier, had announced a system for reading Egyptian hieroglyphs, considerably complicating Young鈥檚 preceding efforts to do the same thing. Read More
Interview Marc Levinson on Outside the Box September 14, 2020 Globalization has profoundly shaped the world we live in, yet its rise was neither inevitable nor planned. It is also one of the most contentious issues of our time. Read More
Essay Our worst fears: Conspiratorial fictions and the unremitting assault on democracy September 13, 2020 Two years ago, we put the final revisions on our book about conspiratorial thinking in American politics: A Lot of People are Saying: the New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy. Read More
Interview Roy Foster | On Seamus Heaney September 10, 2020 The most important Irish poet of the postwar era, Seamus Heaney rose to prominence as his native Northern Ireland descended into sectarian violence. Read More
Interview Leslie Geddes on Watermarks September 02, 2020 Formless, mutable, transparent: the element of water posed major challenges for the visual artists of the Renaissance. To the engineers of the era, water represented a force that could be harnessed for human industry but was equally possessed of formidable destructive power. Read More
Interview Despina Stratigakos on Hitler鈥檚 Northern Utopia August 31, 2020 Between 1940 and 1945, German occupiers transformed Norway into a vast construction zone. This remarkable building campaign, largely unknown today, was designed to extend the Greater German Reich beyond the Arctic Circle and turn the Scandinavian country into a racial utopia. Read More
Essay Navigating grad school in uncertain times August 26, 2020 Even in 鈥渘ormal鈥� times, grad school is fraught with uncertainty 鈥� uncertainty around whether a degree is worth it, whether you picked the right program and whether they were smart to pick you, whether you can get enough funding to keep doing your work, whether you can publish enough to get a job, and whether there even will be any jobs when you鈥檙e done. Read More
Essay Multitasking and the pandemic parent August 24, 2020 From my third floor attic office, I can hear my wife鈥檚 muffled voice through the door to the room just off the stairs. I can鈥檛 hear what she is saying, but from its now familiar cadence, I can tell that she is in a meeting. We used to post signs when we were in meetings, but we don鈥檛 bother anymore. Read More
