Roger Pielke’s The Honest Broker is a cautionary piece. So you’re a scientist, and in addition to your research, you want to engage the public sphere. Pielke’s point: when influencing...
The NYT column Proof is about alcohol and society, and on the 20th, former bartender Brian McDonald poured a literary concoction of drunken writers and poets, Under the Literary Influence. For McDonald,...
The biggest bang we know of since the Big Bang was confirmed last Thursday, February 19. It’s Gamma-ray Burst (GRB) 080916C, spotted by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope at 7:13 pm EDT on September...
Guardian economics editor Larry Elliot appreciates Richard Bronk’s point of view, that of putting imagination back into economics. It’s a call that’s been heard before, but was obviously...
West coast rep Michael Baron recently visited some of the last, best places to keep culture and ideas alive in California. The journey of this day starts across the street from San Francisco City College....
From The Huffington Post comes a review of Sean Theriault’s Party Polarization in Congress. We’re certainly not post-partisan yet. As Julian Zelizer explains in his Book Corner, there are “two...
Historian of ideas and long-time Cambridge author Quentin Skinner gave a long interview last year about the many aspects of his research, academic culture, and Cambridge over the last 40 years. One of...
Things have changed, haven’t they? Months ago, we were arguing over universities hoarding their endowments even as tuition prices increased. Then endowments took massive hits and even Harvard terminated...
Richard Florida (The Rise of the Creative Class) wrote an interesting long piece in The Atlantic focusing on the shocks to urban areas as high finance crumbles. Will the big job losses mean that the center...
Peter Day interviewed Richard Bronk yesterday for BBC Radio 4 World Business. Bronk clarified what it means to apply Romantic sentiment to economics, and where it diverges from simple behavioral science. Here’s...
200 years ago today, Charles Darwin was born. Who better to wish him a happy birthday than his own sister? There’s more family news [omitted] in the letter, but I was especially charmed by a middle-section...
Northeast rep Mary Beth Barilla visits an old favorite in Providence When I’m on the road, I often listen to news radio, and in January, the news was a bit depressing. Sure, Obama took office, but almost...