Chicago

A city of vast shoulders and a great university, where Martha Nussbaum has spent her career arguing that what people can actually do and be matters more than any metric can capture.

Chicago is a city that takes ideas seriously in a practical way. The University of Chicago has been home to some of the most ambitious intellectual programs in American academic history, from the Chicago School of economics to the great-books curriculum to the law-and-economics movement. Martha Nussbaum joined the law school faculty in 1995 and has been working here since, developing the capabilities approach to justice in a place that takes both philosophy and law seriously. Saul Bellow taught here. Hannah Arendt visited. Thomas Kuhn published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions through the University of Chicago Press. The city seems to require that ideas come with consequences.