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Privacy in America has never been private but a part of public life.

Privacy—I probably need convince no one—looms large in the United States today, sparked by concerns about NSA spying as well as social media profiling, facial recognition software as well as...

The Known Citizen

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The United States is a nation like all others.

I have spent my entire adult life studying and writing about the United States in world affairs. Much of my work, especially the essays, but also many of the books,...

A Nation Like All Others

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The United States is a nation like all others, and there was no American isolationism in the 1920s.

A Nation Like All Others is a history of American foreign relations from 1776 to the present; it also a critique of the idea of American exceptionalism; and it laments...

A Nation Like All Others

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The United States is a nation like all others, and there was no American isolationism in the 1920s.

For those whose eyes are caught by the book’s cover, I would urge them to read the preface (2 pages) and “Last Thoughts” (5 pages). Those few pages will tell...

A Nation Like All Others

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Poor Americans' patriotism is a reasoned sense of ownership, not stupidity or false consciousness.

Broke and Patriotic is an effort to better understand and give voice to an important segment of the population that most of the country so often neglects. It also speaks...

Broke and Patriotic

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Poor Americans' patriotism is a reasoned sense of ownership, not false consciousness.

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 –...

Broke and Patriotic

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Poor Americans' patriotism is a reasoned sense of ownership, not stupidity or false consciousness.

I would hope that readers open the book precisely at the first page of Chapter 1, where we hear Eddy’s thoughts (all names have been disguised, to protect anonymity), an...

Broke and Patriotic

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Slavery, housework and precarious makeshift jobs are as modern and capitalist as wage work, and inseparable from it.

For a first encounter with the book that would hopefully encourage further reading I recommend the chapter on work discourses (chapter 2). In this chapter, I contrast voices that seek...

Work

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Slavery, housework and precarious makeshift jobs are as modern and capitalist as wage work, and inseparable from it.

Work takes on different meanings depending on the historical and regional context. During Greek and Roman antiquity, any kind of work was disdained, while the ideal human condition was praxis...

Work

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Slavery, housework and makeshift jobs are as modern and capitalist as wage work.

In contrast to earlier, more inclusive ideas about work, the Western conception of work was, by the end of the nineteenth century, reduced to gainful employment. Labor studies from liberal,...

Work

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Palestinian citizens of Israel in the 1950s and 1960s were active participants in the Afro-Asian decolonizing world.

In the fourth chapter, “Palestinian Spokesmen,” I discuss little-known dimensions of two famous Palestinian writers: Mahmoud Darwish and Ghassan Kanafani. While Darwish is best known for his poetry and Kanafani...

Brothers Apart

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Palestinian citizens of Israel in the 1950s and 1960s were active participants in the Afro-Asian decolonizing world.

When people hear the term “Palestinians,” they usually think of people living in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, or in refugee camps and small communities scattered around the...

Brothers Apart

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Palestinian citizens of Israel in the 1950s and 1960s were part of the decolonizing world.

Most of the existing scholarship on Palestinian citizens of Israel revolves around Israeli policies and majority-minority relations. This approach reflects in part the dominance of anthropologists and sociologists and social...

Brothers Apart

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African wildlife poaching is organized transnational crime driven by profit, not subsistence hunting, and must be analyzed as crime.

I would hope that readers browsing the book would find the section on offenders and the section on solutions. Two highlights are the description of their motivations and methods, and the chart that offers a profile of offender type by species.

Exploiting the Wilderness

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African wildlife poaching is organized crime for profit, not subsistence hunting.

I discovered many interesting issues in my research into the illegal wildlife trade and will just mention three here. The German and British colonial governments in east Africa established the first game parks and game laws on the continent.

Exploiting the Wilderness

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African wildlife poaching is organized transnational crime driven by profit, not subsistence hunting, and must be analyzed as crime.

I set out to provide the reader with a detailed overview of the global illegal trade in African wildlife. The illegal trade involves the poaching, trafficking and consumption of common and endangered species. These include mammals, marine species,

Exploiting the Wilderness

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Judicial ordeals worked because defendants believed in them, and the water was not actually boiling.

WTF?! is a tour through a museum of the world’s weirdest practices—guaranteed to make you say, “WTF?!” Did you know that “preowned” wives were sold at auction in nineteenth-century England?...

