Essays

Who Is Shakespeare For?

I Asked My Students to Take the Bard Off His Pedestal—It Let Us Reconsider His Place in Our World

“What do we do with Shakespeare?” “Who is Shakespeare for?” “What would it look like to reject Shakespeare?”

These were questions I put at the center of the Pop Culture Shakespeare class I taught in the summer of 2020, and which I’ll return to this fall. Four hundred and sixty years after the Bard’s birth (nearly to the day, we like to imagine), people have answered these questions many times over. But working with my students taught me that one powerful way to understand Shakespeare today is as a transmedia narrative—a …

by Lee Emrich |

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The Genius Mexican Composer History Forgot

Uncovering Juventino Rosas, Whose Waltz Took the World By Storm But Whose Story Remains a Mystery

by Oliver Mayer |

Juventino Rosas’ waltz “Sobre las Olas” (Over the Waves) is perhaps the most famous song of its generation. Now, more than 130 years after it was written, the tune still …

Is the Wilderness Act Still Protecting Nature?

The Landmark 1964 Law Is Now Preventing Effective Land Management and Critical Climate Research

by Daniel T. Blumstein and Thomas B. Smith |

At the end of 2023, four environmental groups sued the National Park Service and invoked the Wilderness Act to stop the replanting of trees following a catastrophic wildfire in Sequoia and …

Will Young Americans Finally Rock the Vote?

After Decades of Research, We Know How to Get New People to the Polls. We Just Don’t Always Do It

by Jane Eisner |

Twenty years ago, I published Taking Back the Vote: Getting American Youth Involved in Our Democracy. The book grew out of a personal passion: Once my oldest child was able …

Reading Animal Farm in Zimbabwe

From Minority White Rule to Dictatorship and Beyond, Orwell’s 1945 Novel—Now in a New Translation—Has Proved Prescient

by Beaven Tapureta |

I began to notice Animal Farm references proliferating in Zimbabwe in 2008.

That was the year hyperinflation nosedived the economy, and long-time leader Robert Mugabe felt threatened enough by a newly …

In Search of the ‘Tomato King’

Finding a Mexican Migrant Politician, Rooted in California Soil

by Adrián Félix |

There is only one person more obsessed than I when it comes to the memory of Don Andrés Bermúdez: his son, Andrés Junior. Junior lives with his family in the …


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