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Irreverence was not a symptom of China's modernization but one of its engines.

E.B. White said that “humorists fatten on trouble,” and in modern China there’s been plenty of that to go around. One of the broad concerns of my book is to...

The Age of Irreverence

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Irreverence was one of the engines of China's modernization.

The Chinese press dubbed 1933 the “Year of Humor.” The catalyst was the Analects Fortnightly, a new magazine inspired by The New Yorker and other contemporaries, which since its launch...

The Age of Irreverence

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Irreverence was one of the engines of China's modernization.

The early twentieth century changed the ways people in China talked about what’s funny. The Age of Irreverence is about how and why. Part of the focus is historical: What changed?...

The Age of Irreverence

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Native California's small family-based bands are a recent form, appearing within the last 1,500 years.

Orderly Anarchy places the Indians of California in modern evolutionary perspective. It disputes the traditional, stage by stage, cultural evolutionary interpretation in which hunter-gatherers represent a primitive, unevolved stage of...

Orderly Anarchy

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Native California's small family bands are a recent development, not a primitive survival.

The discussion and arguments are generally easy to follow. Even so, my guess is that the casual reader will most likely turn first to the graphics, which were chosen to...

Orderly Anarchy

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Native California's small family-based bands are a recent form, appearing within the last 1,500 years.

Orderly Anarchy is about hunter-gatherer California specifically but has three broader theoretical implications. The first is that self-interest is central to much of the human evolutionary trajectory. This becomes clear if...

Orderly Anarchy

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The belief that unsupervised city children are in danger is a recent ideology, not common sense.

The chapter with the most sidewalk appeal is probably Chapter Two, “Shirley Temple as Streetwalker.” I argue that film starring Shirley Temple and Jane Withers, the Little Orphan Annie Comic...

Fantasies of Neglect

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The belief that unsupervised city children are in danger is a recent ideology, not common sense.

Fantasies of Neglect is at once a work of cultural criticism and an account of changing ideas of childhood, parenting, and the urban from the 1930s to the present. It...

Fantasies of Neglect

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The belief that unsupervised city children are in danger is a recent ideology, not common sense.

Until this book, I never wrote about or taught anything related to childhood. I came to this project initially through my interest in film and urbanism. As I wrote and...

Fantasies of Neglect

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There is no such thing as an identity.

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...

The Politics and Ethics of Identity

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There is no such thing as an identity, only a jumble of self-identifications with raw appetites underneath.

We are multiple, fragmented, and evolving selves who, nevertheless, believe we have unique and consistent identities. What accounts for this illusion? Why has the problem of identity become so central to...

The Politics and Ethics of Identity

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There is no such thing as an identity, only a jumble of self-identifications with raw appetites underneath.

The opening chapter provides an historical, philosophical and psychological overview of the project and its central ideas. The first few pages are especially important in this regard.

The Politics and Ethics of Identity

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The English Financial Revolution began when alchemical improvers, having failed to make gold, turned to a credit currency instead.

Ever since enrolling in a PhD-program in Economics, I have been troubled by the excessive abstraction whereby economists treat money. While past thinkers, from Aristotle and Plato to Karl Marx...

Casualties of Credit

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The English Financial Revolution began when alchemists, having failed to make gold, turned to credit.

While chapter four, dealing with the debates surrounding the use of the death penalty for counterfeiting crimes, offers some revealing examples of how contemporaries understood money politically, I would steer...

Casualties of Credit

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The English Financial Revolution began when alchemical improvers, having failed to make gold, turned to a credit currency instead.

Casualties of Credit offers a cultural history of early modern money. In exploring the intellectual underpinnings of the seventeenth-century English Financial Revolution, I uncover how people conceived of money and...

Casualties of Credit

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Staying attached to what wears you out is the structure of optimism, not irrationality.

Sometimes a book like mine makes people feel that, if they don’t know the films or novels or cases written about, they can’t read a given chapter or judge its...

Cruel Optimism

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Staying attached to what wears you out is the structure of optimism, not irrationality.

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...

Cruel Optimism

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Staying attached to what wears you out is the structure of optimism, not irrationality.

Cruel Optimismis a book about living within crisis, and about the destruction of our collective genres of what a “life” is; it is about dramas of adjustment to the pressures...

Cruel Optimism

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The urban form of Seoul, Taipei and Singapore was the instrument of their growth, not its byproduct.

This book takes a fresh look at the so-called “Asian Tiger” success stories of South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. While these countries have been much lauded for their incredible postwar...

The New Asian City

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The urban form of Seoul, Taipei and Singapore was the instrument of their growth, not its byproduct.

The final three chapters of The New Asian City each examine in detail one national site and one aesthetic form: Singaporean city poetry, Taiwanese New Cinema, and Korean minjung (people’s...

The New Asian City

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The urban form of Seoul, Taipei and Singapore was the instrument of their growth, not its byproduct.

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....

