Essay Age of anxiety / age of hope April 22, 2024 We all know anxiety as a physiological response to a source of alarm. But it can also serve as an alarm in and of itself—if the real source of the anxiety is not evident to the conscious mind. Read More
Essay The 2024 solar eclipse might be an omen, but what does it portend? April 18, 2024 As the warmest winter in human history draws to a close, many of us are unsure about what comes next. At least celestial mechanics are unaffected. Read More
Essay Our innumerate democracy April 16, 2024 The Declaration of Independence is a mathematical document. It starts by proclaiming certain truths to be self-evident and proceeds to list them. In math, such statements are the axioms of a theory. Read More
Interview James Marcus on Glad to the Brink of Fear April 15, 2024 James Marcus introduces us to Emerson as a visionary and a skeptic, an ardent lover and a fiery political activist. Read More
Interview Jorell Meléndez-Badillo on Puerto Rico: A National History April 12, 2024 Jorell Meléndez-Badillo provides a new history of Puerto Rico that gives voice to the archipelago’s people while offering a lens through which to understand the political, economic, and social challenges confronting them today. Read More
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 Timothée 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’s 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
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 How bad was the world’s 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—an apparent pox-like disease that ravaged not just Rome, but several Roman cities during Marcus’ reign. Read More
Essay The wonderful world of wasps March 20, 2024 Wasps continued conservation and presence are essential for our own well-being but, rather scarily, we know very little about the world’s incredibly rich species diversity, and even less about their ecological interactions. Read More
