An interdisciplinary journal published by MIT on behalf of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, each quarterly issue invites a number of prominent writers addressing a particular theme.

Articles Featured in our Library:

The cockfight (tetadjen; sabungan) is a means of expression; its function is neither to assuage social passions nor to heighten them, but, in a medium of feathers, blood, crowds, and money, to display them. […] Attending cockfights and participating in them is, for the Balinese, a kind of sentimental education.

In this essay, Judith Shklar (not a Buddhist) ponders the implications of placing cruelty first (as the Buddha did). She shows how this position stands at odds with both Christian piety and neoliberal apathy and carves out a more realistic humanism than either extreme.

Featured in the course, " The Practice of Buddhism"
An Argument About Beauty (2005) – Susan Sontag

Genetics, biosocial groups & the future of identity (2006) – Ian Hacking

The Idea of Nature in America (2008) – Leo Marx

Perceiving is the process by which evanescent sensations are linked to environmental cause and made enduring and coherent through the assignment of meaning, utility, and value.

A Sustainable Agriculture? (2015) – G. Philip Robertson

We contend that even in situations of apparent procedural equality, deliberation’s legitimating potential is limited by its potential to increase normatively focal power asymmetries. We conclude by describing how deliberative contexts can be modified to reduce certain types of power asymmetries, such as those often associated with gender, race, or class.

Policy-makers often mistakenly view host state security and refugee security as unrelated–or even opposing–factors. In reality, refugee protection and state stability are linked together; undermining one factor weakens the other. Policies to protect refugees, both physically and legally, reduce potential threats from the crisis and bolster state security. In general, risks of conflict are higher when refugees live in oppressive settings, lack legal income-generation options, and are denied education for their youth.

Syria and The CNN Effect: What Role Does the Media Play in Policy-Making? (2018) – Lyse Doucet

Targeted groups came to be attributed a biological or timeless essence, not because this was inevitable, we argue, but because of these failures to historicize inequality.

Failure to Respond to Rising Income Inequality: Processes That Legitimize Growing Disparities (2019) – Leanne S. Son Hing, Anne E. Wilson, Peter Gourevitch, Jaslyn English, and Parco Sin

Justice and The Capability to Function in Society (2019) – Pascoe Pleasence and Nigel J. Balmer

Sexual Harassment of Women Leaders (2020) – Olle Folke, Johanna Rickne, Seiki Tanaka, and Yasuka Tateishi

The End of Arms Control? (2020) – Linton F. Brooks

Slow Disaster in the Anthropocene: A Historian Witnesses Climate Change on the Korean Peninsula (2020) – Scott Gabriel Knowles

Let Me Tell You a Story (2020) – Antonio Oposa

The Moral Economy of High-Tech Modernism (2023) – Henry Farrell and Marion Fourcade

Language on Trial (2023) – Sharese King and John R. Rickford

Governance for Human Social Flourishing (2023) – Jenna Bednar

Care typically emerges in the context of close personal relationships, and it is not well suited to either utilitarian or Kantian accounts of morality, or to “social contract” accounts of cooperation. Markets and states both have difficulty providing and supporting care, and as a result, care is overlooked and undervalued. I sketch alternative ways of thinking about the morality and politics of care and present alternative policies that could help support carers and those they care for.

Young Children and Implicit Racial Biases (2024) – Andrew N. Meltzoff and Walter Gilliam

The Implicit Association Test (2024) – Kate A. Ratliff and Colin Tucker Smith