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...
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...
How is academia dealing with the influence of AI on student writing? Just ask ChatGPT, and it’ll deliver a list of 10 ways in which the rapidly expanding technology is creating both opportunities and challenges for faculty everywhere.
On the one hand, for...
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...