WTF?! An Economic Tour of the Weird

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Judicial ordeals worked because defendants believed in them, and the water was not actually boiling.

What’s the dumbest social ritual you’ve partaken in? Fraternity hazing, perhaps? Or maybe debating a lunch mate over who gets the privilege of picking up the tab? How about pretending...

WTF?! An Economic Tour of the Weird

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Humanity's weirdest rituals, like trial by ordeal, were clever solutions to real problems.

At each exhibit, you’ll learn about a different seemingly insane ritual used to organize human life and learn a different lesson about how to use economic logic to find its...

WTF?! An Economic Tour of the Weird

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A waning US empire turns to war as its last way to stay a superpower.

Security is often thought of as a topic for international relations or law and limited to topics such as policing, militarism or terrorism. Over the last decade, there has been...

Saving the Security State

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US empire is waning, and the security state is the phase in which it turns to war to stay superpower.

Empires wax and wane, and what we are seeing today is the slow and gradual waning of U.S. empire in the new century. I call this phase of U.S. empire...

Saving the Security State

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US empire is waning, and the security state is the phase in which it turns to war to stay superpower.

Readers encountering my book might first turn to the chapter on Hurricane Katrina, which captures the context of the book, both with regard to the problems of a retreating welfare...

Saving the Security State

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Conservation is one of the routes by which capitalist worldviews became environmental, not a defense of nature against capitalism.

The Nature of Spectacle draws from twenty-five years of experience with international nature conservation, with special reference to Tanzania. As I describe in my book, Conservation and Globalization (2004), I...

The Nature of Spectacle

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Conservation is one of the routes by which capitalist worldviews became environmental, not a defense of nature against capitalism.

The Nature of Spectacle is a book about capitalism and the environment. Its central concern, and unique perspective, is with the ways in which capitalist worldviews have become environmental over...

The Nature of Spectacle

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Conservation is not a defense of nature against capitalism but an expression of it.

I would like a “just browsing” reader to turn to one of the personal stories that open some of the chapters, such as my childhood fascination with nature shows and...

The Nature of Spectacle

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Mobile media are shaped by the spaces where downtime happens, not by the device, and phones do not destroy community.

People check their mobile phones over 80 times every day, and while that frequency may alarm us as we survey a crowd of people hunched over their phones, it is less disturbing when we look at why and where people use their phones.

The Procrastination Economy

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Mobile media are shaped by the spaces where downtime happens, not by the device, and phones do not destroy community.

The complexity of the procrastination economy is best displayed by the mobile culture on the commute. In chapter three, I examine this culture by analyzing the creative process behind Spotify’s playlists. From my research, I learned how Spotify

The Procrastination Economy

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Mobile media are shaped by the places where we kill time, not by the device.

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 1965 and the author was annoyed by transistor radios.

The Procrastination Economy

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GDP's relevance is actively declining, and well-being, resilience and sustainability should replace growth as the collective horizon.

I think the chapter on health is the perfect introduction for any reader interested in what goes on in our contemporary societies and wondering how this book would change her/his...

Measuring Tomorrow

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Well-being, resilience and sustainability should replace growth as our shared goal.

Measuring Tomorrow is essentially a guide to the well-being and sustainability transition and as such aims to make four contributions. First, while we have several insightful historical accounts of GDP’s...

Measuring Tomorrow

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GDP's relevance is actively declining, and well-being, resilience and sustainability should replace growth as the collective horizon.

Measuring Tomorrow is about ending our passion for growth and engaging in the well-being and sustainability transition. Growth of Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, captures only a tiny fraction of...

Measuring Tomorrow

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Neanderthals could not produce the vowels that make speech clear, yet they talked, so language was no sudden human event.

Charles Darwin’s 1859 book, On the Origin of Species, is often cited but hardly ever read. My book presents the observations and the concepts that he actually proposed because they...

The Theory That Changed Everything

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Neanderthals could not produce the vowels that make speech clear, yet they talked, so language was no sudden human event.

I was walking down a hall at MIT when I heard an odd sound: two graduate students in Ken Stevens’ laboratory had programed a computer to synthesize a whale belching....

The Theory That Changed Everything

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Neanderthals talked, so language was not a sudden, uniquely human event.

