Two children looking at artwork hung on the wall

Taking Children’s Art Seriously

Are children’s drawings meaningless scribbles or serious creative work? Western scholars and child psychologists have debated this topic for years.
Hand with Skull Shaped Pill

Why Companies Swallow Poison Pills

Faced with a potential hostile takeover, companies may deploy a dramatic shareholder rights plan, colloquially known as a "poison pill."
An opossum feigning death

The Biology of Death-Feigning

Some animals, when faced with predators, play dead instead of trying to escape. But for death-feigning to work, a lot of things have to go well.
Berthe Morisot, “Woman at Her Toilette”

How Impressionist Berthe Morisot Painted Women’s Lives

Berthe Morisot never became as famous as her counterparts Claude Monet and Édouard Manet, but her work has an important place in art history.
Bilateral Gynandromorph Cardinal

The Mysterious Gynandromorph

Gynandromorphy is an extremely rare condition in which an animal is half male and half female. It's most visible in birds and butterflies.
The Birth of the Monroe Doctrine by Clyde O. DeLand

The Monroe Doctrine’s Checkered Past

This 1823 policy initially focused on preventing European colonization in the Americas. But different U.S. presidents have used it to mean different things.
A toddler tea party in a play house

A Sense of Place for Toddlers

Young children have a unique sense of the world that can be difficult for grown-up architects to grasp.
Profile portrait of Catherine II by Fedor Rokotov (1763)

The Memoirs of Catherine The Great

Catherine II ruled Russia for many years. She also wrote her own memoirs, in a time when such writing was considered inappropriate for a monarch.
Pueblo Indian Eagle Dance, New Mexico

Why White Women Tried to Ban Native American Dances

In the early 1920s, reformers obsessed over the sexual nature of some Pueblo rituals, and attempted to control their performance.
Long-tailed pangolin (Phataginus tetradactyla), Mangamba, Littoral Province, Cameroon

The Pangolin Extinction Vortex

This shy, strange-looking, nocturnal mammal has been poached nearly to extinction.