She likes tea, sews, draws on papers and is a self-taught master of tying and untying knots. But she is not a crafty woman of the DIY set: she is Wattana, an orangutan who lives in the Jardin des Plantes Zoo in Paris. And it is in Paris where Chris H...

For more than fifty years, Robert G. McCloskey's classic work on the Supreme Court's role in constructing the US Constitution has introduced generations of students to the workings of our nation's highest court. As in prior editions, McCloskey's orig...

Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are usually treated as autonomous religions, but in fact across the long course of their histories the three religions have developed in interaction with one another. In "Neighboring Faiths", David Nirenberg examines...

The history of American art is a history of objects, but it is also a history of ideas about how we create and consume these objects. As "Picturing" convincingly shows, the critical tradition in American art has given rise to profound thinking about...

One sure fact of humanity is that we all cherish our opinions and will often strongly resist efforts by others to change them. Philosophers and politicians have long understood this, and whenever they have sought to get us to think differently they h...

During the 1990s, an unprecedented number of Americans turned to complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), an umbrella term encompassing chiropractic, energy healing, herbal medicine, homeopathy, meditation, naturopathy, and traditional Chinese m...

Written in the early 1970s amidst widespread debate over the causes of gender inequality, Marilyn Strathern's "Before and After Gender" was intended as a widely accessible analysis of gender as a powerful cultural code and sex as a defining mythology...

"On the Happiness of the Philosophic Life" presents Heinrich Meier's confrontation with Rousseau's Reveries, the philosopher's most beautiful and daring work, as well as his last and least understood. Bringing to bear more than thirty years of study...

It was the biggest funeral Chicago had seen since Lincoln's. On May 26, 1889, four thousand mourners proceeded down Michigan Avenue, followed by a crowd forty thousand strong, in a howl of protest at what commentators called one of the ghastliest and...

In the wake of the American Revolution, if you had asked a citizen whether his fledgling state would survive more than two centuries, the answer would have been far from confident. The problem, as is so often the case, was money. Left millions of dol...