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Mid-century Jews who changed their names were answering antisemitic barriers, not acting out of shame.

Despite the prevalence of name changing in American Jewish culture, few historians have studied the actual practice of name changing in the United States. A Rosenberg by Any Other Name...

A Rosenberg by Any Other Name

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Mid-century Jewish name changing answered antisemitic application forms, and most name changers stayed in the Jewish community.

The most important reality that my book interrogates is American antisemitism. American Jewish historians have traditionally downplayed the significance of antisemitism in the United States. They have tended to highlight...

A Rosenberg by Any Other Name

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All of Lear's poems are really songs, and the small, dependent Lear is a performed persona, his greatest invention.

If you pick up Inventing Edward Lear in a bookstore, I hope you’ll turn to the pictures first. I would! Maybe you will be delighted by the imaginary enormous Hippopotamouse...

Inventing Edward Lear

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All of Lear's poems are really songs, and the small, dependent Lear is a performed persona, his greatest invention.

My book relates Lear’s work to the intellectual and cultural life of his age in several different ways. I investigate Lear’s anger as a religious dissenter of an Independent cast,...

Inventing Edward Lear

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The small, dependent Edward Lear was a performed persona, his greatest invention.

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...

Inventing Edward Lear

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Asking whether animal science is ethical misses its moral life, which shows in how lab workers talk about animals.

I’ve long been interested in the moral underpinnings of human life on collective (shared) and personal (private) levels of experience. Indeed, the “ethics” of everyday life—or what Gregory Bateson referenced...

Animal Ethos

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Asking whether animal science is ethical misses its moral life, which shows in how lab workers talk about animals.

For a reader who is most interested in browsing the book’s contents, there are several points of entry. For those unfamiliar with my work, they’d probably find the Introduction (“Moral...

Animal Ethos

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The moral life of animal science shows in how lab workers talk about animals.

Animal Ethos is framed by efforts to unearth and decipher moral thought and action in experimental forms of laboratory science. More specifically, as an ethnographic project, it attends to the...

Animal Ethos

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Roosevelt's silver purchases drained China of silver, forced it off the silver standard in 1935, and helped Japan subjugate it.

The most important practical lesson of the book comes from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s attempt to use silver as a political weapon to achieve domestic objectives while ignoring international consequences. During the...

The Story of Silver

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Roosevelt's silver purchases drained China of silver and helped Japan subjugate it.

I would urge the reader to start with the Introduction, called Obsession, which provides a bird’s eye view of how silver has seduced investors and politicians throughout the ages, and...

The Story of Silver

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Roosevelt's silver purchases drained China of silver, forced it off the silver standard in 1935, and helped Japan subjugate it.

This book tells the story of the greatest commodities market manipulation of the 20th century – one that was perpetrated by the larger than life Nelson Bunker Hunt, who, at...

The Story of Silver

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Herding is not mindless, but it is now maladaptive more often than adaptive, so contrarians need institutional protection.

Copycats and Contrarians has some chapters that will appeal to economists and experimental scientists, others that will appeal more to those interested in sociology, social psychology, and politics. The chapter...

Copycats and Contrarians

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Herding is not mindless, but today it misleads us more often than it helps.

Copycats and Contrarians explores our instincts to follow others from a uniquely multidisciplinary perspective. It draws on insights and evidence from economics, finance, psychology, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and behavioral ecology....

Copycats and Contrarians

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Herding is not mindless, but it is now maladaptive more often than adaptive, so contrarians need institutional protection.

Copycats and Contrarians takes on the idea, promulgated by some economists, that humans are selfish and independently-minded creatures, who use complex mathematical rules to solve problems. This book argues that...

Copycats and Contrarians

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The sustainable transition and the just transition are one transition, or neither happens.

If you were to encounter this book in a bookstore, I hope you would first turn to the appendix and read the “Principles of Mobility Justice.” These principles range across...

Mobility Justice

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The sustainable transition and the just transition are one transition, or neither happens.

We are experiencing a triple crisis: urban crisis, climate crisis, and migration crisis. The first involves the demographic explosion, congestion, air pollution, and growing social inequality; the second, global warming...

