When presidential candidate Mitt Romney told a heckler that “corporations are people, my friend” during a 2011 campaign appearance at the Iowa State ...
Tag: History
Public Thinker: A. Naomi Paik on a Future without Rights
What is specific to or even unique about the condition of “rightlessness,” to the ...
Asimov’s Empire, Asimov’s Wall
Isaac Asimov loved large numbers. He was born a century ago this month, and when he died, in 1992, he was both the most famous science fiction writer in the ...
Disrupting the “Startup Hustle”: An Interview with Margaret O’Mara
Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, John Doerr, Jeff Bezos ...
Afterlife of the Troubles
In December 1972, 38-year-old Jean McConville, a widowed mother of 10, was abducted by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), never to be seen alive by her children again. Her remains weren’t ...
A Black Counternarrative
Master narratives become the background music of our lives, undercurrents so ingrained that the violence they often engender is rendered unremarkable. One master narrative is the tale we tell about ...
A Fairy’s Tale
Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl tells a series of stories that we already know, but it achieves its familiar ends through decidedly unfamiliar means. Andrea Lawlor’s first novel presents us with ...
Economics: Theories vs. Stories
In the rubble of the Richard Nixon years, a University of Chicago economist named Arthur Laffer drew a diagram on a napkin to illustrate the hidden blessings of ...
What Future for Magic Mushrooms?
Hallucinogenic mushrooms have been used for centuries by numerous indigenous peoples around the world. These fungi appear in Aztec statues (like the one ...
What Can “Women’s Fiction” Do for Women?
“I am the proud and happy writer of popular fiction,” says novelist Jennifer Weiner, “and I would never argue that it matters as much as the award-winning ...
Why Do Police Drive Cars?
Why did American police end up in cars? And how did policing the nation’s roads become so racially unjust? In Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom, legal historian Sarah Seo uses motor vehicle search and ...
Disrupting the “Startup Hustle”: An Interview with Margaret O’Mara
Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, John Doerr, Jeff Bezos ...
Public Thinker: Kevin Kruse on Why Recent History Is Still History
“Historian. Author/editor of White Flight; The New Suburban History; Spaces of ...
“Kingdom of Dolls”: Sonneberg, Germany
In her mid-19th-century children’s book, Memoirs of a Doll, Julie Gouraud warns her readers not to unstitch their dolls looking for origins and inner workings ...
Public Thinker: Leah Price on Books, Book Tech, and Book Tattoos
Readers today believe that they are living through unprecedented changes in how ...
Membership, Citizenship, and Democracy
President Trump’s pernicious attacks on nonwhite immigrants have thrust a particular theory of political membership—white nationalism—to the forefront ...
Borders, Guns, and Freedom
Like the pioneers two hundred years before him, Mark Romano recently decided to head West. Like those pioneers, Mark—a white, unemployed electrician ...
Black Speculation, Black Freedom
Many black scholars—especially those who study black life, history, and culture—would recognize an uncomfortable and familiar situation that epitomizes ...
Public Thinker: Kathleen Belew on the Rise of “White Power”
Kathleen Belew is an international authority on the white-power movement ...
Exile by the Bay
Imagining home is an inescapable preoccupation of disinherited people. Of all the possessions lost or denied, none is more precious than the security and feeling of belonging that a genuine home ...
