In late October 1994, Susan Smith rolled her car into a lake in Union County, South Carolina, with her two sons, a toddler and a baby, strapped in the backseat, drowning both children. Smith, a white woman, told police that a Black man had carjacked her...
Two years ago, Yale archaeologist Veronica Waweru was in central Kenya, where she conducts her fieldwork, when she received a tip from a local contact. Tourists, she was told, were removing stone hand axes from a prehistoric site located within a private...
A pair of prehistoric predators stand together in the preparators’ lab in the basement of the Yale Peabody Museum.
Poposaurus, a 200-million-year-old bipedal carnivore, bares its pointy teeth. To its right, Deinonychus, a nimble raptor that roamed present...
Yale ornithologist Richard Prum firmly believes that science and the humanities can work in concert to help people better understand the world.
His own research on birds as aesthetic agents inspired Prum to read aesthetic philosophers to get a better...
During a panel event at last month’s UN climate conference in Dubai, Brurce M. Mecca, a climate policy advisor from Indonesia, and Naomi Wagura, an energy expert based in Kenya, swapped ideas for financing clean-energy transitions in countries within the...
Nearly two decades ago, the poet Christian Wiman was diagnosed with a rare form of lymphoma. Doctors told Wiman, who was 39 at the time, that he likely had five years to live.
In the ensuing 19 years, Wiman, the former editor of Poetry magazine, has...
Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, acclaimed military historian Andrew Roberts contacted retired Gen. David Petraeus and proposed that the two write a book together that contextualized the conflict by considering the history of warfare...
William Nordhaus can recall the precise moment when he became interested in what is now known as “green accounting,” a type of accounting that factors environmental costs and benefits into measures of economic activity.
It was 1969, and he was thumbing...
A few years ago, composer Matthew Suttor was exploring Alan Turing’s archives at King’s College, Cambridge, when he happened upon a typed draft of a lecture the pioneering computer scientist and World War II codebreaker gave in 1951 foreseeing the rise of...
Since 1996, Yale anthropologist Eduardo Fernandez-Duque has studied owl monkeys — the only primate species in the Americas with nocturnal habits — in the wild at a field site he established in northeastern Argentina.
During those years, Fernandez-Duque...