Mobility Justice

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The sustainable transition and the just transition are one transition, or neither happens.

Mobility justice is one of the crucial political and ethical issues of the contemporary world. We are currently experiencing a series of crises related to how we move. As cities...

Mobility Justice

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American democratic institutions have proved more hospitable to torture than Americans assume.

It is tempting to presume that sadists and zealots typically commit torture. Sometimes, they do. But American torturers have often insisted that their actions were altogether appropriate, morally justifiable, and...

Civilizing Torture

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American democracy has proved more hospitable to torture than Americans assume.

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...

Civilizing Torture

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American democratic institutions have proved more hospitable to torture than Americans assume.

The “American tradition” in this book’s subtitle is not a particular method of tormenting the body. It refers instead to the debates that Americans have waged regarding torture. At the...

Civilizing Torture

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Every single-factor answer to genius is wrong on its own, because each is half of a paradox.

The marketing people at MIT Press asked me to pick out a brief excerpt from the book that might provide the best entry. I answered that the four-page Prologue would...

The Genius Checklist

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Every single-factor answer to genius is wrong on its own, because each is half of a paradox.

Three points need to be made about how this book covers the subject. First, although the overview is restricted to creative genius—and thus ignores genius in politics, war, and religion—the coverage...

The Genius Checklist

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Genius has no single cause but is a rare blend of nature and environment.

The Genius Checklist addresses the most essential questions about identifying, developing, and manifesting creative genius. Some of these questions have been examined by thinkers for centuries. These recurrent issues include:...

The Genius Checklist

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Art is central to survival, which grounds a human right to art, and looting changes what an object is.

The intentional destruction of cultural heritage in peace and war, the looting of artifacts and their trafficking by criminal networks, as well as contests over the ownership, function, and meaning...

The Missing Pages

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Art is central to human survival, so there is a human right to art.

When I first heard about the lawsuit, it resonated with me in many ways. I am an art historian, I had been a Getty Fellow, and the Armenian Genocide is...

The Missing Pages

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Art is central to survival, which grounds a human right to art, and looting changes what an object is.

In 2010, the world’s wealthiest art institution, the J. Paul Getty Museum, found itself confronted by a century-old genocide. The Armenian Church in Los Angeles was suing for the return...

The Missing Pages

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Working outdoor robots converge on animal body plans because the physics of sand, water and air imposes unbreakable constraints.

From cave paintings to the anatomical sketches of Leonardo da Vinci, the movement of animals has long fascinated people. Now there is an explosion of new interest and understanding in...

How to Walk on Water and Climb up Walls

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Robots that work outdoors end up shaped like animals because physics leaves no choice.

The cover of the book is a water strider—an insect that stands on water as if it were land. As the animal rows, it generates waves on the water surface,...

How to Walk on Water and Climb up Walls

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Working outdoor robots converge on animal body plans because the physics of sand, water and air imposes unbreakable constraints.

Understanding animal motion requires application of physics, material science, and robotics. Take an insect walking on water called the water strider. Its legs are covered in the hairiest surface in the...

How to Walk on Water and Climb up Walls

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The president shapes his party's brand at least as much as the party shapes him.

At the heart of the book are the data. A look at chapter 3 would be a good way to get a feel for my approach. The material in this...

Presidents and Parties in the Public Mind

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The president is the prime author of his party's brand, and the causal arrow runs from president to party.

In the broadest sense, the book is meant to contribute to our understanding of how American democracy operates. It is guided by and adds to the scholarly literatures on survey...

Presidents and Parties in the Public Mind

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The president is the prime author of his party's brand, and the causal arrow runs from president to party.

From analyses of thousands of commercial and academic public opinion surveys covering presidents from Truman to Trump, with results detailed in 54 tables and 93 figures, I argue that modern...

Presidents and Parties in the Public Mind

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Autistic readers, including nonspeaking ones, read literary fiction with insight, sometimes insight the trained English professor lacks.

I guess I’d like readers to skip the introduction and prologue and go right to the first chapter. In it I recount discussing Herman Melville’s great tome, Moby-Dick, two chapters...

