David Graeber’s Possible Worlds
A profile of the anthropologist.
A profile of the anthropologist.
Molly Fischer New York Nov 2021 Permalink
The behavior geneticist Kathryn Paige Harden is waging a two-front campaign: on her left are those who assume that genes are irrelevant, on her right those who insist that they’re everything.
Gideon Lewis-Kraus New Yorker Sep 2021 40min Permalink
More than a decade ago, a prominent academic was exposed for having faked her Cherokee ancestry. Why has her career continued to thrive?
Sarah Viren New York Times Magazine May 2021 35min Permalink
What if people don’t just invent medical symptoms to get attention—what if they feign oppression, too?
Helen Lewis The Atlantic Mar 2021 Permalink
He wants to save classics from whiteness. Can the field survive?
Rachel Poser New York Times Magazine Feb 2021 30min Permalink
She fabricated harrowing personal backstories, peddled gross caricatures, and spoke from perspectives she had no right to claim. And nobody stopped her.
Marisa M. Kashino Washingtonian Jan 2021 20min Permalink
When a Qatari sheikh came to live in L.A., an entire economy sprouted to meet his wishes. “His highness doesn’t like to hear no,” one associate told a professor.
Harriet Ryan, Matt Hamilton Los Angeles Times Jul 2020 20min Permalink
A troubled professor's obsession with "Goodfellas."
Salvatore Pane Always Crashing Mar 2020 20min Permalink
It began with a series of anonymous sexual-harassment complaints that the writer knew were false. But the truth was far stranger.
Sarah Viren New York Times Magazine Mar 2020 35min Permalink
In just the past few years, one union has organized close to 10,000 Florida adjuncts, in what is one of the most remarkable and little-noticed large scale labor campaigns in the country.
Hamilton Nolan Splinter Jun 2019 20min Permalink
Thea Hunter was a promising, brilliant scholar. And then she got trapped in academia’s permanent underclass.
Adam Harris The Atlantic Apr 2019 20min Permalink
How a professional football player became a top-flight mathematician.
Jordan Ellenberg Hmm Daily Sep 2018 20min Permalink
Is this the world’s most bizarre scholarly meeting?
Tom Bartlett Chronicle of Higher Education Jun 2018 20min Permalink
A writer prepares for the possibility of meeting a lost lover.
Esmé Weijun Wang Lenny Letter Dec 2017 10min Permalink
As a young social psychologist, she played by the rules and won big: an influential study, a viral TED talk, a prestigious job at Harvard. Then, suddenly, the rules changed.
Susan Dominus New York Times Magazine Oct 2017 35min Permalink
A professor conducts a lifelong racial experiment.
Jocelyn Nicole Johnson Guernica Aug 2017 20min Permalink
The relationship between creative writing programs and modern fiction.
Elif Batuman London Review of Books Sep 2010 35min Permalink
How did a tenure-track professor wind up selling his plasma? A story about debt.
Josh Roiland Longreads Feb 2017 15min Permalink
A search for meaning through academics, cultural studies, and terrorism.
Camille Bordas The New Yorker Dec 2016 30min Permalink
When Elizabeth Abel returned to the Bay Area home she had rented to a fellow professor on SabbaticalHomes.com, he refused to leave or pay the back rent he owed. She moved in across the street and enlisted her famous academic colleagues to help her get back the house she had raised her children in.
Ian Gordon Mother Jones Dec 2016 10min Permalink
The night America elected Donald J. Trump president, 38-year-old Richard B. Spencer, who fancies himself the “Karl Marx of the alt-right” and envisions a “white homeland,” crowed, “we’re the establishment now.” If so, then the architect of the new establishment is Spencer’s former mentor, Paul Gottfried, a retired Jewish academic...
Jacob Siegel Tablet Nov 2016 20min Permalink
A former reality star's strength in the face of a Presidential candidate's comments.
Marcy Dermansky Vol. 1 Brooklyn Oct 2016 Permalink
Hallucinations and peculiar memories of a dead spouse.
Miranda Schmidt The Collagist Oct 2016 20min Permalink
A story of medical ailments, family dynamics, and conservation work.
Sara Lippmann Midnight Breakfast Mar 2016 30min Permalink
A sociologist’s controversial first book and the debate over who gets to speak for whom.
Gideon Lewis-Kraus New York Times Magazine Jan 2016 25min Permalink