Do You Teach Philosophy?

Contributed by Diane Shader Smith, mother of Mallory Smith, author of Salt in My Soul: An Unfinished Life Literature and medicine have long been intertwined. In the early 2000s, Dr. Rita Charon helped formalize this intersection as a discipline through her work at Columbia University and her book, Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness

Contributed by Lisa Miller, PhD, author of The Awakened Brain: The New Science of Spirituality and Our Quest for an Inspired Life As an undergraduate psychology major at Yale, I always sat in the front row so that I might study not only the material but my professor as well. Like many students who sign

Contributed by Katharine K. Wilkinson, co-editor of All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis “I was shaking as I read the opening essay because I felt so empowered,” one of my students shared at the start of the fall 2020 semester. I’d spent the previous nine months co-editing the bestselling

Lisa Genova is a Harvard-trained neuroscientist and the acclaimed author of novels such as Still Alice. She travels worldwide speaking about neurological diseases and has appeared on Today, PBS NewsHour, CNN, and NPR. Her new book, Remember, is a deep dive into the science of human memory and the intricacies of the brain that help us

Contributed by Neal Gabler, author of Catching the Wind: Edward Kennedy and the Liberal Hour, 1932-1975 What happened to America?  What happened to bring us to this moment of deep and perhaps unbridgeable polarization, of disorder and chaos, of skepticism about science, institutions, even the very idea of fact itself, of rising white supremacy, of

Contributed by Margaret MacMillan, author of War: How Conflict Shaped Us Let me start with what my book is not about. It is not a history of war, although it contains many historical examples. Nor is it, unlike the many books that line the shelves of libraries or bookshops, devoted to a particular campaign or

Contributed by Kate Manne, author of Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women CW: This post contains descriptions of misogynistic and sexual violence On Friday May 23, 2014, I was an assistant professor just finishing up my first year of teaching at Cornell University. Scrolling through my Facebook feed, I saw reports of a horrible crime

Contributed by Celeste Headlee, author of Do Nothing I recently asked a group of college professors on social media if they’d noticed a rise in the number of students who are burning out in school. I received a resounding chorus of replies that can be summed up in one word: YES. One prof at Southern

Contributed by Alex Beam, author of Broken Glass Broken Glass: Mies van der Rohe, Edith Farnsworth, and the Fight Over a Modernist Masterpiece is an unusual book because it is about architecture, and it is also the story of two strong-willed, creative people. My ambition was to write a biography of a beautiful building, told

Contributed by David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth Climate change is not a single subject, or a single story, but the theater in which all human life is now conducted, transforming and reordering nearly every aspect of modern life—our infrastructure and our migration patterns, our cities and our energy systems and our agriculture, our

Contributed by T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong, authors of the book Unbelievable In journalism we have a word for a story that resonates, that gets passed around and talked about, that so engages or infuriates or floors its readers that they feel compelled to share it with someone else. This kind of story forces

Contributed by Jessica Brody, author of Save the Cat! Writes a Novel (Ten Speed Press, 2018).   In 2005, I was a walking cliché: a struggling writer attempting to sell my first novel, living in a studio apartment wallpapered with rejection letters. I had recently been laid off from my corporate job as a financial