2154 Micro-Interviews

700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators
600+ Threads

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The Apothecary’s Wife - In a nutshell

First, Abandon Binaries All Ye Who Enter Here. Lived life and therefore history are more complicated than simple oppositions...

Karen Bloom Gevirtz
Breathing Space - The wide angle

Yet this is essentially what our lungs do: they blur the boundary between inside and outside and, although they are internal organs, maintain a constant connection to the external world. I began to see an analogy...

Tim Altenhof
Lipstick - A close-up

The Object Lessons series excels at connecting objects to larger implications. Ultimately, I hope my readers will become more curious about how something as banal as lipstick connects to sexuality, power, gender identity, and class...

Eileen G’Sell
Post-Digital Humanism

Post-Digital Humanism is the idea that digital tools should ultimately deepen our physical, emotional, and sensory relationship with the real world rather than detach us from it. Post-digital Humanism doesn’t mean after technology...

Rory Noble-Turner
The Diversity Principle - In a nutshell

That old aphorism that great minds think alike is completely wrong; great minds think differently, and when they work together make great decisions and discoveries...

David B. Oppenheimer
Picky - The wide angle

Pleasure matters. Pickiness reduces pleasure for kids and parents. Parents are stressed because they don’t want picky kids and fear doing the wrong thing. I want to be part

Helen Zoe Veit
Caribbean Blood Pacts - In a nutshell

These forces built the very foundations of the CIA’s operations. The first plot, Operation PBFORTUNE, was started by the dictators and backed by United Fruit..

Aaron Coy Moulton
A Four-Eyed World - A close-up

I’m particularly fond of the part where I look at how glasses are portrayed in books. When eyewear first began to appear in literature, a whiff of sulfur or mystery hung over it; if glasses helped people see, what other powers might they possess? Besides sharpening vision, writers have imagined glasses revealing secrets...

David King Dunaway
Prince’s Minneapolis - In a nutshell

One of the main ideas in this book is that music is connected to geography; it originates from a specific place. The social factors shaping that place...are reflected in the music...

Rashad Shabazz
The Nature of Nurture - In a nutshell

Almost all discourse about nature and nurture only focuses on genetics when it comes to the nature side of things, ignoring natural selection, adaptation, and the fundamental goal of all living things...

Jay Belsky
Neuroethics - In a nutshell

Deep brain stimulation can restore motor control in people with Parkinson’s disease. Yet access to information about a person’s brain from neuroimaging...

Walter Glannon
Reaching for the Extreme - The wide angle

Most applications of mathematics are hidden behind the scenes. No one wants to have to learn spherical trigonometry to use their car’s satellite navigation...

Ian Stewart
Friction - The wide angle

...we instinctively manipulate friction all the time. We use carts with wheels to help move heavy objects. We buy new tires when our treads wear out so our cars grip the road better...

Jennifer R. Vail
The Revenge of Reason - In a nushell

What’s important about reason is not building up from certain foundations, but our ability to continually revise the rules that govern the way in which we think, and indeed how we live...

Peter Wolfendale
Mazzy Star’s So Tonight That I Might See - In a nutshell

They’re a band that never wanted fame, and I mean that quite literally. They were with independent labels, they’re publishing stuff on their own, and they’re refusing to rush...

Anthony Gomez III
How to Read a Wedding Dress - A close-up

Although the book covers such iconic examples as Grace Kelly, Jacqueline Kennedy and Beatle wife Pattie Boyd, I would perhaps hope that it would first fall open on pages covering the choices of ordinary women who had to be inventive to be fashionable. A favourite example can be found on page 61, where a glamorous fashion...

Lydia Edwards
Magic Is Made of Statistics and Marketing

Some people have genuinely not recovered emotionally from the shock of a machine mimicking human language so fluently. We believed that language was uniquely ours...

EP Pajo
The Last Titans - In a nutshell

I'm tempted to say one of the unique things about my book is that there's less of it. There are a lot of very long biographies of Churchill and de Gaulle, and what I hoped, in a funny kind of way, by putting the two men together,

Richard Vinen
Enver Hoxha: Twentieth-Century Tyrant - In a nutshell

Communism was one of the most alluring alternatives to becoming modern, especially in countries with poor financial resources and lacking social capital. Dictatorships are a response to insecurity and the crisis of self-confidence...

Artan R. Hoxha
Why Q Needs U - In a nutshell

But another benefit comes from an appreciation of how the alphabet works (or sometimes doesn’t work), because we today are a chapter in its long story. The alphabet is a testament to innovation, and every population...

Danny Bate
The Musical Lives of Charles Manson - In a nutshell

I try to understand how the different genres that emerged or entered maturity in the late 1960s – including rock music criticism, true crime, gonzo journalism, science fiction...

Nicholas Tochka
Artificial Intelligence Is Intelligence That Is Built, Not Born

Artificial intelligence is an act of mimicry. We design systems we fully and deliberately control to reproduce our own ability to purposefully manipulate matter. What we build has no soul. What we build has no biological intent...

EP Pajo
Picky - In a nutshell

So the argument that pickiness is natural and inevitable doesn’t hold up. That’s extremely hard for parents to hear. I try to understand mass pickiness as a historical phenomenon that has shaped...

Helen Zoe Veit
Lipstick - The wide angle

For me to explore the fraught nature of femininity within academia—and which persists within the professional realm more broadly—is something I do not take for granted. It’s something I have been preoccupied by personally and intellectually for at least the last 30 years. I was very lucky...

Eileen G’Sell
Friction - In a nutshell

From the DNA in our bodies to the formation of planets in the universe, friction is present and that’s what makes it such an intriguing force. However, friction is arguably the most underappreciated force in our lives...

Jennifer R. Vail
A Four-Eyed World - The wide angle

I’m extremely near-sighted. I’ve worn glasses since childhood. If I misplaced them, I’d need glasses to find my glasses. My vision is so bad that I need them to cross the street. But I’m embarrassed to say that, for most of my life, I didn’t give them much thought. When I was kicking around the idea...

David King Dunaway
Reaching for the Extreme - In a nutshell

If you want financial reasons for the importance of mathematics, that’s a pretty clear answer. But there are other reasons too, which I think are more important — among them the subject’s intrinsic beauty, the element of surprise....

Ian Stewart
Enver Hoxha - In a nutshell

What’s unique about the Enver Hoxha: Twentieth-Century Tyrant is that we don’t actually have a decent scholarly biography of Enver Hoxha. There is some work—Blendi Fefziu has a book, which is fairly standard, even in its title...

Robert C. Austin
Charlotte Brontë's Life Through Clothes - A close-up

Clothes are, and always have been, a vital part of our daily lives. Few things walk with us so closely. The garments that we wear literally mould themselves to our bodies, even becoming imbued with our DNA...

Eleanor Houghton
Lipstick - In a nutshell

Lipstick is really a metonym for larger systems of adornment, especially feminine adornment. Though it’s part of the Object Lessons series, the book, Lipstick, is not a comprehensive history of the object. Other books have done that quite well...

Eileen G’Sell

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