Yale political scientist Ian Shapiro admires Tom Paine, the English-born American revolutionary whose 1776 pamphlet “Common Sense” galvanized support for independence from Great Britain, whose “American Crisis” letters sustained the American forces...
In 1859, Charles Darwin coined the term “living fossils” to describe organisms that show little species diversity or physical differences from their ancestors in the fossil record. In a new study, Yale researchers provide the first evidence of a...
Well before the rise of Google, Amazon, Facebook, and other tech behemoths, philosopher Luciano Floridi contemplated the ethical and conceptual implications of the information age, producing work that presciently addressed the world-changing benefits and...
An ethnic minority faces state violence after advocating for self-determination. Immigrants endure discrimination from the native population. A local government faces the challenges of integrating newly arrived refugees. A country erupts into civil war. ...
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...
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...
At first glance, tube-eyes and cods seem nothing alike. The former, a ribbon-shaped, deep-sea fish, has bizarre tubular eyes that resemble goggles. The latter, one of the world’s most commercially important fishes, has unremarkable looks but pairs well...
In 2011, Yale sociologist Alka Menon came across an article in The New York Times on the racial and ethnic differences in cosmetic surgery.
A plastic surgeon quoted in the piece explained that when he and his colleagues encountered patients of a certain...
In a common metaphor used to describe human fertilization, sperm cells are competitors racing to penetrate a passive egg. But as critics have noted, the description is also a “fairy tale” rooted in cultural beliefs about masculinity and femininity.
A new...