The first chapter, “Strawberries,” presents the formative experience: the voyage of HMS Beagle that formed Darwin’s views on the common humanity of all people and set the stage for his...

The Theory That Changed Everything

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Nature poetry of timeless solace cannot meet irreversible environmental change, because its unchanging nature is somewhere to escape to.

Each chapter in the book treats work by two or three poets who address a particular issue. That issue might be conceptual—for example, the scalar challenges involved in thinking of...

Recomposing Ecopoetics

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Nature poetry of timeless solace cannot meet irreversible environmental change, because its unchanging nature is somewhere to escape to.

Recomposing Ecopoetics examines 21st-century poetry by a dozen Americans and Canadians who are engaging in their poems with the environmental challenges we currently face. It is, then, a work of...

Recomposing Ecopoetics

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Nature poetry of timeless solace cannot meet a world of irreversible environmental change.

The concept of the “self-conscious Anthropocene,” introduced in the book’s title, is one of the book’s innovations and points to its larger significance. The term Anthropocene was introduced in 2000...

Recomposing Ecopoetics

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Sexual beauty is a property of the female brain judging it, not of the ornament.

I had always been struck by beauties in animals, whether that be the extravagantly colored fish in my childhood aquarium, the long-tailed ornamental pigeons we raised as teenagers, or the...

A Taste for the Beautiful

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Sexual beauty is a property of the brain judging it, not of the ornament.

Stunning beauty abounds in nature. We see it everywhere we look. The brilliant colors and dances of butterflies and fishes, the songs of crickets, frogs, and birds, and even the...

A Taste for the Beautiful

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Sexual beauty is a property of the female brain judging it, not of the ornament.

The first two chapters set the stage for understanding how beauty comes to be in the brain of the beholder. I begin Chapter 1 by asking a simple question: Why...

A Taste for the Beautiful

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Rationality is now the dominant ideology, and protest and hacking are how the public co-produces the technical system.

Technosystem: The Social Life of Reason is a philosophical reflection on the technified world in which we live. Ours is a world of technical systems designed in accordance with technical...

Technosystem

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Rationality is now the dominant ideology, and protest and hacking are how the public co-produces the technical system.

Technosystem begins with a lecture that sums up much of the argument in non-technical language. I use two illustrations to make my points. A reader browsing the book would be...

Technosystem

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Rationality is now the dominant ideology of modern society.

Technosystem should be read as a attempt to link up several different traditions of social thought in an innovative theory of modernity. The big question to which Technosystem is addressed...

Technosystem

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Western philosophy's neglect of Chinese, Indian and African thought is a legacy of Kant's racial theory.

There is much to interest readers in my book beyond a debate about narrow academic curriculum. In one chapter, “Trump’s Philosophers,” I explore how educational demands to “preserve our Western...

Taking Back Philosophy

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Western philosophy's refusal to teach Chinese, Indian and African thought is a lingering effect of Kantian racial theory.

Issues of inclusiveness and cultural identity are at the center of contemporary debates in fields from politics to entertainment. Many educators have been accused of succumbing to “political correctness” for...

Taking Back Philosophy

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Western philosophy's refusal to teach Chinese, Indian and African thought is a lingering effect of Kantian racial theory.

The late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once dismissed the teachings of Confucius as “the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.” In doing so, he was expressing the perspective of...

Taking Back Philosophy

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Florida's tomato fields went from the worst to among the best without a single new law.

Jump into Chapter 4: Has anyone talked with these guys? It gives a sense of what a great, and encouraging, story this is. The Prologue gives a short but comprehensive...

I Am Not a Tractor! How Florida Farmworkers Took On the Fast Food Giants and Won

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Florida's tomato fields went from the country's worst labor conditions to among its best without a single new law.

I Am Not A Tractor! is about the courage, vision, and creativity of the farmworkers and community leaders of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), who have transformed what had...

I Am Not a Tractor! How Florida Farmworkers Took On the Fast Food Giants and Won

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Florida's tomato fields went from the country's worst labor conditions to among its best without a single new law.

Although this effort began in Florida’s tomato fields, the Coalition and the Fair Food Program are providing a model for worker-driven social responsibility that could transform American agriculture, with potential...

