Genius

• McMahon on why it’s time to retire the concept of genius: From Issac Newton to the Genius Bar in Nautilus, October 16, 2014.
• McMahon on the democratization of genius in The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 23, 2013.
• McMahon on how the French Revolution gave us the Cult of Genius, in New Republic, October 19, 2013.
• McMahon on Einstein in The Wall Street Journal, September 2008.

Happiness

• Time Magazine, “Happiness in America Isn’t What it Used to Be“
• “From the Paleolithic to the present: Three revolutions in the global history of happiness”, In E. Diener, S. Oishi, & L. Tay (Eds.), Handbook of well-being. Salt Lake City, UT: DEF Publishers. DOI: nobascholar.com, 2018
• “History Lesson,” (For most of history, people didn’t assume they deserved to be happy. What changed?) Quartz, April 18, 2017.
• McMahon on the history of happiness in L’Unita (Rome), January 2013.
• McMahon on happiness and unhappiness at the holidays in The New York Times: January 2005 and January 2012.
• McMahon on “A History of Happiness: We’ve forgotten much of what older traditions knew about happiness” in YES!, October 2010
• McMahon on the history of happiness in the The Washington Post: April 2007 and June 2007.
• McMahon on the meaning of the “pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence. The Wall Street Journal, July 1, 2005.
• “From the Happiness of Virtue to the Virtue of Happiness,” Daedalus, Spring 2004.
• McMahon on the paradox of progress in the The Wall Street Journal, December 2003.

the Enlightenment and the Eighteenth Century

• “Lighting the Enlightenment,” October 18, 2018
• McMahon on Jonathan Israel’s Democratic Enlightenment in The New York Times, December 2011.
• McMahon on Fear & Trembling, Strangers and Strange Lands in Daedalus, Summer, 2008.
• McMahon on 18th-century cosmopolitanism in The Wall Street Journal, July 2006.
• McMahon on David Hume and JJ Rousseau in The New York Times, April 2006.
• McMahon on Voltaire in The Wall Street Journal, November 2005.
• McMahon on the 18th-century Encyclopedia in The Wall Street Journal, June 2005.
• McMahon on the origins of conspiracy-thinking in the 18th century in The Boston Globe, February 2004.
• McMahon on the 18th-century Encyclopedia in The Boston Globe, June 2003.
• McMahon on Adam Smith in The Wall Street Journal, November 2002.
• McMahon on Isaiah Berlin and the Counter-Enlightenment in The Wall Street Journal, March 2002.

All links to external websites open in a new tab or window, depending on your browser.