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...
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...
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...
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...