Let’s stop talking about conspiracy “theories”
A few years ago, I taught an undergraduate course on “Cons, Cults, and Conspiracies Theories,” exploring the connections and parallels among those phenomena.
John Williams and the two notes that changed cinema
Two notes. Probably the most famous two-note unit of music in modern history.
When a composer has a hit song or an instantly iconic tune, it can be a blessing and a curse. That tune becomes eternally attached to you—and sometimes it can eclipse the rest of your work.
5 books to master your transition to college [reading list]
As the days get cooler and autumn approaches, it’s the perfect time for a fresh start. Back to school is here.
Back to school for happy and healthy kids
Every September, caregivers and kids alike prepare for one big change: the start of a new school year.
Caring fish dads evolved prostates faster
Animals caring for their young, such as a lioness carrying her cub by their scruff or a matriarchal elephant herd nursing young calves, are the kinds of behavior that many would pay good money to watch on a safari.
China’s state-led financialization for tech supremacy
The financialization of Western economies has unfolded as a prolonged systemic failure. What began as a mechanism to support productive enterprise has evolved into a structural dominance of finance over the real economy.
Sabotage of the Normandie? [excerpt]
In the 1940s, the Normandie was the epitome of elegance and engineering—a French ocean liner renowned for its Art Deco splendor and unmatched luxury.
The bordered logic behind the headlines
‘Where do you want to go today?’ served as the tagline for software giant Microsoft’s global marketing campaign running through the mid-1990s. The accompanying advertisements were replete with flashy images of people around the world of all ages, ethnicities, and backgrounds engaging in a diverse range of activities.
A cultural history of the purse [timeline]
In conducting research for The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse in America, Kathleen B. Casey discovered how one everyday object—the purse—could function as a portal to the past.
Your Indo-European beard
It sometimes seems that the greater the exposure of a body part, the greater the chance of its having an ancient (truly ancient!) name.
A snapshot of genomics and bioinformatics in modern biology research
I often tell my students that biology has become a data-driven field. Certainly, there’s a general sense that methods related to biological sequences (that is methods in genomics and bioinformatics) have become very widespread. But what does that really mean?
A handful of remarks on hinting and hunting
Allow me to introduce a group of seemingly ill-assorted words. Each member of this group occupies a secure place in the vocabulary of English, but no one knows for sure whether they belong together.
Knowledge and teaching in the age of information
The advent of the World Wide Web in the turn of the last century completely transformed the way most people find and absorb information. Rather than a world in which information is stored in books or housed in libraries, we have a world where all of the information in the world is accessible to everyone.
What does one day mean?
A while ago, a reader pointed me to a comment on another writer’s OUPblog piece. The comment complained about a caption on a photo, an image of the painting “Adam and Eve in Paradise” by the seventeenth-century Flemish painter David Teniers the Younger.
Quantum information theorists use Einstein’s Principle to solve “Einstein’s quantum riddle”
Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen introduced the mystery of quantum entanglement (entanglement) in 1935 and it has been called “Einstein’s quantum riddle.” Many physicists and philosophers in foundations of quantum mechanics (foundations) have proposed solutions to Einstein’s quantum riddle, but no solution has received consensus support, which has led some to call entanglement “the greatest mystery in physics.”
Why economists should learn machine learning
Economists analyze data. Machine learning (ML) offers a powerful set of tools for doing just that. But while econometrics and ML share a foundation in statistics, their aims and philosophies often diverge.