Essay Numbing memories September 23, 2024 For over a quarter century, many millions in the US have captured moments of their daily lives and shared them online, from the mildly amusing and banal to the shocking and painful. Read More
Essay The right way to drink yerba mate September 18, 2024 The first time someone from North America tries yerba mate in the traditional style, with a gourd or cattle horn stuffed with smokey green leaves and the metal drinking straw, we often break one of the unwritten rules of the South American drink. Read More
Essay Readers, receipts, and the history of empire September 16, 2024 As long as there have been documents, there have been functional archives. In the nineteenth century, a period of immense imperial expansion, the formation of the functional archive was tightly tied to the ideological project of empire building. Read More
Essay Charm is everywhere and it defines our contemporary politics September 12, 2024 Personality rules our politics. We pay way more attention to individual politicians, than to policies, institutions, or abstract values. Read More
Essay Augustine and slavery September 04, 2024 Augustine is America’s public theologian again. Digging deeper into Augustine’s thought reveals why Augustinian Christian Nationalism is unviable. Read More
Essay Charting change in a life’s journey through skills September 03, 2024 When my wonderful colleagues asked me to take on leadership of our budding Skills for Scholars series alongside the eminent former PUP director and editor-at-large, Peter Dougherty, I wanted to figure out how to find my philosophical mind within the universe of practical guides. It isn’t just that I was leaving my philosophical fun house, it was a venture out into an unfamiliar and unchartered territory. Read More
Essay Jews, Europe, and the origins of antisemitism: A new approach August 23, 2024 The Jews—real and imagined—so challenged the Christian majority that it became a society that was religiously and culturally antisemitic in new ways between 800 and 1500. Their new self-understanding remained part of different groups’ cultural identity down to the time of the Holocaust and beyond to the present day. Read More
Interview Ben A. Minteer and Jonathan B. Losos on The Heart of the Wild August 21, 2024 The Heart of the Wild brings together some of today’s leading scientists, humanists, and nature writers to offer a thought-provoking meditation on the urgency of learning about and experiencing our wild places in an age of rapidly expanding human impacts. Read More
Essay Forbidden texts August 12, 2024 When was the last time you read a forbidden text? Not forbidden in some other time and place, but here and now, a text that, were it discovered in your possession, might land you in prison? Read More
Essay Working and investing as an ancient Roman August 03, 2024 Encountering the Romans in the marketplace and observing how they made a living allows us to discover how they negotiated the central questions of civilization. Read More
Essay How did Romans manage the risks of childbirth? July 31, 2024 From weather forecasts to astrology substacks, many people today structure their daily lives with the help of predictive information. Fundamentally, this was also true for ancient Romans. Read More
Essay PUP Life: Meetings, memos, and coffee in the conservatory July 25, 2024 As the senior editor for social science books here in the European office, my role is to seek out the most exciting and important new book ideas and work with authors to help them develop their work into proposals and eventually books. Read More
Essay What’s Joe Biden’s role in politics now? July 24, 2024 In April 2020, when Joe Biden had effectively won his party’s nomination to challenge incumbent US President Donald Trump in the coming election and political commentators had begun to fret about both candidates’ ages, I consulted Plutarch of Chaeronea to get his advice about old men engaging in politics. Read More
Essay Auden in nature and history July 22, 2024 If you look at the volumes published so far in the Auden Critical Editions series, you’ll see that, with the exception of the Juvenilia (a unique kind of text), they feature book-length works. Read More
Essay The life of American Afterlives July 12, 2024 I first became aware of Shannon Dawdy’s American Afterlives during the fall of 2019, when her friend and fellow New Orleanian, the literary scholar and Princeton author Bryan Wagner, suggested that she contact Princeton University Press about her manuscript. Read More
