How Universities Learned to Tolerate Risk, Manage Harm, and Govern Student Life After In Loco Parentis

An Ecological Approach to Social Explanation

How Specialization, Changing Critical Standards, and the Rise of Identity and Formal Experimentation Narrowed the Novel’s Ambitions

Objectivity, Advocacy, Academic Legitimacy, and the Fight Over Scholarly Standards

How America Built a Common Musical Culture—and Then Forgot How to Pass It On

A History, an Economics, and a Labor Bargain for a Fragile Art Form

How Bohemia, the Avant-Garde, Antifascism, and the 1960s Turned Artistic Rebellion Into a Political Obligation

History as Philosophy with Examples

What Do We Owe the Past?

How Neuroscience, Antiquity, and the World’s Religions Taught Us What to Feel Guilty About

How New York Buried the Human Meaning of 9/11—and What a Democratic Culture of Remembrance Would Look Like

Twenty-Five Years Later, What a Real Reckoning with 9/11 Requires

Mental Illness, Diminished Agency, and the Limits of Legal Responsibility

Is the Women’s Movement that Steinem Personified Dead?

A Comparative History of Race in America

What Jill Lepore, America’s Most Widely Read Academic Historian, Tells Us About History Today

Why the Humanities Look Stagnant Just as Their Foundations Are Shifting

What Would Higher Education Look Like If Deep Learning, Rather than Credit Accumulation, Were the Organizing Principle?

How a Profession Created to Treat Mental Illness Became the Interpreter of Our Relationships, Obligations, and the Meaning of Life

How Individualism Broke the Chain Between Past and Future—and What We Still Pass On

What Child Stardom Reveals About Expectations, Identity, and Growing Up

How a Writer Who Knew Far Less Than Us Can Show Us Ways of Thinking We Are in Danger of Losing

Teaching Under Big Brother’s Watchful Eye

What China Gets Right about Finding, Developing, and Retaining Scientific Talent—and What the United States Forgot

Siblings in the Age of the Only Child

Now We’re Teaching Children to Live Without It

The Jewish Culture That Helped Shape Modern America—and May Not Survive It

How America’s Leading Jewish Institutions Became Court Jews to Power — and Lost the Generation They Claim to Represent

How AI Can Bring Authentic Assessment and Guided Inquiry to the Large History Course

What a State-of-the-Art Art Exhibition Requires

How the Great Theories of the Twentieth Century Became Institutional Common Sense, and What Comes After

Three Experiments in Making Art Matter Again: Critique, Inclusion, Storytelling

It Is a Story About Life After the End of a World

The Party’s Conflict is Not Semantic. It Concerns Power, Priorities, and the Capacity to Govern.

When Sophistication Was Fun

What Outgrowing a Book Taught Me About Time, Youth, and the Word “Phony”

The Thinker Who Taught Us to See Power Everywhere Made It Harder to See What Lies Beyond Power

Why the Creator of the Most Important Theatrical Counter-History of the United States is Widely Honored Yet Underappreciated

What the Revisionists Miss

Schmigadoon!, the American Musical’s Golden Age, and the Decline of Democratic Ambition in American Art

How America Lost Faith in the Democratic, Egalitarian, and Liberal-Republican Ideals of 1776

Museums, Cities, and the Civic Imagination

The Songs Told the Truth Frank Sinatra Could Not

How Broadway Stopped Writing America’s Music—and What It Writes Instead

Higher Education Can Become Cheaper and Faster — or Deeper and Better

Privacy, Disclosure, and the Fear That Haunts Adult Life

Juneteenth, Ragtime, Galveston, and Liberalism’s Belatedly-Fulfilled Promises

America's Hierarchies of Harm and Remedy

What Linguists Know That Historians Have Missed

Death of a Salesman and the Lost World of Mid-Century American Fatherhood