Le ‘ventre’ de Paris: pour une pathologie du symbolisme dans L’Oeuvre d’Emile Zola
Locus hystericus: l’image du couvent dans La Religieuse de Diderot
On the emergence of minority disadvantage: testing the cultural Red King hypothesis
The study of social justice asks: what sorts of social arrangements are equitable ones? But also: how do we derive the inequitable arrangements we often observe in human societies? In particular, in spite of explicitly stated equity norms, categorical inequity tends to be the rule rather than the exception. The cultural Red King hypothesis predicts...
Does temporal distance influence abstraction? A large pre-registered experiment
Construal level theory has been extraordinarily generative both within and beyond social psychology, yet the individual effects that form the empirical foundation of the theory have yet to be carefully probed and precisely estimated using large samples and preregistered analysis plans. In a highly powered and preregistered study, we tested the effe...
The molecular vista: current perspectives on molecules and life in the twentieth century.
This essay considers how scholarly approaches to the development of molecular biology have too often narrowed the historical aperture to genes, overlooking the ways in which other objects and processes contributed to the molecularization of life. From structural and dynamic studies of biomolecules to cellular membranes and organelles to metabolism ...
Guns, germs, and public history: A conversation with Jennifer Tucker.
In this wide-ranging conversation, historians David Serlin (UC San Diego) and Jennifer Tucker (Wesleyan University) discuss the role of material culture and visual media in shaping how museums communicate histories of science and technology. Tucker describes recent a public history project focused on 19th-century histories of firearms and gun regul...
Disease, downturns, and wellbeing: Economic history and the long-run impacts of COVID-19.
How might COVID-19 affect human capital and wellbeing in the long run? The COVID-19 pandemic has already imposed a heavy human cost-taken together, this public health crisis and its attendant economic downturn appear poised to dwarf the scope, scale, and disruptiveness of most modern pandemics. What evidence we do have about other modern pandemics ...
What real progress has metaphysics made since the time of Kant? Kant and the metaphysics of grounding
COVID-19: Rethinking the nature of viruses.
In this brief essay, we combine biological, historical, philosophical and anthropological perspectives to ask anew the question about the nature of the virus. How should we understand Sars-CoV-2 and why does it matter? The argument we present is that the virus undermines any neat distinction between the natural and the human-made, the biological an...
Patenting Personalized Medicine Molecules, Information, and the Body