See It Feelingly

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Autistic readers, including nonspeaking ones, sometimes see in fiction what English professors miss.

I think of my book as a kind of literary ethnography. It roughly resembles the sort of work that made the late neurologist-writer Oliver Sacks famous. In the preface to...

See It Feelingly

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Autistic readers, including nonspeaking ones, read literary fiction with insight, sometimes insight the trained English professor lacks.

Can autistic people, across the spectrum, read literary fiction? Can they enjoy and profit from the experience? For years, experts have said no. A “triad of impairments”—in language, social understanding,...

See It Feelingly

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Performance is the hinge trait of evolutionary biology, where sexual selection, life history and sexual conflict meet.

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...

Feats of Strength

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Performance is the hinge trait of evolutionary biology, where sexual selection, life history and sexual conflict meet.

I would hope that readers encounter the last chapter, preferably because they got there through first reading the preceding nine chapters, but I’m not picky. That last chapter is mostly...

Feats of Strength

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The athletic feats of animals are not curiosities but central to how evolution works.

Even more than it is about performance, this book is about evolution. What really draws me to performance is how central it is to a variety of areas in evolutionary...

Feats of Strength

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Because psychology is conducted almost entirely in English, it is missing phenomena for which English has no word.

The book offers, using a cartographic metaphor, a ‘map’ of wellbeing. In that respect, I don’t have a particular preference for which ‘region’ I would hope a reader first encounters....

Translating Happiness

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Because psychology is conducted almost entirely in English, it is missing phenomena for which English has no word.

The book draws on numerous theoretical and empirical paradigms. Perhaps foremost among these is the linguistic relativity hypothesis (LRH), also popularly known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. This paradigm holds that...

Translating Happiness

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Psychology, done almost entirely in English, misses experiences English has no word for.

Translating Happiness celebrates the idea that untranslatable words – terms without an exact equivalent in our own language – can expand our emotional, intellectual, and even experiential horizons. Such words...

Translating Happiness

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The world is riddled with hidden and emerging places, and real exploration tests imagination, not distance travelled.

Beyond the Map is the kind of book you can dip into anywhere. Reviewers often call it ‘quirky’ and the individual chapters are very different from each other; some are...

Beyond the Map

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The world is not becoming uniform but is full of hidden, emerging places.

In the early 1990s I got involved with one of the more outré forms of geography, known as psychogeography. This involved a lot of unplanned, drifting walks and purposely getting...

Beyond the Map

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The world is riddled with hidden and emerging places, and real exploration tests imagination, not distance travelled.

In Beyond the Map I explore our curious but intense relationship to place by telling the story of thirty-nine extraordinary places. It’s a geographical roller coaster. But it’s not just...

Beyond the Map

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The American transparency regime was built by unconnected reforms for which transparency was a means to other ends.

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,...

The Rise of the Right to Know

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The American transparency regime was built by unconnected reforms for which transparency was a means to other ends.

This book has a specific origin in a book I published in 1998. In The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life, I argued that the character of American...

The Rise of the Right to Know

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America's transparency laws were not built by a transparency movement.

This book examines the history of a set of transparency-related reforms that came to fruition in the 1960s and 1970s. The term “transparency” was not in general use in politics...

The Rise of the Right to Know

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UNESCO's heritage work was forged by the colonizing powers as the last gasp of the civilizing mission.

While it is true that UNESCO status bestows a level of international prestige upon ancient sites, for archaeology as a discipline the organization means very little. World Heritage might offer...

A Future in Ruins

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UNESCO's heritage work was born as the last gasp of the civilizing mission.

A Future in Ruins tells the story of UNESCO and its efforts to save the cultural wonders of the world, largely through its famous World Heritage program. I wanted to...

A Future in Ruins

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UNESCO's heritage work was forged by the colonizing powers as the last gasp of the civilizing mission.

I would like readers to look closely at UNESCO’s high-profile Nubian Monuments Campaign, coming as it did right after the disastrous Suez crisis. In the twilight of empire, during just...

A Future in Ruins

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Most law-breaking is done by people who do not register it as breaking, so regulation should start with awareness.

