In The Company Of Scholars

Jacob Hacker's talk, "Is American Politics Undermining the American Dream?" addresses how rising economic inequality is linked to changes in American politics and policy, with a special emphasis on the current election season. "The middle class - drowning in debt, battered by economic insecurity, losing ground to an increasingly affluent group at the top - has been badly neglected by American politics," Hacker says. "This is not a natural market development. Government has made the rich richer and turned its back on the middle class." December 3, 2012.

We live in an age where there seems to be no higher moral imperatives than those associated with parenting. At the same time that there has been a decline in religious orthodoxy, the expectations of what it means to be a parent have become more orthodox. Not that more parents are religious, but that more people treat parenting religiously. This talk explores how this came to be, arguing that parenting is usefully understood through the interdisciplinary matrix of religious studies. Kathryn Lofton, Sarai Ribicoff Associate Professor of Religious Studies and American Studies, spoke on February 19, 2013.

J. Edgar Hoover was one of the most influential men of the 20th century, serving as FBI director from 1924 through 1972. Professor Beverly Gage explores his broader impact on American politics and culture, and on the history of modern conservatism. January 22, 2103.

Experiments at CERN have announced statistically compelling evidence for a new state with properties that roughly match those expected for the Higgs Boson, one of the last puzzle pieces in the standard model of particle physics. After putting the Higgs search in its historical and scientific context, the search and the evidence for the new state will be briefly presented. The search for the Higgs has taught us lessons beyond science and those will also be discussed. Paul Tipton, Thomas Pollard spoke on April 2, 2013.

In the Company of Scholars: “Past and Future Movements of Continents Across Earth’s Surface, and a Geologist’s Perspective on the Ultimate Fate of Humankind” by David Evans, February 11, 2014. Geological science gives a unique perspective on humans' evolving place within the natural world. My research delves into the past motions of continents through billions of years of Earth history. Aside from the academic implications for the inner workings and changing surface environments of our planet, this work also provides a framework for understanding patterns in the distribution of natural resources such as metal ore deposits and fossil fuels. After illustrating the long-term paleogeographic history of our planet, this talk will conclude with speculations on how human society may fare in the not-too-distant future, beyond our current age of unprecedented resource extraction and high standard of living.

Susan Hyde, Associate Professor of Political Science at Yale, gives the "In the Company of Scholars: Does Democracy Promotion Promote Democracy?" lecture on March 25, 2014.

Valerie Hansen, Mary Miller, and Anders Winroth discuss the world in the year 1000, when the different regions of the world participated in complex networks. Archaeological excavations reveal that the Vikings reached L'Anse aux Meadows, Canada, at roughly the same time that the Kitan people defeated China's Song dynasty and established a powerful empire stretching across the grasslands of Eurasia. Viking chieftains donned Chinese silks while Chinese princesses treasured Baltic amber among their jewelry. In what is now the American Southwest, the people of Chaco Canyon feasted on tropical chocolate, while the lords of Chichen Itza wore New Mexican turquoise—yet never knew the Huari lords of the central Andes. Islamic armies conquered territory in western China (modern Xinjiang).

In the Company of Scholars Lecture Series. Gary Tomlinson, John Hay Whitney Professor of Music and the Humanities; Director, Whitney Humanities Center presents a lecture entitled “One Million Years of Music: The Emergence of Human Modernity.” April 16, 2014

In the Company of Scholars Lecture Series: "How to Write a War: Thucydides and the Literature of the First World War" 'From Homeric epic the ancient Greek historian Thucydides inherited the construct of a ‘great’ war as simultaneously a theatre for glorious action and the source of tragic loss and devastation. In the context of the centenary of the First World War of 1914-1918, Emily Greenwood will compare Thucydides’ idea of the ‘great’ war with the figure of the ‘great’ war in British prose fiction and memoirs of the First World War. In his account of The War of the Athenians and the Peloponnesians (fought intermittently between 431 and 404 BCE), Thucydides produced a complex intellectual and emotional critique of the idea of a ‘great’ war and in the process established a series of narrative devices and tropes for writing war that recur in so-called ‘disillusioned’ British memoirs and novels about the First World War. In their preoccupation with the truth about the war as lived exper

Human beings choose their friends, neighbors, and co-workers, and we inherit our relatives; and each of the people to whom we are connected also does the same, such that, in the end, we humans assemble ourselves into vast, face-to-face social networks. These networks are the human equivalent of ant colonies. Why do we do this? How does our embeddedness in social networks affect our lives -- our health, emotions, thoughts, and actions? Why do we copy what our friends, and even our friends' friends, do? And how might an understanding of human social network structure and function be used to intervene in the world to make it better? We will ask and answer such questions in this talk, reviewing the deep mathematical, biological, psychological, and sociological rules undergirding social networks. We will in particular review recent research describing two classes of interventions involving both offline and online networks: those that rewire the connections between people, and those that man