I would like at least that my own intellectual activity should not make things worse or more dangerous, and, preferably, that it would make things by a tiny margin a little bit better, a little bit clearer, a little bit…

I was a fellow at CASBS in 1989-90. At that time, one could not apply to be a fellow and when the letter inviting me to come arrived, I was somewhat perplexed, having never heard of the Center, and almost…

My plans for my (1996-97) year at the Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) were firm: I was definitely doing nothing—other than a final edit of a book and tidying up a textbook manuscript. I had…

Like almost every other day at a few minutes after noon, I walked into the bright sun carrying my tray from the lunchroom. Squinting (I wore no glasses of any kind in 1980 and 1981), I looked to see if…

I was first a CASBS fellow in 2005-06. As a Stanford faculty member since 1991, I had long viewed the Center as a kind of academic nirvana that I was determined to eventually inhabit for a year. From the valley…

CASBS helped shape my research and career in so many ways, that I cannot imagine what would have happened had I not spent my early years as an Assistant Professor at CASBS (1994-1995). The resulting volume, Cetacean Societies, was the…

In the mid-1990s, then Director Neil Smelser made me an offer I couldn’t refuse – the opportunity to work as his colleague on three-year project funded by the Hewlett Foundation, which would culminate in my organizing a year of collective…

During my year at the Center I read a great deal in a variety of fields, outside my training as a physicist or my work in city planning. Moreover, I learned a lot from the anthropologists and historians of science,…

I would like to add my ruminations to Amelie Oksenberg Rorty’s and Kamala Visweswaran’s informative and sensitive comments about the 1970 fire at the Center. I have written a few paragraphs about it in books on the anti-Vietnam War movement…

The economics of happiness is now a burgeoning subject in economics.  It all began at the Center when, over lunch one day, casual mention was made of happiness questions that had occasionally been asked in public opinion surveys.  It struck…