Creole in a Red Turban by Jacques Aman

The Free People of Color of Pre-Civil War New Orleans

Before American concepts of race took hold in the newly-acquired Louisiana, early 19th-century New Orleans had large population of free people of color.
Female Mosquito filled with blood

Scientists Are Putting Mosquitoes on Human Diet Drugs

Humans and mosquitoes share a surprising amount of genes and have similar hunger controls.
A futuristic view of air travel over Paris as people leave the Opera.

Can Science Fiction Predict the Future of Technology?

Science fiction isn’t limited to predicting tech developments: It’s more broadly concerned with imagining possible futures, or alternative presents.
a NASA Mars Exploration Rover

A Mars Miracle, Medical Racism, and Murderous Humans

Well-researched stories from The New Yorker, Pens and Needles, and other great publications that bridge the gap between news and scholarship.
Yorktown Victory Monument, Colonial National Historic Site, Yorktown, Virginia

Whitewashing American History

One of the National Park Service's first historic preservation projects, the Colonial National Monument, wrote people of color completely out of the story.
A tarsier

Can Wildlife Adapt to Heat Waves?

Heatwaves have led to widespread deaths of animals like big-eyed tarsiers and flying foxes. Is there hope for species like this as temperatures rise?
from Suite Vénitienne by Sophie Calle

Love, Obsession, and Sophie Calle

The conceptual artist Sophie Calle creates art that urges us to ask, is attention the same as love?
James Joyce in front of a flowery background

James Joyce’s NSFW Love Letters

The often explicit letters James Joyce wrote to Nora Barnacle contain the same mass of contradictions as his famous literary works, like Ulysses.
A teenage girl kissing a teenage boy on the cheek

Media Representation and Interracial Couples

Recent years have seen increases in both interracial adolescent romances and portrayals of young interracial relationships. What's the connection?
An illustration from an 1897 edition of Persuasion

The Physical Pleasures of Jane Austen’s Persuasion

Smoldering glances? Romantic letters? Forbidden love? Why Persuasion may be the most seductive of Jane Austen's novels.