August 8, 2024

Fiona Bell on The Talnikov Family

From Anna Karenina to The Brothers Karamazov, Russian literature of the nineteenth century is perhaps best known for the family novel. In 1848, as if anticipating the spate of profamily novels to come, Avdotya Panaeva penned a novel that was...

August 6, 2024

Kevin Hart on Contemplation

Contemplation has fallen out of sight in recent decades. For centuries, it was a large part of Christianity, especially Catholicism and Orthodoxy, but since Vatican II (1962–1965) it has not been emphasized. How many times have you heard a homily...

July 24, 2024

Why History Lessons Are So Threatening to Those with Power

Chana Teeger

Erasure and denial of the past are not the only ways to suppress historical claims and reproduce privilege. Chana Teeger’s research in two racially diverse South African schools shows how the past can be recalled while its legacies are ignored.

July 17, 2024

Michiko Suzuki on Decentering the Western Humanitarian Movement:

Japanese Indigenous Humanitarianism (Jindō)

In this Q&A, Michiko Suzuki’s discusses Humanitarian Internationalism Under Empire. The book is the first English written research monograph about the history of the Japanese Red Cross movement.

July 10, 2024

An Impossible Friendship and the Possibilities of Friendship in Israel/Palestine

Sonja Mejcher-Atassi

An Impossible Friendship invites us to glimpse alternative possibilities within and alongside the fraught history of Israel/Palestine.

June 19, 2024

Technology and Vannevar Bush, Fifty Years Later

G. Pascal Zachary

On his death fifty years ago, Vannevar Bush was celebrated with a page one obituary in the New York Times. He died quietly in his home in the late hours of June 29, and his passing was met with the...

June 12, 2024

Beyond Repair:

The Psychic Life of Reparation

Carolyn Laubender

Ten years ago, on June 15, 2014, Ta-Nehishi Coates published his watershed Atlantic article, “The Case for Reparations.” An immediate cultural flashpoint, Coates’s piece sought to legitimize the demand for racial reparation in the contemporary United States by documenting how...

June 5, 2024

Five Scientists with Disabilities Whom You Should Know

Skylar Bayer and Gabi Serrato Marks

In 2018, we (Skylar and Gabi) got together and decided that we would create a book with a diversity of stories about disability and medical conditions in STEM, help contributors tell their stories in their own voices, and provide representation...

May 29, 2024

Eye of the Beholder:

Perception of Art and the Brain

Eric R. Kandel

Art is not complete without the perceptual and emotional involvement of the viewer—that is, without our response to it. As a neuroscientist and a lover of art, I am fascinated by this response, which results from the interaction of two...

May 28, 2024

Hawai‘i’s Chinese and Cold War Politics

Nancy E. Riley

Hawai‘i has been in the orbit of the United States since at least the mid nineteenth century, but it was after World War II, as the United States engaged in Cold War with the USSR, that Hawai‘i became particularly important....

May 23, 2024

Rumi Yasutake on The Feminist Pacific

Rumi Yasutake’s book, The Feminist Pacific: International Women’s Networks in Hawai’i, 1820–1940, conceptualizes the emergence of pan-Pacific feminism in the process of interacting historical forces and women’s activism in Hawai‘i from 1820 through the 1930s. When a mounting tide of...

May 22, 2024

The Rip Current Survival Guide

Rob Brander

The beach. There’s a lot wrapped up in those two words. To some, beaches are associated with the joys of a yearly vacation, but for others they can evoke a scary memory of being caught in a rip current. In...