Class Production
A collection of high school yearbooks from Cleveland captures the rise, fall, and uncertain future of the American middle class.
Why Animals “Give Themselves” to Hunters
Many northern Indigenous cultures think about hunting in terms of literal “gifts” from animal to human, yet outsiders often dismiss the concept as a metaphor.
Owner of a Lonely Heart
Personal ads changed dating, but they also provided source material for sociologists and psychologists to understand how people choose mates.
The I Ching in America
Europeans translated the Chinese Book of Changes in the nineteenth century, but the philosophy really took off in the West after 1924.
A Bot Might Have Written This
ChatGPT is here. How can teachers and students proceed to use it with integrity?
The Pitfalls of the Pursuit of Happiness
The pursuit of happiness is often considered an ideal, but it may be possible to have too much—or the wrong kind—of a good thing.
Unmaking a Priest: The Rite of Degradation
The defrocking ceremony was meant to humiliate a disgraced member of the clergy while discouraging laypeople from viewing him as a martyr.
The Meaning of Tanning
The popularity of tanning rose in the early twentieth century, when bronzed skin signaled a life of leisure, not labor.
Mao Zedong: Reader, Librarian, Revolutionary?
Before becoming leader of communist China, Mao was an ardent library patron and then worked as a library assistant.
In Search of Einstein’s Brain
After Albert Einstein’s death in 1955, a pathologist—searching for the secret of genius—removed, dissected, and ultimately stole the mathematician’s brain.