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 “apéritif,” 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’t sink in. I’d often heard the old adage: “a picture is worth a thousand words.” But the photograph by Alexander Gardner didn’t 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
Podcast The First King of England November 17, 2025 From one of today’s leading historians of the early medieval period, The First King of England is an enthralling chronicle of ?thelstan, England’s founder king whose achievements of 927 rival the Norman Conquest of 1066 in shaping Britain as we know it. Read More
Podcast The Life of Violet November 13, 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—a teasing tribute to Woolf’s friend Mary Violet Dickinson. Read More
Twenty years of Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit November 12, 2025 Among all the attributes of AI, the models are prone to bullshitting. And so too are some humans, as the renowned philosopher Harry Frankfurt detected, and warned: “bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.” Read More
Video PUP Speaks:Karen G. Lloyd on the hunt for life beneath earth’s surface November 10, 2025 Karen G. Lloyd discusses how research expeditions to some of the most extreme locales on the planet are broadening our understanding of what life is. 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—a teasing tribute to Woolf’s friend Mary Violet Dickinson. Read More
Interview Steve Ramirez on How to Change a Memory November 05, 2025 As a graduate student at MIT, Steve Ramirez successfully created false memories in the lab. Now, as a neuroscientist working at the frontiers of brain science, he foresees a future where we can replace our negative memories with positive ones. Read More
Interview Philippa Gander on Life in Sync November 05, 2025 All of life is profoundly shaped by the daily, monthly, and yearly cycles of our planet, and all creatures have internal timekeeping systems that rely on cues from the surrounding environment. Read More
Essay Scratching the surface October 29, 2025 Death confronts us all as the ultimate rupture and mystery at the very heart of life. That existential challenge has been met, it turns out, of an almost infinite variety of customs and rituals. Read More
Essay The seafood platter – past, present, and future October 24, 2025 The Dutch Caribbean islands of Aruba and Cura?ao are famed for their sun-kissed beaches. Just fifty miles to their east, the lesser-known Bonaire island is treasured by scuba divers precisely for its lack of beaches, bathers and tourist hotels. Read More
Podcast Make Your Manuscript Work October 22, 2025 Developmental editing holds the power to make a manuscript connect with publishers and readers, yet few scholarly writers have the training to do it well. Laura Portwood-Stacer shows scholarly writers how to identify what’s been holding their writing back and fix it so they can accomplish their publication goals. Read More
Video PUP Speaks: Cynthia Miller-Idriss on Man Up October 20, 2025 What two things do most mass shooters, terrorists, or violent extremists have in common? Most of us know the first: they are almost always men or boys. But the second? Read More
Essay Prose is a prison, poetry a prism October 15, 2025 In the late 1990s, I worked as a machinist in Rochester, New York, where I operated a 1937 Brown & Sharpe No. 00 Automatic Screw Machine, fabricating precision parts for Xerox photocopiers. Read More
Essay On A Violence October 15, 2025 I love swimming. In the summer, at the community pool, I like diving dramatically from the shallow end to the deep end, under the rope with its small blue and white floating barrels. I like gazing out at the rippling aqua rectangle, in all its green lawn. Read More
