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Fifteen Eighty Four

Academic perspectives from Cambridge University Press

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Bankruptcy Is Welfare.Why Doesn’t It Feel Like It?

“Ten years of getting my ass kicked, just trying to hold on with white knuckles.” That is how Bob Baker, a property developer in Massachusetts, described the decade after the 2008 housing market...

Tess Wise | 13 Nov 2026

Can AI Be Governed?

Revelations that swarms of AI agents, developed in OpenAI’s frontier AI lab, had broken out of their containment to coordinate an attack on data stored by Hugging Face, a machine learning solutions...

Onur Bakiner | 13 Nov 2026

Urbanization and Global Environmental Change: Q&A Reflections from Galina Churkina

1. How do cities influence environmental change far beyond their own boundaries There are two major mechanisms through which cities influence environmental change. First, cities influence environmental...

Galina Churkina | 12 Nov 2026

We’ve Never Had It So Good. So Why Does It Feel Like We Don’t Have Enough?

We live in a world of abundance, but it often feels like we simply do not have enough. We have our first trillionaire in Elon Musk, yet throughout much of the world people are protesting the cost-of-living...

Séamus A. Power | 12 Nov 2026

Political Guardianship Psychology: Understanding China’s Relationship Between the State and Its People

There is an old Chinese saying: “When officials drive the people too far, the people have no choice but to resist” (官逼民反,民不得不反). At first glance, the saying seems to describe...

YIDA ZHAI | 11 Nov 2026

When Voters Exit Authoritarianism Thrives

My new book, Death, Diversion, and Departure: Voter Exit and the Persistence of Authoritarianism in Zimbabwe, examines how large-scale voter exit affects the stability of authoritarian regimes. In the...

Chipo Dendere | 2 Nov 2026

How to End Islamist Civil Wars

This year marks 25 years since the United States led the military intervention in Afghanistan, following the 9/11 attacks. The war that followed lasted for two decades and was highly internationalized,...

Isak Svensson, Desirée Nilsson | 2 Nov 2026

Getting along better: focusing on social relations in collaborative governance of renewable natural resources

It is well established that managing natural resources really means managing people. It is people’s use, or overuse, of natural resources that has to be monitored and managed – through rules on access,...

Fiona Nunan | 2 Nov 2026

Observing the Remnants of the Big Bang

In 1964 Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson of the Bell Telephone Laboratories discovered the almost perfect blackbody microwave glow from the Big Bang. They found this glow to have a nearly uniform temperature...

Martin Bucher | 2 Nov 2026

The Power of Reading

Reading is good for you. Few people would disagree. Yet when we talk about its benefit, we often think first of knowledge: the information that books make available to us. But reading does more than expand...

Falk Huettig | 2 Nov 2026

What really happens in family group chats?

When was the last time you had a family dinner? And when was the last time you sent a message in a family group chat? For many of us, the answer to the second question is probably much more recently. Family...

Hanwool Choe | 30 Oct 2026

Why Are Humans Capable of Both War and Peace?

Humans occupy a peculiar place in the natural world. Coalitionary lethal attacks against members of other groups have been documented in only a relatively small number of species, including certain social...

Hugo Meijer | 30 Oct 2026