The introduction, which provides some background, opens with descriptive and normative questions that behavioral ethics brings to the legal literature, such as people’s awareness and responsibilities concerning ethical choices. The...

The Law of Good People

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Most people who break the law do not notice they are breaking it.

We have a misconstrued perception of who the “bad guys” are. In reality, (almost) all of us are violators of laws, regulations, contracts, and ethical norms. Various studies on the...

The Law of Good People

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Most law-breaking is done by people who do not register it as breaking, so regulation should start with awareness.

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 Law of Good People

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A secret police file is better evidence about the officers who wrote it than about the person it tracks.

I tried to finesse this question by putting the most important things at the beginning: a surveillance photo of myself in my underwear, a preface beginning with the sentence I...

My Life as a Spy

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A secret police file is better evidence about the officers who wrote it than about the person it tracks.

The book is highly relevant to contemporary life, in which forms of surveillance have become ubiquitous, although they differ from the ones I describe. It encourages readers to ask how...

My Life as a Spy

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A secret police file says more about the officers who wrote it than about its target.

This book is about how surveillance functioned in communist Romania from 1973 to 1988, the period during which I was one of its subjects. The text contains many verbatim quotations...

My Life as a Spy

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De-extinction is a failure to learn what drove species extinct, and it threatens the wildness it claims to save.

Although The Fall of the Wild is text-driven, it contains a number of photographs, some of them quite famous in the visual history of wildlife conservation. Chapter three (“The Call of...

The Fall of the Wild

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De-extinction is not making amends but a failure to learn why species died out.

The Fall of the Wild is a book about the ethical challenges of conservation in a time of accelerating wildlife losses and growing scientific and technological power. In an age...

The Fall of the Wild

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De-extinction is a failure to learn what drove species extinct, and it threatens the wildness it claims to save.

For a long time, the field of environmental ethics has been dominated by non-anthropocentrism, i.e., the belief that nature has intrinsic value and that we have powerful duties to promote...

The Fall of the Wild

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Postwar suburbia is a landscape of interiors, each an escape capsule from a city becoming racially mixed.

To those who do not have the time to peruse the book from cover to cover, I would recommend reading chapter five, which looks at windows and glass architecture in suburbia. Picture windows have become ...

Indoor America

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Postwar suburbia is a landscape of interiors, each an escape capsule from a city becoming racially mixed.

The greatest challenge in writing a cultural history is that its primary object of study is incredibly hard to pin down. The focus should not only be on the materiality of architectural spaces but also on the...

Indoor America

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Postwar suburbia is a chain of interiors built as escape capsules from a racially mixed city.

There is no question that suburbs are one of the defining features of the U.S. urban landscape, as well as the place where most Americans have spent their lives since...

Indoor America

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The binding constraint on campus free speech is culture, not policy, and the real danger is universities becoming echo chambers.

Speak Freely provides a succinct, accessible explanation of the principles of free speech and their relationship to the workings of a modern university. In contrast to wide-spread polemics about the free speech crisis on campus, this book tries to offer a fair-minded guide

Speak Freely

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Free inquiry is not a courtesy universities extend but the core of their mission.

Over the past few years, I realized that I was taking some very important things for granted, and that was probably a mistake. Speak Freely is part of an effort to address that oversight and to speak out on some issues that need to be discussed. Most basically, I have been disturbed by how colleges

Speak Freely

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The binding constraint on campus free speech is culture, not policy, and the real danger is universities becoming echo chambers.

For a reader “just browsing” the book, there is a natural inclination to skip ahead to chapter three and some of the specific sections there. In that chapter, I take up the various kinds of controversies that have recently roiled university campuses i

Speak Freely

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US human spaceflight is the work of extending Western concepts of system and environment into the solar system.

I hope the reader will thumb through the book and check out the images and illustrations. U.S. human spaceflight is both a civil and a military activity, which means that...

Into the Extreme

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US human spaceflight is the work of extending Western concepts of system and environment into the solar system.

Into the Extreme offers an unusual look into the vast domain of U.S. human spaceflight. I wrote it after doing years of fieldwork in its workplaces that are off-limits to...

