Features
Alice Hamilton
Brief life of a public-health pioneer and reformer: 1869-1970
by Daniel Stone
A Plague Reborn
The fight against an ancient scourge shifts to new battlegrounds...
by Jonathan Shaw
Saint Fiacre
Brief life of the gardener saint: 600-670
by Richard Marius
Making Credit Safer
It is impossible to buy a toaster that has a one-in-five chance of bursting into flames and burning down your house. But it is possible to...
George Bancroft
Brief life of a public historian: 1800-1891...
Shedding Light on Life
The scenes are familiar from biology textbooks. A long string of DNA is copied to form a matching strand. A virus infects a cell by stealing through its membrane.
by Courtney Humphries
Light Makes a Comeback
Today’s high-powered light microscopes bear little resemblance to the iconic instruments of high-school biology labs. This revolution...
Home of the Humanities
At a serene Harvard outpost, scholars find fertile ground for Byzantine, pre-Columbian, and landscape studies...
by Elizabeth Gudrais
Ko K'un-hua
Yale was the first American college to offer instruction in Chinese, in 1877; apparently, no one signed up. The next year, a group of Boston and...
The Physics of the Familiar
Photograph by Jim Harrison Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan “Just because something is familiar doesn’t mean you understand it. That...
by Jonathan Shaw
Saving Money, Oil, and the Climate
The United States is in urgent need of a comprehensive, rational, and—above all—honest policy to guide its energy future, a policy...