All the threads

Melville's samurai is an invention, not a citation of Japanese tradition.

Melville's obsessive use of close-ups of the protagonist's face in Le Samouraï also emphasizes the protagonist's subjective viewpoint. These close-ups not only function to represent his psychological state but also reject the viewer's identification with his emotions.

Le Samouraï

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Humans sleep less than any other primate, and that is an adaptation, not a deficit.

"Not only do humans sleep the least of any primate, but we have the most REM, proportionally. So we have this really special, unique kind of sleep architecture relative to other primate species."

The Sleepless Ape: The Story of Sleep in Human Evolution

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Missionaries form the earlier layer of this story. American Protestant missionaries in Turkey used film in schools, churches, hospitals, prisons, and villages. They screened science films, agricultural films, health films, Disney films, and religious films.

Film Diplomacy: A Media History of Turkey-US Relations

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The commercial internet was made in San Francisco, not in Silicon Valley.

The internet, if you think about what a website is — the engineering is underneath it, but it's really about the design, and the creative expression, and the writing. So it's a different thing. And relatedly, the people who were interested in the culture of Burning Man were also the people who were interested in the design end of technology. That became central, much more than the kind of hard engineering part of it.

City on the Edge: Technology, Politics, and the Fight for the Soul of San Francisco

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Socially responsible investing does not work and cannot, and the $30 trillion industry built on it is selling an illusion.

Understanding this made it clear why 80% of socially responsible funds invest in oil and gas companies, despite their carbon dioxide emissions heating the planet to the breaking point. Like Big Tobacco, Big Oil does not pay for the damage that comes from using their products. Besides, the oil industry often outperforms other sectors in the stock market.

Profit vs. Progress

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Socially responsible investing does not work and cannot, and the $30 trillion industry built on it is selling an illusion.

The more complex my field of study became, the simpler the underlying truths. Corporations exist, and have always existed, solely to deliver value to shareholders. This is a core strength of the capitalist system, and a key to its prodigious productivity.

Profit vs. Progress

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Socially responsible investing does not work and cannot.

The reality is that sustainable (also called "socially responsible") investing mostly supports the status quo. Corporations are happy to receive sustainable investments, but they don’t let it change their course. They have one objective: produce value for shareholders.

Profit vs. Progress

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PONG succeeded because its understated wood-grain cabinet got it into cocktail lounges, hotel lobbies and airports.

The argument I always make as an educator and a historian is that I hope game developers today are looking at older games to see, one, what's been done — don't do it again, think differently. I don't know how much history is active in game design programs.

King PONG

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Nothing counts as human thought unless it is universal across cultures.

We humans are so proud of our big brains because it "feels" like brain size must be an advantage, but is it? As some of the essays in this book suggest, a lot of bad behavior and negative thoughts come out of those big brains as well. We feel superior to other animals who are doing just fine in their particular habitat, and we often feel it is our "right" to rule everything on the planet. Our big brains might, in the end, be our downfall

How We Think

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The Metaverse does not exist yet, and the collapse of its hype is the Second Life cycle repeating.

virtual worlds fundamentally reshape the learning experience, particularly in distance education. A shared virtual environment offers far more engagement than a traditional online lecture. Presence, spatial interaction, and avatars foster connection, spontaneity, and active participation. Students can meet in virtual classrooms, break into groups, and collaborate around digital objects, making remote learning more interactive and less isolating.

The Virtual Universe

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The Metaverse does not exist yet, and the collapse of its hype is the Second Life cycle repeating.

Virtual worlds and the Metaverse are no longer at the center of media attention, as one has to admit, unlike a few years ago when Mark Zuckerberg rebranded Facebook as Meta to signal the growing importance of virtual reality for business and society. It was during that period that I decided to return to researching virtual worlds, despite having once sworn that I never would.

The Virtual Universe

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The castrato phenomenon was repressed rather than ended after Moreschi's death, and it surfaces in Fellini's 1950s cinema.

Castrato Phantoms emerged from two threads casually unloosed from papal lore by a Sistine chapel bass and collector of modern Roman chapel documents and scores, Luciano Luciani, whom I visited on the outskirts of Rome in the later 2000s when preparing for the Bloch Lectures.

Castrato Phantoms: Moreschi, Fellini, and the Sacred Vernacular in Rome

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The castrato phenomenon was repressed rather than ended after Moreschi's death, and it surfaces in Fellini's 1950s cinema.