Into the Extreme

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US human spaceflight extends Western ideas of system and environment into the solar system.

I was a graduate student at Rice University in Houston Texas when the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated overhead as it was returning to Earth. I watched communities in and around...

Into the Extreme

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Human heredity became a science inside insane asylums, and eugenic ambition was in it from the start.

When I began graduate school in 1977, the history of science was mainly about theories. I had been drawn to the field by the work of Thomas Kuhn, whose famous...

Genetics in the Madhouse

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Human heredity became a science inside insane asylums, not universities.

While diligent readers who behave according to the plan should recognize the coherence of this project, it has, I admit, an inescapably far-flung character. The long chapter titles attest to...

Genetics in the Madhouse

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Human heredity became a science inside insane asylums, and eugenic ambition was in it from the start.

Genetics in the Madhouse examines the study of human heredity historically, from the ground up. The gene eventually comes into the story, as anyone would expect, but in an odd...

Genetics in the Madhouse

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Chimpanzee killing is amoral, a means to an end, and the reconciliation that normally prevents it deserves the attention.

Most readers tell me they are most intrigued by the Machiavellian politics that define chimpanzee social life; and indeed, increasing evidence of violence may shed light on the nature of...

The New Chimpanzee

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Chimpanzees are not caricatures of us but a vista onto ourselves.

My own involvement with chimpanzees came about fortuitously. In the late 1980s, I was conducting my doctoral research in Bangladesh on a previously little-known monkey called the capped langur. I...

The New Chimpanzee

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Chimpanzee killing is amoral, a means to an end, and the reconciliation that normally prevents it deserves the attention.

This book is about the lives of chimpanzees living in the tropical forests of Africa. Over the past two decades, scientists have made dramatic discoveries about chimpanzees that will change...

The New Chimpanzee

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The campaign to convert pension funds into 401(k)s is economic voter suppression, not a solvency fix.

I backed into this topic, largely by accident. I began my legal career litigating corporate and securities cases at a New York law firm. I recall commiserating with a friend...

The Rise of the Working-Class Shareholder

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The campaign to convert pension funds into 401(k)s is economic voter suppression, not a solvency fix.

The Rise of the Working-Class Shareholder tells the story of labor’s unheralded shareholder activism. That activism weaponizes the $3 trillion in labor’s capital, which is vested in the pensions of...

The Rise of the Working-Class Shareholder

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Turning pensions into 401(k)s is economic voter suppression, not a funding fix.

My book begins with a largely forgotten California strike that took place at Safeway supermarkets in 2003-04. At first glance, the basic arc of that story is a familiar confrontation...

The Rise of the Working-Class Shareholder

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Arguing about policy is arguing at the wrong level, because political opponents are not wrong, they start elsewhere.

I hope that readers who come across the book come to realize that people who disagree with them politically aren’t necessarily “wrong.” They just have a very different understanding of...

Political Vocabularies

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Political opponents are not wrong, they are starting from somewhere else.

Political Vocabularies is about how Americans can agree on general political principles such as freedom and equality and at the same time disagree so vehemently about how to put those...

Political Vocabularies

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Arguing about policy is arguing at the wrong level, because political opponents are not wrong, they start elsewhere.

The book looks at how people form the different political worlds in which they live. Perhaps we agree, in a broad sense, on what it means to be an “American.”...

Political Vocabularies

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Abstract art is not pure self-reference but an analog of the real world.

I hope that a potential reader would flip through the book and find unexpected images or startling juxtapositions thereof. He might ask why a more familiar modernist painting by Kandinsky...

Four Metaphors of Modernism

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Metaphor is constitutive of modern art, so abstraction is an analog of the real world, not pure self-reference.

The book argues for a new paradigm: only in considering Der Sturm and the Société Anonyme together, can we grasp the extent of their respective influences on Euro-American modernism; both...

Four Metaphors of Modernism

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Metaphor is constitutive of modern art, so abstraction is an analog of the real world, not pure self-reference.

Four Metaphors of Modernism follows artists, who participated in the German organization Der Sturm (the storm) and the American organization Société Anonyme (anonymous society), and who found inspiration in metaphor....

