Breaking Out: An Indian Woman's American Journey
Padma Desai grew up in the 1930s in the provincial world of Surat, India, where she had a sheltered and strict upbringing in a traditional Gujarati Anavil Brahmin family. Her academic brilliance won h...
2 Jul 202315min
Dynamics Among Nations: The Evolution of Legitimacy and Development in Modern States
Liberal internationalism has been the West's foreign policy agenda since the Cold War, and the West has long occupied the top rung of a hierarchical system. In Dynamics Among Nations, Hilton Root argu...
1 Jul 202317min
Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program
In July 1969, ninety-four percent of American televisions were tuned to coverage of Apollo 11's mission to the moon. How did space exploration, once the purview of rocket scientists, reach a larger au...
30 Jun 202319min
Making Democracy Fun: How Game Design Can Empower Citizens and Transform Politics
Anyone who has ever been to a public hearing or community meeting would agree that participatory democracy can be boring. Hours of repetitive presentations, alternatingly alarmist or complacent, for o...
29 Jun 202315min
Bleak Houses: Disappointment and Failure in Architecture
The usual history of architecture is a grand narrative of soaring monuments and heroic makers. But it is also a false narrative in many ways, rarely acknowledging the personal failures and disappointm...
28 Jun 202318min
The War on Learning: Gaining Ground in the Digital University
Behind the lectern stands the professor, deploying course management systems, online quizzes, wireless clickers, PowerPoint slides, podcasts, and plagiarism-detection software. In the seats are the st...
27 Jun 202316min
The Bubble Economy: Is Sustainable Growth Possible?
The global economy has become increasingly, perhaps chronically, unstable. Since 2008, we have heard about the housing bubble, subprime mortgages, banks “too big to fail,” financial regulation (or the...
26 Jun 202316min
Surf Craft: Design and the Culture of Board Riding
Surfboards were once made of wood and shaped by hand, objects of both cultural and recreational significance. Today most surfboards are mass-produced with fiberglass and a stew of petrochemicals, movi...
25 Jun 202314min
