January 30, 2024

Three Myths About Presidential Campaign Visits:

From Joe Biden’s Basement to Donald Trump’s Rallies

Christopher J. Devine

Did Joe Biden spend the 2020 campaign hiding in his basement? Did Hillary Clinton cost herself the 2016 election by not bothering to visit Wisconsin? Did Donald Trump’s rallies fire up his base and win him the presidency? To many...

January 23, 2024

Kimberly D. Acquaviva on The Handbook of LGBTQIA-Inclusive Hospice and Palliative Care

A year and a half after she published her first book about LGBTQIA-inclusive hospice and palliative care in 2017, Kimberly D. Acquaviva learned that her wife Kathy had ovarian cancer. When they were unable to find a local hospice with...

January 15, 2024

Israel, Palestine, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s Civil Rights Legacy

Roger Baumann

In mid-January each year, many Americans turn their attention to questions about the legacy of the historic civil rights era of the 1950s and ’60s in the United States. This annual period of national introspection focuses especially on Martin Luther...

January 2, 2024

California’s Conservatorships:

Why Britney Spears and Not the Most Vulnerable

Alex V. Barnard

As estimated 1.3 million Americans are living under conservatorships (also known as guardianships): legal arrangements by which a judge takes decision-making power away from a person with disabilities and gives it to a third party. A conservator then determines where...

December 27, 2023

Chick-fil-A in the Early Nineteenth Century

Joseph P. Slaughter

The fall semester is wrapping up at Wesleyan University, which includes my fall course Jesus Chicken—a class that explores the intersection of religion and business in America. For those unfamiliar, the course’s title refers to Chick-fil-A—a derisive moniker given to...

December 20, 2023

Why Democrats Need to Show Up in Rural America

Nicholas Jacobs and Daniel Shea

The widening gulf between rural and urban America is becoming the most serious political divide of our day. Support for Democrats, up and down the ballot, has plummeted throughout the countryside. Rural Americans are supposedly bigots, culturally backward, lazy, scared...

December 18, 2023

The Evolving Politics of the Rust Belt “Union Man”

Lainey Newman

In the heyday of American labor, the influence of local unions extended far beyond the workplace and conveyed fundamental worldviews, making blue-collar unionists into loyal Democrats who saw the party as on the side of the working man. Today, Republican-leaning groups...

December 11, 2023

James W. Cortada in Conversation with Robyn Massey About Inside IBM

James W. Cortada―a business historian who worked at IBM for many years―pinpoints the crucial role of corporate culture in IBM’s success. He provides an inside look at how this culture emerged and evolved over the course of nearly a century,...

December 4, 2023

Q&A: Andy Secher on The Trilobite Collector’s Guide

After a three-decade-long career in the rock ’n’ roll industry—during which he edited the heavy metal magazine Hit Parader, produced two music-oriented TV shows, and created Titanium Records—Andy Secher turned his attention towards another paramount interest: those strange, long-gone marine...

November 17, 2023

Stepping Ashore the Fennoscandian Shield in the Åland Archipelago

Markes E. Johnson

In the narrow Gulf of Bothnia between Finland and Sweden, the Åland Islands are dominated by exposures of the 1.6-billion-year-old Rapakivi granite. Limestone is scarce and its fossil content largely unknown to the outside world. Sixty islands are inhabited, surrounded...

November 15, 2023

Q&A: Giving Voice and Data to the Gender Gap in Science

Lisa M. P. Munoz

For more than twenty years, Lisa M. P. Munoz has interviewed hundreds of different scientists about their work in psychology, neuroscience, the geosciences, biotechnology, and immunology, among other disciplines. Time and time again, she heard about the unique struggles facing women...

October 25, 2023

C. S. Lewis’s Claim that Jesus was Either a Liar, a Lunatic, or the Lord Is Either Lame, Ludicrous, or Lousy with Literalism

John D. Caputo

The problem with religion is that, with each passing day, as the Pew polls keep showing, it is making itself more and more unbelievable, and the people who try to defend it make it worse, so we do not know...