Steven Shapin

Until fairly recently, you did not choose a scientific career with the idea of getting rich. After the end of World War Two, American academic scientists started out on about $2000 a year – the rough equivalent of $17,000 these days – while few full professors at the peak of their careers commanded as much as $10,000. The American scientist, a writer in Science magazine observed in 1953, is not properly concerned with hours of work, wages, fame or fortune. For him an adequate salary is one that provides decent living without frills or furbelows. No true scientist wants more, for possessions distract him from doing his beloved work. He is content with an Austin instead of a Packard; with a table model TV set instead of a console; with factory rather than tailor-made suits. … To boil it down, he is primarily interested in what he can do for science, not in what science can do for him.

In 1617, the governors of the Dutch East India Company placed an order for goods to be procured by their agents. The shopping list included a hundred thousand bags of black pepper and thousands of pounds of other sorts of pepper; as much in the way of cloves, ginger and cinnamon as the ships could carry; 1000 barrels of nutmeg and 300 of mace; 3000 pounds of cassia wood (closely related to...

Historical progress is back, even if it was only in some genres of academic history that it ever went away. It’s been some time, certainly, since historians of art saw painting as a triumphal progress from Titian to Tracey Emin, or historians of music celebrated a linear ascent in compositional quality from Bach to Birtwistle. It was, perhaps, in political history that historians first...

Well over half a billion books about food and wine are sold in the States every year and the circulation of glossy food and wine magazines goes up and up: Bon Appetit (1.3 million), Food and Wine and Gourmet (both about a million). By comparison, the circulation of the New Yorker was just short of a million in 2004. And now its former fiction editor Bill Buford has provided one of the most evocative testaments to our – and his – current obsession: Heat is a record of several years spent in willing servitude to some of the great chefs, and food artisans, of Manhattan and Italy. He wants to know what it’s like; he needs to know how to do what they do. He wants the magic, and he knows that it can’t be had through the reading of books and the watching of television shows, but only through the laying on of hands.