The Case Grows For Plant Intelligence, Now Moral Considerations Emerge
“Henning and his colleagues have shown that the plant alters the timing of this move depending on how often it expects a pollinator to stop by. If bees are visiting frequently, Nasa poissoniana raises its stamens at short intervals; if the visits are rare, the plant waits longer. Should the interval between apian callers change, […]
A Fourth Category Of Literature: Literature of Power
“Against Economics”
On Being A Curator (Of Fine Art)
On The Arrival Of Computers, And The “Dying Art Of Instruction”
“The advantages are clear enough. But it’s also clear that this is the end of a culture in which learning was a collective social experience implying a certain positive hierarchy that invited both teacher and student to grow into the new relationship that every class occasions, the special dynamic that forms with each new group […]
On The Role Of Dance In The Ancient World
The Paradoxical Surge In Demand For Humanities, While Majors Decline
“People like history—just look at the New York Times bestseller list—but not enough historians actually take the time to try to talk to the interested public… An obvious remedy would be to place more stress on good writing; courses on how to write for the informed laity should be central to all humanities instruction. But the humanities […]
On Why Bach Increasingly Recycled His Work Later In His Career
A Review Of The Judicial Justification For Campus Diversity
A Moment In Praise Of Jill Lepore, And The Power Of Stories
“For Lepore, history is essentially a writing problem: how we know what we know (or think we do), how different forms and genres transmit different kinds of signals, what it might mean to encounter a gap between the evidence and the truth. Her work has confronted the tension between what a reader needs to know […]