Four Metaphors of Modernism

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Anglo-American policy toward the Muslim Brotherhood has run on one template since the 1940s, anointing moderates against extremists.

In examining the evolving relationship between the West and the Brotherhood from the perspective of both sides, I was conscious of the fact that my subject did not fit easily...

The Muslim Brotherhood and the West

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Since the 1940s Britain and America have kept searching for Muslim Brotherhood moderates to back.

This book examines the history of the relationship between the Muslim Brotherhood—the world’s most important Islamist movement—and the Western powers that have dominated the Middle East over the last century—the...

The Muslim Brotherhood and the West

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Anglo-American policy toward the Muslim Brotherhood has run on one template since the 1940s, anointing moderates against extremists.

The book ended up longer than I anticipated—in part because the evidence that I accumulated in Cairo, London, and Washington, proved to be so rich and the story so compelling...

The Muslim Brotherhood and the West

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Much of what we think we know about Mars is nonsense, pushed past the data by scientists courting the press.

Readers who are shopping for a great book to read, who are trying to decide whether to read past page one in Life on Mars, likely will turn first to...

Life on Mars

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Much of what we think we know about Mars is nonsense, pushed past the data by scientists courting the press.

Life on Mars is a history book that is about the future. Mars is in our future, probably the very near future. What we already know and what we likely...

Life on Mars

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Much of what we think we know about Mars is nonsense.

Life on Mars is about both the astronomers who have made claims about the existence of past or present life on Mars and about those discoveries themselves. It is about...

Life on Mars

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Frontline bureaucrats cope with impossible demands by quietly narrowing their role.

We are constantly thinking about what it is that the state ought to do—what sorts of policies it should pursue. But policy implementation gives rise to another, equally important question: the question of how the state ought to interact with citizens when pursuing such policies.

When the State Meets the Street

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Street-level bureaucrats cope with conflicting values by moral specialization, narrowing their role until they can live up to it.

As a work of political theory, When the State Meets the Street is unusual in that it combines normative reasoning with ethnographic fieldwork. Political theory is often criticized for operating at too high a level of abstraction, specifying ideals of justice or democracy

When the State Meets the Street

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Street-level bureaucrats cope with conflicting values by moral specialization, narrowing their role until they can live up to it.

When we encounter the state, we do not meet with the text of the law but with a particular person – a case manager at a welfare office, a frontline worker at the DMV, a local counselor, or perhaps a law enforcement officer.

When the State Meets the Street

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Designing tools, objects and institutions designs ways of being, so market-driven design is a cause of the present crisis.

I am not a professional designer nor a social theorist in a design school. At the same time, my intellectual and professional life has gravitated around design issues, first as...

Designs for the Pluriverse

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Designing tools, objects and institutions designs ways of being, so market-driven design is a cause of the present crisis.

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...

Designs for the Pluriverse

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In designing objects and institutions we design ways of being.

I would recommend that readers potentially interested in the book start by looking at the Preface. Why? Because besides giving a straightforward idea about the book’s main argument, it also...

Designs for the Pluriverse

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Metric fixation is predictably counterproductive, because what can be measured is not always what is worth measuring.

Based on the real-life experiences of its creators, David Simon and Ed Burns, the HBO series “The Wire,” is regarded by some as among the greatest cultural documents of our...

The Tyranny of Metrics

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Measuring performance without judgment predictably does more harm than good.

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...

The Tyranny of Metrics

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Metric fixation is predictably counterproductive, because what can be measured is not always what is worth measuring.

We increasingly live in a culture of metric fixation: the belief of so many organizations that scientific management means replacing judgment based upon experience and talent with standardized measures of...

The Tyranny of Metrics

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Privacy in modern America has functioned as a category of public life, and it is not dead but remade.

As an historian of ideas, I’m keenly interested in people’s convictions and how they change. I’ve been especially curious about the way ordinary Americans have revised their understandings of the...

The Known Citizen

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Privacy in modern America has functioned as a category of public life, and it is not dead but remade.

A reader who picked up The Known Citizen and opened it at random might come across social outrage over candid photographs in the late nineteenth century, prompting a spate of...

The Known Citizen

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