The fall of Masada June 24, 2021 Two thousand years ago, 967 Jewish men, women, and children reportedly chose to take their own lives rather than suffer enslavement or death at the hands of the Roman army. Read More
Ants as artists and architects June 23, 2021 I have always been an experimental biologist. Ants have been my life, and I have tracked their behavior from above ground for over fifty years. Read More
Things Fall Together book trailer June 22, 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
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
Listen in: Hate in the Homeland June 16, 2021 Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right by Cynthia Miller-Idriss reveals the unexpected places where violent hate groups recruit young people. Listen to a chapter from the audiobook. Read More
A look inside Eva Palmer Sikelianos June 15, 2021 I was myself introduced to Eva Palmer Sikelianos while leafing through books and magazines about Greece in my parents’ library in the 1960s and 1970s. Read More
A look inside The Mushroom at the End of the World June 14, 2021 In 1908 and 1909 two railroad entrepreneurs raced each other to build track along Oregon’s Deschutes River. The goal of each was to be the first to create an industrial connection between the towering ponderosas of the eastern Cascades and the stacked lumberyards of Portland. Read More
Ivor Gurney: Writing in lockdown for fifteen years June 11, 2021 Contrary, perhaps, to expectation, few of us have produced great volumes of work in lockdown. Whilst many academics might previously have craved a moment out of time, for the world to stop and for them to have time to think, it doesn’t seem to have prompted the hoped-for avalanche of creativity. Read More
Listen in: Eva Palmer Sikelianos June 08, 2021 Listen to an audio sample from Eva Palmer Sikelianos: A Life in Ruins, a new book about the American actor, director, composer, and weaver best known for reviving the Delphic Festivals. Read More
Farewell to the Arctic Ocean of old June 07, 2021 The Arctic Ocean is an ocean of ice. Everything that lives on, in or around the Arctic Ocean, and that includes peoples of the north, has adapted to and lives in harmony with that ice. But the Arctic Ocean is losing its ice. Read More
PUP Speaks Author expertise for an ever‑changing world June 07, 2021 On June 2nd Princeton University Press launched PUP Speaks—an exciting new initiative to support and champion authors as expert speakers. Katie Stileman has been overseeing the set-up of this new enterprise. Read More
By Design | An Infinite History June 04, 2021 Emma Rothschild’s An Infinite History is a history of infinite possibilities. The book traces the fortunes of a single family and its descendants across space and time, beginning with an ordinary, illiterate woman—Marie Aymard—in an ordinary, provincial part of France—Angoulême—in a time that was drifting towards political revolution and economic transformation. Read More
The loneliest neuron June 04, 2021 There it lives, the loneliest neuron. The neuron that lies furthest from the outside world. Furthest from the inputs from your senses; furthest from the outputs to your muscles. 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
Is artificial intelligence today where brain research was 100 years ago? June 02, 2021 Babies are not born with randomly connected brains and turned on to learn. And yet, 100 years ago, neurobiologists were not so sure. Read More
