Essay Deep time and the Civil War dead October 15, 2024 In rocky tombs, formed millions of years before Gettysburg, rested the fossilized remains of a riotous wonder of life that had cavorted and gnashed its way through the continent’s primordial seas and landscapes. This lost world had been unearthed piecemeal in the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War. Read More
Interview Paul Reitter and Paul North on Karl Marx’s Capital October 08, 2024 Paul Reitter and Paul North discuss the creation, reception, and future of “Capital.” Read More
Essay Up from feudalism: the Black American liberal tradition October 03, 2024 What did it mean to be an enlightened “liberal” in the United States before the twentieth century? What’s race got to do with it? Read More
Essay Narrative images, sacred places September 30, 2024 Close inspection of a "kalamkari" shows the work is exemplary of early modern temple paintings, which in form and subject mirror the concentric enclosing walls of the Hindu temple. Read More
Essay Ungoverning: an unfamiliar name for an unfamiliar danger September 30, 2024 The idea that those entrusted with responsibility for governing a democracy would intentionally make the state less capable—degrading its ability to collect taxes, to deliver mail, to conduct diplomacy, to prosecute violations of civil rights—is almost unthinkable. We call this “ungoverning.” Read More
Essay Numbing memories September 23, 2024 For over a quarter century, many millions in the US have captured moments of their daily lives and shared them online, from the mildly amusing and banal to the shocking and painful. Read More
Essay The right way to drink yerba mate September 18, 2024 The first time someone from North America tries yerba mate in the traditional style, with a gourd or cattle horn stuffed with smokey green leaves and the metal drinking straw, we often break one of the unwritten rules of the South American drink. Read More
Essay Readers, receipts, and the history of empire September 16, 2024 As long as there have been documents, there have been functional archives. In the nineteenth century, a period of immense imperial expansion, the formation of the functional archive was tightly tied to the ideological project of empire building. Read More
Essay Charm is everywhere and it defines our contemporary politics September 12, 2024 Personality rules our politics. We pay way more attention to individual politicians, than to policies, institutions, or abstract values. Read More
Essay Augustine and slavery September 04, 2024 Augustine is America’s public theologian again. Digging deeper into Augustine’s thought reveals why Augustinian Christian Nationalism is unviable. Read More
Essay Charting change in a life’s journey through skills September 03, 2024 When my wonderful colleagues asked me to take on leadership of our budding Skills for Scholars series alongside the eminent former PUP director and editor-at-large, Peter Dougherty, I wanted to figure out how to find my philosophical mind within the universe of practical guides. It isn’t just that I was leaving my philosophical fun house, it was a venture out into an unfamiliar and unchartered territory. Read More
Essay Jews, Europe, and the origins of antisemitism: A new approach August 23, 2024 The Jews—real and imagined—so challenged the Christian majority that it became a society that was religiously and culturally antisemitic in new ways between 800 and 1500. Their new self-understanding remained part of different groups’ cultural identity down to the time of the Holocaust and beyond to the present day. Read More
Interview Ben A. Minteer and Jonathan B. Losos on The Heart of the Wild August 21, 2024 The Heart of the Wild brings together some of today’s leading scientists, humanists, and nature writers to offer a thought-provoking meditation on the urgency of learning about and experiencing our wild places in an age of rapidly expanding human impacts. Read More
Essay Forbidden texts August 12, 2024 When was the last time you read a forbidden text? Not forbidden in some other time and place, but here and now, a text that, were it discovered in your possession, might land you in prison? Read More
Essay Working and investing as an ancient Roman August 03, 2024 Encountering the Romans in the marketplace and observing how they made a living allows us to discover how they negotiated the central questions of civilization. Read More
