July 15, 2025

Maciej Ryś in Conversation with Renee Bales About Sparks for Innovation

In an increasingly complex world, hackathons have the potential to help innovators, academics, and industry professionals tackle important challenges. These gatherings of members of an industry or academic field for collective problem-solving arose primarily in the tech world in the...

November 27, 2024

A Historical Roadmap to Understanding the United States’ Relationship with China

Thomas M. Larkin

How does one make sense of the relationship between the United States and China? Where should one even begin? China and the United States are the world’s two largest economies by a significant margin, and entangled ones at that. A...

March 20, 2024

The Untold History of Women’s Death by Laughter

Maggie Hennefeld

“Those who do not remember the joke are doomed to continue laughing at it.” —An unidentified feminist philosopher. What is the funniest joke you’ve ever heard? And have you ever laughed so hard you thought you might explode? In 1907,...

June 7, 2023

Beethoven’s Music

Genius, Curiosity, Liver Disease, and Lead

Larry S. Sherman and Dennis Plies

In our book, Every Brain Needs Music: The Neuroscience of Making and Listening to Music, we discuss the contributions of curiosity to creating music. Curiosity is a trait that can be described as “a state of information seeking that can...

May 25, 2023

Q&A: Simon LeVay on Attraction, Love, Sex

Why do we have sex? Why do we fall in love? What attracts us to one another? And how do we compare to other species in the animal kingdom? Researchers have been trying to answer these questions for years, and...

November 19, 2022

Buddhism, Relationships, and Authenticity

Avram Alpert

A few years ago, I was driving through the Blue Mountains outside of Sydney with my wife, who is Australian. We were not yet married at the time and were still learning about each other. We had been silent for...

November 15, 2022

Q&A: Reed Brody on To Catch a Dictator

What does it take to make a dictator answer for his crimes? Hissène Habré, the former despot of Chad, terrorized, tortured, and killed on a horrific scale while enjoying full American and Western support. After his overthrow, his victims and...

November 9, 2022

Announcing Our 2022-2023 Religion Catalog

Letter from the Religion Editor: Friends, colleagues, authors, scholars of religion, and beyond: Greetings, with a special hello to those attending AAR/SBL in person! It’s nice to see you here. It’s that time of the year when we introduce our...

November 4, 2022

Announcing our 2022-2023 Social Work Catalog

Letter from the editor: I am pleased to share the 2022-2023 Columbia University Press social work catalog. At what we hope is the tail end of a long pandemic, this fall semester marks a return to some kind of normality. It...

October 28, 2022

Look Away: Instinct as Deterministic Force in Jordan Peele’s Nope

Thomas M. Puhr

Note: This piece contains spoilers. In a series of one-sheets released for Jordan Peele’s Nope (2022), the horror film’s characters stare skyward, expressions of wide-eyed fear dominating their faces. They almost appear hypnotized. What, we wonder, is eliciting this response?...

September 29, 2022

The Multifaceted Advice of the Zhuangzi

Richard John Lynn

This translation is “new” in that it differs significantly from previous translations since it is based on one particular traditional Chinese commentary, the earliest complete philosophical commentary by Guo Xiang 郭象 (265–312). The translation technique is also “new” in that...

August 30, 2022

“Seoul, So Far Away” from Who Ate Up All the Shinga?

Park Wan-suh

“Suddenly a blinding flash shot from a building straight into my eyes. The light was unlike any I’d seen before. There was no fire, but it was more intense than any flame. I clung to my mother in fear. She...