The New Asian City

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Fiction did not rise, and the modern refusal to care whether characters existed is the historical anomaly.

This isn’t the first book to make fictionality the primary variable in the history of the novel, though it does depart pretty radically from earlier attempts. That departure was unplanned....

Before Fiction

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Fiction did not rise, and the modern refusal to care whether characters existed is the historical anomaly.

No question, the best way to dip into Before Fiction is by skipping the short Preface and getting right to the Introduction. That’s where I lay out and illustrate my...

Before Fiction

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Not caring whether characters really existed is the historical anomaly, not the norm.

On the face of it, my title is silly: there is no “before fiction” for humans, for we are, from the start of recorded history and from the start of...

Before Fiction

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Amateur films and photographs Germans made during the war are evidence in their own right, and exceed their makers' intentions.

Through Amateur Eyes is all about how amateur documentary films and photographs taken primarily by Germans can be used in the memory and memorialization of World War II and the...

Through Amateur Eyes

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Amateur films and photographs Germans made during the war are evidence in their own right.

I would hope that the browser who picked up Through Amateur Eyes in a bookstore would turn to the image section in the middle of the book. The archival images that...

Through Amateur Eyes

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Amateur films and photographs Germans made during the war are evidence in their own right, and exceed their makers' intentions.

What lead me to this research? I have always been interested in the visual documentation of the Holocaust, and at one point had considered writing my doctoral dissertation on the...

Through Amateur Eyes

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The Statue of Liberty had essentially nothing to do with immigration when it went up.

The Statue of Liberty tells the story of America’s most beloved icon, the symbol, we like to think, of our openness to the world. But how many Americans know that...

The Statue of Liberty

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The Statue of Liberty had essentially nothing to do with immigration when it went up.

My intellectual trajectory in coming to this book stems from my longstanding interest in France. I’m an American who has studied France and its history for the past 30 years. I...

The Statue of Liberty

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The Statue of Liberty had essentially nothing to do with immigration when it went up.

I hope browsers will look at the book’s prologue, since I open the story by describing an excursion to the Statue of Liberty, my first trip there since my 6...

The Statue of Liberty

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Victorian writers saw modern life as a world in play, with no conceptual outside.

Oscar Wilde—the subject of my concluding chapter—is the true hero of the book. Were a reader to read only one chapter, it should probably be my chapter on Wilde, for...

The World in Play

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Victorian writers saw modern life as a world in play, with no conceptual outside.

The most compelling and unsettling moment for me in all of Victorian literature comes when Alice tumbles down the rabbit hole: that epistemological abyss at the heart of nineteenth-century modernity....

The World in Play

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Victorian writers saw modern life as a world trapped inside play, with no outside.

My motivations for writing this book were largely historical and aesthetic. I wanted to explain the proliferation of various tropes of play in Victorian literary representations of modern life. Even...

The World in Play

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Muhammad leading his followers into Palestine in 634–35 is an earlier tradition than his death at Medina in 632.

The introduction will give readers the best overview of the issues and questions that the book engages, as well as its broader intellectual context. Nevertheless, I attempted to write the...

The Death of a Prophet

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An earlier tradition has Muhammad alive and leading his followers into Palestine after 632.

This book is an effort at the “quest for the historical Muhammad” that uses methods and perspectives borrowed from biblical and early Christian studies to investigate the beginnings of Islam....

The Death of a Prophet

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Muhammad leading his followers into Palestine in 634–35 is an earlier tradition than his death at Medina in 632.

One of the main goals of this book is to narrow the divide that exists between the study of religion in the late ancient Mediterranean and the study of Islamic...

The Death of a Prophet

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Costs and incentives decide what science gets done, and US research money should move to the physical sciences.

Everyone knows that research costs money, of course. But I think for many of us it is surprising just how much research costs—and just how expensive “small scale” science can...

How Economics Shapes Science

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Costs and incentives decide what science gets done, and US research money should move to the physical sciences.

At least since the days of “knabe” (boy) physics in the 1920s and 1930s, science has been thought to be a young person’s game. But is that really the case?...

How Economics Shapes Science

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Costs and incentives decide what science actually gets done.

How Economics Shapes Science focuses on how costs and incentives—core concepts in economics—shape the practice of science, especially the practice of science at universities. Costs matter: they play a role in...

How Economics Shapes Science

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Story is what most sets humans apart, and fiction survived evolution because stories are flight simulators for social life.

To see what a hard question this is, let’s conduct a fanciful, but hopefully illuminating, thought experiment. Throw your mind back into the mists of prehistory. Imagine that there are...

The Storytelling Animal

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Story, not intelligence or language, is what most sets humans apart.

You might not realize it, but you are a creature of an imaginative realm called Storyland. Storyland is your home and before you die you will spend decades there. If...

The Storytelling Animal

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Story is what most sets humans apart, and fiction survived evolution because stories are flight simulators for social life.

My career has focused on bridging the gap between the estranged cultures of the humanities and sciences. How can we use science to better understand fiction? And what can scientists...

