Why Success Makes Us Risk Averse
Source: Psychology Today
Psychologist Ruth Blatt uses music as an example to explain how achieving success can often lead to risk aversion.
Arts & Entertainment
Patriotism on Broadway
Source: The Economist
The timelessness and universality of Alexander Hamilton’s story is explored in this review of the popular hip-hop musical Hamilton.
Photography in the Age of Falsification
Source: The Atlantic
Even when Photoshop can create false or impossible images, we still tend to trust what we see in photos as real. But not only can we not trust the veracity of photos now—images have been manipulated for aesthetic and political effect since the dawn of photography.
Battle Lines: A Graphic History of the Civil War
Source: Ari Kelman
Award-winning historian Ari Kelman and the acclaimed graphic novelist Jonathan Fetter-Vorm produced this graphic novel about the civil war. Scroll down the page to access and read the book online.
Joy Harjo
Source: Poetry Foundation
This biography of poet Joy Harjo includes an overview of her work.
Why We Need the Wild
Source: The Wall Street Journal
Professor David Gessner of the University of North Carolina Wilmington reviews the nature writing in Jason Mark’s recently-published Satellites in the High Country, and he touches on some transcendental ideas in the process.
The Decades That Invented the Future, Part 1: 1900-1910
Source: Wired
The turn of the century from the 1800s to the 1900s was a time of great innovation and growth. Read about some of the influential inventions of the twentieth century’s first decade.
In Defense of Thoreau
Source: The Atlantic
Duke professor Jedediah Purdy makes a counter-argument to Kathryn Schulz’s “Pond Scum” essay in The New Yorker, which criticized Henry David Thoreau both as a writer and as a person.
Aaron Douglas’s Magisterial Aspects of Negro Life
Source: New York Public Library
This text provides an overview of Harlem Renaissance painter Aaron Douglas. Click the images on the left to view some of his work in more detail and watch the video at the bottom for more background.
How Animal Farm Gave Hope to Stalin’s Refugees
Source: The Atlantic
Ukranians oppressed by the Soviet Stalin regime managed to smuggle in a translation of George Orwell’s indictment of Stalinism.