By utilizing the granular materials of scores, recordings, anecdotes, pedagogies, films, filmic scenarios, photographs, letters, wills, contracts, birth, death, and marriage records, architectural plans, oral histories, and the unpublished memoir of Fellini’s niece Rita Fellini, in part furnished by a rich family archive

Castrato Phantoms: Moreschi, Fellini, and the Sacred Vernacular in Rome

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People consistently underestimate how positively others will respond to being engaged, and the result is chronic undersociality.

Once you see that your own beliefs are a little bit misplaced, it’s that sense of empowerment that I hope people get out of the book. I hope the book encourages you to look for those places, and to test your beliefs. You don't have to believe me about the results here. They provide an opportunity or encouragement to go out and test them yourself...

A Little More Social

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What matters in a kinetic work happens between control and chance, not in its mechanism.

My aluminum sheets are alive to me. They bend and shift with their surroundings—delicate yet strong, protective yet vulnerable. Aluminum is originally used for roofing, a material designed to adapt to environmental forces such as heat, wind, and rain. In my work it becomes something more sensitive, almost like skin. I also see a kind of femininity in this material—resilient and powerful yet refusing inappropriate control.

Moonment

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Reptiles and amphibians are in the same trouble as the charismatic mammals we protect.

Reptiles and amphibians are in trouble for a variety of reasons. Most are connected to habitat loss and degradation because of human activities. Many animals, including some reptiles, are eaten. They are items in the diet, especially in Asia.

Cold-Blooded Murder

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A painting is not finished until someone looks at it.

A work is built through a set of formal relationships—proportion, alignment, adjacency, interval—but those relationships don’t settle into a single reading. Edges register, then slip. Intervals hold, then open. The composition remains slightly in play.

Work Looks Back

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School mathematics stops centuries ago and leaves students believing the subject is finished.

Math is still being made. This thread pushes back against the idea that mathematics is a closed body of old knowledge, showing instead how new work is constantly emerging—and how badly our classrooms fail to convey the subject’s vitality, reach, and inventiveness.

Mathematics and Creativity

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Infinity is a fiction, and the mathematical universe is finite.

The belief that both the physical and the mathematical universes are finite. Of course, they are enourmously large, but still finite. The so-called infinity is completely unnecessary, and is due to a superstitious belief in something transcendental, analogous to the belief in God.

Ultrafinitism

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The cartoon is a form of architectural criticism, often more effective than the essay.

What did ordinary people think when confronted with a house shaped like a cube? How did city dwellers feel, a century ago, surrounded by forests of skyscrapers? What relationship existed between the human body — especially the female body, so often confined to domestic space during the twentieth century — and architecture itself?

Alan Dunn: The Cartoonist as Architectural Critic

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Five of the six main causes of start-up failure are avoidable, so the ninety-percent failure rate is not inevitable.

There is a temptation to think that what startups need most is a sense of wonder — the ability to wander in the mind, to think about things other people thought were impossible. But I think it's actually the opposite problem that brings most of them down. Startups fail more often because of lack of focus. Too much wandering. Generally, you need to focus.

Why Start-Ups Fail

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People consistently underestimate how positively others will respond to being engaged, and the result is chronic undersociality.

It supports this idea that our sense of worth comes from our beliefs about others. When self-esteem is low, when we're not feeling good about ourselves, that's our body's and mind's way of signaling to us that things aren't going great in our relationships. It's an alarm...

A Little More Social

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A dark-adapted astronaut who turns from Earth to the stars feels humility and disorientation, not the overview effect's unity.

He began to realize -- based on vision, not just imagination -- just how many stars there were, a number too large for his brain to adequately process. In that moment, he realized that the universe was far bigger than he had ever understood and became certain that there was other intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.

The Ultraview Effect

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What matters in a kinetic work happens between control and chance, not in its mechanism.

Instead of forcing material into a fixed form, I began asking a different question: what if sculpture could move and respond to the world around it? That question gradually evolved into Moonment. Over time, the project expanded into a series of site-specific installations in different cities, each responding to its environment while remaining connected to the larger idea of shared time and perception.

Moonment

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The Declaration's vagueness is deliberate, which makes originalism a misreading of the founders' own design.

The genius is to realize that America was born out of this idea of free will and self-actualization—the notion that you can be whatever you want...

Declaration

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When you are born matters more than who you are, and history is baked into criminal records.

