Publications

Because brainwashing affects both the world and our observation of the world, we often don’t recognize it while it’s happening—unless we know where to look. As Rebecca Lemov writes in The Instability of Truth, “Brainwashing erases itself.” What we call...

The United States depends on immigrants.

Tens of thousands of us would die without them. Nearly one in four doctors in the U.S. is foreign-born—many from South Asia—and they often serve in rural and underserved urban communities where American physicians...

In the early 20th century, business elites, trade associations, wealthy powerbrokers, and media allies set out to build a new American orthodoxy: down with “big government” and up with unfettered markets. With startling archival evidence, Oreskes and...

A forceful reckoning with the relationship between energy and power through the history of what was once East Asia’s largest coal mine.

The coal-mining town of Fushun in China’s Northeast is home to a monstrous open pit. First excavated in the early...

The idea that a woman may leave a biological trace on her gestating offspring has long been a commonplace folk intuition and a matter of scientific intrigue, but the form of that idea has changed dramatically over time. Beginning with the advent of modern...

A vivid portrait of how Naval oversight shaped American oceanography, revealing what difference it makes who pays for science.

What difference does it make who pays for science?

Some might say none. If scientists seek to discover fundamental truths about...

Forbidden Knowledge explores the censorship of medical books from their proliferation in print through the prohibitions placed on them during the Counter-Reformation. How and why did books banned in Italy in the sixteenth century end up back on library...

In Mind Fixers, “the preeminent historian of neuroscience” (Science magazine) Anne Harrington explores psychiatry’s repeatedly frustrated efforts to understand mental disorder. She shows that psychiatry’s waxing and waning theories have been shaped not...

Do doctors really know what they are talking about when they tell us vaccines are safe? Should we take climate experts at their word when they warn us about the perils of global warming? Why should we trust science when our own politicians don’t? In this...

Not since the printing press has a media object been as celebrated for its role in the advancement of knowledge as the scientific journal. From open communication to peer review, the scientific journal has long been central both to the identity of...

n years after the Human Genome Project’s completion the life sciences stand in a moment of uncertainty, transition, and contestation. The postgenomic era has seen rapid shifts in research methodology, funding, scientific labor, and disciplinary structures...

Just a few years before the dawn of the digital age, Harvard psychologist Bert Kaplan set out to build the largest database of sociological information ever assembled. It was the mid-1950s, and social scientists were entranced by the human insights...