The 19th century Victorian obsession with a variety of pseudosciences extended to the study of love, sex, and romance. “One of the great myths about the Victorian age [was] that it was sexually repressive; on the contrary, Victorian society was obsessed with sexual reform, heterosexual and homosexual love, lust, and Read more…
In this essay for the University of Maryland Baltimore County’s “Seeing Science: Photography, Science, and Visual Culture,” I examine how images of the environment “serve as both as catalyst and as a mode of understanding. Visual portrayals help shape the context in which a politics takes place, and are often Read more…
In Inside Sources, I write about Donald Trump’s inauguration into not only the presidency, but the assembly of wax figures at Madame Tussauds Museum in London. Wax is a strange medium—both real and unreal, and with a long history since ancient times of representing life and death, truth and deception. Read more…
In this op-ed co-authored with Matthew Miller, I highlight the astonishing reality that while our country closely regulates the impact of automobiles on public health and safety, it does not do so for firearms. Why? In 2005, Congress passed an unprecedented law that largely exempts guns from federal consumer-safety laws, Read more…
Following a school shooting in Oregon, I was interviewed on Connecticut Public why guns are not regulated as consumer products like any other that poses a threat to human health. “Our nation’s lax attitude toward gun proliferation is partly the result of a Hollywood version of gun technology…[Specifically, the notion Read more…
In this op-ed, I debunk the conventional picture of the Wild West as a place with rampant gun violence. Contrary to its name, the Wild West was the setting for the passage of some of the nation’s first gun-control laws. In 19th-century frontier towns, people couldn’t just walk around with Read more…
I was featured on a BBC program titled, “The Tichborne Claimant: The Five Photographs that (You Didn’t Know) Changed Everything” in which I discussed how a seemingly mundane photograph can have a lasting and powerful historical impact. I told the story of one such photograph taken in 1865 that changed Read more…
In an essay co-authored with Aria Danaparamita, I write about the decision by the British Museum to lend Russia one of the most esteemed vestiges of Western art and civilization: the Parthenon marbles. We explore the long-standing role of art in cross-cultural negotiations and political dialogue. Read more in The Read more…
I write about the FBI’s use of state-of-the-art facial recognition technology in its Next Generation Identification System, the world’s biggest biometric database. The new system has come under fire from privacy rights advocates who fear that federal databases will eventually be cross-referenced against other data, connecting faces to medical, financial, Read more…
Writing in the Boston Globe’s Sunday Ideas section, I examine the strange and extraordinary history of the iconic “monkey-to-man” evolution illustration—one of the most intriguing and misleading drawings in the modern history of science. Though the image fails to accurately illustrate Darwinian evolutionary theory, it has been hugely successful as Read more…
