Around the year 1000, Scandinavia embraced European religious, political, and economic culture. Unlike many other regions, Northern Europe chose to become Christian without being conquered by any Christian power. In The Conversion of Scandinavia: Vikings, Merchants, and Missionaries in the Remaking of Northern Europe, Anders Winroth answers the question of how this happened. His conclusion is […]
Since the rise of Napster and other file sharing services in its wake, most of us have assumed that intellectual piracy is a product of the digital age and that it threatens creative expression as never before. The Motion Picture Association of America, for instance, claimed that in 2005 the film industry lost $2.3 billion […]
When Samantha Brennan realized that her fiftieth birthday was looming, she decided to do something about it. She announced, on Facebook, that it was her plan to be fitter than she had ever been by the time she hit that milestone birthday. Her friend and colleague, Tracy Isaacs, who was nearly the same age, took […]
Children don’t grow up simply by adding inches and pounds—child development is a much richer mix of physical, cognitive, social, and emotional growth. While children make progress at their own pace, parents can help (or, occasionally, hinder) them. Understanding the many ways in which your child grows is the essence of parenting, and the goal […]
William Thorndike, a graduate of Harvard College and the Stanford Graduate School of Business, is the Founder and Managing General Partner of Housatonic Partners, a private equity firm with $1 billion in assets under management and offices in Boston and San Francisco. Since its founding in 1994, Housatonic has made over 60 investments in private […]
Patrick Carr is the Program Director of the Program in Criminal Justice, and Associate Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University. He is also an Associate Member of the MacArthur Foundationâs Research Network on the Transitions to Adulthood and Public Policy. He earned his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Chicago and his research interests […]
Doug Stewart writes frequently about history and the arts for Smithsonian Magazine, which has published more than 60 of his stories. The subjects he has written about range from Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth I to the great Florida land boom of the 1920s and the jeep in World War II. Smithsonian assignments have taken him […]
An interdisciplinary scholar of the indigenous and colonial past, James F. Brooks is professor of history and anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has previous been a member of the faculty at the University of Maryland, UC Santa Barbara, and UC Berkeley, and has held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in […]
In the fall of 1700, Awat’ovi, a Hopi community that had existed peacefully on Arizona’s Antelope Mesa for generations, was decimated, its inhabitants the victims of a massacre carried out by their neighbors—fellow Hopi Indians. The story of that night, during which scores of men, women, and children were brutally slain, has been shrouded in […]
Cape Wind is the real story, told for the first time in full, of the battle for our energy future. It also is the story of Jim Gordon and his quest to erect the world’s largest wind farm in Nantucket Sound, which is, of course, bounded by the storied vacation lands of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard […]
The first study to examine why violence erupts in America’s small towns and suburbs—and what can be done to prevent it. In the last decade, school shootings have decimated communities and terrified parents, teachers, and children in even the most “family friendly” American towns and suburbs. These tragedies appear to be the spontaneous acts of […]
In Democratic By Design: How Carsharing, Co-ops and Community Land Trusts Are Reinventing America, Gabriel Metcalf proposes that, today, alternative institutions offer a distinct strategy for social change. At a moment when so many social systems are in need of revitalization, opportunities exist for creating progressive alternatives that have a chance of taking hold. Democratic By […]
Jeremy Popkin holds the William T. Bryan Chair in history at the University of Kentucky, where he teaches classes on the era of the French Revolution. Two of his books, one on the explosion of “new media” after 1789: Revolutionary News: The Press in France, 1789-1799, published by Duke University Press in 1989 and You […]
Andreas Wagner is a professor in the Institute of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Zurich and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute for the study of complex systems. He is the author of Arrival of the Fittest: How Life Invents Itself, which Kirkus (in a starred review) called “A book of startling congruencies, insightful flashes and an artful enthusiasm…’ His next book, <em>Landscapes of Evolution: Mapping the Origins of Creativity</em>, will be published by Basic Books.
Amir Alexander is a writer, historian, and mathematician living in Los Angeles. He teaches history at UCLA. He is the author, most recently, of <em>Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World</em>, published by Scientific American Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Named a <em>Wall Street Journal</em> Best Science Book to Give for the Holidays and a <em>Library Journal</em> Best Science Book of 2014, it was called “a triumph” by <em>Nature</em>. Amir’s next book, <em>The Science of Certainty</em> also will be published by Scientific American Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
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 […]