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, […]
Atul Gawande uses the term “positive deviant” to describe unusually effective performers in the field of medicine. To Gawande it is natural that we should study these outliers in order to learn from them and improve performance. Surprisingly, however, in business the best are not studied as closely as in other fields. The Outsiders is an attempt […]
It was a spring day on the Las Vegas strip in 1971 when Ruby Duncan, a former cotton picker turned hotel maid and the mother of seven, led a procession. Followed by an angry army of welfare mothers, they stormed Caesar’s Palace to protest Nevada’s decision to terminate their benefits. The demonstrations went on for […]
How do new things come about in biology? Darwin’s theory of natural selection explains what happens once innovations arise—to preserve and propagate those adaptations that are helpful. But it doesn’t tell us how those innovations come to be in the first place. In the absence of a good explanation, we’ve defaulted to attributing evolutionary change […]
Gretchen Ritter is Harold Tanner Dean of Arts and Sciences and professor of government. A third-generation Cornellian, she is the College’s first female dean. She previously served as vice provost and professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin. She has also taught at MIT, Princeton and Harvard.Dean Ritter received her B.A. in government from […]
Martha Hanna is an professor of history at the University of Colorado, Boulder. During a research trip to Paris in June 2000 she unearthed a previously unknown collection of wartime letters written by a peasant couple, Paul and Marie Pireaud. Numbering well over a thousand letters, the Pireaud collection – perhaps the only extant collection of […]
Arthur C. Brooks is the president of the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author, most recently, of the best selling <em>The Conservative Heart: How to Build a Fairer, Happier, and More Prosperous America</em>, a bold new vision for conservatism as a movement for social and economic justice. <em>The Conservative Heart</em> was published by Broadside/HarperCollins.
Arthur is a regular contributor to the <em>Wall Street Journal</em> and the <em>New York Times</em>. He writes and speaks widely on the connections among culture, politics, and economic life. His previous books include the bestselling <em>The Road to Freedom</em> and <em>The Battle: How the Fight between Free Enterprise and Big Government Will Shape America’s Future</em>.
Marjorie J. Spruill, is Professor of History at the University of South Carolina. She is recognized in the US and abroad as a leading authority on the women’s movement. Marjorie is the author of Divided We Stand: Womenâs Rights, Family Values, and the Polarization of American Politics, published by Bloomsbury. Writing in The New York Times, Gillian Thomas wrote, […]
America faces a new culture war. It is not a war about guns, abortions, or gays—rather it is a war against the creeping changes to our entrepreneurial culture, the true bedrock of who we are as a people. The new culture war is a battle between free enterprise and social democracy. The Battle by Arthur C. […]
On the night of March 5, 1770, British soldiers fired into a crowd gathered in front of Boston’s Custom House, killing five people. Denounced as an act of unprovoked violence and villainy, the event that came to be known as the Boston Massacre is one of the most familiar incidents in American history, yet one […]
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 […]
In Work 2.0, Bill Jensen introduces us to a new breed of managers and organizations that are maximizing productivity, developing leaders at all levels, constantly innovating, attracting exceptional talent, and winning in the marketplace. The key to their success is recognizing that the most valuable assets in the company are the time, attention, knowledge, passion, energy, […]
Adrian Johns is a professor in the Department of History and the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books, most recently <em>Death of a Pirate</em>, published by Norton. <em>Piracy</em>, his history of intellectual piracy from the invention of printing to the Internet, was published by the University of Chicago Press and has been published in Italian, Spanish, French, and Czech. <em>Piracy </em> won the Book of the Year Award from the American Society for Information Science and Technology and was named an Outstanding Title by <em>Choice Magazine</em>.
Elizabeth Fenn is professor of history at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She studies and writes about the early American West, focusing on epidemic disease, Native American, and environmental history. Her aim is to develop a continent-wide analysis that incorporates Native Americans as well as African, British, Spanish, French, Dutch, and Russian colonizers into a […]
Arthur C. Brooks is the president of the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author, most recently, of the best selling <em>The Conservative Heart: How to Build a Fairer, Happier, and More Prosperous America</em>, a bold new vision for conservatism as a movement for social and economic justice. <em>The Conservative Heart</em> was published by Broadside/HarperCollins.
Arthur is a regular contributor to the <em>Wall Street Journal</em> and the <em>New York Times</em>. He writes and speaks widely on the connections among culture, politics, and economic life. His previous books include the bestselling <em>The Road to Freedom</em> and <em>The Battle: How the Fight between Free Enterprise and Big Government Will Shape America’s Future</em>.
Marjorie J. Spruill, is Professor of History at the University of South Carolina. She is recognized in the US and abroad as a leading authority on the women’s movement. Marjorie is the author of Divided We Stand: Womenâs Rights, Family Values, and the Polarization of American Politics, published by Bloomsbury. Writing in The New York Times, Gillian Thomas wrote, […]