Essay A spacetime interval聽 March 14, 2022 Albert Einstein is dead. Bohemia, too, no longer exists. They have ascended to the realm of myths and legends, become words to conjure with鈥攜et they are not, in general, invoked together. Read More
Essay Pi Day March 11, 2022 As every mathematician knows, 3.14 is only a rough approximation to 蟺, one that fails to reveal its most fascinating properties, of being irrational and in fact transcendental. Read More
Reading List A playlist for Waterloo Sunrise March 07, 2022 There are cultural moments that implant themselves in our shared consciousness, impacting how we discuss or recall those times. If someone were to mention the early aughts, for example, chances are we could all point to an event, a celebrity, a song that represents the entire era, not just for one person, but for us all. Read More
Essay Facebook鈥檚 dark design: It鈥檚 not just the algorithms February 25, 2022 In the midst of our current debate about Facebook, have we ignored a core issue? Public scrutiny has focused almost entirely on the company and its practices. Read More
Essay Power, racism, and the role of the university February 23, 2022 In October 2020, I sat down with historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad for an event about my book, The Campus Color Line. It was a lively conversation, ranging from discussions about reparations in higher education to questioning who should lead U.S. colleges and universities. Read More
Essay The physicality of life February 15, 2022 DNA is stuff: physical, tangible, material. We all know this; we can even picture in our minds its famous double helical form. Read More
Interview Nomi M. Stolzenberg and David N. Myers on American Shtetl February 10, 2022 Settled in the mid-1970s by a small contingent of Hasidic families, Kiryas Joel is an American town with few parallels in Jewish history鈥攂ut many precedents among religious communities in the United States. Read More
Essay A look inside The War That Doesn鈥檛 Say Its Name February 03, 2022 In early 2008, I set up my research base at the VIP hotel in downtown Goma, a trade hub in the eastern Congo nestled between the Nyiragongo Volcano and the shores of Lake Kivu. Read More
Interview Zeynep Pamuk on Politics and Expertise January 31, 2022 Our ability to act on some of the most pressing issues of our time, from pandemics and climate change to artificial intelligence and nuclear weapons, depends on knowledge provided by scientists and other experts. Read More
Essay Arnold Weinstein on The Lives of Literature January 29, 2022 The Lives of Literature: Reading, Teaching, Knowing as the subtitle suggests, is after large game: why we go to literature, what its value might be in a world increasingly devoted to 鈥渋nformation,鈥� and what a career in teaching has taught me, as well as my students. Read More
Essay Skill, power, and control in the world of Qatar鈥檚 migrant workers January 27, 2022 On the shoreline of Doha, Qatar, a tacky countdown clock, an enormous fuchsia hourglass cast in acrylic and sponsored by the luxury watchmaker Hublot, flashes the days, minutes, and seconds until the first ball of the 2022 FIFA World Cup is kicked at 6pm on November 21, 2022. Read More
Interview Daniel Jackson on The Essence of Software January 24, 2022 As our dependence on technology increases, the design of software matters more than ever before. Why then is so much software flawed? Why hasn鈥檛 there been a systematic and scalable way to create software that is easy to use, robust, and secure? Read More
Essay The pandemic has flooded the world with grief, but we鈥檙e not in a 鈥榞rief pandemic鈥� January 21, 2022 In a span of less than two years, Covid-19 infections have killed 4.5 million people worldwide. Experts estimate that each person who dies is significantly grieved by nine others. Read More
Essay Bambi: The lonely destiny of outsiders January 14, 2022 Today, almost all the animals in the world do not and cannot determine their destinies. It was not always like this. Before the emergence of human beings thousands of years ago, animals were free to roam the planet as they wished. Read More
Interview Meir M. Bar-Asher on Jews and the Qur鈥檃n January 12, 2022 In this panoramic and multifaceted book, Meir Bar-Asher examines how Jews and Judaism are depicted in the Qur鈥檃n and later Islamic literature, providing needed context to those passages critical of Jews that are most often invoked to divide Muslims and Jews or to promote Islamophobia. Read More
