2154 Micro-Interviews

700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators
600+ Threads

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The Apothecary’s Wife - The wide angle

To my shock, when I opened Elizabeth Blackwell’s (1707-59) stunningly beautiful, massive two-volume set of medicinal plants entitled A Curious Herbal, I realized that as late as the 1730s, apothecaries and physicians saw ordinary housewives as competition: economic competition, no less...

Karen Bloom Gevirtz
Music, Place, and the Moment - Reverb Series

Our authors might of course be fans of the subject, but they are also - with one or two exceptions - academics who are interested in broader social, historical or cultural trends. Another important aspect in this was the focus on creativity...

John Scanlan
The Nature of Nurture - The wide angle

For me it was a matter of seeing in color what had otherwise only been viewed in black and white...

Jay Belsky
American Peril - In a nutshell

A look at the long, often erased history of anti-Asian racism in the United States—from nineteenth-century violence to the surge of hate during the COVID-19 pandemic—and why these histories remain widely misunderstood.

Scott Kurashige
The Diversity Principle - A close-up

[W]e should seek opportunities to enrich our lives, our families, our communities, and our country by embracing diversity in its many forms...

David B. Oppenheimer
Painting as My Most Honest Language

Painting is my most natural language and the most honest way for me to communicate with the world. Many of the themes I explore arise from everyday life, but above all from profound personal experiences and memories...

Agron Bytyçi
Enver Hoxha: Twentieth-Century Tyrant - The wide angle

Such a phenomenon is not isolated but related to the advancement of the extreme-left agendas, which attack all the pillars of liberal democracy. We can draw important lessons from Enver Hoxha’s...

Artan R. Hoxha
Breathing Space - A close-up

At its core, Breathing Space asks what kinds of buildings we want to inhabit as consciously breathing beings: permeable structures embedded in the atmosphere, or sealed containers...

Tim Altenhof
The Revenge of Reason - The wide angle

Liberals think freedom is just not being interfered with, right? But that means they don't understand what the positive conditions that enable choice are...

Peter Wolfendale
The Ethics of AI Are the Ethics of You

Higher education has been especially eager to host this debate, which should not surprise. A system dependent on controlling the transmission of knowledge has every incentive to place itself at the center of any grand moral reckoning about a technology that threatens to route around it...

EP Pajo
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

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