Talking Points

We are a nation shaped by immigrants, as the Statue of Liberty reminds us, but now, horrifyingly, immigrants are increasingly subjected to prejudice for both their ethnic identity and their religion. Older and equally repellent anti-Semitism and...

Harlan Robins was a trained physicist specializing in string theory when he arrived at the Institute as a Member in systems biology (2002–2006). "I didn't know any biology when I got here, so I would say my entire career as a biologist developed...

On November 12, at the opening of the Large Hadron Collider exhibition at the Science Museum in London, Nima Arkani-Hamed, Professor in the School of Natural Sciences, met with novelist Ian McEwan for a conversation aimed at finding the common...

The point of just war theory is to regulate warfare, to limit its occasions, and to regulate its conduct and legitimate scope. Wars...

“I remember going into Professor Habicht’s office—he always had time no matter how busy he was—and saying ‘How would you like it if IG II2 2971 dates to around 250 instead of 314?’ . . . I did not expect to hear anything for a day or two, as I had interrupted him in the midst of his work. Was I ever mistaken! About one half hour later I opened my door to his knock…”

From the very beginning of its existence, the Muslim world practiced and developed an elaborate legal system meant to control and to judge all aspects of life . . . This system, known as sharia, was based on the Qurʾān, an immutable divine...

Pierre first started visiting Moscow in the 1970s, deep in the USSR era; at the time, such visits from a foreign mathematician, while not expressly forbidden, were quite non-trivial to arrange, and all the more valuable for that. He has continued to...

I am very skeptical about all the pronouncements that are made by the experts. I know how completely uncertain the subject is. But I don’t claim to be an expert myself, so I won’t argue with anybody about details. And I am certainly not a spokesman...

Arabia seems to have been a much more developed place than most Islamicists (myself included) had ever suspected—not just in the north and south, but also in the middle. We are beginning to get a much more nuanced sense of the place, and again it is...

“There is no such thing as a unique scientific vision, any more than there is a unique poetic vision. Science is a mosaic of partial and conflicting visions. But there is one common element in these visions. The common element is rebellion against...