Winston Churchill

Give it up, Psmithe

Economic historian Gregory Clark, a Glaswegian now at UC Davis, has been extending a main channel of British science into the 21st Century. His new book, The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility is another milestone in the revitalization of the human sciences after their long, self-inflicted dry spell in the later decades of ...


Queen Elizabeth I

Kingship and Kinship, Nepotism and Neposchism

A skeleton dug up from a parking lot in Leicester, England last year was confirmed this month to be King Richard III. This provides as good an excuse as any for exploring the now overlooked but always relevant complexities of ...

Mother’s Baby, Father’s Maybe

A young English teacher at a public high school in New Jersey emails me: I"€™m just in my third year of teaching, so I get stuck with the remedial classes. I mean, what are you going to do? But the stress of dealing with bad behavior ...


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