2315 Micro-Interviews

700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators
600+ Threads

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Untamed Unicorns - The wide angle

Why do securities laws exist at all? The answer runs back to the 1929 crash and the New Deal conviction that sunlight is the best disinfectant. This piece follows how narrow, sensible exemptions to disclosure quietly expanded until secrecy became a matter of choice for some of the largest and most powerful companies in the economy.

Renée M. Jones
Against Heritage - A close-up

Every dish contains a whole world — a tangle of history, culture, and memory that only multiplies with each ingredient. From compiling an index of every food named to building a five-step "toolkit" for protecting culinary heritage from below, this is a reflection on writing about food as an act that shuttles constantly between the intimate and the immense. What can any of us actually do to re-value the traditions on our plates?

Lily Kelting
Action in Artwork — A close-up

Nonggi are traditional Korean folk banners, made collectively around the harvest to motivate, bless, and speak to the gods — even to carry them. In multi-day workshops with an immigrant rights organization, community members paint, embroider, and photo-transfer their hopes onto eight-foot banners over sixteen slow hours, drawing out the stories that shorter projects never reach.

Aram Han Sifuentes
Religion as Make-Believe – In a nutshell

What if religious belief is less like accepting a fact and more like a grand game of make-believe? Drawing an analogy from children who form groups around imaginary heroes, a philosopher argues that "religious credence" is a distinct mental attitude—chosen, bound up with sacred identity, and, unlike ordinary belief, largely immune to evidence.

Neil Van Leeuwen
Markets of Pain - A close-up

Ten thousand farmers gather to cheer a politician’s empty promises, scoring poppies by hand exactly as their great-grandparents did—only it is 1981, not the 1880s. A single rally opens onto a hidden world where peasant labor, state power, and global capital collide, and it suggests why “crisis” may be the wrong word for what came next.

Benjamin Robert Siegel
Sidewalk Nation – The wide angle

A pandemic's worth of neighborhood walks turned into a question: why has the law almost everywhere made the property owner next door responsible for the public walkway out front? Where property law, local government, and the First and Fourth Amendments all meet the pavement, most of what happens turns out to be a policy choice we get to make.

Michael Pollack
Diversityland — In a nutshell

One of the wealthiest and most racially diverse suburbs in the country tells itself three things: that it is harmonious, that it has no racial inequality, and that these facts make it superior to everywhere else. Two years and 150 interviews later, the harmony turns out to be real — and to rest on an unspoken bargain about which racial realities may be named out loud. Diversity, it turns out, is not the same thing as equity.

Kiara Wyndham
Vonnegut's War – In a nutshell

It changed how we write about war, got banned and burned, inspired rock bands, and put phrases into the language—yet the story behind the novel is as gripping as the book itself. A POW digging corpses from the ruins of firebombed Dresden, a discredited historian, and a strange leap into alien abduction: how a masterpiece took twenty-four years to find its shape.

Susan E. Farrell
He Has the People – The wide angle

History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. A long-ago election, held as the country tore itself apart over slavery, speaks uncomfortably to our own moment of fragile institutions and contested democracy—and to what it means when voters have to choose in the middle of a crisis.

Jonathan Earle
Out of the Ballpark – In a nutshell

What does it actually mean to say baseball "means" something? A case for dropping the tired clichés about national character and instead treating the game as an object of inquiry—one whose meanings accumulated over time, across North America, East Asia, and the Caribbean, and alongside every other form of modern mass entertainment.

David M. Henkin
Markets of Pain - The wide angle

How does a humble crop, scraped by hand in the fields of central India, connect overdose deaths in America to the development dreams of newly independent states? Following the poppy across the century between empire and epidemic, a historian of agriculture uncovers the people and systems that quietly supplied the world’s pain relief—and the pride of families still producing a drug the world has almost stopped buying.

Benjamin Robert Siegel
Voices in Stone - A close-up

The lives of statues then can take unexpected twists. While some are ready to write the obituary of the public statue, the appearance in many places of new monuments to honour modern-day heroes, whether the leaders of independence struggles or top-flight football players, demonstrates that the genre continues to thrive.

Paul Brummell
Nostalgic Futures - A close-up

It's beyond the scope of any single book to provide a framework for preemptively stopping reactionary activity. But through analyzing the affective economies — the emotions circulating in these controversies — I demonstrate the various ways that looking to the interactions of fans of speculative fiction can enable us, be it scholars or the general public, to really understand these reactionary groups' formation, their communication, and their continuation.

Max Dosser
A Kitchenette to Fit Your Needs - A close-up

A celebrated civil-rights drama and the family that grew wealthy from the very apartments it depicts turn out to be tangled together in surprising ways. This close reading resists easy heroes and villains, showing how people working within unjust systems can fund real change while remaining caught in those systems' contradictions.

Amani C. Morrison
Sidewalk Nation – In a nutshell

We walk over it every day without a second thought, yet this thin strip of public space is where fights over commerce, protest, policing, homelessness, free speech, and accessibility all collide. A case for treating an overlooked civic resource as the contested, high-stakes ground it actually is—and for rethinking who should be responsible for it.

Michael Pollack
He Has the People – In a nutshell

We treat some outcomes as inevitable—of course the log-cabin boy became president at the nation's hour of crisis. But what if we took the sheer contingency of the past seriously? A case for narrative history that restores human agency, chance, and the sense that things could have gone very differently.

