Interview Robert Frank on Under the Influence January 07, 2020 Psychologists have long understood that social environments profoundly shape our behavior, sometimes for the better, often for the worse. But social influence is a two-way street鈥攐ur environments are themselves products of our behavior. Read More
Essay For the beauty of invisibility January 06, 2020 Human beings are naturally visual creatures. Our eyes, capable of counting single photons, have been optimized over evolutionary time to the very limits of the laws of physics. Read More
Essay Roger F. Pasquier on Birds in Winter December 20, 2019 The recent report from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society that there are today in the United States and Canada 29.4 billion fewer birds than the estimated 100 billion estimated as present fifty years ago is sobering news. Read More
Essay Philip Freeman on聽Cicero, Star Wars, and the Stoic Idea of God December 13, 2019 Ancient Rome was a wildly diverse and exotic place. As I tell the students in my college classes, if you want to get a feel for what Rome was like, watch Star Wars. Read More
Essay How do human rights come about?: A few lesser-known activists and the popular movements they led December 10, 2019 How do human rights actually come about? International resolutions and treaties, like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are important, but they hardly suffice. Read More
Interview Marion Turner on Chaucer: A European Life December 02, 2019 More than any other canonical English writer, Geoffrey Chaucer lived and worked at the centre of political life鈥攜et his poems are anything but conventional. Read More
Interview Jedediah Purdy on This Land is Our Land November 26, 2019 Today, we are at a turning point as we face ecological and political crises that are rooted in conflicts over the land itself. Read More
Interview Dan Hooper on rethinking our universe鈥檚 first moments November 18, 2019 Over the past century, cosmologists have pieced together a remarkably detailed picture of our universe and its history, spanning from the first seconds that followed the Big Bang up to the present. Read More
Essay Michelangelo gave me a new perspective on aging November 15, 2019 I needed to pass age sixty before I could write a book about the artist Michelangelo Buonarroti in his seventies and eighties. Read More
Interview Nicholas Buccola on The Fire is Upon Us November 14, 2019 On February 18, 1965, an overflowing crowd packed the Cambridge Union in Cambridge, England, to witness a historic televised debate between James Baldwin, the leading literary voice of the civil rights movement, and William F. Buckley Jr., a fierce critic of the movement and America's most influential conservative intellectual. Read More
Interview Naomi Oreskes on Why Trust Science? November 13, 2019 Do doctors really know what they are talking about when they tell us vaccines are safe? Should we take climate experts at their word when they warn us about the perils of global warming? Why should we trust science when our own politicians don't? Read More
Essay A look inside Protest!: A History of Social and Political Protest Graphics November 12, 2019 Throughout history, artists and citizens have turned to protest art as a means of demonstrating social and political discontent. Read More
Essay A look inside The Nevada Test Site November 11, 2019 More nuclear bombs have been detonated in America than in any other country in the world. Between 1951 and 1992, the Nevada National Security Test Site was the primary location for these activities, withstanding more than a thousand nuclear tests that left swaths of the American Southwest resembling the moon. Read More
Essay How to Build Community November 06, 2019 In the pages聽and impact聽of each book can be found the work of as many as 35 different individuals鈥攆rom editorial assistant to聽metadata manager鈥攁nd that doesn鈥檛 include readers and listeners, which increase the individuals involved in a book in exponential ways. Read More
Essay By Design | Fungipedia: A Brief Compendium of Mushroom Lore November 05, 2019 Playfully illustrated by Amy Jean Porter, Fungipedia is an accessible, and sometimes irreverent, tour of mycology: a mini encyclopedia of mushrooms, for all intents and purposes. Read More