Rather than fixating on predicting individual criminality or a supposed criminal character, we should focus on building the institutions and environments that prevent crime and help us meet the unexpected challenges that the future will bring.

Marked by Time

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When you are born matters more than who you are, and history is baked into criminal records.

History, in other words, is baked into criminal records. In this case, it generates a systematic gap between actual and predicted arrest patterns across birth cohorts. This bias appears in all major racial groups and among youth who were arrested as juveniles, so it is not the usual form of bias we worry about. It also shows up for both absolute and relative risk. A prediction tool can correctly rank who is riskier ...

Marked by Time

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American biological psychiatry descends by a traceable line from the eugenic tradition that produced the Nazi euthanasia programs.

I think my readers are surprised to learn that we, in U.S. psychiatry, follow the lead of a man who trained Nazi doctors—Emil Kraepelin. They’re further surprised to discover, in the story of Philippe Pinel, that psychiatric methods that feel impossibly humane now existed in the late 1700s...

The Devil’s Castle

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What companion AI takes away is friction, and the capacity to bear it for someone else decays when unused.

What I hope the book does is open a more nuanced conversation. Not panic, not dismissal, but attention. I want readers to ask better questions about what these systems are offering, what they are shaping, and what we want to protect as distinctly human.

The Friend Machine

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What companion AI takes away is friction, and the capacity to bear it for someone else decays when unused.

We are watching the emergence of what might be called a synthetic intimacy industry. Chatbots that position themselves as companions, therapists, romantic partners. Services that promise presence, understanding, even love. Some of these are explicitly marketed that way.

The Friend Machine

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What companion AI takes away is not the partner but the friction.

I found that synthetic intimacy is not emerging in a vacuum; it is meeting a real, unmet need, or perhaps more cynically speaking, entering and widening a wound that was already there, exacerbated by elements like the loneliness epidemic. That is why it is so powerful, and also why it is so complicated.

The Friend Machine

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Seeing feels immediate but is an organized activity.

I’m interested in how those frameworks can be made visible through form. Each decision of proportion, alignment, interval and edge is intentional. The aim isn’t to complicate the image, but to make its internal structure legible over time – revealed. What I’d want a reader to notice first is that sense of intention. The work doesn’t resolve all at once; it unfolds as relationships begin to register.

Seeing Is Not Immediate

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Painting war means showing the inner condition of the people forced into it, not its events.

The first encounter with this painting may not be beautiful in an aesthetic sense, but it is true to my feeling. I have always believed that humanity is capable of peace, and peace is the opposite of everything that is depicted here...

The Cries of Evil Times

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People consistently underestimate how warmly others will respond to being engaged.

Another big reason is that people underestimate how positively the other person will respond when we reach out to connect with them. People are reluctant to engage a stranger in conversation. If they think the other person doesn't want to talk to them, they often underestimate how interested the other person is in talking to them. We're reluctant to engage in deep conversation ...

A Little More Social

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PONG succeeded because its plain wood-grain cabinet got it into places arcade machines never went.

Raiford Guins on King PONG, his history of Atari's launch product as a masterclass in market creation. Three engineers with no business background reinvented coin-op amusement, then pivoted into consumer electronics via Sears — becoming the engine behind ubiquitous gaming today.

King PONG

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The world shaped the American Revolution, not merely the reverse.

When street protests prompt controversy and violence, a complex and colorful history of global resistance to tyranny has much to teach us. We see how ordinary people—from enslaved pregnant women to suffering soldiers to Indigenous grandmothers—navigated extraordinary, conflict-ridden times. We learn about quiet acts of resistance,

Freedom Round the Globe

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The 1976 bicentennial was a decisive event of the 1970s, where national political realignment actually ran.

But I think I’m most pleased with the extensive discussions of counter-bicentennial activism. This includes dramatic protests led by African Americans, beginning in the late 1960s; the media-savvy actions of the People’s Bicentennial Commission; the Native American Trail of Self-Determination, which followed the Wagon Trail Pilgrimage...

Bicentennial: A Revolutionary History of the 1970s

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The 1976 bicentennial was a decisive event of the 1970s, where national political realignment actually ran.

When I finally made the bicentennial my research priority in anticipation of the commemoration of US 250 in 2026, I slowly came to the realization that the book would be queer-inclusive but not queer-focused. Mostly that’s because I realized that there were so many untold stories about African Americans, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, Latinos, Native Americans, people with disabilities...

