Interview Book Club Pick: Making Motherhood Work May 01, 2021 This month鈥檚 Book Club Pick is Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving by Caitlyn Collins. I can鈥檛 think of a more relevant or timely selection for today鈥檚 working parents鈥攅specially after the challenges that we鈥檝e faced in the last year. Read More
Essay Turkish Kaleidoscope musical playlist April 28, 2021 The Turkish Kaleidoscope Musical Playlist is a kaleidoscopic view of the musical backdrop from 1970s Turkey. It explores the music scene of the period, from Anatolian rock & pop to modern & traditional folk music (t眉rk眉) and arabesk. Read More
Podcast Poet of Revolution: The Making of John Milton April 27, 2021 John Milton (1608鈥�1674) has a unique claim on literary and intellectual history as the author of both聽Paradise Lost, the greatest narrative poem in English, and prose defences of the execution of Charles I that influenced the French and American revolutions. Read More
Essay Russia beyond Putin April 26, 2021 Weak Strongman aims to improve our great national debate about Russia by drawing on a host of fascinating new research that views Russia in comparative perspective. Read More
Essay 鈥淪ay it came from Billie鈥� April 26, 2021 Anyone who鈥檚 ever seen Sugar 鈥淜ane鈥� Kowalczyk (Marilyn Monroe)鈥攄ressed in a form-fitting black skirt, frilly overcoat, and flapper hat, carrying a fiddle in one hand and a small, boxy suitcase in the other鈥攎aking her grand entrance at the Chicago train station in Billy Wilder鈥檚 Some Like It Hot (1959) likely still has a relatively sharp memory of it intact. Read More
Podcast Listen in: Delicious April 22, 2021 Start listening to Chapter 1 of Delicious by Rob Dunn and Monica Sanchez鈥攁 savory account of how the pursuit of delicious foods shaped human evolution. Read More
Essay Fracking, freedom, and the tragedy of the commons April 21, 2021 Whenever Earth Day rolls around, I think about Cindy Bower, one of the most dedicated environmentalists I know. When I first met her, in 2013, the silver-haired sexagenarian reminisced about carrying signs for the first Earth Day, many Aprils ago, in 1970. Read More
Essay The paradoxical pleasures of reading literature April 21, 2021 Reading literature is a deeply dialectical experience, one that offers a variety of paradoxical pleasures. One of the most salient of these is that in reading well we both submit to the text and resist it. Read More
Video Turkish Kaleidoscope book trailer April 21, 2021 Turkish Kaleidoscope聽is a聽powerful graphic novel that traces Turkey鈥檚 descent into political violence in the 1970s through the experiences of four students on opposing sides of the conflict. Read More
Essay Crossing Medieval borders: Chaucer and Europe April 20, 2021 At the moment, almost no one is crossing borders. We aren鈥檛 allowed to travel, and many of us are separated from family, missing our international colleagues, and wishing we could go on holiday. Read More
Video After Callimachus Readings by Stephanie Burt April 19, 2021 Callimachus may be the best-kept secret in all of ancient poetry. Loved and admired by later Romans and Greeks, his funny, sexy, generous, thoughtful, learned, sometimes elaborate, and always articulate lyric poems, hymns, epigrams, and short stories in verse have gone without a contemporary poetic champion, until now. Read More
Podcast Can we fix social media? April 16, 2021 We use social media as a mirror to decipher our place in society but, as Chris Bail explains, it functions more like a prism that distorts our identities, empowers status-seeking extremists, and renders moderates all but invisible. Read More
Podcast Listen in: Why We Are Restless April 16, 2021 We live in an age of unprecedented prosperity, yet everywhere we see signs that our pursuit of happiness has proven fruitless. Dissatisfied, we seek change for the sake of change鈥攅ven if it means undermining the foundations of our common life. Read More
Essay Minds wide open April 14, 2021 How to Keep an Open Mind is a selection of writings from the ancient Greek skeptic Sextus Empiricus. The title is mine, not his. Sextus鈥� skepticism is all about suspension of judgment concerning the true nature of things. Read More
Interview Chris Bail on Breaking the Social Media Prism April 14, 2021 In an era of increasing social isolation, platforms like Facebook and Twitter are among the most important tools we have to understand each other. Read More
