Jacob Soll

Dan Kitwood / Getty Images A new book recovers the work of scholars who helped establish greater understandin…

The fake news hit Trent, Italy, on Easter Sunday, 1475. A two-and-a-half year-old child named Simonino had go…

In a world seemingly inured to financial scandals, the Panama Papers leak has reminded us of their capacity t…

In hiring Bruce Harreld as president of the University of Iowa, the governor and the Board of Regents have to…

Anyone who thought China might finally be developing a normal stock market was reminded last week that China …

As of midnight Tuesday, it now appears that Greece has defaulted on part of its debt by missing a $1.7 billio…

As the Greek debt crisis lurches toward a major missed payment and potential catastrophe, the familiar politi…

Wherever we look today in academia, scholars are rushing to defend the Enlightenment ideas of political and i…

Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and NationsBy Norman Davies (Viking, 830 pp., $40) There is a …

Anatole Deibler, France's official executioner from 1899 to 1939, once remarked, "To kill in the name of one'…

IN FRANZ KAFKA'S novel, The Trial, the hapless protagonist, Josef K., is asked to stand trial for a crime tha…

A HISTORY OF double-entry accounting? Not a sexy prospect. The very idea evokes rows of half-starved, bent-ov…

By Ann M. Blair (Yale University Press, 397 pp., $45) In 1945, in an article called "As We May Think," Vannev…

The fake news hit Trent, Italy, on Easter Sunday, 1475. A 2 ½-year-old child named Simonino had gone missing,…

In sheer numbers, the Black Death of 1348 was an unalloyed horror. The bubonic plague killed between 30 and 7…

In Niki Caro's adaptation of Diane Ackerman's The Zookeeper's Wife , the protagonist listens in fascination a…

Press play to listen to this article Jacob Soll is university professor and professor of philosophy, history …