Richard Deming was at work on an essay about the 2008 film “Synecdoche, New York” when he received an unexpected phone call from an old friend. Philip Seymour Hoffman, the star of that very film, had just been found dead of a drug overdose.
The news was...
Astronomers have found the oldest-known X-ray quasar in the universe — and its properties align exactly with predictions for a new class of distant objects made by Yale astronomer Priyamvada Natarajan and her research group.
In a new study in the journal...
The mystery of Ezekiel’s Wheel — the extinct sea creature, not the Biblical vision — may have taken its final turn, thanks to Yale paleontologists.
In so doing, the researchers have also finally put a scientific name to the favorite fossil of a beloved...
Kia Nobre really had no intention of leaving Oxford. A renowned cognitive neuroscientist, she’d chaired the venerable university’s Department of Experimental Psychology for several years and directed the Oxford Centre for Human Brain Activity, where she...
It was a 2006 exhibition focused on melancholy in Western Art at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin that planted a seed for Nana Adusei-Poku thinking about how grief, mourning, and sadness are expressed by artists of the African Diasporas.
“No artists of...
Yale historian Ned Blackhawk has won a National Book Award for “The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History,” an ambitious and sweeping volume that documents the central role of Native Americans in the political and...
There is something magical that happens when grown-ups share books and puzzles with the children in their lives — and for Sam Raskin, something mathematical.
Raskin, the James E. English Professor of Mathematics in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences,...
A few years ago, Sybil Alexandrov, a senior lector II in the Yale Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ (FAS) Department of Spanish and Portuguese, had some questions about the university’s child-rearing relief policies.
At the time, in most schools across the...
Scientists have long puzzled over why all of the planets in Earth’s solar system have slightly slanted orbits around the sun. But a new, Yale-led study suggests this phenomenon may not be so unusual after all. Even in “pristine” solar systems, planets...
From 2001 to 2010, Yale historian Alan Mikhail lived in Cairo where he conducted research within the massive, state-run Egyptian National Archives. From his perch in the archive’s reading room, Mikhail took careful note of the myriad, maddening...