Bicentennial: A Revolutionary History of the 1970s

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The 1970s were not an interlude between the liberal sixties and the conservative eighties.

First, it offers new historical perspectives on the 1970s, treating the bicentennial as one of the decade’s most significant events and arguing that the decade has been misrepresented as a mere interlude between the liberal 1960s and the conservative 1980s. Instead we see the bicentennial as a critical moment in a ...

Bicentennial: A Revolutionary History of the 1970s

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The alphabet only looks fixed, and the right to adjust its letters belongs to every population that uses them.

This single letter so nicely demonstrates the development of the alphabet, through both its enduring similarities and later differences with its bovine prototype. The letter A has lost much of the complexity...

Why Q Needs U

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Arithmetic is to mathematics what spelling is to literature.

Arithmetic may be the foundation, but it is not the heart of mathematics. This thread examines the difference—and why proof and reasoning matter so much.

Mathematics vs Arithmetic

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This history comes into focus when we take both the films and their audiences seriously. Educational films were not marginal relics, and viewers were not passive recipients. Sponsors, translators, censors, researchers, projectionists, and audiences all shaped meaning. Viewers did not simply take what institutions gave them.

Film Diplomacy

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A dark-adapted astronaut who turns from Earth to the stars feels humility and disorientation, not the overview effect's unity.

That’s part of what makes this moment in space exploration so interesting. With the Artemis missions, astronauts returning to the Moon may have greater opportunities to experience true darkness, far from the reflected light of Earth. I find myself wondering what it will mean for people to look out into a sky so full of stars that constellations disappear...

The Ultraview Effect

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Beyond the overview effect lies a rarer experience in space, one of humility and disorientation.

What we tend to underestimate, though, is the importance of spirituality or religious belief in human life. As an anthropologist of religion, I’ve spent a lot of time looking at how religion provides a lens for understanding everything from politics to food to gender roles to economics.

The Ultraview Effect

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Mazzy Star's album is about a Los Angeles being gentrified, and Hope Sandoval must be heard as a Mexican-American woman.

There’s something so powerful about artists who are simply willing to be artists, to create to create, without [a demand for social presence]. To put their world out there and let us sink into it...

Mazzy Star’s So Tonight That I Might See

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A kinetic work lives between control and chance, not in its mechanism.

There is a line from the Chinese poet Zhang Jiuling that has always stayed with me: “A bright moon rises above the sea; though far apart, we share this moment.” That idea of sharing the same moment across distance is central to the project.

Moonment

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Digital fabrication is not what pulled design from the physical world but a way back to it.

In that sense, the dunes of the north coast remain my quiet collaborators; endlessly reshaping the ground beneath my feet and reminding me that the role of design is not to escape reality, but to help us experience it more deeply.

Experiencing Reality

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When you are born matters more than who you are.

Most research on children’s development follows a group of people born around the same time—a single birth cohort. But as children grow up, the world around them is also changing. Individual development and social change are intertwined; you cannot really understand one without the other.

Marked by Time

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The archival documentary was born in 1930s America, from four decades of accumulated footage and the synchronized human voice.

Of course, not every forgotten film is unjustly forgotten, but almost all are worthy of a line entry in an index of American film history and some—like the titles above-- deserve a whole chapter. As blueprints for the archival documentary, they are the best evidence for the overarching argument of the book: that only with the passage of thirty-or-so years of documentation by the motion picture medium ...

How Film Became History

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The archival documentary was born in 1930s America, when sound met decades of old footage.

The idea behind How Film Became History was to trace the origin of the motion picture genre that is now the central repository for our shared history--the archival documentary. “Films beget films,” declared the film historian Jay Leyda, but only in the 1930s would they become fruitful and multiply.

How Film Became History

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The archival documentary was born in 1930s America, from four decades of accumulated footage and the synchronized human voice.

In good Marxist fashion, two dialectical forces squared off: the Stalinists, who supported the Soviet regime with the fervor of religious zealots, and the Trotskyites, who looked upon Stalin’s dictatorship as a betrayal of the true faith. In the USSR, the suppression of the one by the other

How Film Became History

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There is no perfect map, and mathematically there cannot be.

Many people are aware that if you look at a graph, maybe you should consider what's in this graph. Well, maps, I think, we take for granted. When we use the word ‘manipulate,’ people often think it's some bad person trying to manipulate what we think, which absolutely happens with maps. But there's also the point that we cannot show everything.

