2024 promises to be a year of decision for democracies worldwide, with important elections scheduled in Taiwan, Venezuela, Mexico, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Several of these elections...
Arthur C. Clarke famously stated that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Most of us have experienced this law with respect to the latest iterations of large language...
A page from the “Negroes” installment of Ilf and Petrov’s “American Photographs” showing a smiling young dancer; a man on the banks of the Mississippi River in New Orleans; and the marquee...
Most people have some dissatisfaction or concern about body weight, fatness, or obesity, either personally or professionally. I wrote ’Understanding Obesity’ out of a dissatisfaction with the dominant...
As I wrote my book Improving University Mental Health, the commonest question people asked was ‘who is the intended audience?’ If you are reading these words, then the answer is ‘you...
Intuition is an ultimate experience, beyond words: We know more than we can tell. This phenomenon upsets many who believe in rationality as a purely conscious activity. People often confuse intuition...
What is the topic of the book? Measurement is one of the most fascinating and misunderstood aspects of quantum physics. It plays no role in classical physics, other than reducing ignorance about the...
Nicole Loraux speaks at a conference in Montrouge (Paris) in 1987, along with, from left to right, Claude Lefort, Louis Dumont and François Furet. Paris, l’École des hautes études en sciences...
We share the fondness many people have for dogs. In the United States, approximately half of households express their fondness by opening their doors, and most often their hearts, to dogs. Indeed, a majority...
Studying self-referring language is fun. This is the reason why so many philosophers talk about the logic of truth. When we talk about the truth or falsity of sentences, we use language to talk about...
We live in a world of States. With the exception of the high seas, outer space, and Antarctica, the entirety of our currently inhabitable environment falls within the jurisdiction of one State or another....
When I want to introduce people to the nineteenth-century polymath John Herschel (1792–1871), sometimes it’s difficult to know where to begin. There are simply so many possible ways to start: He...