Arts, Ideas, and Travel
Joanne M. Pierce, College of the Holy Cross This autumn, a Swiss Catholic church installed an AI Jesus in a confessional to interact with visitors. The installation was a two-month…
Michael Carrafiello, Miami University Every November, numerous articles recount the arrival of 17th-century English Pilgrims and Puritans and their quest for religious freedom. Stories are told about the founding of…
Roger J. Kreuz, University of Memphis How will the internet evolve in the coming decades? Fiction writers have explored some possibilities. In his 2019 novel “Fall,” science fiction author Neal…
David Markowitz, Michigan State University Artificial intelligence-generated summaries of scientific papers make complex information more understandable for the public compared with human-written summaries, according to my recent paper published in…
Lisa Bitel, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences This time of year, I often run across articles proclaiming Halloween a modern form of the pagan Irish holiday of…
Sarah Kollat, Penn State Fall for me as a teenager meant football games, homecoming dresses – and haunted houses. My friends organized group trips to the local fairground, where barn…
Christine Kinealy, Quinnipiac University; Kimberly DaCosta, New York University, and Miriam Nyhan Grey, Mary Immaculate College When Barack Obama was elected president, the people of Moneygall in Ireland celebrated. Birthplace…
Nina Silber, Boston University Few Americans today know about the events that occurred 75 years ago in the small Hudson Valley community of Peekskill, New York. That’s where a riot…
David Routt, University of Richmond Students in my medieval history courses often wonder whether historical reality can be gleaned from medieval cinematic fantasy. I tell them that fantasy does not…
Edith Gwendolyn Nally, University of Missouri-Kansas City Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it…