Social Science

Designing Scientific Visuals 101: When to Use Color

Why aren’t more people outside the scientific community engaged with the developments of science and engineering? Perhaps, as Felice Frankel suggests, it has something to do with the way scientists communicate their ideas. Frankel, along with co-author Angela DePace, recently wrote Visual Strategies: A Practical Guide to Graphics for Scientists

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The Political Role of the Church: Liberation Theology

Earlier this year, we introduced John Lynch’s book, New Worlds: A Religious History of Latin America, which charts the development of religion in Latin America from the colonial period up to modern times. While we focused then on the challenges faced by missionaries during the early colonization efforts, a substantial

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The Pride of the Veil

When one hears the term dress code, images come to mind of the French teenage media darlings of last winter, fighting for their right to wear skimpier clothes to school. A new school rule had stated that inappropriate clothing choices like short skirts, piercings, board shorts, and clothing with holes

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The Life and Death of the Scientific Buddha

Follow @yaleSCIbooks When we speak of the “Buddha” in the West today, are we really referring to the one born 2,500 years ago, or are we just invoking a more recent, Westernized incarnation of him? In his latest book, The Scientific Buddha: His Short and Happy Life, Donald S. Lopez,

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Open Yale Courses Fall 2012 Book Sampler

Download the Open Yale Courses Fall 2012 Book Sampler This fall we’ve expanded the Open Yale Courses Series to include three new publications: Introduction to the Bible by Christine Hayes, The Moral Foundations of Politics, by Ian Shapiro, and Political Philosophy, by Steven B. Smith. We invite you to take a

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Dante’s Inferno and Paradise in Modern Times: Good Italy, Bad Italy

The plot of what is arguably the most important work of Italian literature, La Divina Commedia (Divine Comedy), is known to many of us: guided by his muse, Beatrice, Dante journeys throughout l’Inferno (Hell) and il Purgatorio (Purgatory) until he reaches il Paradiso (Heaven). 700 years after its creation, what

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Benny Morris’s 1948 Reconsidered

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a speech ensconced in a dramatic performance in front of the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday night. The highlight of Netanyahu’s delivery, which captured media attention everywhere, was the “clear red line” he drew over a cartoon-like bomb with a fuse, a diagram

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Editor Phoebe Clapham on Political Economy Books

Phoebe Clapham— As I discovered on becoming the politics and economics editor at Yale University Press’s London office, ‘political economy’ is a phrase that means very different things to different people. Before the twentieth century it was generally used where now we say ‘economic policy’, to describe how a state

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The Cost Disease: Some Surprisingly Good News

What if the constant panic about the rising costs of health care and higher education in America were somewhat unfounded? What would this entail for this country? A giant, collective sigh of relief? This is the premise of famous economist, Willian J. Baumol’s new book, The Cost Disease: Why Computers

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Lest We Forget: The 1980s As They Would Have Seemed

Sarah Underwood—   Growing up in the 1990s, I had conflicting, and generally superficial, views of the 1980s. Either I was proud to be “from” the previous decade – I was born in 1989 – like cooler, older teenagers (my babysitters), or I was glad that I had essentially escaped

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