Curious Behavior

Recent News

• Lincoln Mullen, author of The Chance of Salvation, spoke with the Atlantic about the long history of religious conversion in America.
• An extract adapted from Steven Lubar’s Inside the Lost Museum: Curating, Past and Present that considers why museum collections matter was published online by Smithsonian magazine.
• Elizabeth Lunbeck, author of The Americanization of Narcissism, considered the ways in which President Trump’s narcissism is a resource for—not an impediment to—his electoral and political success at the L.A. Review of Books.
• Impeachment author Cass Sunstein argued at Bloomberg View that a president must be impeached, convicted, and removed from office before being subject to criminal prosecution.

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August 16: The Science and Politics of Identifying the Dead

The recent identification of the 1641st victim of the September 11, 2001 World Trade Center attacks highlights both the continuing development of DNA profiling technology and the ongoing commitment of the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) to endeavor to identify the remains of 9/11 victims. Before this, the most recent identification occurred in March 2015 when 26-year-old Fiduciary Trust employee Matthew David Yarnell was identified using newly available testing methods. In Who Owns the Dead? I chronicle the efforts of scientists, construction workers, politicians, and uniformed service personnel to recover and identify the remains of the victims of the World Trade Center…