Essay Teaching your mind to fly: The psychological benefits of birdwatching July 13, 2021 It is now a matter of common knowledge—bolstered by significant and growing scientific documentation—that immersion in the natural world can provide measurable benefits to human physical and mental health. Read More
Interview Tonio Andrade on The Last Embassy July 12, 2021 George Macartney’s disastrous 1793 mission to China plays a central role in the prevailing narrative of modern Sino-European relations. Read More
Podcast We Are Not Born Submissive: How Patriarchy Shapes Women’s Lives July 09, 2021 What role do women play in the perpetuation of patriarchy? On the one hand, popular media urges women to be independent, outspoken, and career-minded. Yet, this same media glorifies a specific, sometimes voluntary, female submissiveness as a source of satisfaction. Read More
Interview Book Club Pick: Uneasy Street July 01, 2021 This month’s Book Club Pick is Uneasy Street by Rachel Sherman. This is an excellent non-fiction summer book club selection for readers who are curious about the lives of the 1%. Read More
Essay On self interest June 30, 2021 Self-interest drives capitalism. Capitalism’s friends and foes agree on this, even if they agree on nothing else. Read More
Essay Who was Euclid? June 29, 2021 Euclid of Alexandria: mathematician, author of the Elements of Geometry. Utterer of apocryphal quips including the famous put-down to Ptolemy I: ‘there is no royal road to geometry’. Who was he? What did he look like? Read More
Essay A look inside A World Divided June 28, 2021 Hoi An is a lovely Vietnamese town, one that managed to survive, largely unscathed, the wars that ravaged the country in the twentieth century. Read More
Podcast The Spirit of Green: The Economics of Collisions and Contagions in a Crowded World June 26, 2021 Solving the world’s biggest problems—from climate catastrophe and pandemics to wildfires and corporate malfeasance—requires, more than anything else, coming up with new ways to manage the powerful interactions that surround us. Read More
Essay 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
Essay 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
Video 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
Podcast 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
Podcast 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
Essay 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
Essay 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