‘You try not to eat’: What joblessness means for low‑paid women in Pennsylvania May 04, 2021 Losing your job is difficult for anyone, but for working-class women without savings it is even harder. Sarah Damaske talked to women in low-wage jobs in Pennsylvania who struggled to afford to feed their families or pay for childcare so they could look for work. 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
Books for getting outside May 02, 2021 Being outdoors improves well-being in myriad ways, and these selections from Princeton Nature range far and wide in their coverage of the natural world including award-winning photographic field guides, large-format reference books, and authoritative field guides. Read More
Book Club Pick: Making Motherhood Work May 01, 2021 This month’s Book Club Pick is Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving by Caitlyn Collins. I can’t think of a more relevant or timely selection for today’s working parents—especially after the challenges that we’ve faced in the last year. Read More
Turkish Kaleidoscope musical playlist April 28, 2021 The Turkish Kaleidoscope Musical Playlist is a kaleidoscopic view of the musical backdrop from 1970s Turkey. It explores the music scene of the period, from Anatolian rock & pop to modern & traditional folk music (türkü) and arabesk. 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
“Say it came from Billie” April 26, 2021 Anyone who’s ever seen Sugar “Kane” Kowalczyk (Marilyn Monroe)—dressed in a form-fitting black skirt, frilly overcoat, and flapper hat, carrying a fiddle in one hand and a small, boxy suitcase in the other—making her grand entrance at the Chicago train station in Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959) likely still has a relatively sharp memory of it intact. Read More
Russia beyond Putin April 26, 2021 Weak Strongman aims to improve our great national debate about Russia by drawing on a host of fascinating new research that views Russia in comparative perspective. Read More
Listen in: Delicious April 22, 2021 Start listening to Chapter 1 of Delicious by Rob Dunn and Monica Sanchez—a savory account of how the pursuit of delicious foods shaped human evolution. Read More
The paradoxical pleasures of reading literature April 21, 2021 Reading literature is a deeply dialectical experience, one that offers a variety of paradoxical pleasures. One of the most salient of these is that in reading well we both submit to the text and resist it. Read More
Turkish Kaleidoscope book trailer April 21, 2021 Turkish Kaleidoscope is a powerful graphic novel that traces Turkey’s descent into political violence in the 1970s through the experiences of four students on opposing sides of the conflict. Read More
Fracking, freedom, and the tragedy of the commons April 21, 2021 Whenever Earth Day rolls around, I think about Cindy Bower, one of the most dedicated environmentalists I know. When I first met her, in 2013, the silver-haired sexagenarian reminisced about carrying signs for the first Earth Day, many Aprils ago, in 1970. Read More
Crossing Medieval borders: Chaucer and Europe April 20, 2021 At the moment, almost no one is crossing borders. We aren’t allowed to travel, and many of us are separated from family, missing our international colleagues, and wishing we could go on holiday. Read More
After Callimachus Readings by Stephanie Burt April 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
Listen in: Why We Are Restless April 16, 2021 We live in an age of unprecedented prosperity, yet everywhere we see signs that our pursuit of happiness has proven fruitless. Dissatisfied, we seek change for the sake of change—even if it means undermining the foundations of our common life. Read More