We’ve all been taught that through biological inheritance we acquire traits from our parents and grandparents as a result of the individual genes that they pass along to us, unchanged, barring rare mutations. But what if your grandmother’s diet could affect your health? Obviously if we accept that inherited = genetic, this doesn’t make sense. […]
Software platforms are the invisible engines that have created, touched, or transformed nearly every major industry for the past quarter century. They power everything from mobile phones and automobile navigation systems to search engines and web portals. They have been the source of enormous value to consumers and helped some entrepreneurs build great fortunes. And […]
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 […]
What can the rocks in old stone walls tell us about how the earth’s crust was shaped, melted by volcanoes, carved by glaciers, and worn by weather? And what can they tell us about earlier people on the land and the first settlers? As Adam and his grandfather work together to repair the family farm’s […]
Jonathan S. Adams is a conservation biologist, writer, and former program director of the Nature Conservancy’s Conservation Knowledge and Communities Program. His latest book, Nature’s Fortune, written in collaboration with Mark R. Tercek, was published by Basic Books and was the winner of the 2014 Green Prize for Sustainable Literature Award in the category of […]
Wendy Hamand Venet is professor of history at Georgia State University. A scholar of 19th century U.S. history, her work on Civil War Atlanta began in 2006 when she encountered the diary of Samuel P. Richards, a bookstore owner in Atlantaâs central business district during the Civil War. His diary is the best account of […]
W. M. Adams (Bill) holds the Moran Chair of Conservation and Development in the University of Cambridge, where he has taught about conservation and the environmental development since the 1980s. He has a masters degree in Conservation from University College London, and a PhD in Geography from Cambridge. He has been awarded an Honorary Doctorate […]
Eva Rosen is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Sociology, at the Poverty and Inequality Research Lab at Johns Hopkins University. She will join the faculty at Georgetown University in Fall 2017. Her research and writing focuses on urban sociology, poverty and inequality, race and ethnicity, immigration, and social policy.
When Thomas Paine’s name is mentioned, you might think “pamphleteer,” “radical,” “author,” but probably not “bridge builder,” either literally or figuratively. Yet Paine spent much of the last several decades of his life dedicated to designing, promoting, and building an iron bridge that could span rivers without impeding the flow of waterborne traffic below. At […]
So many college graduates leave school carrying an enormous debt burden. Article after article makes the sobering observation that many graduates risk being crushed by its weight. As Suzanne Mettler makes clear in Degrees of Inequality: How the Politics of Higher Education Sabotaged the American Dream, that it’s not “just” debt that is tarnishing our once-unparalleled system. […]
Dark Energy. Dark Matter. They don’t just sound mysterious, their strangeness is causing long-held notions about the universe to be questioned all over again. Astronomers have long known that the universe is expanding, but they assumed that gravity was slowing down that growth. Instead, it appears that the growth of the universe is accelerating and […]
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 […]
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 […]
Blake Clayton is a member of the Integrated Oil and Gas equity research team at Citigroup. Prior to joining Citigroup, Dr. Clayton was a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he currently serves as an adjunct fellow on energy. He received a doctorate from Oxford University. The recipient of the University of Chicago […]
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 […]
Arthur C. Brooks is the president of the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author, most recently, of the best selling The Conservative Heart: How to Build a Fairer, Happier, and More Prosperous America, a bold new vision for conservatism as a movement for social and economic justice. The Conservative Heart was published by Broadside/HarperCollins.
Arthur is a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. He writes and speaks widely on the connections among culture, politics, and economic life. His previous books include the bestselling The Road to Freedom and The Battle: How the Fight between Free Enterprise and Big Government Will Shape America’s Future.