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 […]
No medical advances inspire more media hyperventilation than do those in aging research. Terms like “life extension” reek of snake oil, and despite our frequent forays into wishful thinking, we know in our bones that this stuff is the impossible dream. Aging’s daunting complexity, coupled with the fact that neither the drug regulators nor the […]
In Ramp Hollow, Steven Stoll offers a fresh, provocative account of Appalachia, and why it matters. He begins with the earliest European settlers, whose desire for vast forests to hunt in was frustrated by absentee owners―including George Washington and other founders―who laid claim to the region. Even as Daniel Boone became famous as a backwoods […]
When the pirate operator Oliver Smedley shoots and kills his rival Reg Calvert in Smedley’s country cottage on June 21, 1966, it is a turning point in the careening career of the outlaw radio stations dotting the coastal waters of England. Situated on ships and offshore forts like Shivering Sands, these stations blasted away at […]
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>.
Adam Segal is the Maurice R. Greenberg Senior Fellow for China Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). An expert on security issues, technology development, and Chinese domestic and foreign policy, he leads the Cyberconflict and Cybersecurity Initiative. Adam is the author of <em>A Hacked World Order: How Nations Fight, Trade, Maneuver, and Manipulate in a Digital Age</em> which was published by Public Affairs. The <em>Wall Street Journal</em> wrote, "[Adam Segal] gives us plenty of reasons to wonder how long global powers will keep from going ânuclearâ in cyberspace." His previous book, <em>Advantage: How American Innovation Can Overcome the Asian Challenge</em>, was a look at the technological rise of Asia.
Paul Freedman is the Chester D. Tripp Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at Yale University. He specializes in medieval social history, the history of Spain, and comparative studies of the peasantry. Paul Freedman taught for eighteen years at Vanderbilt University before joining the Yale faculty in 1997. At Vanderbilt, he was awarded […]
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 […]
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 […]
The terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” were both coined in the 20th century to describe the attempted extermination of a specific group of people by their own government. Genocide was first used in 1944 in regard to the Holocaust, and ethnic cleansing was first used in the early 1990s to describe the policies of Bosnian […]
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 […]
As a backyard naturalist and river enthusiast, Henry David Thoreau was keenly aware of the way humans had altered the waterways and meadows of his beloved Concord River Valley. And he recognized that he himself―a land surveyor by trade―was complicit in these transformations. In The Boatman: Henry David Thoreau’s River Years, Robert Thorson narrates Thoreau’s progress […]
Claudio Saunt is the Richard B. Russell Professor in American History and the associate director of the Institute of Native American Studies at the University of Georgia, A native of San Francisco, he has long been interested in exploring the early history of all parts of the continent and all the peoples living there, and his scholarship has been widely recognized for its innovative approach to the early American past.
His most recent book, <em>West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776</em> was published by W.W. Norton. It invites readers to extend their bounds and discover the continent beyond the British colonies, by looking at nine American places, stretching from the Aleutian Islands to San Diego, and from the Florida Gulf Coast to the Saskatchewan River in 1776. His next book, <em>Aboriginia</em>, also will be published by W. W. Norton.
Fred Anderson is professor of history at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is the author of <em>Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766</em>, published by Alfred A. Knopf and the winner of three prizes: the Mark Lynton History Prize, the Francis Parkman Prize, and the Colorado Book Award. It was also a finalist for the National Critics Book Circle Award in Non-Fiction. With Andrew Cayton, he is the author of <em>The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500-2000</em>, which was published by Viking Penguin. He also is the author of <em>The War That Made America: A Short History of the French and Indian War</em>, published by Viking as a companion volume to the PBS documentary series of the same name.
Ariane De Lannoy is a senior researcher at the Children’s Institute and lecturer in the Sociology Department of the University of Cape Town. Her research focuses on youth transitions to adulthood in South Africa, and she has published on young adults and educational decision making, youth belonging and citizenship, and youth violence in a context […]