Featured articles
Featured Articles
Imagined devices such as Francis Bacon’s sound-houses and the “cat piano” reveal how speculative musical instruments have influenced music, technology, and cultural ideas about sound.
By: Deirdre Loughridge and Thomas Patteson
This Greenfield, Massachusetts collective fights housing insecurity and promotes racial, environmental, and economic justice.
By: Damon Orion
A 19th-century hyperpolyglot reported to have known up to 72 languages, the biography of Cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti explores the boundaries of how we characterize multilingualism.
By: Michael Erard
Photographs taken during and after the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre document the scale of the violence against Greenwood, reveal how white participants framed the destruction, and shape how this history is understood today.
By: Karlos K. Hill
Twin research sheds light on genetics, behavior, and evolutionary psychology, helping us understand human nature and individual differences.
By: Nancy L. Segal, PhD
From hands to feet, voice to vision, our digital tools extend, transform, and sometimes erase the human body.
By: Vanessa Chang
The worker-owned collective ChiCommons helps Chicago residents find local mutual aid-based organizations.
By: Damon Orion
Using early microscopes and detailed observation, Grew identified plants’ internal structures and functions, shaping the foundations of botany and comparative anatomy.
By: Brian Garrett
Just as humans gradually developed bipedalism to aid their survival, they have innate responses to circumstances and tendencies that guide their behavior.
By: Marjorie Hecht
From the Mona Lisa to Dutch genre painting, the smile has long been a complex, culturally coded expression in portraiture, revealing social norms, artistic challenges, and shifting ideas of human emotion.
By: Nicholas Jeeves