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
Essay Jaws, lost sharks, and the legacy of Peter Benchley July 13, 2021 Jaws, the mere mention of the movie conjures up images of a large triangular fin cutting through the water, beneath it a large fearsome-looking toothy shark swimming with a sense of authority, a purpose. 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
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
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
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
Essay 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
Essay 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
Interview 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
Interview 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
Essay 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