War and Herbaria
May 31, 2023
Maura C. Flannery— In October 2022, the National Herbarium of Ukraine in Kiev suffered damage from Russian bombing, and similar destruction has happened to preserved plants collections called herbaria in… READ MORE
Category: Essays
Engaging Citizens in the Politics of the Ocean
May 26, 2023
Chris Armstrong— The ocean resembles an enormous life-support system, performing a series of key roles, albeit often in the background, that keep our planet hospitable for life. It absorbs a… READ MORE
Women Hidden in Plain Sight
May 24, 2023
Alejandra Dubcovsky— There were women in the Early South, for surely there had to be. I was familiar with the long catalogue of responsibilities and obligations historians use to describe… READ MORE
Crashes, Crises, Coaching?
May 17, 2023
Harold James— Economics is not homogenous, especially at the moment. Orthodoxy is challenged, heterodoxy is in, there are calls for new textbooks and New Economic Thinking. Each different style of… READ MORE
Clocks, Calendars, and Schedules
April 10, 2023
David M. Henkin— In the ever-changing world of white-collar labor, it is the small touches that signal dystopia. Much of the enduring resonance of Mike Judge’s 1999 classic comedy film… READ MORE
Where Next for the World’s First Author?
March 24, 2023
Sophus Helle— Enheduana is the first known author in the history of world literature. She was a royal princess and high priestess who lived in the 23rd century BCE in… READ MORE
Interests, Not Ideology, Should Drive America’s Approach to China
March 16, 2023
Ryan Hass— Ideologues prefer to understand the U.S.-China relationship as a contest between good versus evil. They take comfort in clean divisions between democracies versus autocracies. They like parallels between… READ MORE
“My Dearest James”: Agha Shahid Ali and James Merrill
March 15, 2023
Manan Kapoor— Sometime in the 1990s, Agha Shahid Ali wrote a poem about the Bosnian War and sent it to James Merrill, who responded: “There is nothing that you can… READ MORE
The Difference a Single Verse Can Make
March 14, 2023
David Bentley Hart— When I first set out to translate the New Testament, my aim was to return as faithfully as possible to the original Greek, and to its ambiguities…. READ MORE
“I Create My Own Space”: A Conversation about Fierceness