5,084 words | Jun. 24, 2025 | foreignaffairs.com In his first months back in office, U.S. President Donald Trump has threatened to use military force to seize Greenland & the Panama Canal, suggested that the United States could take ownership of Gaza after…

1,136 words | 26-Sep-2023 | scientificamerican.com In October 2022, Mississippi reported some exhilarating news. After the state started using phonics to teach reading in 2013, its fourth-grade reading scores jumped from 49th to 29th in the nation, according…

1,338 words | 05-Sep-2024 | scientificamerican.com In World War II’s most desperate months, the mathematician Alan Turing assembled a team of codebreakers to decrypt intercepted Nazi messages. He tested applicants with chess puzzles, hired a classicist &…

2,082 words | 06-Aug-2025 | propublica.org Two weeks into President Donald Trump’s second presidency, & just days after he pardoned hundreds of Capitol rioters, officials Trump had placed in charge of the Justice Department made a sweeping demand. They wanted…

3,361 words | 23-May-2024 | noemamag.com Today’s generative AI systems like ChatGPT & Gemini are routinely described as heralding the imminent arrival of “superhuman” artificial intelligence. Far from a harmless bit of marketing spin, the headlines & quotes…

2,604 words | 20-Aug-2025 | atlanticcouncil.org What drives long-term prosperity & where should reform begin? Data suggest that the rule of law consistently emerges as the most influential factor—outperforming economic & political freedom—in driving prosperity…

542 words | 13-Oct-2016 | scientificamerican.com Decisions are based on the way choices are framed. This is because people use emotion when making decisions, leading to some options feeling more desirable than others. For e.g., when given £50, we are more…

1,394 words | 20-Jul-2020 | scientificamerican.com In March, as COVID-19 was spreading rapidly, & the lives of Americans were turned upside down, the country was deeply worried about ventilators. There did not seem to be enough of the breathing machines to…

6,692 words | 16-Apr-2024 | noemamag.com In the late 18th century, officials in Prussia & Saxony began to rearrange their complex, diverse forests into straight rows of single-species trees. Forests had been sources of food, grazing, shelter, medicine, bedding…

937 words | 02-Sep-2025 | propublica.org When a source first told me about the case of Lloyd Gray in late 2024, I jotted down these notes: two Black jurors, a swastika & Gov. Jeff Landry. That was an oversimplification of a deeply troubling issue, but it…

772 words | Sep. 21, 2025 | newyorker.com The structure of “Elephant,” one of Raymond Carver’s last stories, is simple, but the emotional effect is outsized, numinous, convincing, & comic. It opens with the narrator’s brother calling him to ask for money.…

2,115 words | 17-Oct-2024 | scientificamerican.com Scholars have long contemplated the connection between language & thought—& to what degree the two are intertwined—by asking whether language is somehow an essential prerequisite for thinking. British philosopher…

2,913 words | Jun. 2020 | newcriterion.com When Henri Matisse was a twenty-five-year-old student of Gustave Moreau’s, he painted a view of his immediate surroundings, including a pair of his fellow artists. The Atelier of Gustave Moreau (ca. 1895, Private…

2,752 words | 15-Dec-2016 | lrb.co.uk In 1735​ , the Duke of Richmond was in search of a sloth bear. He took delivery of an animal but wasn’t happy with what had arrived. ‘I wish indeed it had been the Sloath that had been sent me, for i.e. the most curious…

2,200 words | 15-May-2017 | slate.com In 2008 I published a short piece in Cabinet magazineon the fate of writer Thomas Browne’s skull, stolen from his coffin 158 years after his death. It caught the attention of an editor at a small press called Unbridled…

4,324 words | 09-May-2022 | newyorker.com No one expects contemporary philosophers to be more than mildly eccentric. Creatures of the modern academy, they have careers, not vocations. Some mixture of incentive & professional obligation keeps them productive.…

2,799 words | 26-Sep-2016 | thepointmag.com As a child in the early Nineties, I looked forward to reading Ask Ann Landers, the syndicated advice column that appeared in the Chicago Tribune my parents had delivered every Sunday. Like conversations overheard…