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
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
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
Sharon Marcus on The Drama of Celebrity August 19, 2019 Why do so many people care so much about celebrities? Who decides who gets to be a star? What are the privileges and pleasures of fandom? Do celebrities ever deserve the outsized attention they receive? Read More
Back to School Reading August 12, 2019 Whether you’re an educator looking for inspiration, a student wondering just how to get through calculus this year, or anyone struggling to balance the ever mounting costs of education, these books offer something for everyone returning to academic life. Read More
Celebrating Eid al-Adha August 11, 2019 The Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha, or Feast of Sacrifice, commemorates the willingness of Ibrahim (Abraham) to sacrifice his son in obedience to God’s wishes—and God’s mercy in providing a lamb to sacrifice instead after Ibrahim’s faith had been tested—and also marks the end of the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. Read More
Artemis Leontis on Eva Palmer Sikelianos: A Life in Ruins August 05, 2019 This is the first biography to tell the fascinating story of Eva Palmer Sikelianos (1874–1952), an American actor, director, composer, and weaver best known for reviving the Delphic Festivals. Read More
Hanna Gray on An Academic Life June 19, 2019 Hanna Holborn Gray has lived her entire life in the world of higher education. The daughter of academics, she fled Hitler’s Germany with her parents in the 1930s, emigrating to New Haven, where her father was a professor at Yale University. Read More
Sketches from Red Meat Republic June 15, 2019 Joshua Specht puts people at the heart of Red Meat Republic—the big cattle ranchers who helped to drive the nation’s westward expansion, the meatpackers who created a radically new kind of industrialized slaughterhouse, and the stockyard workers who were subjected to the shocking and unsanitary conditions described by Upton Sinclair in his novel The Jungle. Read More
Getting outside when day turns to night May 29, 2019 What’s the best way to commemorate a historic scientific experiment? Centenaries are popular, and one of the biggest is upcoming, the centenary of the 1919 eclipse observations that confirmed Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Read More
Daniel Kennefick on No Shadow of a Doubt May 01, 2019 In 1919, British scientists led extraordinary expeditions to Brazil and Africa to test Albert Einstein’s revolutionary new theory of general relativity in what became the century’s most celebrated scientific experiment. The result ushered in a new era and made Einstein a global celebrity by confirming his dramatic prediction that the path of light rays would be bent by gravity. Read More
In Dialogue with Eelco Rohling and Sean Fleming: Earth’s changing bodies of water April 20, 2019 Earth’s bodies of water have gone through considerable changes over time. We asked Eelco J. Rohling and Sean W. Fleming if these changes can tell us anything about climate change—and the future? Read More
In Dialogue with Thomas Seeley and Nick Haddad: Why is insect conservation important? April 18, 2019 Thomas Seeley and Nick Haddad sound off on why insect conservation is important, and to reflect on the magnitude of the loss of key populations. Read More
Jonathan Bate on How the Classics Made Shakespeare April 16, 2019 Ben Jonson famously accused Shakespeare of having “small Latin and less Greek.” But he was exaggerating. Shakespeare was steeped in the classics. Read More
Justin Smith on Irrationality April 08, 2019 It’s a story we can’t stop telling ourselves. Once, humans were benighted by superstition and irrationality, but then the Greeks invented reason. Later, the Enlightenment enshrined rationality as the supreme value. Discovering that reason is the defining feature of our species, we named ourselves the “rational animal.” Read More