Mapmatics: A Mathematician's Guide to Navigating the World

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Medicine became unaffordable by economic decision when physicians and apothecaries supplanted women's free domestic medicine.

It shows that medical history is inextricably entwined with social history, and that history depends as much on words as on events...

The Apothecary’s Wife

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Painting is not the pursuit of fashion but a record of lived experience.

Over time, my art and my creative consciousness have developed in parallel, growing together and responding to historical, social, and spiritual circumstances.

War Became Visual Memory

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De Gaulle became the one thing Churchill never managed to be, a great peacetime leader.

National greatness is always a bit of a fairy tale. Sometimes it's necessary, but you're unwise if you completely buy into it. These are very strange and exciting lives...

The Last Titans

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The Declaration's vagueness is deliberate, which makes originalism a misreading of the founders' own design.

Franklin understood the Declaration was not just for the American people of that time. Because of the hypocrisy and the long way we had to go, it was an aspirational gift to humanity...

Declaration

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What matters about reason is the capacity to revise the rules of thinking, and autonomy is its practical twin.

The idea that the brain is hardware and the mind is software is a bad metaphor drawn from computers and physical devices that we're familiar with, rather than the mathematical theory of computation...

The Revenge of Reason

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The Metaverse does not exist yet.

It connects economics, technology, and ethics, while also exploring practical implications for business functions such as marketing, human resources, and supply chain management. At the same time, it looks beyond the corporate world to broader fields such as education, healthcare, and sustainability.

The Virtual Universe

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American biological psychiatry descends by a traceable line from the eugenic tradition that produced the Nazi euthanasia programs.

My history holds a mirror to U.S. psychiatry over the last half decade—its promises and its perils, particularly for females. At the same time my story is used insofar as it supports the research, always...

The Devil’s Castle

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The Kardashians are not people to be judged but a concept, like Las Vegas or Disney.

My work aims to make postmodern and media theory more accessible by using the Kardashian family as the ultimate exemplar. I also aim to utilize postmodern and media theory to help explain how the Kardashians managed to make such a massive, inescapable cultural impact. Some people view my project as parasocial. Others view it as pretentious.

DeKonstructing the Kardashians

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Enver Hoxha was a typical twentieth-century tyrant, and Albania's story is not a local one.

The metamorphosis Enver Hoxha underwent: from a materialist and pragmatist dictator who wanted to modernize his country, he became a dogmatic tyrant, blind to his people’s suffering, obsessed with pursuing at all costs ideological purity...

Enver Hoxha

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The castrato phenomenon did not end when the last castrato died.

Castrati, I argue, assumed the function of a latency that haunted Moreschi and his predecessors, especially after about 1830. By then, they had departed from European opera stages and soon ended up exclusively in papal Rome. Since then, castrati have continued haunting our present..

Castrato Phantoms: Moreschi, Fellini, and the Sacred Vernacular in Rome

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James Creighton, dead at 21 in 1862, gave baseball its strike zone and threw a curveball before Candy Cummings.

An ugly public relations battle ensued between the two sports over which one was responsible for the death of the popular young Creighton. Cricketers suggested that Creighton had fatally injured an internal organ by swinging a baseball bat; baseball men – including members of the Excelsior club – countered that Creighton had hurt himself while batting in the cricket match. 

Death in the Strike Zone

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James Creighton, dead at 21 in 1862, gave baseball its strike zone and threw a curveball before Candy Cummings.

Viewing the game of baseball in the Amateur Era through the eyes of contemporary sportswriters was like reading a police reporter’s review of an opera.

Death in the Strike Zone

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James Creighton, dead at 21 in 1862, is the reason baseball has a strike zone.

Like a detective investigating a cold criminal case, to find answers I had to blow the dust off of ancient case files, open them up and look at them with new eyes. All of my witnesses are long dead, and making new discoveries about someone who died 160 years ago would seem to be unlikely – yet I managed to make a few.

Death in the Strike Zone

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Historically speaking, it seems that we have already reached the end of neoliberalism and globalization. The world is shaking under new orders and in the effort to create new ones. I see what I have done so far as representative of a historical period that has already passed.

The Idealized City - A close-up

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What’s interesting to me is that while every political ideology of the past, and every empire in history, had its own architecture, it seems that nobody wants to claim contemporary architecture as its own, not even the neoliberal class that enforced it through treaties, diplomacy, soft power, and societal control...

