Interview Nicholas Money on Molds, Mushrooms, and Medicines April 12, 2024 Nicholas Money takes readers on a guided tour of a marvelous unseen realm, describing the continuous conversation between our immune systems and the teeming mycobiome inside the body. Read More
Essay Why we practice magic April 11, 2024 Not many academic philosophers discuss magic, however, five centuries ago, prominent Renaissance philosophers wrote extensive treatises on the topic. Read More
Essay Forging an American vision of Jewish masculinity April 11, 2024 When we think of Jewish masculinity in the United States, our imagination likely conjures up the quintessential nebbish: the neurotic, bookish, geeky intellectual type: think Woody Allen or, more recently, Seth Rogen or even Timoth茅e Chalalemet. Read More
Interview Claudia de Rham on The Beauty of Falling April 02, 2024 Claudia de Rham shares captivating stories about her quest to gain intimacy with gravity, to understand both its feeling and fundamental nature. Her life鈥檚 pursuit led her from a twist of fate that snatched away her dream of becoming an astronaut to an exhilarating breakthrough at the very frontiers of gravitational physics. Read More
Interview Amin Ghaziani on Long Live Queer Nightlife April 02, 2024 Not all gay bars are the same. And so, if there are many types of gay bars, then there must be many reasons why some of them are struggling. Those that have folded faced a variety of challenges, some unique to a particular place, others more widely shared. Read More
Interview Leslie Valiant on The Importance of Being Educable March 26, 2024 We are at a crossroads in history. If we hope to share our planet successfully with one another and the AI systems we are creating, we must reflect on who we are, how we got here, and where we are heading. Read More
Essay A twenty-first century medical zoo March 26, 2024 It has taken a long time for humans to recognize that they are animals. Contemporary scientific advances in the life sciences have added to that promising insight by painting a picture of humans, not as autonomous subjects, but rather, inextricably entwined with their environments, starting, for instance, with huge numbers of bacteria, microbes or viruses populating their guts and skins. Read More
Essay How bad was the world鈥檚 first pandemic? March 25, 2024 What exogenous shock knocked the Roman Empire from its prosperous and peaceful pinnacle? In recent years, historians have zeroed in on an infectious outbreak known as the Antonine plague鈥攁n apparent pox-like disease that ravaged not just Rome, but several Roman cities during Marcus鈥� reign. Read More
Interview Martin Thomas on The End of Empires and a World Remade March 25, 2024 Martin Thomas tells the story of decolonization and its intrinsic link to globalization. He traces the connections between these two transformative processes: the end of formal empire and the acceleration of global integration, market reorganization, cultural exchange, and migration. Read More
Essay The wonderful world of wasps March 20, 2024 Wasps continued conservation and presence are essential聽for our own well-being but, rather scarily, we know very little about the world鈥檚 incredibly rich species diversity, and even less about their ecological interactions. Read More
Essay ISMs: Quotations for a new generation March 13, 2024 While Einstein, Darwin, and Jung conducted most of their intellectual work in writing, artists rarely do the same. But it is still possible to know their words. Read More
Interview Urs Gasser and Viktor Mayer-Sch枚nberger on Guardrails March 08, 2024 What are good guardrails in today鈥檚 world of overwhelming information flows and increasingly powerful technologies, such as artificial intelligence? Read More
Interview Stephen Porder on Elemental February 27, 2024 It is rare for life to change Earth, yet three organisms have profoundly transformed our planet over the long course of its history. Read More
Essay Learning from imperial violence February 22, 2024 Historians are supposed to feel lucky when our new books align closely with topics prominently in the news. I would welcome a little less relevance for 鈥淭hey Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence.鈥� Read More
Essay Beyond bestiaries: the cats and dogs of Old English February 12, 2024 The words for 鈥榗at鈥� and 鈥榙og鈥� are virtually the same in Old English 鈥� hund (from which we get 鈥榟ound鈥�) and cat聽or catte (pronounced COT-tuh). Read More
