Endless economic growth rests on a belief in the limitless abundance of the natural world. But when did people begin to believe that societies should—even that they must—expand in wealth indefinitely? In The Great Delusion, the historian and storyteller Steven Stoll weaves past and present together through the life of a strange and brooding nineteenth-century German […]
The Guide to Walden Pond is the first guidebook to Henry David Thoreau’s most defining place, visited by half a million people each year. Many more know it as the fountainhead of America’s environmental consciousness. Using this guide, developed in collaboration with the Walden Woods Project, both armchair readers and trail walkers alike can join […]
Of all the areas ripest for disruption by big data, learning is among the biggest — and most lucrative. Online access to education is getting a lot of ink. But the far more significant story is what’s happening below the surface that hasn’t received much attention: how data is being used to identify what works, […]
Most people would feel a great loss if elephants, rhinos, or gorillas were to become extinct, but would we willingly move our families, change our means of earning a living, and disrupt our culture to prevent their extinction? People living in rural Africa are being asked to do just this by the world community. The Myth […]
Doc Searls is a writer, speaker and consultant on topics that arise where technology and business meet. In 1978, he was a co-founder of Hodskins Simone and Searls, which became one of Silicon Valley’s leading advertising and public relations agencies. He has been a fellow with the Center for Information Technology and Society (CITS) at […]
Christopher Hodson specializes in colonial and Atlantic history, with an emphasis on the early modern French empire, comparative imperialism, and early modern diasporas. After earning his PhD. from Northwestern University in 2004, Chris spent two years as an Andrew Mellon Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, University of Pennsylvania. In 2007 he […]
Richard Mark Gergel is a United States District Judge and presides in the federal courthouse in Charleston, South Carolina. He is a native of Columbia, South Carolina and graduated from Duke University, summa cum laude, and the Duke University School of Law. He returned to his hometown of Columbia to practice law, where he was […]
Cynthia A. Kierner is Professor of History at George Mason University, where she teaches early American and women’s history. She is the author of six books, among them Martha Jefferson Randolph, Daughter of Monticello: Her Life and Times, published by the University of North Carolina Press. The book was awarded the 2013 Julia Cherry Spruill Prize from […]
Popular views of the 1970s associate the decade with failure: failure of the military in Vietnam, failure of the presidency in Watergate, failure of the economy in oil crises and stagflation, and ailure of both major political parties in addressing the nation’s serious problems. Pulitzer Prize winner David Kennedy dismissed American society in the 1970s […]
Ten years after Cluetrain’s original publication, too many companies still ignore the idea that markets are really made up of people. In our rapidly changing world, this book’s message is more vital than ever. Companies may be wired for business, but they still struggle with how to talk to their customers like human beings.The 10th […]
Paul and Marie Pireaud, a young peasant couple from southwest France, were newlyweds when World War I erupted. With Paul in the army from 1914 through 1919, they were forced to conduct their marriage mostly by correspondence. Drawing upon the hundreds of letters they wrote, Martha Hanna tells their moving story and reveals a powerful […]
William-Henry Ireland was nineteen years old in 1795 when he handed his father a document that he claimed was written and signed by William Shakespeare, and alluded to a trunk full of such documents that belonged to a mysterious Mr. H. by whom he was employed. His father, along with an impressive group of scholars, […]
Edward Gray is the former editor of the interactive journal Common-place, and is the author of several books, including, most recently, Tom Paine’s Iron Bridge, published by W. W. Norton. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Kathleen DuVal called the book “fascinating and important.” Since 1999 he has taught courses in colonial and revolutionary-era American history and […]
Rick Levine is a soup-to-nuts serial entrepreneur, with a bent towards creating companies that produce things. In the last 30 years, his experience has ranged from software development to consumer goods. Much of his work, despite often being buttressed by technology in some form, revolves around anchoring product and brand experience in the real world, with tangible […]
Ben Kiernan is the Whitney Griswold Professor of History, Professor of International and Area Studies and Founding Director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University. As director of the Cambodian Genocide Program (CGP), he received approximately $2 million in grants to document the crimes of the Pol Pot regime, to establish the Documentation Center of […]
Steven Stoll is Associate Professor of History at Fordham University, where he teaches environmental history and writes about agrarian society in North America. He is a contributor to Harper’s Magazine, writing on subjects as diverse as Haiti, economic growth, and the Little Ice Age. Steven is the author of Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia, published by […]