Ice Rivers: A Story of Glaciers, Wilderness, and Humanity September 16, 2021 A riveting blend of cutting-edge research and tales of encounters with polar bears and survival under the midnight sun, Ice Rivers is an unforgettable portrait of—and love letter to—our vanishing icy wildernesses. Read More
The Book Proposal Book: A Guide for Scholarly Authors September 15, 2021 The scholarly book proposal may be academia’s most mysterious genre. You have to write one to get published, but most scholars receive no training on how to do so—and you may have never even seen a proposal before you’re expected to produce your own. Read More
Ideas Podcast: Moving Up without Losing Your Way August 24, 2021 Upward mobility through higher education has been an article of faith for generations of working-class, low-income, and immigrant college students. While this path usually entails financial sacrifices and hard work, little attention has been paid to the personal compromises such students make as they enter worlds vastly different from their own. Read More
In Pursuit of the Perfect Portfolio August 19, 2021 Is there an ideal portfolio of investment assets, one that perfectly balances risk and reward? In Pursuit of the Perfect Portfolio examines this question by profiling and interviewing ten of the most prominent figures in the finance world. Read More
Émigrés: French Words That Turned English July 16, 2021 Richard Scholar examines the continuing history of untranslated French words in English and asks what these words reveal about the fertile but fraught relationship that England and France have long shared. Read More
What do the ancients have to teach us? July 15, 2021 Marshall Poe recently had a fascinating conversation with Rob Tempio, the talented editor behind the Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers series. The books in this series present the timeless and timely ideas of classical thinkers in lively new translations. Read More
We Are Not Born Submissive: How Patriarchy Shapes Women’s Lives July 09, 2021 What role do women play in the perpetuation of patriarchy? On the one hand, popular media urges women to be independent, outspoken, and career-minded. Yet, this same media glorifies a specific, sometimes voluntary, female submissiveness as a source of satisfaction. Read More
The Spirit of Green: The Economics of Collisions and Contagions in a Crowded World June 26, 2021 Solving the world’s biggest problems—from climate catastrophe and pandemics to wildfires and corporate malfeasance—requires, more than anything else, coming up with new ways to manage the powerful interactions that surround us. Read More
Taken for Granted: The Remarkable Power of the Unremarkable June 20, 2021 Why is the term “openly gay” so widely used but “openly straight” is not? What are the unspoken assumptions behind terms like “male nurse,” “working mom,” and “white trash”? Read More
Things Fall Together: A Guide to the New Materials Revolution June 03, 2021 Things in life tend to fall apart. Cars break down. Buildings fall into disrepair. Personal items deteriorate. Yet today’s researchers are exploiting newly understood properties of matter to program materials that physically sense, adapt, and fall together instead of apart. Read More
After Callimachus: Poems May 19, 2021 Callimachus may be the best-kept secret in all of ancient poetry. Loved and admired by later Romans and Greeks, his funny, sexy, generous, thoughtful, learned, sometimes elaborate, and always articulate lyric poems, hymns, epigrams, and short stories in verse have gone without a contemporary poetic champion, until now. Read More
American feminists and the global fight for democratic equality May 03, 2021 Reclaiming social democracy as one of the central threads of American feminism, Dorothy Sue Cobble offers a bold rewriting of twentieth-century feminist history and documents how forces, peoples, and ideas worldwide shaped American politics. Read More
Poet of Revolution: The Making of John Milton April 27, 2021 John Milton (1608–1674) has a unique claim on literary and intellectual history as the author of both Paradise Lost, the greatest narrative poem in English, and prose defences of the execution of Charles I that influenced the French and American revolutions. Read More
Can we fix social media? April 16, 2021 We use social media as a mirror to decipher our place in society but, as Chris Bail explains, it functions more like a prism that distorts our identities, empowers status-seeking extremists, and renders moderates all but invisible. Read More
The water crisis on the High Plains April 12, 2021 The Ogallala aquifer has nourished life on the American Great Plains for millennia. But less than a century of unsustainable irrigation farming has taxed much of the aquifer beyond repair. Read More
