This book is about Steven Spielberg's 1977 film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. A lot of people assume this is special effects driven film and about “wow” and “wonder”—which it is—but it's also about alienated lost masculinity. Part of what I argue—and I think this is the new angle to the book—is that in the beginning of the 70s films by Paul Schrader, Martin Scorsese, Hal Ashby, Kubrick and others...

The title Rethinking American Art applies both to me and to the field—it’s constantly being rethought. My hope is that anyone interested in history, collecting, or American culture will take a look. American history itself is constantly reinterpreted—the facts are the same, but interpretations change...

Entropy is a concept that's almost as important as energy, but far less widely understood. The book explains how until the 1850s the two concepts were confused, and that a clear understanding of what entropy really is was reached only in 1947...

I came to this book through my decades-long engagement with issues at the intersection of race, science, law and justice. I began over thirty years ago by exploring sites of the legal management of identity. This led me into the arena of privacy law and the ways in which it serves as a principle for managing individual identity in the face of intrusive market force and state policies...

The book asks not where the Global South is—a fair question in its own right—but when it is. After the colonial era, many postcolonial writers felt an acute sense of belatedness. They considered the “true present” to be somewhere else—namely, in Europe...

I tried to tell a story when writing The Invention of Rum, and like most stories this one is probably best enjoyed from the beginning. If readers start with the introduction, they will …