700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators
For more than a generation, the conservative counterrevolution in America blurred the distinction between the invisible hand of the market and the all-powerful hand of God. In the “culture wars”...
As someone who went to college in the 1970s and was interested in “Eastern Philosophy” as it used to be called, I read The Tibetan Book of the Dead and...
Göring’s Man in Paris is about three things: first, it is a detailed portrait of a Nazi art plunderer (Dr. Bruno Lohse); second, it tells the story of what happened...
The general rubric under which the concepts of this book are laid out is evolutionary biology. The core positions are about how and why the emotion of disgust aids in...
A half century ago a “radical caucus” formed in the American Psychiatric Association. The group, while somewhat small, felt that mental medicine needed to change in the US. The caucus...
It is hard to choose just one from the plentitude of examples—from all corners of the world—for how not to promote entrepreneurship.But here is a striking case.In 1970s and 1980s,...
While Crack is, as books go, on the slim side, it covers a lot of ground. While I hope the chapters on the history of cocaine, the lure of crack,...
The close-upThe cover of the book is truly beautiful. I was very happy with the press, and I had some creative input on the work that their wonderful designer did....
There is a short section devoted to the painting reproduced on the book’s cover, which is Rosso Fiorentino’s Dead Christ (1527), a very strange painting and nothing less than a...
My big question is: Why do people stay with lives, forms, and fantasies of life that don’t work?How do we learn to associate certain things with our fantasies of the...
This book addresses one of the greatest challenges facing the US educational system: high school dropouts. The problem has been labeled by some, including President Obama, as a national crisis.The...
As to what pages of the book I would hope a browser encountered first, I will say, unsurprisingly, the introduction and conclusion. The introduction spells out in a bit more...
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...
I started Listed when I was working in Washington, DC, as a policy fellow with the American Association for the Advancement of Science. At the time the Endangered Species Act...
The main idea of my book, Making Sense of Pakistan, is that we need first and foremost to make sense of the country’s identity crisis.This crisis, I argue, is rooted...
I set out to write a book not so much about the varieties and comparative deficiencies of cars in the Soviet Union as what these objects meant to Soviet citizens....
The First Pop Age takes up these matters above all: how Pop art folds painting and photography into one another; how, in doing so, it combines the effect of immediacy...
Radical Thinking is a book about how we make sense of the world, and how we can make more sense of it. But it’s not a typical ‘critical thinking’ book. It’s ‘radical’ (from the Latin radic, meaning ‘root’) because it’s about the roots - the foundations - of what we think. In other words, it’s about the things that shape our thoughts...
The germ of this book sprouted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where I had returned in my mid-50s to start an academic career, after spending some 35 years working...
My interest in the topic of public art and modernism in Los Angeles grew out of a lifelong concern with artistic and literary censorship. Early in my career, I learned...
This book is about the often amazing athletic abilities that animals possess. It aims to explain how and why evolution has equipped certain animals with the capacity to do things...
The Prometheus Bomb is an account of the building of the atomic bomb that ended combat in the Pacific theater of World War II. The book focuses on how breakthroughs...
Chapter 3 is devoted to the celebrated artist Sadequain (1930–1987) who introduced calligraphic motifs in his modernist paintings and drawings. Sadequain’s residence in Paris during the 1960s is of fundamental...
I would hope someone stumbling upon That’s Disgusting in a bookstore either first thumbed through the chapter on horror and perverse pleasures (Chapter 6, “Horror Show”), or the chapter on...
The non-specialist who is browsing through the book should turn to chapter one, where I discuss the foundation narratives of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It is interesting that all three...
The New York Times once published a piece that described mobile device users as a “cretins” who “lovingly hug” their devices “with a look of rapt idiocy.” The year was...
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...
My interest in the concept of obscenity grew out of a law school course on the topic of the rhetoric, law and culture. One of the readings was Sophocles’ play...
In the Company of Strangers is about how different ideas of the family affect the deep narrative structure of novels.The principles of marriage and reproduction seem to be fundamental to...
There are two sections that I hope browsers would encounter. The first is from a section at the beginning called the Year of Two Presidents. It is a fictional vignette...
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