2073 Micro Interviews

700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators

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The Rise of Climate Science - A close-up

The book is full of stories connected with each of these segments of my life. I hope different browsers will first look at the table of contents, then open to...

Gerald R. North
Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives - In a nutshell

I begin with the fact that, along with the United States, no country was more important in the twentieth century than was the Soviet Union. And it may also be...

Stephen F. Cohen
Reclaiming Modernity - A close-up

Like any proud author, my expectation is that the browsing prospective reader might find delight by turning to virtually any page in my book. However, I will limit myself to...

Larry Bennett
Africa’s Struggle for Its Art - A close-up

Film and literature play a central role in the restitution debate of the 1970s, opening a space for political imagination. Many African filmmakers trained in former large colonial cities, where...

Bénédicte Savoy
Unsilencing - A close-up

I would begin with the preface where I describe my first meeting with Krum Horozov, one of the most candid survivors I interviewed. In the late spring of 2006, I stood at the door of his apartment not yet knowing that this encounter would define the years to come. Horozov, an eighty-one-year-old former political prisoner, had spent eleven years in camps and prisons...

Lilia Topouzova
Exemplary Things - The wide angle

Exemplary Things investigates the history of a Japanese cultural keyword, meibutsu, and the pervasive influence it has had in shaping consumption practices in Japan. It's a term that has no exact anglophone equivalent. Japanese commodity culture developed in the 15th century, and in Exemplary Things, I show how...

Christine M. E. Guth
The Tyranny of Metrics - The wide angle

I came to the subject as an outsider to the field of management: as an historian with a broad interest in the social sciences and in public policy. I was...

Jerry Z. Muller
The Just City - The wide angle

Beginning in the 1960s, scholars of urban politics have criticized urban decision makers for imposing policies that exacerbated the disadvantages suffered by low-income, female, gay, and minority residents. In particular,...

Susan S. Fainstein
Relations - The wide angle

Over the past decade, a series of books has examined women’s claims to urban space at the turn of the twentieth century as integral to the rise of the modern...

Marilyn Strathern
The Rise and Demise of World Communism - In a nutshell

The rise and demise of world communism was one of the great dramas of the 20th century. It was born in wars (World War I, World II), and offered an...

George W. Breslauer
Colonization - A close-up

Page 6, which shows the difference between the number of states that are included in the data that underpin our book, compared to the number of states identified in existing...

Ryan D. Griffiths
Heaven’s Bride - A close-up

If a reader were just dipping into the book, I hope that he or she might first browse the fourth chapter.Against all odds, Craddock went about her work as a...

Leigh Eric Schmidt
If I Am Right, and I Know I Am - In a nutshell

If I Am Right, and I Know I Am is the story of a woman who changed our understanding of the planet but never received the recognition she deserved. It is the first biography of Inge Lehmann, the Danish geophysicist who discovered Earth’s solid inner core in 1936.I didn’t want to write a traditional scientific biography. I wanted to write a book...

Hanne Strager
Civilizing Torture - The wide angle

My interest in these historical events is a product of our times. Prior to 2004 it is unlikely that I would have written a book about torture in the United...

W. Fitzhugh Brundage
Autopsy of a Crime Lab - In a nutshell

“That’s not my fingerprint, your honor,” said the defendant, after FBI experts reported a “100-percent identification.”They were wrong.The judge sided with the FBI and ordered the defendant, Brandon Mayfield detained...

Garrett L. Brandon
Forbidden Fruit - In a nutshell

Counterfactuals are “what-ifs.” They change a feature of the past in the expectation of changing the present. The antecedent (the change introduced in the past) is connected to the consequent...

Richard Ned Lebow
Rolling Stone and the Rise of Hip Capitalism - The wide angle

When I decided to write about Rolling Stone and read previous works about the magazine, I realized that I needed a new angle. It seemed like a good idea to try to produce a narratively focused cultural history. It’s a book that tells a “story,” with identifiable protagonists who confront challenges over a period of time. But I convey that story in a way that enables readers to see how Rolling Stone fit into...

Charles L. Ponce de Leon
Science and religion are not incompatible

The view that the findings of science are incompatible with claims of revealed religion per se is widespread—but mistaken.In the first chapter of The Unintended Reformation I explain why many intellectuals today think that science...

Brad Gregory
Ecological economics

When the Endangered Species Act was passed, in 1973, traditional economics, which looked to self-interest and endless growth as the predominant drivers of the economy, was pretty much the only...

Joe Roman
Psychopathy Unmasked - A close-up

The structure of the book is relatively straightforward. There is a total of eight chapters, where five of them examine one of five central claims about psychopathy by reviewing research...

Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen
Signs from the Future - In a nutshell

This book explores the importance of warnings, our tendency to ignore them, and strategies to address this critical issue. I believe the 21st century is characterized by a widespread failure...

Santiago Zabala
Before Colonization - In a nutshell

This book corrects a Eurocentric picture of International Relations (IR) that has dominated the study of international relations over the past decades, and especially the statistical study of IR. If...

Charles R. Butcher
Theory of the Gimmick - In a nutshell

This book looks closely at an aesthetic form unique to capitalist society: the irritating and yet strangely compelling gimmick. It argues that the gimmick lies latent in every made thing...

Sianne Ngai
Stone Men - In a nutshell

Ostensibly, Stone Men is about the lives and labors of Palestinian stonemasons. These are men who work in the West Bank stone industry—in quarries, workshops, and factories—and have a rich...

Andrew Ross
Will poor nations suffer greatly from climate change?

My critics have “granted me” the point that developed free market cities have the ability and the capacity to cope with many aspects of climate change. But they have countered...

Matthew E. Kahn
Orderly Anarchy - The wide angle

Orderly Anarchy is about hunter-gatherer California specifically but has three broader theoretical implications.The first is that self-interest is central to much of the human evolutionary trajectory. This becomes clear if...

Robert L. Bettinger
The Politics and Ethics of Identity - The wide angle

Encouraged by therapists, people search for their inner selves. Groups and corporations develop “identities,” to which their members are “invited” to internalize. Political leaders encourage us to distinguish ourselves from...

Richard Ned Lebow
A Prehistory of Ordinary People - A close-up

Today, the reading experience has been expanded to different formats and time frames. So I have divided each chapter into smaller sections that make a particular point about some aspect...

Monica L. Smith
Isolationism - The wide angle

It was during the 1990s, after the end of the Cold War, that I first contemplated writing a book about the history of isolationism. During that decade, Americans seemed to...

Charles A. Kupchan
Inventing Edward Lear - In a nutshell

Edward Lear, the author of ‘The Owl and the Pussy-cat’ and ‘The Quangle Wangle’s Hat,’ is rightly beloved as a nonsense poet. But few people know that he was also...

Sara Lodge

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