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“I Love Learning; I Hate School” - The wide angle

The topic of this book is connected to everything! (Okay, maybe not directly to geology or health insurance. But to a gazillion other things that matter.) It’s connected to the...

Susan D. Blum

Timepass - The wide angle

The book considers issues of class, politics and waiting through reference to a lower middle class of Jats in Meerut district, Uttar Pradesh, especially students from this caste studying in...

Craig Jeffrey

Heart of Europe - In a nutshell

The Holy Roman Empire’s history is central to the European experience and the question of European identity. Founded with Charlemagne’s coronation on Christmas Day 800, it lasted just over a...

Peter W. Wilson

The Lolita Effect - In a nutshell

The Lolita Effect addresses the media sexualization of young girls. In the book, I draw a distinction between healthy, age-appropriate concepts of sexuality that should develop as children mature, and...

M. Gigi Durham

Tales of Militant Chemistry - In a nutshell

This book asks what happens when we take something we’re familiar with and consider it in an unfamiliar light. The “thing” in question is film: not films, the things we...

Alice Lovejoy

Is Eating People Wrong? Great Legal Cases and How They Shaped the World - In a nutshell

This book makes a strong argument against the widespread perception, inside and outside the legal profession, that law is somehow an inanimate set of abstract rules which are the product...

Allan C. Hutchinson

Cars for Comrades - The wide angle

No contextual landscape for the book existed in the sense of a previous body of historical scholarship devoted to the subject. The Soviet automobile did figure in Cold War-era economists’...

Lewis H. Siegelbaum

Madness in Civilization - In a nutshell

Madness is something whose mysteries puzzle us still. The loss of reason, the sense of alienation from the common sense world the rest of us imagine we inhabit, the shattering...

Andrew Scull

The American Lie - A close-up

Many of the same Americans who believe in the Easter bunny also think that public opinion is a significant force in political life. Perhaps, not all would accept James Bryce’s...

Benjamin Ginsberg

The Missing Pages - The wide angle

The New Asian City began from the observation that there was something unique about the gleaming metropolises of East Asia, which existing theories of urban development did not account for....

Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh

Heroes of Empire - The wide angle

There are two main contexts for this book, the first of which has to do with Barack Obama and charisma.I began work on this book when the then junior senator...

Edward Berenson

The Rise of the Right to Know - A close-up

I think the most interesting and surprising chapter in the book is the one on the role of public disclosure in environmental legislation. What is detailed, especially on pp. 205-219,...

Michael Schudson

Why We Disagree About Climate Change - In a nutshell

Why We Disagree About Climate Change is about the idea of climate change—where it came from, what it means to different people in different places and why we disagree about...

Mike Hulme

Genomic Politics - The wide angle

A great deal of activity, ranging from public policies to address poverty or climate change, to individual choices about whether to change a job or marry one’s partner, depends on...

Jennifer Hochschild

Essaying Shakespeare - A close-up

I guess I’d direct a browsing reader to my last essay: any writer is always most interested in his or her current work.A colleague, Margaret Ferguson, observed over twenty years...

Karen Newman

Pistols! Treason! Murder! The Rise and Fall of a Master Spy - A close-up

Pistols! Treason! Murder! contains numerous original illustrations, which I scripted and storyboarded, and which were created by Dan Hallett. The one reproduced here, titled The Wounds of Giulio Cazzari, accompanies...

Jonathan Walker

The Stalin Cult - A close-up

Socialist realism was arguably the 20th century’s most successful artistic phenomenon, especially if measured in terms of quantitative output and geographical reach. Yet socialist realism remains notoriously difficult to define....

Jan Plamper

Learning to Hear - The wide angle

This book is part of a much longer project within philosophy and social theory seeking to understand what I describe as the sensed unconscious. The concept describes aspects of our...

Sarah Maslen

Clash of Extremes - A close-up

Here are my suggestions for browsing Clash of Extremes. Begin with the Introduction: it provides a brief overview and roadmap for the rest of the book. Then take a look...

Marc Egnal

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

The Scientific Method - The wide angle

Relevance can be an accident. When I started working on this project in 2010, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway had just published Merchants of Doubt, their account of organized science...

Henry M. Cowles

Theory of the Gimmick - The wide angle

Theory of the Gimmick continues the effort undertaken in my previous books, Our Aesthetic Categories (2012) and Ugly Feelings (2005) to get people to take “minor,” trivial, or everyday affective...

Sianne Ngai

Consequential Strangers - The wide angle

Throughout my career, I wrote books and articles about intimate relationships. When I made a move from New York City to Northampton, Massachusetts in 1990, I left all my everyday...

Melinda Blau

Overthrowing the Queen - In a nutshell

In 1976, Ronald Reagan hit the campaign trail with an incredible story about a woman committing massive welfare fraud. The story caught fire and launched the most devastating symbol of...

Tom Mould

The Unintended Reformation - In a nutshell

The Unintended Reformation is a wide-ranging revisionist history that concerns the present as much as the past. It argues that in central respects, North American and European life in the...

Brad Gregory

Supernormal Stimuli - A close-up

Most people don’t try to parse cuteness. Like pornography, we know it when we see it. With a bit of examination, however, cuteness has easily quantifiable aesthetics. Take a moment...

Deirdre Barrett

No Right Turn - In a nutshell

When did America take a right turn? Most people think it began with the chaos of the 1960s, the unraveling of the New Deal coalition, the rise of the New...

David T. Courtwright

In the Company of Strangers - A close-up

The first paragraph in the Introduction is about a family memory which prompted the book in the first place.On page 11 I discuss fairytales looking at the problem of maturation...

Barry McCrea

Andean Cocaine - A close-up

I use a number of lenses on cocaine’s history, but one revealing close-up concerns the actual “technology” of cocaine making.Usually, the history of cocaine departs from the heroics of modern...

Paul Gootenberg

Transatlantic Fascism - The wide angle

Fascism was a cross-regional civic religion in its most extreme form. In certain Catholic countries fascism reoccupied places previously held by institutional religion but also let itself be invested by...

Federico Finchelstein

2073 Micro Interviews