I Am Not a Tractor! How Florida Farmworkers Took On the Fast Food Giants and Won

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Ordinary crime control, not ideology, was one of the decisive steps to the Bolshevik totalitarian state.

In recent years, we have witnesses the overthrow of authoritarian regimes and the difficulties new regimes have in their transition to liberal democracy. This book provides a clue to understanding...

Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution

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Crime control, not ideology, was a decisive step toward the Bolshevik totalitarian state.

I would hope readers pay close attention to Chapter 5, An Epidemics of Mob Justice, pp. 167-191, especially the graphic cases, 170–177. Also, I would like readers to pay attention...

Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution

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Ordinary crime control, not ideology, was one of the decisive steps to the Bolshevik totalitarian state.

The story of the Russian Revolution has more often been told from the perspective of the active participants in the revolution, whether they were the leaders of political groups or...

Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution

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The prohibition on hosting kleptocrats' money fails for structural reasons, and the remedy is to recruit the profit motive.

A basic point of both curiosity and frustration that motivated me to write the book is the difference between rules in the rule-book and what happens in practice. In theory,...

The Despot's Guide to Wealth Management

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The way to stop kleptocrats' money is to recruit the profit motive, not fight it.

Of the four host countries I studied—the US, Britain, Switzerland, and Australia—the last one seems like the odd one out. Aside from the fact that I am from there, Australia...

The Despot's Guide to Wealth Management

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The prohibition on hosting kleptocrats' money fails for structural reasons, and the remedy is to recruit the profit motive.

Twenty years ago, if a leader from a country like Nigeria looted billions of dollars from his own country and stashed the money in the United States, the US had...

The Despot's Guide to Wealth Management

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Spontaneous generation was a well-supported theory that happened to be false, and survived two millennia of hard testing.

There was a moment in the thirteenth century, when the great polymath Albertus Magnus held in his hand an exquisitely wrought ancient onyx cameo. He went on to describe it...

Creatures Born of Mud and Slime

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Spontaneous generation was a well-supported theory that happened to be false, and survived two millennia of hard testing.

The planet we live on is positively crawling with life. There is not a nook or a cranny, it sometimes seems, where we don’t find some odd species of worm,...

Creatures Born of Mud and Slime

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Spontaneous generation was a well-supported theory that happened to be false.

Spontaneous generation is one of those wrong theories that clutter the basements of the biological sciences and that now look so very obviously wrong that it is hard to see...

Creatures Born of Mud and Slime

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The Alt-Right's ideology is old, and only its ironic, anonymous online delivery is new.

This project was a natural outgrowth of my earlier book, Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism. That book, written before Donald Trump announced his candidacy, predicted a major disruption of the...

Making Sense of the Alt-Right

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The Alt-Right's ideology is old, and only its ironic, anonymous online delivery is new.

I think my chapter on the Alt-Right and the 2016 presidential election is especially important. There has been a lot of talk about Donald Trump being an Alt-Right president. I...

Making Sense of the Alt-Right

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The Alt-Right's ideology is old, and only its ironic, anonymous online delivery is new.

This book traces the antecedents, origins, major figures, and tactics of the white nationalist movement commonly known as the Alt-Right. Although the Alt-Right’s ideology is not new, it is much...

Making Sense of the Alt-Right

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Pulp writers used slang as a deliberate experiment, so they belong inside modernism.

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...

The Word on the Streets

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Early twentieth-century pulp and popular writers used slang as a deliberate experimental aesthetic, so vernacular modernism belongs inside modernism.

The Word on the Streets is a book, first and foremost, about slang: how slang and vernacular language gain purchase as experimental and self-conscious forms in American literature. The book...

The Word on the Streets

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Early twentieth-century pulp and popular writers used slang as a deliberate experimental aesthetic, so vernacular modernism belongs inside modernism.

The Word on the Streets enters in a rather thorny place in modernist studies. In my mind—and I make the claim in the book—the field of modernist studies has been...

The Word on the Streets

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Gods were an incidental byproduct of brain evolution, born when autobiographical memory taught humans they would die.

Based on an idea originally proposed by Charles Darwin, Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods argues that the emergence of gods was an incidental consequence of several evolutionary factors. Using data ranging from ancient skulls and archeological artifacts to child development,

Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods

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Gods were an incidental byproduct of brain evolution, born when autobiographical memory taught humans they would die.

