Navigating college as a first generation student: An interview with Alvina Atkinson May 12, 2021 There is a startling disparity in the number of female math PhDs and tenured professors, as evidenced by the most recent research from the American Mathematical Society showing the percentage of men vs. women who earned a PhD in Math and are tenured. Read More
Jenny White on the graphic novel and the complicated roots of political violence May 10, 2021 I first arrived in Turkey as a young woman in 1975 to study at Ankara’s Hacettepe University, unaware that Turkey was experiencing a low-level civil war. Read More
The trees in your life May 07, 2021 The Earth supports about sixty thousand tree species. I wonder, how many of them would you come across in an average day? Read More
Mothers, by default May 07, 2021 A few weeks ago, I sat down with a mom I’ll call Erica to talk about how she and her family have navigated the challenges of this past pandemic year. Read More
How Hume anticipated Darwin May 06, 2021 It’s a great irony that many still believe Darwin’s theory of evolution was a sudden, startling revelation rather than itself being the fruit of the evolution of ideas. Read More
‘You try not to eat’: What joblessness means for low‑paid women in Pennsylvania May 04, 2021 Losing your job is difficult for anyone, but for working-class women without savings it is even harder. Sarah Damaske talked to women in low-wage jobs in Pennsylvania who struggled to afford to feed their families or pay for childcare so they could look for work. Read More
Turkish Kaleidoscope musical playlist April 28, 2021 The Turkish Kaleidoscope Musical Playlist is a kaleidoscopic view of the musical backdrop from 1970s Turkey. It explores the music scene of the period, from Anatolian rock & pop to modern & traditional folk music (türkü) and arabesk. Read More
“Say it came from Billie” April 26, 2021 Anyone who’s ever seen Sugar “Kane” Kowalczyk (Marilyn Monroe)—dressed in a form-fitting black skirt, frilly overcoat, and flapper hat, carrying a fiddle in one hand and a small, boxy suitcase in the other—making her grand entrance at the Chicago train station in Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959) likely still has a relatively sharp memory of it intact. Read More
Russia beyond Putin April 26, 2021 Weak Strongman aims to improve our great national debate about Russia by drawing on a host of fascinating new research that views Russia in comparative perspective. Read More
Fracking, freedom, and the tragedy of the commons April 21, 2021 Whenever Earth Day rolls around, I think about Cindy Bower, one of the most dedicated environmentalists I know. When I first met her, in 2013, the silver-haired sexagenarian reminisced about carrying signs for the first Earth Day, many Aprils ago, in 1970. Read More
The paradoxical pleasures of reading literature April 21, 2021 Reading literature is a deeply dialectical experience, one that offers a variety of paradoxical pleasures. One of the most salient of these is that in reading well we both submit to the text and resist it. Read More
Crossing Medieval borders: Chaucer and Europe April 20, 2021 At the moment, almost no one is crossing borders. We aren’t allowed to travel, and many of us are separated from family, missing our international colleagues, and wishing we could go on holiday. Read More
Minds wide open April 14, 2021 How to Keep an Open Mind is a selection of writings from the ancient Greek skeptic Sextus Empiricus. The title is mine, not his. Sextus’ skepticism is all about suspension of judgment concerning the true nature of things. Read More
Chris Bail on Breaking the Social Media Prism April 14, 2021 In an era of increasing social isolation, platforms like Facebook and Twitter are among the most important tools we have to understand each other. Read More
To discover that which was believed lost April 13, 2021 I thought it was gone. I thought it had left me or I had left it somewhere in the street, in a cabinet, inside the grocery store, at the gas station. The arguments were depleting, had become idiotic, fantasy. Read More
