Criminal Podcast: Bears, Birds, and Bones
As long as 2,500 years ago, Native Americans placed the bones of their dead in giant mounds of earth in the shape of animals. The Effigy Mounds National Monument in…
The Beginning or the End of America
During Black History Month we share a letter written by James Baldwin, one of the foremost novelists and public intellectuals of the 20th century. In 1970 Baldwin wrote an open letter to…
The Lost Cause Rides Again
HBO’s Confederate takes as its premise an ugly truth that black Americans are forced to live every day: What if the Confederacy wasn’t wholly defeated? By Ta-Nehisi Coates HBO’s prospective…
A Mental Disease by Any Other Name
t starts without warning—or rather, the warnings are there, but your ability to detect them exists only in hindsight. First you’re sitting in the car with your son, then he…
How to Suppress Women’s Writing by Joanna Russ
The cover of How to Suppress Women’s Writing by Joanna Russ is an eye-catcher. The lines of red text are a hard hook: “She didn’t write it. She wrote it…
Octavia Butler’s Prescient Vision of a Zealot Elected to “Make America Great Again”
By Abby Aguirre July 26, 2017 Octavia Butler’s tenth novel, “Parable of the Sower,” which was published in 1993, opens in Los Angeles in 2024. Global warming has brought drought…
3,900 Pages of Paul Klee’s Personal Notebooks Are Now Online, Presenting His Bauhaus Teachings (1921–1931)
Paul Klee led an artistic life that spanned the 19th and 20th centuries, but he kept his aesthetic sensibility tuned to the future. Because of that, much of the Swiss-German Bauhaus-associated painter’s…
The Divine Within: Aldous Huxley on Mind-Body Integration and How We Become Who We Are
Aldous Huxley (July 26, 1894–November 22, 1963) endures as one of the most visionary and unusual minds of the twentieth century — a man of strong convictions about drugs, democracy,…
Someday This Army Is Going to Leave
Korean farmers face off against the US military's largest overseas base. If you drive about an hour south of Seoul, you will find yourself next to the largest US military…
Grandmothers have the best curse words
two highlights: we hold swear words in a different part of the brain than the rest of language. We often don’t think of the literal meaning of common swear words…