Mary Beard abused on Twitter over Roman Britain’s ethnic diversity
Classicist says her assertion that there was at least some diversity under Roman rule led to ‘torrent of aggressive insults’
The End of Sand
Yogita Limaye investigates concerns, highlighted in a United Nations study, that vitally important reserves of sand are running out, with serious consequences for human society and the planet. Nearly everything…
Researcher reveals how “Computer Geeks” replaced “Computer Girls”
as late as the 1960s many people perceived computer programming as a natural career choice for savvy young women.
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…