As critics of McCarthyism derided the period’s anti-Communist campaign as a “witch hunt,” the 1950s Broadway drama The Crucible underscored the link between contemporary political investigations and the 1692 Salem witch trials. The Specter of Salem reveals that this twentieth-century cultural moment, often cited as marking the emergence of such associations, actually followed a long […]
It’s intuitively appealing to imagine a line as composed of infinitely small individual points – or “indivisibles,” as they’re called in mathematics. After all, we know that wood is a composite of individual fibers, and a rope is composed of individual strings, so we would expect the same to be true of the lines and […]
The story of the marriage of Rachel and Andrew Jackson has come down to us as one of the most romantic love stories in American history. But aside from treatment in a chapter of the many biographies of Andrew – Rachel’s story has been barely told. (at least not since Irving Stone’s The President’s Lady!) Although […]
Drawing from a study of over 2,500 people in 460 companies, Simplicity has been hailed as “ a breakthrough in the design of understanding,” a book that “outlines the future of leadership.” It’s a powerful guide to working smarter, not harder, and, in the process, creating more flexible and productive organizations, more compelling experiences for customers, and […]
Ethan J. Leib is Professor of Law at Fordham Law School. He teaches in contracts, legislation, and regulation. His most recent book, Friend v. Friend: Friendships and What, If Anything, the Law Should Do About Them, was published by Oxford University Press. In it, he explores the costs and benefits of the legal recognition of and […]
Denise Herzing has been studying dolphin communication in the wild since 1985, when she founded the Wild Dolphin Project and began her unprecedented, long-term study of Atlantic spotted dolphins in the Bahamas. She received her Ph.D. in Behavioral Biology and Environmental Studies from the Union Institute Graduate School and is currently a professor in biological […]
Brett Rushforth is a scholar of the early modern Atlantic world whose research focuses on comparative slavery, Native North America, and French colonialism and empire. He is assistant professor of history at the University of Oregon. His first book, Colonial North America and the Atlantic World (co-edited with Paul W. Mapp), uses primary documents to […]
Richard Schmalensee is the Chairman of Market Platform Dynamics, He is also a principal at Global Economics group and is the Howard W. Johnson Professor of Economics and Management, Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Professor of Economics, Emeritus, Dean Emeritus, and Director of the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research at […]
Data Mining for the Social Sciences: An Introduction is a short non-technical introduction to data mining for people who are interested in using data mining to analyze quantitative data, but who don’t yet know much about these methods. Data Mining, using automatic or semi-automatic analysis of large quantities of data to discover previously unknown or interesting […]
Computer programs can recognize human faces more reliably than humans. They beat us at board games, they bluff better than the best poker players in the world, and some of them can almost pass as human. At a breathtaking pace, machines are becoming better and faster at making complex decisions—even compared to us. Machines have […]
In the 1930s, a fierce struggle over the rights of workers was waged in the agricultural fields of California. Infuriated by the increasing militancy of workers during the Great Depression, California growers and their allies responded with mob assaults and official repression. Carey McWilliams used the term “farm fascism” to describe the response of corporate […]
David Moss is the Paul Whiton Cherington Professor at Harvard Business School, where he teaches in the Business, Government, and the International Economy (BGIE) unit. He is the founder of the Tobin Project, a nonprofit research organization that has received the MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions. He is the author of When All Else […]
Ethan Zuckerman is director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT, and a principal research scientist at the MIT Media Lab. His research focuses on the distribution of attention in mainstream and new media, the use of technology for international development, and the use of new media technologies by activists. He is the author of Digital […]
Judith Donath is a Faculty Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the former director of the Sociable Media Group at MIT’s Media Lab. She has created many pioneering online social applications and her work, and the work of the Sociable Media Group, has been shown in museums and galleries worldwide. She […]
Serena Zabin is a professor of history at Carleton College and a historian of early America. She is the author of two books: Dangerous Economies: Status and Commerce in Imperial New York published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2009 and The New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741: Daniel Horsmanden’s Journal of the Proceedings, […]