For readers just browsing, I would hope that they would open to chapter six in the book and specifically to the section on skull cults. This is the time in history, about 10,000 to 8,500 years ago, when ancestor worship had apparently reached its peak and the first gods

Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods

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Gods were a byproduct of brain evolution, born when humans learned they would die.

The book is based upon four scientific principles. The first is the principle of human evolution. It was Darwin, in fact, who first suggested that a belief in gods might be a result of “structure of brain heredity.” The book uses modern neuroscience

Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods

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Small towns around 1900 routinely tolerated trans men who were productive, law-abiding husbands and neighbors.

At the end of chapter one, I discuss one of my very favorite primary sources in the entire book: an editorial published in the New York Times in late 1883,...

True Sex

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Small towns around 1900 often tolerated trans men who lived as good husbands and neighbors.

True Sex discusses the lives of eighteen individuals who were assigned female at birth but who lived as male in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century. By...

True Sex

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Small towns around 1900 routinely tolerated trans men who were productive, law-abiding husbands and neighbors.

For a long time, histories of the LGBT community were often based in urban areas. George Chauncey’s Gay New York, published in 1994, is an early example of this. Chauncey’s...

True Sex

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The American death penalty collapsed because defense lawyering improved, not because of innocence or falling murder rates.

In my first job as a lawyer, I represented several people who had spent years behind bars but were exonerated by DNA tests, including people who had falsely confessed, like...

End of Its Rope

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The American death penalty collapsed because defense lawyering got better.

End of its Rope explores why the death penalty in America unexpectedly faded away. Twenty years ago, death sentencing was at its modern height. Across the Southern “death belt,” death sentences...

End of Its Rope

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The American death penalty collapsed because defense lawyering improved, not because of innocence or falling murder rates.

Turn to page 17 and read the story of two young brothers, Henry McCollum and Leon Brown, who were convicted and sentenced to death in North Carolina in 1984. They...

End of Its Rope

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Every past sudden advance in code has humanized work rather than mechanized it, and this one will too.

I’d be delighted if a “just browsing” reader were to gravitate toward the last third of the book, because that’s really where I explore the implications of the story for...

The Code Economy

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New advances in code make work more human, not more mechanical.

The Code Economy is a book about the past and likely future of human progress. My aim in writing it was to combine history with economics to explain how human...

The Code Economy

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Every past sudden advance in code has humanized work rather than mechanized it, and this one will too.

We have all heard that we’re about to become obsolete, irrelevant. Or if not us, then, certainly, our children. No number of coding camps will help them. And definitely not...

The Code Economy

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The decisions that rebuilt the World Trade Center were financial and made off the record.

Chapter 10 relates a particularly compelling episode of how the idea of integrating culture at Ground Zero exposed the tension inherent in accommodating the dual mandate to remember and rebuild.Many...

Power at Ground Zero

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The decisions that rebuilt the World Trade Center were financial and off the record, not the public architectural competitions.

I have long believed that city building is a story of implementation for which plans are but the foundation for debate and action, and that action is driven by politics,...

Power at Ground Zero

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The decisions that rebuilt the World Trade Center were financial and off the record, not the public architectural competitions.

Power at Ground Zero tells the epic story of how the site of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan was rebuilt after the terrorist attack of 9/11. The destruction...

Power at Ground Zero

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The hunger strike was pioneered by women, though men get the credit.

Starving for Justice examines three hunger strikes that took place in the 1990s on university campuses. Twenty years ago, Chicana/o, Latina/o students at UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, and Stanford stopped...

Starving for Justice

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The hunger strike was pioneered by force-fed suffragists, though the men who used it later are the ones lionized.

Since the late 1980s I have been involved in social movements. Activists that went “all the way,” putting their bodies on the line, risking arrest, going on hunger strike, and...

Starving for Justice

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The hunger strike was pioneered by force-fed suffragists, though the men who used it later are the ones lionized.

I would hope that readers would flip to chapter two, titled “Speak About Destruction.” In the mid-1980s, a band called “Time Zone,” featuring former Sex Pistols lead singer Johnny Rotten...

Starving for Justice

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Where to draw the line between gambling and investment is a moral and political question, not a technical one.

