700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators
This book is about adopting a longer-term perspective to understand the world we live in.In the 1800s a handful of countries, initially in western Europe and lands settled by Europeans,...
Lost to the Collective is an exploration into both the history of suicide and the elusive promises of Soviet socialism and the modern social sciences.Suicide unsettled the Soviets because it...
My interest in writing this book came from my most recent research on ancient urbanism. Cities are only about 6,000 years old, but our patterns of behavior and capacity for...
The book attempts to bring together three related bodies of literature and make them speak to each other. The first one is behavioral economics. Through thousands of experiments, this literature...
The retrieval of Craddock’s life from the vaults of vice suppression offers an entryway into major religious, cultural, and political issues of her day—and, often enough, of our own as...
This morning, October 1, 2009, I picked up the New York Times to notice a full-page ad on the back of the news section. It was prepared and paid for...
I first became interested in the history of children’s literature when I was working on the writings of Geoffrey Chaucer. Chaucer was viewed as the “father of English Literature,” and...
The most contentious of the standards and conventions of “real” journalism, as I’ve found in my dual career as historian and journalist, has long been the ideal of objectivity. Having...
I mentioned earlier the key idea of the Cuban hustle that frames the book. It is this culture of invention and everyday hustle that has helped maintain the spirit of...
Nearly half of Americans have suffered from mental illness at some point in their lives. One quarter has been mentally ill during the previous year. These figures come from the...
America’s poorest citizens are among its most patriotic. Their love of country – and indeed, their sense that the United States is superior to other countries in the world –...
Are cities losing their soul? Stroll around the center of the world’s great cities, and you see the same gentrified neighborhoods, certified historic buildings, spectacular skyscrapers and new modern art...
This book illustrates the long history of the basic moves of information management on which we still rely today, even with digital tools. I call them the 4S's: selecting, summarizing,...
I am sometimes asked what a grown man, let alone a Harvard business professor, is doing with a history of the beauty industry. Underlying the question is the assumption that...
In Political Affect I address human nature as bio-cultural. Each one of us is a “body politic” that connects the social and the somatic. I avoid the extremes of social...
The opening of chapter one introduces the reader to Leibniz as he arrives in Paris, ostensibly on a secret mission to establish world peace – or at least to persuade...
Primitive Selves offers a different take on the history of Japanese colonial rule in Korea. Whereas most studies focus on specific policies—such as economic exploitation, compulsory education, assimilation directives, military...
I’m intrigued about the implications of the Snake Detection theory for human behavior, and, in the epilogue, I write most directly about humans.Have you ever wondered about our ability to...
While chapter four, dealing with the debates surrounding the use of the death penalty for counterfeiting crimes, offers some revealing examples of how contemporaries understood money politically, I would steer...
There wasn’t one moment when the book started to take shape in my mind, but I’ve been thinking about it, off and on, since I was a student. If you...
One chapter of the book, for which I have a particular liking, bears the title “Humanists on Laxatives.” It tells the story of the reception of Arabic pharmacology in the...
Numbers, words, and other symbols for precise quantities, are a human invention that had a broad impact on our cognitive and behavioral lives. This claim is based on extensive findings...
The best entry point for the book is probably the introduction. I use that rather lengthy section to demonstrate the permeability of modernist boundaries and to lay out my argument...
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...
In A Kingdom of Stargazers I analyze the nebulous and tendentious practice that astrology occupied within the culture of the later Middle Ages, a period characterized by profound and multiple...
Pictures of all kinds in all media are so omnipresent, so naturalized in our 21st-century lives that a world without them is hard to imagine. Yet the picture-saturated culture we...
Designs for the Pluriverse is, succinctly stated, about the potential for redesigning design and, in so doing, contribute to redesigning the world. Why? To me, the answer is simple: because...
Between 1933 and 1945, when both Hitler and Stalin were in power, their two regimes murdered some fourteen million people in the lands between Berlin and Moscow, which I call...
Here is an excerpt from the first chapter. I hope readers think of it as a true-crime, historical CSI.On Halloween, 1828, sometime before 11 pm, Hugh Alston, a grocer in...
Piracy today is often presented as the definitive transgression of the information age. There are pirate movies and pirate music, obviously, but there are also pirate pharmaceuticals and seeds, pirate...
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