Content by 2013-2015 Sinai and Synapses Fellows
How We Write Our History Shapes How We Think About the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
What you choose to include or exclude from your retelling of the region’s history determines your understanding of the more recent Israeli and Palestinian conflict.
What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us About Humanity
Unlike the angels, who are programmed to be unerring, we can avail ourselves of the positive opportunity for change and growth.
Why Rites of Passage Are Painful
In the modern West, the initiation into adulthood is a long, messy, and rather undignified process with no clear endpoint.
Judaism Must learn to Welcome Outsiders to its Traditions
Much as we should continue honoring membership in a people, we should also acknowledge the ways that people can be Jewish, do Jewish, and experience Jewish in more ephemeral ways.
Songs For Passing
For millennia, music has marked moments of transition in our lives.
Rearranging Ritual: A Conversation With Connor Wood, PhD
How can we rethink work, play and their incentives in the new landscape of post-COVID America?
Are We Too Fearful of Artificial Intelligence?
Perhaps the real risk is not the artificial intelligence itself, but our relationship to it as human beings.
The Joys and Challenges of Interdisciplinary Research
Many of the greatest research breakthroughs come when the insights or discoveries of one field illuminate the problems of another, or when researchers from only semi-related disciplines get together to swap ideas.
The Symbolism of Old Gods and the U.S. Capitol Assault
As people unmoored from vertically transmitted traditions cast desperately around for something to believe in, things are going to get weird. No, scratch that. Weirder.
The Human Need for Culture
People need tribes and culture – things that liberalism tends to dissolve.
Racism and the Professional Class
Who benefits from the policies white progressives are advocating? Are we fighting for racial justice, or for someone else’s justice? Or for no one’s? Until I know, I will be slow to speak and quick to question orthodoxies.
Scientific Conflict About the Coronavirus Lockdown
There is a unique danger of data wonkishness: putting so much stock in scientific abstractions that reality itself becomes invisible.