Essay Dreaming under fascism January 27, 2026 Did ordinary Germans realise they were living through a historical nightmare? Would we recognise the same signs if we were living through them today? Read More
Interview Mustafa Aksakal on The War That Made the Middle East January 22, 2026 A sweeping narrative of war, great power politics, and ordinary people caught up in the devastation, Mustafa Aksakal's The War That Made the Middle East offers new insights about the Great War and its profound and lasting consequences. Read More
Essay Children as projects January 22, 2026 Contemporary parenting is far from permissive chaos and more relentless effort: careful scheduling, constant supervision, and pouring our souls鈥攁s well as loads of money鈥攊nto our children. Read More
Essay On the page January 21, 2026 鈥淭his is perhaps the greatest accomplishment of poetry: to descend, to fall, to break, to know that in writing and reading we become one again.鈥� Read More
Essay Squirrels: Nature鈥檚 ultimate ambassadors January 20, 2026 At the edge of every woodland, backyard, and city park, a small, twitchy-nosed guide ushers us into our most common encounter with the wild. The squirrel lives where we live, moving easily between tree canopy and sidewalk, wilderness, and civilization. Long before we can name ecosystems or understand food webs, squirrels introduce us to the idea that we share our world with other lives. Read More
Essay When shaming backfires January 16, 2026 When someone behaves badly, a natural and understandable reaction is to shame them. But what if the problem being addressed is actually fuelled by shame? Read More
Interview Hanna Pickard on What Would You Do Alone in a Cage with Nothing but Cocaine? January 09, 2026 What would you do alone in a cage with nothing but cocaine? Drawing on her expertise as an academic philosopher and her clinical work in a therapeutic community, Hanna Pickard explores the meaning of drugs for people with addiction and the diverse factors that keep them using despite the costs. Read More
Essay Countering violence through never-ending tales January 02, 2026 Once upon a time, I thought that the foundation of Israel in 1948 would set an example of peace and good will on this troubled planet. Sadly, this has not occurred, and the decline of Israel as a model state has compelled me to do soul searching. Read More
Essay Thinking from the far south January 02, 2026 How do we see the world whole? We can start by looking at it through the lenses that southern writers and storytellers offer us. Read More
Essay Civility in the age of Shakespeare December 16, 2025 A time of turmoil, riven with conflict, a deeply divided world in which opposing factions harbour nothing but contempt for other members of society鈥攖he early modern period bears a remarkable resemblance to our own. Read More
Essay Minding our minds December 08, 2025 Roughly twenty-five centuries ago in northern India, the Buddha learned to watch his feelings in order to forge new kinds of relationships with them. Read More
Essay The Aztecs鈥� grammar of gratitude November 27, 2025 Forty years ago, I was deeply involved with a manuscript housed in the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. It was written in a language variously known as Aztec, Mexicano, and Nahuatl.聽 Each of these names carries a bit of truth. Read More
Essay Why know-it-alls get under our skin, and what their history can teach us November 21, 2025 You probably know the kind of person who can ruin a dinner party before anyone has picked up a fork or knife. They casually correct your pronunciation of 鈥渁p茅ritif,鈥� keenly explain the difference between prosecco and cava, and, by dessert, are lecturing on the limitations of spelling checkers. Read More
Essay Finding Sophie November 18, 2025 Somehow, the message didn鈥檛 sink in. I鈥檇 often heard the old adage: 鈥渁 picture is worth a thousand words.鈥� But the photograph by Alexander Gardner didn鈥檛 explain itself to me. Instead, it took me about 130,000 words to try and explain it. I wrote an entire book about one photograph. Read More
Interview Urmila Seshagiri on The Life of Violet November 06, 2025 In 1907, eight years before she published her first novel, a twenty-five-year-old Virginia Woolf drafted three interconnected comic stories chronicling the adventures of a giantess named Violet鈥攁 teasing tribute to Woolf鈥檚 friend Mary Violet Dickinson. Read More
