700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators600+ Threads
Animals inhabit diverse environments: our homes, our settlements, agricultural land, the wild. Some animals never directly encounter human beings. Others are deliberately created by us. Do these different contexts and...
The Chinese press dubbed 1933 the “Year of Humor.” The catalyst was the Analects Fortnightly, a new magazine inspired by The New Yorker and other contemporaries, which since its launch...
“The Racial Return,” chapter 2 in the book, reveals, through the lens of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, how strategic partnerships between organizations in the nonprofit...
My book looks at what happened to American literary culture when a new world of mass culture—tabloid newspapers, amusement parks, early cinema, Wild West shows—began to dominate public life. Most...
Can autistic people, across the spectrum, read literary fiction? Can they enjoy and profit from the experience? For years, experts have said no. A “triad of impairments”—in language, social understanding,...
If you pick up Inventing Edward Lear in a bookstore, I hope you’ll turn to the pictures first. I would! Maybe you will be delighted by the imaginary enormous Hippopotamouse...
Like many law professors, I began my career by doing two judicial clerkships—basically, serving as a staff lawyer for a federal judge. I spent one year in the chambers of...
This book started out as a reflection on why it is that in the past two decades a re-veiling trend has swept over the Muslim world and Muslim communities in...
All computational models of the brain and cognitive activity produced so far are either idealizations, making the models hypothetical, or approximations, making the models inexact descriptions of their target phenomena,...
Waste occupies a paradoxical position today: it is made to be disposable, and we want to get rid of it, but we cannot. Where at other times in history, we’ve...
The fun thing about writing a book about an emerging phenomenon is that there is always something surprising to learn.If I could direct readers to any part of the book,...
9/11 was one of the most photographed events in history, and in the years that followed numerous films investigated, profiled and sought to understand what happened on that day and...
This book tells my personal story, that is, the story of a young scientist, driven by a curiosity about the natural world, who found himself wandering, essentially by accident, into...
My book critiques Romantic ideas of authorship—for example, that a single creator is responsible for each work of art, and that art is primarily expressive—to argue instead that creation is...
Lamentations that special interests, spending obscene amounts of money, strangle the voice of “the people”? More lobbyists than Corinthian columns in the halls of Congress? These sound familiar today in...
Here is an excerpt from the first chapter. I hope readers think of it as a true-crime, historical CSI.On Halloween, 1828, sometime before 11 pm, Hugh Alston, a grocer in...
Mysteries of Sex invites the reader to suspend the belief that men are men and women are women and explore two intertwined phenomena. The book asks first of all just...
It is tempting to presume that sadists and zealots typically commit torture. Sometimes, they do. But American torturers have often insisted that their actions were altogether appropriate, morally justifiable, and...
I first became interested in the phenomenon of conscience through my work in corporate law.Some readers may find this odd: the business world is often described as a place where...
The U.S.A. was the product of a successful revolution so it may seem paradoxical to regard many of its leading figures as conservative. However, they recognized their achievement as fragile,...
The book offers, using a cartographic metaphor, a ‘map’ of wellbeing. In that respect, I don’t have a particular preference for which ‘region’ I would hope a reader first encounters....
I hope that readers will begin with my introduction, which lays out the basic terms of my argument. However, casual readers might prefer to start with one of the chapters...
The first few pages of the first chapter explain why Making Our Neighborhoods, Making Our Selves provides an important, new way of looking at neighborhoods that transcends the narrow perspectives...
I approach the Gulf Stream as a nexus that links many strands from both the scientific and cultural worlds. While plenty of mysteries remain about the Gulf Stream, much more...
The first three pages of the Preface set the scene. If you are in a bookstore that allows more leisurely browsing the thirteen-page Introduction sets out the principal arguments—this is...
I was walking down a hall at MIT when I heard an odd sound: two graduate students in Ken Stevens’ laboratory had programed a computer to synthesize a whale belching....
Most countries in medieval Europe were monarchies, ruled by a royal or imperial family, a dynasty, so politics at the top level was shaped by the births, marriages, and deaths...
The final chapter of Radical, Religious, and Violent examines religious radicalism in a historical context. Having established earlier in the book why religious radicals can be lethal terrorists and especially...
Histories of the long, prosperous liberal consensus in the middle of the twentieth century looked back to the specific experience of the industrial North. The people and institutions of the...
I hope the reader would pleasurably remark first on the book’s brevity. It aims to pack a large punch in a small format. It can be read quickly.Readability aside, I...
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