People Don’t Want to Argue with AI, and That Makes Them More Persuaded by It

Persuasion research has long studied the message. A conversation is two-sided, so the question became how people behave when the other side is a chatbot, and why they see so little point in arguing with it.

From People to Prompts

I didn’t write this about the world, I wrote it about myself.

An old, sick man tries to rob a bank to get medical care, and the police send him home. Seven songs ask what it would cost to treat everyone as a neighbor.

Rooming House

The early Supreme Court was a political institution both by design and in practice.

Judges are not politicians, a future chief justice told the Senate in 2005. For the nation's first hundred years that idea would have baffled Americans: justices rode circuit, drafted legislation, advised presidents, backed candidates, and roughly a third of them ran for president from the bench.

The Political Supreme Court: A Forgotten History

The diversity within the communist world and within particular countries is often forgotten.

Everyday life under communism is usually pictured as total control and silent conformity. Three historians were asked what that picture leaves out. Their answers find life going on beneath it in different places: churches full in Poland and banned in Albania, reformers quietly at work inside Soviet institutes, and Soviet teenagers memorizing Beatles lyrics.

The Cold War: A Rorotoko Weave - Part II

Mysticism without religion, and the fungus that made it possible.

A small brown mushroom travels from ritual use in the mountains of central Mexico to university labs and pharmaceutical boardrooms. Along the way it gathers many of the modern age's hopes, from mystical experience outside religion to the next profitable drug.

Still Seeking the Magic Mushroom: Fungi, Pharmaceuticals, and Mysticism Without Religion

A very powerful woman's story

A storm on the first night, the fear of being out of reach, and twenty years of anthropology among women migrants. Why film can carry a story further than an academic article, and the daily ethics of telling it.

Rescue

Even at 1.5 °C, Antarctica loses ice this century. How much is our choice.

Beneath a floating ice shelf, warm water thins the brake that holds back the glaciers behind it. Under very high emissions the dominoes fall, and Antarctica alone could add as much as 25 centimeters to sea level by 2100. Taking that seriously would change coastal planning and where research looks next.

Committed Antarctic Ice Sheet mass loss by the end of the twenty-first century

Intertidal oyster reefs live for millennia and prevent shoreline erosion but not climate change.

Oyster reefs are being restored as breakwaters and promoted as carbon sinks. Cores from 25 reefs in North Carolina show they grow with sea level, and that the shells they build give back the carbon they bury.

Sea level-induced oyster reef accretion causes minimal net carbon burial change