Podcast Listen in: American Afterlives November 22, 2021 Death in the United States is undergoing a quiet revolution. You can have your body frozen, dissected, composted, dissolved, or tanned. Read More
Podcast When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People November 22, 2021 There is an epidemic of bad thinking in the world today. An alarming number of people are embracing crazy, even dangerous ideas. Read More
Essay Bob Dylan’s “Murder Most Foul” and National Memory November 22, 2021 This week marks the 58th anniversary of the assassination of JFK. Last year’s anniversary went nearly unnoticed in the press. Read More
Essay Shock value: The life and death story of electricity November 22, 2021 It is an irony of our age that while electricity increasingly drives nearly every aspect of our daily lives, we continue to view it as some kind of mysterious external physical force that powers our appliances rather than an internal and vital biological force that animates our bodies. Read More
Podcast Listen in: Running Out November 15, 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
Essay Rediscovering friendship November 12, 2021 Plagues and pandemics are nothing new in history with the classical world of ancient Greece and Rome certainly having their share. Read More
Essay Educating citizens November 11, 2021 The presidential election of 2016 prompted many academic leaders and faculty members to ponder the implications for their own institution. Read More
Essay Collaborative innovations in support of diverse voices November 10, 2021 A few weeks ago, I sat in a Zoom room with our social science team, in awe (again) of my colleagues’ commitment and their embrace of change. Read More
Interview Margaret Jacobs on After One Hundred Winters November 09, 2021 After One Hundred Winters confronts the harsh truth that the United States was founded on the violent dispossession of Indigenous people and asks what reconciliation might mean in light of this haunted history. Read More
Essay Humanities to the rescue November 08, 2021 Environmentally speaking, it might be said that Western culture backed the wrong horse with both Christianity and capitalism. Each ingrained a self-centeredness—respectively, inter- and intra-species—that has proven disastrous for the planet. Read More
Podcast Listen in: Career and Family November 05, 2021 A century ago, it was a given that a woman with a college degree had to choose between having a career and a family. Today, there are more female college graduates than ever before, and more women want to have a career and family, yet challenges persist at work and at home. Read More
Essay Stepping into A Dog’s World November 05, 2021 As I write these words, Bella is napping on the floor next to my desk, curled into herself like a large hairy black bean. Every so often, following an inner cue that remains mysterious to me, she stretches out and arches onto her back, feet to the sky, exposing a soft white belly. Read More
Podcast Listen in: After One Hundred Winters November 01, 2021 After One Hundred Winters confronts the harsh truth that the United States was founded on the violent dispossession of Indigenous people and asks what reconciliation might mean in light of this haunted history. Read More
Reading List Raising understanding and action in the climate crisis November 01, 2021 For decades Princeton University Press has been publishing books about the planet, to introduce the biodiversity of the natural world to the human species the world over. But a reverence for nature, and an understanding of ecological and evolutionary processes, is not enough to counter the climate crisis. Read More
Essay So what’s new? Innovation in ancient Greek experience October 29, 2021 When I worked in business in the 1980s I was struck by the constant demand for the new. The company I worked in produced and stocked a wide range of well-designed products for a varied international market, but customers would regularly pass over existing designs—even the most recent ones—and ask “What’s new?” Read More
