2154 Micro-Interviews

700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators
600+ Threads

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How Churchill and de Gaulle Saved Their Nations and Transformed the World - The wide angle

De Gaulle is very tall, socially awkward, quite cold, extraordinarily austere in his personal tastes. Churchill is short, very charming, not always entirely trustworthy...

Richard Vinen
Why Q Needs U - The wide angle

Consequently, English has at a glance never seemed more united – but a glance only reveals half the story. What the eye misses the ear picks up: the spoken language...

Danny Bate
Mazzy Star’s So Tonight That I Might See - The wide angle

And at the end of the day, having grown up in LA, having grown up with Mazzy Star as the soundtrack of my life, I just wanted to do something that blended the personal with the research...

Anthony Gomez III
Reaching for the Extreme - A close-up

A mathematical proof is a type of story. It has a beginning (statement of the theorem), an end (QED), and a middle (the proof itself). The better the story, the better the proof...

Ian Stewart
Random dot product graphs

How do connections form in complex networks? One elegant answer comes from the random dot product graph, a model that imagines every individual as a vector of interests and uses their dot product to reveal the hidden structure of social worlds.

Edward Scheirneman
The Musical Lives of Charles Manson - The wide angle

Yet as an academic historian, I learned to approach the stories that people tell about the world as participating in larger projects to “invent” or “produce” or “construct” that world in some way...

Nicholas Tochka
The Musical Lives of Charles Manson - A close-up

To really understand a piece of writing, you must grasp its unity. And that unity can be grasped only by discovering how a work is one—and in that same moment, many...

Nicholas Tochka
Enver Hoxha: Twentieth-Century Tyrant - The wide angle

This is the challenge for historians, especially when you're teaching. It is to explain to students why an idea that obviously ended so badly was so attractive...

Robert C. Austin
Declaration - In a nutshell

Thomas Jefferson spent seventeen days in a second-story loft at the Graff House in Philadelphia working on the draft. He gets all the credit, but a good chunk of the Declaration was removed or added largely by Ben Franklin...

Robert P. Watson
The Apothecary’s Wife - In a nutshell

First, Abandon Binaries All Ye Who Enter Here. Lived life and therefore history are more complicated than simple oppositions...

Karen Bloom Gevirtz
Breathing Space - The wide angle

Yet this is essentially what our lungs do: they blur the boundary between inside and outside and, although they are internal organs, maintain a constant connection to the external world. I began to see an analogy...

Tim Altenhof
Lipstick - A close-up

The Object Lessons series excels at connecting objects to larger implications. Ultimately, I hope my readers will become more curious about how something as banal as lipstick connects to sexuality, power, gender identity, and class...

Eileen G’Sell
Post-Digital Humanism

Post-Digital Humanism is the idea that digital tools should ultimately deepen our physical, emotional, and sensory relationship with the real world rather than detach us from it. Post-digital Humanism doesn’t mean after technology...

Rory Noble-Turner
The Diversity Principle - In a nutshell

That old aphorism that great minds think alike is completely wrong; great minds think differently, and when they work together make great decisions and discoveries...

David B. Oppenheimer
Picky - The wide angle

Pleasure matters. Pickiness reduces pleasure for kids and parents. Parents are stressed because they don’t want picky kids and fear doing the wrong thing. I want to be part

Helen Zoe Veit
Caribbean Blood Pacts - In a nutshell

These forces built the very foundations of the CIA’s operations. The first plot, Operation PBFORTUNE, was started by the dictators and backed by United Fruit..

Aaron Coy Moulton
A Four-Eyed World - A close-up

I’m particularly fond of the part where I look at how glasses are portrayed in books. When eyewear first began to appear in literature, a whiff of sulfur or mystery hung over it; if glasses helped people see, what other powers might they possess? Besides sharpening vision, writers have imagined glasses revealing secrets...

David King Dunaway
Prince’s Minneapolis - In a nutshell

One of the main ideas in this book is that music is connected to geography; it originates from a specific place. The social factors shaping that place...are reflected in the music...

Rashad Shabazz
The Nature of Nurture - In a nutshell

Almost all discourse about nature and nurture only focuses on genetics when it comes to the nature side of things, ignoring natural selection, adaptation, and the fundamental goal of all living things...

Jay Belsky
Neuroethics - In a nutshell

Deep brain stimulation can restore motor control in people with Parkinson’s disease. Yet access to information about a person’s brain from neuroimaging...

Walter Glannon
Reaching for the Extreme - The wide angle

Most applications of mathematics are hidden behind the scenes. No one wants to have to learn spherical trigonometry to use their car’s satellite navigation...

Ian Stewart
Friction - The wide angle

...we instinctively manipulate friction all the time. We use carts with wheels to help move heavy objects. We buy new tires when our treads wear out so our cars grip the road better...

Jennifer R. Vail
The Revenge of Reason - In a nushell

What’s important about reason is not building up from certain foundations, but our ability to continually revise the rules that govern the way in which we think, and indeed how we live...

Peter Wolfendale
Mazzy Star’s So Tonight That I Might See - In a nutshell

They’re a band that never wanted fame, and I mean that quite literally. They were with independent labels, they’re publishing stuff on their own, and they’re refusing to rush...

Anthony Gomez III
How to Read a Wedding Dress - A close-up

Although the book covers such iconic examples as Grace Kelly, Jacqueline Kennedy and Beatle wife Pattie Boyd, I would perhaps hope that it would first fall open on pages covering the choices of ordinary women who had to be inventive to be fashionable. A favourite example can be found on page 61, where a glamorous fashion...

Lydia Edwards
Magic Is Made of Statistics and Marketing

Some people have genuinely not recovered emotionally from the shock of a machine mimicking human language so fluently. We believed that language was uniquely ours...

EP Pajo
The Last Titans - In a nutshell

I'm tempted to say one of the unique things about my book is that there's less of it. There are a lot of very long biographies of Churchill and de Gaulle, and what I hoped, in a funny kind of way, by putting the two men together,

Richard Vinen
Enver Hoxha: Twentieth-Century Tyrant - In a nutshell

Communism was one of the most alluring alternatives to becoming modern, especially in countries with poor financial resources and lacking social capital. Dictatorships are a response to insecurity and the crisis of self-confidence...

Artan R. Hoxha
Why Q Needs U - In a nutshell

But another benefit comes from an appreciation of how the alphabet works (or sometimes doesn’t work), because we today are a chapter in its long story. The alphabet is a testament to innovation, and every population...

Danny Bate
The Musical Lives of Charles Manson - In a nutshell

I try to understand how the different genres that emerged or entered maturity in the late 1960s – including rock music criticism, true crime, gonzo journalism, science fiction...

Nicholas Tochka

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