In the aftermath of the recent financial crisis, we heard many critiques of speculation for having contributed to the problem, and many defenses of speculation as necessary for robust markets....

Speculation

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Where to draw the line between gambling and investment is a moral and political question, not a technical one.

The book begins with a story that took place during the Civil War. In 1862, the cost of the war forced the government to abandon the gold standard. The “greenback,”...

Speculation

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The line between gambling and investment is a moral question, not a technical one.

Speculation is about a dilemma that has troubled the legal system for a long time. For centuries, there has been a consensus that investment is necessary and ought to be...

Speculation

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What school produces is largely non-learning, and that is a property of the structure, not of the students.

I have to confess that I like this book. I poured my heart and soul into each page. I lived with the ideas and the sentences and the chunks for...

“I Love Learning; I Hate School”

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What school produces is largely non-learning, and that is a property of the structure, not of the students.

Students do a lot of non-learning in school. They cheat, cut corners, cram, forget everything as fast as they can, and are often miserable in the process. This is a...

“I Love Learning; I Hate School”

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School largely produces non-learning, and the fault lies in the structure, not the students.

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...

“I Love Learning; I Hate School”

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American public debate is impoverished because its dominant voices suppress the factual uncertainties at each hard issue's core.

I believe that One Nation Undecided is a unique contribution to public affairs discourse in several respects. First, it is written in a dispassionate, non-partisan, and non-ideological spirit. This distinctive...

One Nation Undecided

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American public debate is impoverished because its dominant voices suppress the factual uncertainties at each hard issue's core.

Each reader, of course, will be more interested in some of the issues than in others, and the book’s organization facilitates their ability to pick-and-choose with that in mind. For...

One Nation Undecided

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Hard public issues are hard because good arguments exist on several sides.

One Nation Undecided (Princeton University Press, 2017) is a natural sequel to my last book, Why Government Fails So Often, and How It Can Do Better (Princeton University Press, 2014). Why...

One Nation Undecided

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The new craft trades are closed in practice to the working-class people who would benefit most.

If a reader were to casually pick up the book, I would hope they would flip to Chapter 7, which is called “Service Teaching.” This chapter focuses on the three...

Masters of Craft

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The new craft trades are closed to the working-class people who would benefit most, and not by discrimination.

There are three broad forces occurring in society today that in concert are leading to these jobs becoming cool. First, how we classify taste is shifting. Consumers are questioning what...

Masters of Craft

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The new craft trades are closed to the working-class people who would benefit most, and not by discrimination.

Many blue-collar, manual labor, and service jobs that were once low-status have become “cool” in today’s economy. In fact, jobs like bartender, distiller, barber, and butcher have gone from providing...

Masters of Craft

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A single process, combogenesis, generates everything in the universe in exactly twelve levels from quarks to geopolitical states.

All scholarship involves being diligent in seeking and finding of patterns. It doesn’t matter what the field is. We might be considering cultural studies, anthropology, botany, chemistry, linguistics: It doesn’t...

Quarks to Culture

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A single process, combogenesis, generates everything in the universe in exactly twelve levels from quarks to geopolitical states.

I recently gave a book talk at a salon held on the first Sunday of every month at the Cornelia Street Café, in New York. (Great jazz there, by the...

Quarks to Culture

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A single process, combogenesis, builds everything from fundamental particles to geopolitical states.

Quarks to Culture involves a new, big picture perspective of the universe. Now, by universe I do not mean the astronomical cosmos that the word usually refers to. I mean...

Quarks to Culture

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Modernity is a historical artifact people had to acquire and perform, and Fritz Kahn's illustrations were among their materials.

Body Modern focuses on the history of a peculiar kind of imagery of the human body: the conceptual scientific illustration. Primarily found in America and Germany between 1915 and 1960,...

Body Modern

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Modernity is something people had to learn and perform, not something that happened to them.

Before Body Modern, I had mostly focused on the earlier history and cultural politics of anatomy. In A Traffic of Dead Bodies (2002) I argued that, in the 19th century,...

Body Modern

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Modernity is a historical artifact people had to acquire and perform, and Fritz Kahn's illustrations were among their materials.

Scholars have long debated modernity, its origins, and its defining characteristics. Body Modern sidesteps those questions. Modernity, it argues, did not descend upon the world like a deus ex machina...

Body Modern

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