700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators
I have taught and researched media and media theory for over twenty years and have been increasingly struck by how little we understand about the human relationship with technology, particularly...
A casual reader might want to start with page 106, the beginning of “Bending Brass,” the chapter in which I tell the story of my own experience with the trumpet....
Parallel Public examines experimental art from the final years of East Germany in relation to state power. In the book, I argue that these artists did not practice their art...
The Death and Afterlife of Achilles looks at all types of ancient evidence about Achilles to reconstruct the basic outlines of his death and afterlife. For literary evidence, the Homeric...
Each chapter of Age of Fracture brings its readers into a different facet of the age’s great debates.The opening chapter shows how the social vocabulary of the Cold War slipped...
The book is a study of the 1989 romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally… written by Nora Ephron and directed by Rob Reiner. It’s one in a series of books...
Chapter 3, entitled “Which Came First?”, goes over a number of examples of engineering achievements that were accomplished without full scientific understanding or explanation of the phenomena involved. Among those...
A four-dimensional hypercube has 32 edges. Here’s why. Start with a simple line segment. It has only one edge...
If science made you an atheist, you are ready for serious scientific answers to the rest of life’s persistent questions.Here is a list of most of these questions and their...
Lenin’s Brother follows my earlier work on Lavrov, Nechaev, Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin. The book allowed me to revisit Lenin’s entry into the revolutionary movement—a fateful moment. Most historians agree...
My book is about the peoples who are often referred to as “barbarians” during the period commonly known as “the Dark Ages.” I argue that far from being the uncivilized...
A Brave Vessel is a story of two Williams: William Strachey, a poet and would-be chronicler of the New World in 1609 London; and William Shakespeare, a playwright of uncommon...
The argument of Beyond Belief, Beyond Conscience rests on two claims about the importance of religious liberty to our broader constitutional tradition. First, of all the rights we possess, the...
Obviously, this isn’t the first book about Starbucks. But Everything but the Coffee is first to examine the company’s rise and fall and look ahead to its uncertain future in...
This book began with a question about all the installation art and performance that I was seeing in the early 2000s in New York galleries and museums, wondering where this...
Chapter 5 adopts a rigorous definition of what externalities are, identifies a wide range of external social benefits of higher education, presents and evaluates the empirical evidence for each, and...
No one can write about Helen of Troy without thinking about the meaning of beauty.Consider the following statements about Helen’s beauty. Here is Guido delle Colonne writing in the thirteenth...
The Culture Transplant debunks the view that immigrants fully assimilate in a generation or two. This is something my fellow economists know—we have vast empirical literatures showing that, for instance,...
The current policy environment is one in which we must come to grips with the unsustainable increases in health care costs, the unconscionable proportion of the population without insurance, and...
The business of contemporary art has changed immeasurably over the last half century. What was essentially a small, insider trade clustered in a few key avant-garde capitals has expanded into...
I am never quite sure of the meaning of the word “context.” One can talk about the context of history, in which case you would read a lot about Le...
The book can be read like parts of a puzzle. Although some themes (education, history, progress, and national identity) permeate the entire book, one can start anywhere depending on one’s...
The brief Epilogue of Memos from the Besieged City, like many aspects of this book, pivots on its two epigraphs. The first is from Walt Whitman’s ambiguously democratic and imperialist...
The Toothpick is a technical and cultural history of what is arguably the simplest of manufactured things. A wooden toothpick consists of a single part made of a single material...
The “Introduction” is a paean, a song in praise of comparative philosophy.Some think that studying ancient wisdom traditions involves anachronism and ethnocentrism. One talks across too much time and one...
Pages 2 through 5 state what the book is about, its objectives, the historical significance of the story, and my role in it. Allow me to stitch together some of...
A home of TSP studies is the field of applied mathematics known as operations research. The focus of the field is the creation of methods to improve decision making, in...
On December 30, 2019, the Chinese scientist Jiankui He was sentenced to three years in jail and fined three million yuan. His crime? Creating the world’s first CRISPR-edited babies. My...
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...
Some book titles are mysterious or allegorical, providing no obvious clue of what the darn things are about. No danger of that here. I’ve written a book about the long...
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