Newsroom

It was fencing that led me to my interest in the history and philosophy of timekeeping. Forget what you think you know about fencing—what you’ve seen in TV shows and movies and such. The reality is both less visually exciting and intellectually more engaging...

Although “Franken” has in the cultural zeitgeist become a watchword for the power of science to destroy humanity, Mary Shelley had a far more open view of science. Don’t mistake the messenger, Victor, for the message. In fact, in her day, “science” had a lower...

America is in an unprecedented era, or so many commentators claim. Nowhere is this uniqueness more apparent, some assert, than in the new administration’s attitudes towards climate and environmental science. Trump’s declaration that global warming is a hoax...

Mary Lincoln has been a mystery for more than 150 years. Irritable as the wife of Abraham Lincoln in Illinois, erratic as First Lady, and frankly psychotic as a widow, she died at the young age of 63 after years of unusual physical symptoms and progressively...

In the late-1990s, the fourth floor of the Engineering Library at the University of Wisconsin – Madison was filled with hundred-year old trade journals. I was writing a dissertation about the steel industry, but when you first came off the elevator right at...