July 24, 2024

Why History Lessons Are So Threatening to Those with Power

Chana Teeger

Erasure and denial of the past are not the only ways to suppress historical claims and reproduce privilege. Chana Teeger’s research in two racially diverse South African schools shows how the past can be recalled while its legacies are ignored.

July 10, 2024

An Impossible Friendship and the Possibilities of Friendship in Israel/Palestine

Sonja Mejcher-Atassi

An Impossible Friendship invites us to glimpse alternative possibilities within and alongside the fraught history of Israel/Palestine.

June 19, 2024

Technology and Vannevar Bush, Fifty Years Later

G. Pascal Zachary

On his death fifty years ago, Vannevar Bush was celebrated with a page one obituary in the New York Times. He died quietly in his home in the late hours of June 29, and his passing was met with the...

June 12, 2024

Beyond Repair:

The Psychic Life of Reparation

Carolyn Laubender

Ten years ago, on June 15, 2014, Ta-Nishi Coates published his watershed Atlantic article, “The Case for Reparations.” An immediate cultural flashpoint, Coates’s piece sought to legitimize the demand for racial reparation in the contemporary United States by documenting how...

June 5, 2024

Five Scientists with Disabilities Whom You Should Know

Skylar Bayer and Gabi Serrato Marks

In 2018, we (Skylar and Gabi) got together and decided that we would create a book with a diversity of stories about disability and medical conditions in STEM, help contributors tell their stories in their own voices, and provide representation...

May 29, 2024

Eye of the Beholder:

Perception of Art and the Brain

Eric R. Kandel

Art is not complete without the perceptual and emotional involvement of the viewer—that is, without our response to it. As a neuroscientist and a lover of art, I am fascinated by this response, which results from the interaction of two...

May 28, 2024

Hawai‘i’s Chinese and Cold War Politics

Nancy E. Riley

Hawai‘i has been in the orbit of the United States since at least the mid nineteenth century, but it was after World War II, as the United States engaged in Cold War with the USSR, that Hawai‘i became particularly important....

May 22, 2024

The Rip Current Survival Guide

Rob Brander

The beach. There’s a lot wrapped up in those two words. To some, beaches are associated with the joys of a yearly vacation, but for others they can evoke a scary memory of being caught in a rip current. In...

April 22, 2024

A Systems Thinking Approach to Teaching About Climate Change

Cassie Xu and Radhika Iyengar

Climate change is one of the largest threats for humanity and has already had a significant impact globally and locally. It is perhaps the most defining issue of our time. It will ultimately test how communities, cities, and countries around...

April 15, 2024

Changing the Media Environment to Protect Climate Activists

Adrienne Russell

Activism serves as an essential channel of communication from the public to policy makers, corporations, and other powerful actors. It is precisely because of its essential ro­­le in governance (and even capitalist arrangements, such as so-called voting with your pocketbook)...

April 11, 2024

Matthew Fraleigh on The Same Moon Shines on All

The last few decades have been a time of great change for the field of Japanese literary studies. The scope of the category “Japanese literature” is very differently conceptualized than it was just a generation ago; it now embraces a...

April 10, 2024

What’s the Difference Between a Tree and a Building? Sometimes Nothing.

Dickson Despommier

The New City: How to Build Our Urban Sustainable Future is about the urban environment and how to make it a safer place for us to live in and, at the same time, dramatically reduce its effects on rapid climate...