Martin Luther King, Jr.

Why MLK Believed Jazz Was the Perfect Soundtrack for Civil Rights

Jazz, King declared, was the ability to take the “hardest realities of life and put them into music, only to come out with some new hope or sense of triumph.”
Binocular-framed view of Tweety Bird who is also holding a pair of binoculars

The Tweety Bird Test

How a classic Tweety Bird cartoon became a mainstay in linguistics research.
Central Arizona Project (CAP) Canal, Phoenix, AZ

What Desert Cities Can Teach Us about Water

Pushed by necessity, the country’s least sustainable region evolved to master its water use. As climate heats up, other cities may adopt similar tactics.
Sylvia Beach outside of Shakespeare & Co., circa 1935

The Patron Saint of Bookstores

100 years ago, Sylvia Beach, the first publisher of James Joyce’s Ulysses, opened the doors to her legendary bookstore, Shakespeare & Co.
A 19th-century advertisement for Hood's Tooth Powder

How the Ban on Medical Advertising Hurt Women Doctors

Intended to protect consumers from unscrupulous quackery, a nineteenth-century ban on medical advertising proved to be a double-edged sword.
An illustration from the cover of Grendel by John Gardner

The Question of Race in Beowulf

J.R.R. Tolkien’s seminal scholarship on Beowulf centers a white male gaze. Toni Morrison focused on Grendel and his mother as raced and marginal figures.
Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud’s The Ego and the Id

Freud died 80 years ago this week. In this "Virtual Roundtable," three scholars debate the legacy of his 1923 text.
Naomi Klein

Naomi Klein: We Are Sleepwalking toward Apocalypse

Klein talks about her new book, On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal, and the youth movement for climate action.
A solar-panel equipped ship moves down the Amazon River

Can Sustainable Travel in the Amazon Help Reduce Forest Fires?

A rainforest evangelist hopes that Brazil’s 55-million year old jungle can survive 21st century human impact.
A fetus inside of an artistic depiction of an artificial womb

On the History of the Artificial Womb

Will outside-the-womb gestation, increasingly viable for animal embryos, lead to a feminist utopia? Or to something like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World?