The Idealized City

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Globalization has turned landscapes worldwide into a loop of the same images.

I was more interested in actions and public interventions, but I use those methods less and less, since neoliberalism has found a way to appropriate dissent—at least its most superficial forms—and turn it into propaganda for its own ends as well...

Public Space as Art

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Chinese independent bookstores engage with politics as a strategy of market differentiation, and reading them as resistance overstates their politics.

What I also discovered through this study was that independent bookstores were not merely retail outlets but cultural spaces where ideas and aesthetics are thoughtfully curated to generate and sustain meaning. They functioned as critical arenas...

Cultural Mavericks

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Chinese independent bookstores engage with politics as a strategy of market differentiation, and reading them as resistance overstates their politics.

I decided to understand what it meant to be an independent bookstore in the Chinese book trade and explore the forces and factors driving the rise of both the notion and the practice of independent bookselling in the country.

Cultural Mavericks

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Chinese independent bookstores use politics to stand out in the market, not mainly to resist.

I develop the concept of ‘culturally adapted strategy’ to explain how they creatively engage with political narratives, draw moral legitimacy, and harness cultural resources to carve out a unique identity, one that affords them an..

Cultural Mavericks

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Enver Hoxha is not explained by Albania, he was an ordinary twentieth-century tyrant of the Leninist type.

I was doing research on museums, and I had this feeling that I wouldn’t be back. I like Albania, but it’s not my Albania anymore. I thought my time had passed...

Enver Hoxha

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Mathematics is created, not discovered.

Mathematics often appears fixed and timeless, yet many of its most powerful ideas—from negative numbers to infinite dimensions—are human creations born from imagination and experimentation.

Creativity in Mathematics

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Early-life adversity accelerates puberty because early reproduction is adaptive, and what looks like dysfunction is often evolution working.

Thus, knowing how a person develops does not tell you whether nature or nurture were principally responsible because the same way...

The Nature of Nurture

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Printmaking is any transfer of a mark from one surface to another, a lip print on a glass included.

Printmaking allows imagery to be made and distributed cheaply as multiples, which historically has served to democratize knowledge. With that proud history and the awareness of our shared global peril...

Print Day in May

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Printmaking is any transfer of a mark from one surface to another.

Print Day in May defines printmaking as transferring a mark from one surface to another. Anything from an edition of etchings to a lip print on a margarita glass.

Print Day in May

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Printmaking is any transfer of a mark from one surface to another, a lip print on a glass included.

Print Day in May began at Monterey Peninsula College in 2007. A small group of printmaking students had become a very tight and committed collegial group, creating events, traveling...

Print Day in May

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Most causes of start-up failure are avoidable, so a ninety percent failure rate is not inevitable.

At the center of everything is building best teams, because that’s what successful people do. They really build a team, and they bring different things together, and they make it a team, not just a collection of people. And of course, ensuring alignment. That is, getting people to move in the same direction, even though they each have different things to do, they’re aligned with the vision of where we’re trying to go. That’s a bit about what competencies are, and I think you can see that they’re different from skills.

Why Start-Ups Fail

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Caribbean dictators, Guatemalan reactionaries, United Fruit and Britain plotted against Guatemala's Revolution years before the CIA did.

Dictators, as did the British government, spent a decade claiming any opposition was communist. These efforts directly shaped the US ...

Caribbean Blood Pacts

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Caribbean dictators, Guatemalan reactionaries, United Fruit and Britain plotted against Guatemala's Revolution years before the CIA did.

The biggest surprise was recovering those dictators’ goals. The region’s dictatorships denounced any opposition to their regimes as some communist conspiracy led by the Soviet Union...

Caribbean Blood Pacts

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American biological psychiatry descends directly from the eugenics behind the Nazi euthanasia programs.

So while I am looking at things historically, I also bring them into the present, to interrogate the concept of “madness” and other states, and to ask how we can do better with mind care.

The Devil’s Castle

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What matters about digital design tools is not what they make possible but why we use them.

The tension between immense computational possibility and the simplicity of human sensory experience became the starting point for my work; a line of inquiry I eventually began testing through the design of tactile, small-scale objects.

From Making More to Meaning More

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Medicine became unaffordable by economic decision when physicians and apothecaries supplanted women's free domestic medicine.

