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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Jeff Koons, the world’s top-selling living artist, produces his work through a factory-like system in which a team of artists and craftspeople, working in a New York studio, follow his precise specifications to bring his artistic visions to life.
During a...
Rose Prentice, formerly enslaved, was in her mid-sixties when Sarah Goodridge, a noted miniaturist, painted her portrait.
Born in 1771, Prentice retained the surname of her second enslaver, John Prentice, who likely manumitted her, before or upon his...
“Beauty is in the Street” declares a poster of a young woman, rendered in red against a white backdrop, hurling a brick into the air.
In late 2008, author Cynthia Ozick received a letter from author John Updike, who reported having pneumonia.
“I returned from Russia with sniffles that wouldn’t go away and now we have unleashed all the diagnostic hounds of Mass. General Hospital,” wrote...