Jonathan Earle
The Barberini Butchers – In a nutshell

For a few decades in the seventeenth century, Rome was flooded with an astonishing amount of meat—at times a pound of it per person, per day. Why did feeding a city so much lamb and pork become a statement of religious and political power in the age of the Reformation? A story of faith, appetite, and the artisans who moved meat from pasture to table.

Bradford A. Bouley
SimPolitics - A close-up

What are the ways to produce new models and prototypes within the computational imaginary of politics? Mainstream games rarely reflect alternatives. As Jim Gasperini noted when making Hidden Agenda, discussed in the last chapter, "No matter how fantastic the fantasy, no matter how simulated the simulation, the outlines of our familiar reality will always be discernible underneath."

Fenwick McKelvey
Untamed Unicorns - In a nutshell

America's biggest startups are raising trillions in private markets while sidestepping the disclosure rules that once protected investors and the public. This conversation traces how four decades of deregulation shrank the public markets, let companies stay private for decades, and handed founders nearly unchecked power. It asks what that shift means for ordinary people locked out of an insular, network-driven financing system.

Renée M. Jones
Markets of Pain - In a nutshell

The opioid crisis is almost always told as a uniquely American tale of corporate greed. But what if it was really the wreckage of a global system, built over more than a century to supply the world with morphine, codeine, and pain pills? This is the hidden history of legal opium—the crop that moved from hand-scored poppy fields through treaties and monopolies into the medicine cabinets of the West.

Benjamin Robert Siegel
Voices in Stone - The wide angle

Excepting the wondrous creations of the Greek god Hephaestus, and the statue of the murdered Commendatore in Mozart's opera Don Giovanni, statues are themselves passive and emotionless participants in their biographies. The lives of statues are really the lives of the humans who interact with them. The book tells their stories.

Paul Brummell
Against Heritage - The wide angle

Why compare fine dining across three continents? Because zooming out reveals that no celebrated chef is truly exceptional — each one recycles the same nostalgic dreams of primitiveness and wildness that writers have leaned on for centuries. Seen from this vantage, even "the local" turns out to be a thoroughly global idea, and the plate becomes a way to think through the entangled political, ecological, and cultural crises of the Anthropocene.

Lily Kelting
To Think Like a Statistician - In a nutshell

Is it a good idea to think like a statistician? A confident Yes here, admittedly by someone who earns his living doing so. We live in a random universe, where truth most often lies hidden beneath a fog of noise. Statistics is the science of peering through the fog and learning from experience, especially experience that arrives in sometimes contradictory pieces: Did the COVID vaccines save or cost lives? Is sugar good or bad for you?

Bradley Efron
SimPolitics - The wide angle

What I hope people take away is both a skepticism that computers can fix politics, and better demands for claims that it will. Especially in the next election cycle, how can we assess accurately the hype. My book helps readers distinguish between what's new and what's just someone who knows the rules of the game, trying to oversell the new tool or piece of software.

Fenwick McKelvey
A Kitchenette to Fit Your Needs - The wide angle

What starts as a literary curiosity turns into an archival scavenger hunt across sociology, public-housing records, and — improbably — a health-sciences library. This is the story of chasing a nearly invisible housing form through the archive, and of what history's cycles of segregation, migration, and neglect can teach us about the housing pressures of our own moment.

Amani C. Morrison
THE AGE OF TOMATO - Η ΕΠΟΧΗ ΤΗΣ ΤΟΜΑΤΑΣ

Nineteenth-century theatre thus operated as a densely social and often unruly space, where attention was dispersed and porous. Contemporary "social theatre" extends this condition into a more open and continuous field of exchange, where gestures of approval and disapproval circulate instantaneously. This raises questions of temporality and agency: what is seasonal—the act, the incident, or its reception?

Georgia Kotretsos
Nostalgic Futures - The wide angle

One of the best authors to do this kind of storytelling is Ted Chiang, who writes short stories where there's this technology, this novum, this thing dropped into the world. The story isn't really about that — it's about people interacting with it. He'll present people who are very positive about it and people who are very negative. So they're really these sociological takes on how the world is different because of this technology.

Max Dosser
The Epic History of Macaroni and Cheese - A close-up

Told in eight scenes, this close-up follows macaroni and cheese from Juliette Corson's 1877 fifteen-cent dinners for the poor through the anti-Italian cholera panic of the 1880s and the tariff fights of the 1890s. The resolution is pure irony: Americans planted durum wheat at home and, by World War I, were exporting it back to the very countries whose "imported" macaroni still filled their shelves.

Karima Moyer-Nocchi
Alan Dunn: The Cartoonist as Architectural Critic - A close-up

That small, brilliant joke encapsulates an entire debate that had been raging for years about the "readability" of modern architecture, about the relationship between museums and artworks, and between museums and the city itself. Dunn distilled all of it into a single drawing and a single line.

Gabriele Neri
Against Heritage - In a nutshell

Culinary "heritage" isn't really the past — it's a product, something bought, sold, and traded on in the present. Comparing food revivals from the American South to the New Nordic kitchens of Noma to the traditional ingredients of India, this is a polemical argument that our nostalgia for old foods is bound up with regressive politics and a looming ecological reckoning. What if the truest way to honor the past is to go back more honestly?

Lily Kelting

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