To my shock, when I opened Elizabeth Blackwell’s (1707-59) stunningly beautiful, massive two-volume set of medicinal plants entitled A Curious Herbal, I realized that as late as the 1730s, apothecaries and physicians saw ordinary housewives as competition: economic competition, no less...

The Apothecary’s Wife

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We do look for a balance between scholarly rigour and accessibility. Narrative voice is less important simply because it is the subject that will attract the reader of books in this series and not really the author...

Editorial Craft

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There are not many other cultural phenomena that academics undertake to research and write about that are also sustained by fan forums, which in their own way provide their own kind of platform for examining or narrating what the music means to its listeners. 

Reverb Series

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Popular music is best understood through the places and moments it comes from.

Our authors might of course be fans of the subject, but they are also - with one or two exceptions - academics who are interested in broader social, historical or cultural trends. Another important aspect in this was the focus on creativity...

Music, Place, and the Moment - Reverb Series

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Scatman John's stutter was the mechanism of his art, and overcoming is the wrong frame for disability.

If a browsing reader were to open the book at random, I’d hope they land in Chapter 24, which recounts John’s appearance on the Norwegian TV show Rondo in 1995.At this point, John is riding an extraordinary wave of fame ...

Scatman John

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Friction is a designable tool, and tuning it is worth up to twenty percent of global energy consumption.

Automobiles have gotten larger and heavier, yet somehow fuel efficiency has improved. It used to be that about one third of the fuel put into a car was spent overcoming friction. Guess how...

Friction

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Early-life adversity accelerates puberty because early reproduction is adaptive, and what looks like dysfunction is often evolution working.

For me it was a matter of seeing in color what had otherwise only been viewed in black and white...

The Nature of Nurture

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Anti-Asian violence in America is a continuous 175-year pattern, and denying its racial motive is part of the pattern.

Such sentiments did not come from thin air. The dehumanization of Asians as faceless enemies—marked with racist epithets—spanned repeated U.S. wars in Asia and the Pacific.

American Peril

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Anti-Asian violence in America is a continuous 175-year pattern, and denying its racial motive is part of the pattern.

When the history of Asian Americans and U.S.-Asia relations surfaces inconvenient truths to dispel these myths, it is disregarded. When Asian Americans speak out...

American Peril

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Anti-Asian violence in America is a continuous pattern going back 175 years.

A look at the long, often erased history of anti-Asian racism in the United States—from nineteenth-century violence to the surge of hate during the COVID-19 pandemic—and why these histories remain widely misunderstood.

American Peril

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Diversity is a two-century-old principle, and mixed groups discover more, decide better and earn more.

[W]e should seek opportunities to enrich our lives, our families, our communities, and our country by embracing diversity in its many forms...

The Diversity Principle

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Diversity is a two-century-old principle, and mixed groups discover more, decide better and earn more.

[T]he origins of the diversity principle were little discussed. I hoped that my discoveries would help educators and business leaders to trade...

The Diversity Principle

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The dead and disappeared of the Kosovo war are unresolved wounds, not settled history.

Painting is my most natural language and the most honest way for me to communicate with the world. Many of the themes I explore arise from everyday life, but above all from profound personal experiences and memories...

Painting as My Most Honest Language

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Enver Hoxha was a typical twentieth-century tyrant, and Albania's story is not a local one.

Such a phenomenon is not isolated but related to the advancement of the extreme-left agendas, which attack all the pillars of liberal democracy. We can draw important lessons from Enver Hoxha’s...

Enver Hoxha

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Modern architecture's interpenetration of inside and outside came from a turn-of-the-century breathing culture, with the lung as model.

At its core, Breathing Space asks what kinds of buildings we want to inhabit as consciously breathing beings: permeable structures embedded in the atmosphere, or sealed containers...

Breathing Space

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What matters about reason is the capacity to revise the rules of thinking, and autonomy is its practical twin.

Liberals think freedom is just not being interfered with, right? But that means they don't understand what the positive conditions that enable choice are...

The Revenge of Reason

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Nearly half of adult cancer deaths worldwide are preventable, and prevention gets the least time and money in oncology.

I knew all about the limited treatment options and dismal prognosis … because I published research on glioblastoma management. What I couldn’t answer was why it had to be her husband...

Outsmarting Cancer

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Nearly half of adult cancer deaths worldwide are preventable, and prevention gets the least time and money in oncology.

With ballooning health care costs and consistently dropping life expectancy, we are missing the forest for the trees. We invest billions in new therapies...

Outsmarting Cancer

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