In Defense of Partisanship
By Julian Zelizer
January 14, 2025
“Contravening conventional wisdom, Zelizer offers a spirited defense of parties and partisanship.” —Frances Lee, Princeton University
Partisanship is a dirty word in American politics. If there is one issue on which almost everyone in our divided country seems to agree, it’s the belief that the intense loyalty within the electorate toward Democrats and Republicans is the source of our democratic ills—division, dysfunction, distrust, and disinformation. The possibilities that responsible partisanship can offer were at the heart of an important intellectual tradition that flourished in the 1950s and 1960s, one which was institutionalized through a sweeping set of congressional reforms in the 1970s and 1980s. Read more about In Defense of Partisanship.
Greedy Science: Creating Knowledge, Making Money, and Being Famous in the 1980s
Edited by Michael D. Gordin and W. Patrick McCray
February 2025
On the transformative role of greed in global science and technology during the 1980s.
In the 1980s, a transformative era emerged where profit-driven motives and an entrepreneurial spirit dominated scientific research and technological innovation. This collection of essays, edited by Michael D. Gordin and W. Patrick McCray, examines how greed reshaped the global scientific community through the relentless pursuit of money, fame, and celebrity. Read more about Greedy Science.
Johann Buxtorf, Impresario of Hebrew and Jewish Books
By Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg
February 2025
Johann Buxtorf (1564–1629) pursued the study of Hebrew and Aramaic and the writings and rituals of Jewish tradition through a long and productive life as a professor at the University of Basel and an impresario of Jewish texts. The focus of this work is on Buxtorf's scholarly practices -- for example, the ways in which he read and made excerpts from a wide variety of Jewish texts, recycled them in his polemical Juden schul (1603), a treatise on the customs and ceremonies of Ashkenazic Jews, and surveyed them in pioneering if incomplete bibliographies. Read more about Johann Buxtorf, Impresario of Hebrew and Jewish Books.