Trust in a distrustful world October 18, 2022 US politics faces a serious trust deficit. MAGA Republicans don’t trust RINOs, leftist Democrats don’t trust their centrist colleagues, Republicans don’t trust Democrats (and vice versa), and trust in major social institutions has been weakening for decades. Read More
Jonathan Kirshner on An Unwritten Future October 16, 2022 An Unwritten Future offers a fresh reassessment of classical realism, an enduring approach to understanding crucial events in the international political arena. Read More
Capitalism: The word and the thing October 12, 2022 Capitalism is a word used variously to describe an economic and social system, a modern form of political power, a dynamic mode of production, a stage in a world-historical process running from feudalism to communism, a western object of ideological allegiance, a durable form of inequality or, more simply, a thing. Read More
On anniversaries, time, patience, perseverance, and publishing October 11, 2022 As Cicero wrote, “we truly can’t praise the love and pursuit of wisdom enough, since it allows a person to enjoy every stage of life free from worry.” These same words of wisdom scale readily from an individual to an organization like PUP, as we navigate every stage of the book, and every stage of our life as a publisher. Read More
What is viral justice? An interview with Ruha Benjamin October 11, 2022 In spring 2020, Ruha Benjamin received a DM on Twitter from her literary agent Sarah Levitt: “I’m hungry to read anything you have.” Inspired, Benjamin began writing and spent the first few months of the pandemic conceiving what would become her new book, Viral Justice. Read More
What I mean by landscape orientation October 05, 2022 I entered without words: Poems has been described as “landscape oriented” in every sense. Originally a photographic term, now applied to a horizontal page, landscape orientation is, for me, a poetics. A poetics that begins by questioning the term “landscape” itself. Read More
The need for material literacy October 03, 2022 In a time of screen saturation, digitized images of objects and manuscripts, and an emphasis on “knowledge workers” rather than craftspeople, we run the risk of becoming materially illiterate. Read More
Aline, Eero, my boyfriend, and me September 20, 2022 A few years ago, after I had just met my boyfriend, we found ourselves driving in circles around a Colorado carpark. He claims the carpark was confusingly oriented, that its architecture seemed to indicate that we would go either up or down if we kept going. Read More
The challenge of popularizing mathematics September 19, 2022 Of all the academic disciplines, mathematics is perhaps the most difficult to popularize. One must navigate a subject that is not always received with excitement by the general public. Read More
On ‘seeing’ trees and forests September 19, 2022 Forests and the trees that comprise them are understood at different scales of space and time. This is true for professional and recreational naturalists, research scientists, hikers, conservationists, eco-tourists, and ecologists. Read More
Making democracy with autocrats: East Asia’s past, China’s future? September 15, 2022 Democracy is not just Western; it is Eastern as well. In a time when democracies globally—including the United States—are endangered, three Asian democracies stand out for their quality and stability: Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Read More
Word watch September 12, 2022 Ever have the feeling that you should know something, but you don’t yet know what it is? But wait, if it is unknown to you, then how do you know that you should know it? Read More
Dinosaurs are more and less unknown than you think August 22, 2022 Even if you aren’t interested in dinosaurs, it’s almost impossible not to absorb some information from the endless swirl of discoveries reported in the media, new documentaries and even movies (of bother greater and lesser quality). Read More
Rediscovering Melville and Mumford August 22, 2022 The darkest times often feel unprecedented, but as almost any historian will tell you, they’re not. Read More
Young, Gifted and Diverse: Q&A with the authors August 22, 2022 Despite their diversity, Black Americans have long been studied as a uniformly disadvantaged group. Read More