Oxford Professor Margaret MacMillan Reveals How War Has Shaped Human History

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

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Cornell Professor Kate Manne on the Pursuit of Gender Justice

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

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An Architectural History of a Modernist Masterpiece

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

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David Wallace-Wells on the Science and “Humanities” of Climate Change

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

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Bringing Students to a Necessary Conversation

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

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Jessica Brody on Her Innovative New Guide for Creative Writers

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

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THE CLASS Explores a New Approach to STEM Education

Contributed by Heather Won Tesoriero, author of  The Class: A Life-Changing Teacher, His World-Changing Kids, and the Most Inventive Classroom in America (Ballantine Books, 2018). In the fall of 2015, I was a producer for the CBS Evening News. We were planning to do an endpiece for the show about Olivia Hallisey, a Greenwich, CT, teenager who

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Letter From The Author: Matthew Desmond on Researching and Writing EVICTED

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City I began this project because I wanted to write a different kind of book about poverty in America. Instead of focusing exclusively on poor people or poor places, I began searching for a process that involved poor and well-off people alike. Eviction—the forced removal of families from

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