The origins and importance of talk March 29, 2023 I come from a family of talkers. The household in which I grew up was always noisy. My parents were loud and opinionated, and interrupted and quarreled boisterously with each other. Read More
In dialogue: Writing women’s history March 27, 2023 We asked four of our authors the following question: What do we find when we read ‘women’ into histories that often exclude them? Read More
Arthur V. Evans on The Lives of Beetles March 20, 2023 With some 400,000 species, beetles are among the largest and most successful groups of organisms on earth, making up one-fifth of all plant and animal species. Read More
How to see the world, by Nathaniel Hawthorne March 15, 2023 Sitting before a lake one summer, Nathaniel Hawthorne took a newspaper from his pocket and began to read. His object was not to catch up on the news but to play a trick—to lull nature into a false sense of security, to make it think he was not perceiving the world around him, so he could look up suddenly and see the trees for how they really are. Read More
Pi is magic March 14, 2023 Pi is magic. It is a number that is infinite, universal, transcendental, and irrational. It appears everywhere, and my mathematician friends tell me that Pi is as close to religion as you can get in math. Read More
On spiny ants and the rising tide March 11, 2023 In the mangrove forest mudflats Down Under, a worker ant cautiously extends her antennae. What is the expansive substance before her? Tap, tap, tap. Water! Read More
Laurence Packer on Bees of the World March 09, 2023 The archetypal bee is the western domesticated honey bee (Apis mellifera)—which is just one among over 20,500 different species of bees. Few realize there are so many species or that our honey bee is such an unusual one. Read More
What your publisher wishes you knew March 02, 2023 One of the scariest parts of the publishing process, at least for some people, is promotion, i.e., all the things that you and your press will do to make sure people are aware of your book when it’s published and hopefully read it. Read More
Marion Turner on The Wife of Bath March 01, 2023 Medieval women led varied, interesting, risky lives. They worked in a wide variety of jobs, were economically active, and were often independent. This is the world in which Chaucer’s Wife of Bath–one of the most famous and enduring female characters in English literature–was born. Read More
In Dialogue: What is misunderstood about Blackness? February 27, 2023 For decades, ‘Blackness’ has been a crucial political and cultural category that grounds a public discourse on cherishing a robust historical tradition and systemically uprooting white supremacy. Read More
Meaning and the hard problem of life February 21, 2023 In the middle of the twentieth century something happened to the meaning of “meaning.” Until then meaning had been associated with concepts, definitions, and language—and so associated strongly with the human animals who hold concepts, define things, and speak. But now it came to be connected to a term, information, that was sponsoring revolutions in areas from computation to biology. Read More
Why democracy belongs in artificial intelligence February 21, 2023 Most of the real harms AI systems can cause—but also the opportunities they can afford—are nothing to do with robots taking over the world or self-generating AI systems. They are to do with what, how, when, and why we should use powerful predictive tools in the decision-making systems of our political, social, and economic organizations. Read More
Ukraine’s memorials February 20, 2023 One of the curiosities of the Russian invasion of Ukraine is how, even amid the deprivations of a savage war, Ukrainians have turned their attention to destroying or de-Russifying Soviet monuments and protecting their own. Read More
Medea, again February 16, 2023 Although she is surrounded by the accoutrements of a magical spell that she is performing, which gestures to her mastery of an arcane science, the predominant impression is of a woman who is being victimized by a love-charm that the gods have cast upon her, compelling her to use her special knowledge to help the hero Jason. Read More
James B. Nardi on The Hidden Company That Trees Keep February 15, 2023 You can tell a lot about a tree from the company it keeps. James Nardi guides you through the innermost unseen world that trees share with a wondrous array of creatures. Read More
