Essay Liberalism may be the source of your soul June 14, 2024 The most obvious and important realities can sometimes be the hardest to think and talk about. Read More
Essay Matsutake as world-makers January 10, 2024 What a Mushroom Lives For takes us beyond the animal realm to explore a place barely known to most people, the inner realm of fungi and how they participate in making the world around them via their relations to microbes, other fungi, plants, and animals. Read More
Essay The women who opened the doors to astronomy December 13, 2023 In France, Dorothea Klumpke earned her Docteur-ès-Sciences at the University of Paris in mathematical astronomy in 1893, after completing her thesis, “L’etude des Anneaux de Saturne” (A study of the rings of Saturn), thereby becoming the first woman to achieve the academic distinction of earning an advanced degree for work done in astronomy. Read More
Essay What it’s like to be a bee November 21, 2023 Alien minds are right here, all around you. Indeed, the perceptual world of bees is so distinct from ours, governed by completely different sense organs, and their lives are ruled by such different priorities, that they might be accurately regarded as aliens from inner space. Read More
Essay Democracy’s real deal September 15, 2023 Was the US Consitution a masterpiece? The common answer has frequently been an unabashed “yes,” but many critics now complain that the Constitution was fatally flawed from the beginning. Read More
Essay Will social scientists’ disputes over words ever end? August 16, 2023 Social scientists observe the social world. They measure and represent it. They advance and test truth claims about it. For these purposes, they classify things, they sort them into classes, they draw distinctions among them. Read More
Essay The guardian tree: The birthplace of Carl Linnaeus July 26, 2023 In ancient times, Nordic people believed that the World Tree was an ash and the protective guardian tree a linden—a Tilia. The biography of Linnaeus should surely begin with a linden. Read More
Essay Roni Horn’s reflections on Iceland June 07, 2023 I returned to Iceland with migratory insistence and regularity. The necessity of it was part of me. Iceland was the only place I went without cause, just to be there. Read More
Essay On the tactics of modern strongmen April 27, 2023 Dictators have been changing. They did not loosen their grip over the population—far from it, they worked to design more effective instruments of control. But they did so while acting the part of democrats. Read More
Essay To a slower life April 26, 2023 I live less than a mile from Walden Pond. There, in the woods on the east side of the pond, Thoreau built his small cabin and wrote his great book. It is probably true that Thoreau left his cabin from time to time to walk into the town of Concord, one mile away, to see his family and others. Read More
Essay Venki Ramakrishnan on Virtual You March 24, 2023 What are the prospects of simulating ourselves in a computer? At first sight, this sounds more science fiction than fact. Read More
Essay Roland Betancourt on White: The History of a Color February 02, 2023 Moving away from those who might wish to find a universal symbolism or archetypal truth in a color, Michel Pastoureau’s The History of a Color series has sought to understand color as first and foremost a social phenomenon, one with historically grounded realities and effects. Read More
Essay A look inside Running Out December 22, 2022 On the high plains of western Kansas, there is no clear line between water and second chances. Although I didn’t know it at the time, I was in search of both when I turned my Prius off a two-lane highway and onto the washboard gravel that led back to the farm. Read More
Essay A look inside Pandemic Politics October 11, 2022 The floor of the Bank of Oklahoma Center in Tulsa was awash in red, white, and blue. Eager supporters of President Donald Trump were holding signs, wearing “Make America Great Again” hats, and sporting T-shirts with expressions ranging from “Guns, God, and Trump” to “Make Liberals Cry Again.” Read More
Interview A look inside Syllabus October 04, 2022 What really is a syllabus? Is it a tool or a manifesto? A machine or a plan? What are its limits? Its horizon? And who is it really for? And what would happen if you took the syllabus as seriously as you take the most serious forms of writing in your own discipline? Read More
