Ryan Patrick Hanley on Adam Smith October 08, 2019 Adam Smith is best known today as the founder of modern economics, but he was also an uncommonly brilliant philosopher who was especially interested in the perennial question of how to live a good life. Read More
Philipp Ther on The Outsiders October 03, 2019 Philipp Ther provides needed perspective on today’s “refugee crisis,” demonstrating how Europe has taken in far greater numbers of refugees in earlier periods of its history, in wartime as well as peacetime. Read More
Michael Schmidt on Gilgamesh October 02, 2019 Poetry Day in the UK is October 3, the perfect time to revisit a lost poem—and its rediscovery by contemporary poets. Gilgamesh is the most ancient long poem known to exist. Read More
Susan Mattern on The Slow Moon Climbs October 01, 2019 Are the ways we look at menopause all wrong? Historian Susan Mattern says yes, and The Slow Moon Climbs reveals just how wrong we have been. Read More
Jennifer C. Lena on Entitled September 30, 2019 Two centuries ago, wealthy entrepreneurs founded the American cathedrals of culture—museums, theater companies, and symphony orchestras—to mirror European art. But today’s American arts scene has widened to embrace multitudes. Read More
A Reading List for the Jewish High Holy Days September 25, 2019 From illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages to a firsthand portrait of American Judaism today, these books offer new perspectives on Jewish life, history, texts, and art. Read More
Eric D. Weitz on Human Rights Advances September 23, 2019 History is full of human rights tragedies and abuses, and it can be difficult to feel hopeful about the current state of affairs with those atrocities in mind. But there are success stories as well. Here, Eric Weitz shares a few exceptional human rights advances in recent history. Read More
Searching for Spirit in Science Publishing September 19, 2019 Not long ago, I read an article in Scientific American about the power of words and how language shapes the brain. The article, written by a young Japanese postdoc in neuroscience, begins by invoking the Japanese word, kotodama, which can be translated to mean, literally, “word spirit.” Read More
Eleanor Wilner on Before Our Eyes September 18, 2019 A poet who engages with history in lyrical language, Elenor Wilner creates worlds that reflect on and illuminate the actual one, drawing on the power of communal myth and memory to transform them into agents of change. Read More
Chester Finn and Andrew Scanlan on Learning in the Fast Lane September 17, 2019 The Advanced Placement program stands as the foremost source of college-level academics for millions of high school students in the United States and beyond. More than 22,000 schools now participate in it, across nearly forty subjects, from Latin and art to calculus and computer science. Read More
Jennifer M. Morton on Moving Up Without Losing Your Way September 17, 2019 Upward mobility through the path of higher education has been an article of faith for generations of working-class, low-income, and immigrant college students. Read More
Radcliffe Edmonds on Drawing Down the Moon September 12, 2019 What did magic mean to the people of ancient Greece and Rome? How did Greeks and Romans not only imagine what magic could do, but also use it to try to influence the world around them? Read More
Eric D. Weitz on A World Divided September 03, 2019 From Greek rebels, American settlers, and Brazilian abolitionists in the nineteenth century to anticolonial Africans and Zionists in the twentieth, nationalists have confronted a crucial question: Who has the “right to have rights?” Read More
In Dialogue: Reframing how we think about bugs August 26, 2019 We live in a world dominated by insects. Sometimes it may seem to us that all of them are pests, but in reality, pest species are an infinitesimally small component of our biodiversity. Read More
Peter Martin on The Dictionary Wars August 26, 2019 Peter Martin recounts the patriotic fervor in the early American republic to produce a definitive national dictionary that would rival Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary of the English Language. Read More