Follow @freudeinstein (Jennifer Michael Hecht) There is a certain myth to the idea that most suicides occur around the holidays; in fact, it’s usually in spring and summer that see the highest rates of this irretrievable act. In our latest episode of the Yale Press Podcast, Jennifer Michael Hecht, author
Follow @yaleRELIbooks Jennifer Michael Hecht, author of Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It, felt the terrible effects of suicide twice in two years. The loss of two friends and fellow poets, the second of which seemed prompted by the first, inspired Hecht to write a column for The Best American
Follow @yaleRELIbooks As the Romans conquered vast territories in the first century BCE, they brought disparate parts of the world under one political rule. Their strategy for maintaining these sprawling territories left room for relative cultural, linguistic and religious diversity, so long as it did not threaten Roman authority. Ideas
How did the historical, concrete Jesus become known as the Christ, the Son of God? How did the idea of this man develop? Forty years after he first entered the “Jesus field,” lauded academic Geza Vermes gives a narrative of that expansion from the embodied Jesus to the belief in
Follow @yaleSCIbooks In his television series Cosmos, whose Emmy-award winning co-creator served as one of the directors of the new film Journey of the Universe, astronomer Carl Sagan declared, “We are all stardust.” The sentiment was already a familiar one, for in Joni Mitchell’s famous 1970 song “Woodstock,” she too
Michelle Stein— I am familiar with the conflicting images and identities of shifting or presumably unchanging institutions. New York City may have been immortalized in the arts, and its landmarks might be recognized the world over, but underneath there is constant change. Whether the shuttering of one shop and
Follow @yaleSCIbooks In our age of calculators, computers, and the fifteenth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, most questions are pretty easy to answer. Why is the sky blue? What is the cube root of 1331? Who was Fredrick the Great of Prussia? Still, in some areas, uncertainty lingers—even though we