Mortimer Jerome Adler was an American philosopher, educator, and popular author. As a philosopher he worked within the Aristotelian and Thomistic traditions. He lived for long stretches in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, and San Mateo, California. He worked for Columbia University, the University of Chicago, Encyclopædia Britannica, and Adler's own Institute for Philosophical Research.
Steven Arthur Pinker is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, linguist, and popular science author. He is Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and is known for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.
Diane Arbus was an American photographer. Arbus famously worked to normalize marginalized groups and highlight the importance of proper representation of all people. She worked with a wide range of subjects including members of the LGBTQ+ community, strippers, carnival performers, nudists, dwarves, children, mothers, couples, elderly people, and middle-class families. She photographed her subjects in familiar settings: their homes, on the street, in the workplace, in the park—celebrating imagery that seem to reflect our deepest fears and most private wish. “She is noted for expanding notions of acceptable subject matter and violates canons of the appropriate distance between photographer and subject. By befriending, not objectifying her subjects, she was able to capture in her work a rare psychological intensity”. In his 2003 New York Times Magazine article, "Arbus Reconsidered," Arthur Lubow states, "She was fascinated by people who were visibly creating their own identities—cross-dressers, nudists, sideshow performers, tattooed men, the nouveau riche, the movie-star fans—and by those who were trapped in a uniform that no longer provided any security or comfort." Michael Kimmelman writes in his review of the exhibition Diane Arbus Revelations, "Her memorable work, which she did, on the whole, not for hire but for herself, was all about heart—a ferocious, audacious heart. It transformed the art of photography, and it lent a fresh dignity to the forgotten and neglected people in whom she invested so much of herself."
Diane Keaton is an American actress, director, producer, photographer, real estate developer, author and singer. She has received various accolades, including an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, two Golden Globe Awards, and the AFI Life Achievement Award.
Diane Silvers Ravitch is a historian of education, an educational policy analyst, and a research professor at New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Previously, she was a U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education. Ravitch writes for the New York Review of Books.
Gordon Stewart Wood is an American historian and university professor at Brown University. He is a recipient of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for History for The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992). His book The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (1969) won a 1970 Bancroft Prize. In 2010, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal.
Steven Berlin Johnson is an American popular science author and media theorist.
Loren Eiseley was an American anthropologist, educator, philosopher, and natural science writer, who taught and published books from the 1950s through the 1970s. He received many honorary degrees and was a fellow of multiple professional societies. At his death, he was Benjamin Franklin Professor of Anthropology and History of Science at the University of Pennsylvania.
Ecopsychology studies the relationship between human beings and the natural world through ecological and psychological principles. The field seeks to develop and understand ways of expanding the emotional connection between individuals and the natural world, thereby assisting individuals with developing sustainable lifestyles and remedying alienation from nature. Theodore Roszak is credited with coining the term in his 1992 book, The Voice of the Earth, although a group of psychologists and environmentalists in Berkeley, including Mary Gomes and Allen Kanner, were independently using the term to describe their own work at the same time. Roszak, Gomes and Kanner later expanded the idea in the 1995 anthology Ecopsychology. Two other books were especially formative for the field, Paul Shepard's 1982 volume, "Nature and Madness," which explored the effect that our ever-diminishing engagement with wild nature had upon human psychological development, and philosopher David Abram's The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World, published in 1996. The latter was the first widely read book to bring phenomenology to bear on ecological and ecopsychological issues, examining in detail the earthly dimensions of sensory experience, and disclosing the historical effect of formal writing systems upon the human experience of nature's agency, voice, and interiority.
Big History is an academic discipline which examines history from the Big Bang to the present. Big History resists specialization, and searches for universal patterns or trends. It examines long time frames using a multidisciplinary approach based on combining numerous disciplines from science and the humanities, and explores human existence in the context of this bigger picture. It integrates studies of the cosmos, Earth, life, and humanity using empirical evidence to explore cause-and-effect relations, and is taught at universities and primary and secondary schools often using web-based interactive presentations.
Environmental philosophy is a branch of philosophy that is concerned with the natural environment and humans' place within it. It asks crucial questions about human environmental relations such as "What do we mean when we talk about nature?" "What is the value of the natural, that is non-human environment to us, or in itself?" "How should we respond to environmental challenges such as environmental degradation, pollution and climate change?" "How can we best understand the relationship between the natural world and human technology and development?" and "What is our place in the natural world?" As such, it uniquely positions itself as a field set to deal with the challenges of the 21st Century. Environmental philosophy includes environmental ethics, environmental aesthetics, ecofeminism, environmental hermeneutics, and environmental theology. Some of the main areas of interest for environmental philosophers are:
Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture is a discredited 2000 book by historian Michael A. Bellesiles about American gun culture, an expansion of a 1996 article he published in the Journal of American History. Bellesiles, then a professor at Emory University, used fabricated research to argue that during the early period of US history, guns were uncommon during peacetime and that a culture of gun ownership did not arise until the mid-nineteenth century.
Morris Berman is an American historian and social critic. He earned a BA in mathematics at Cornell University in 1966 and a PhD in the history of science at The Johns Hopkins University in 1971. As an academic humanist cultural critic, Berman specializes in Western cultural and intellectual history.
William "Bill" Cronon, FBA is a noted environmental historian and the Frederick Jackson Turner and Vilas Research Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He was president of the American Historical Association (AHA) in 2012.
The Zookeeper's Wife is a non-fiction book written by the poet and naturalist Diane Ackerman. Drawing on the unpublished diary of Antonina Żabińska, it recounts the true story of how Antonina and her husband, Jan Żabiński, director of the Warsaw Zoo, saved the lives of 300 Jews who had been imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto following the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. The book was first published in 2007 by W. W. Norton.
Eating Animals is the third book by the American novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, published in 2009. A New York Times best-seller, Eating Animals provides a dense discussion of what it means to eat animals in an industrialized world. It was written in close collaboration with Farm Forward, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that implements innovative strategies to promote conscientious food choices, reduce farmed animal suffering, and advance sustainable agriculture.
Elliot Ackerman is an American author. He is the son of businessman Peter Ackerman and author Joanne Leedom-Ackerman and the brother of mathematician and wrestler Nate Ackerman.
Defeating ISIS: Who They Are, How They Fight, What They Believe is a non-fiction book about counterterrorism against ISIS. It was written by Malcolm Nance, a former cryptology analyst, with a foreword by Richard Engel. Its thesis is that ISIS is not part of Islam, and instead functions as a separate destructive extremist group. He emphasizes that a majority of those harmed by ISIS are themselves Muslim. The book traces the history of the movement from Al-Qaeda in Iraq, and discusses their combat and recruiting tactics. Nance offers a four-point plan to defeat ISIS, including airpower and special forces, Internet tactics, strengthening the Syrian military, and engaging Arab world states.