The Storytelling Animal

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Computing became acceptable to the public as an aesthetic achievement, and the interface is an architectural invention.

I’d like to imagine that a reader picking up this book might be able to flip to the chapter that addresses a particular medium that interests them—e.g. graphics, industrial design,...

The Interface

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Computing became acceptable to the public as an aesthetic achievement, and the interface is an architectural invention.

The Interface is an attempt to explain how computing became an essential aspect of everyday life. This wasn’t always the case, and it wasn’t always certain that it would be. Since...

The Interface

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Computing won over the public as an aesthetic achievement, not a technical one.

In 1956 the president of IBM, Thomas Watson Jr., hired the industrial designer and architect Eliot Noyes, charging him with reinventing IBM’s corporate image at every level, from the logo...

The Interface

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Sexual change in twentieth-century Europe was no steady liberalization, and liberalizing campaigns carried their own atrocities inside them.

Readers have riveted onto different things. Some are most struck by the world of one hundred years ago, which I try to recreate in the first chapter. How prostitution was...

Sexuality in Europe

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Sexual change in twentieth-century Europe was no steady liberalization, and liberalizing campaigns carried their own atrocities inside them.

The twentieth century is often called “the century of sex” and seen as an era of increasing liberalization. Indeed, taking the century as a whole, we have seen the erosion...

Sexuality in Europe

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Sexuality in twentieth-century Europe did not follow a steady path of liberalization.

The book arcs from the waning of Victorianism to the collapse of Communism and the rise of European Islam. Throughout, it investigates the shifting fortunes of prostitution and marriage, of...

Sexuality in Europe

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Shakespeare's Sonnets resist sustained reading by design, because lyric earns its power by refusing narrative.

When did you last immerse yourself in a pool of make-believe? In a television drama, or a film, watched from the sofa or a cinema seat? A story you read...

Why Lyrics Last

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Shakespeare's Sonnets resist sustained reading by design, because lyric earns its power by refusing narrative.

Why do all cultures have verse? Why nevertheless, is poetry a minority taste, unlike stories, even among keen readers of literature? And why, all the same, does some verse succeed...

Why Lyrics Last

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Lyric poetry earns its power by refusing the mind's urge toward narrative.

In On the Origin of Stories I asked why we are storytelling and especially fiction-making animals. It’s a fat book, a fairly comprehensive book. But to be truly comprehensive about...

Why Lyrics Last

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Ideal theories of justice should be dropped entirely, and judgment should start from the physical sensation of injustice.

My thinking on judgment as a faculty triggered by a sense (or rather, a sensation) of injustice was first prompted by my involvement with the struggle against the communist regime...

The Scandal of Reason

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Judgment should start from the felt sense of injustice, not from ideal theories of justice.

Although the Enlightenment, at the dawn of Modernity, raised the beacon of Reason and thus raised humanity’s hopes for a right answer to complex issues, doubts about that promise emerged...

The Scandal of Reason

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Ideal theories of justice should be dropped entirely, and judgment should start from the physical sensation of injustice.

This book defends the duty of judgment and the freedom to err. Against the modernist ambition to discover truth by the power of reason, and post-modernist flagellation of both truth...

The Scandal of Reason

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Pakistan's celebrated modernists belong to a transnational Muslim South Asian modernism, not a national one.

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...

Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia

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The modernists filed as Pakistani national figures belong to a transnational Muslim South Asian modernism.

I wrote this book keeping in mind a number of audiences. Scholars of modernism who remain narrow in their scope and clearly need to understand it in a genuinely global...

Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia

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The modernists filed as Pakistani national figures belong to a transnational Muslim South Asian modernism.

My study looks at the emergence of modern art among Muslim South Asian artists by examining in some detail the work and intellectual concerns of a select number of artists...

Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia

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A social worker's finding of neglect is as factual as a doctor's reading of a blood-pressure number.

Why are we so worried about our dignity? References to human dignity are enshrined in human rights declarations as the ultimate value or criterion for assessing what people are allowed...

Why Things Matter to People

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Values are not subjective projections but fallible claims about human flourishing and suffering.

My book examines the role of values, reason and ethics, and concern with dignity in everyday life. It’s about everyday morality and immorality—banal goodness as well as banal evil. While...

Why Things Matter to People

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A social worker's finding of neglect is as factual as a doctor's reading of a blood-pressure number.

This book is intended to help social scientists make sense of the fact that our relation to the world is one of concern. The concern needn’t take the form of...

Why Things Matter to People

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US vaccine innovation has been falling since World War II because development itself was broken into specialized, outsourced pieces.

My interest in this topic began in 1999 when I was sitting in the back of a bus in Japan, reading an article about Aum Shinrikyo, a cult that released...

Long Shot

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US vaccine innovation has been falling since World War II because development itself was broken into specialized, outsourced pieces.

The ability to develop new vaccines quickly is essential to national security and public health. Historically, the U.S. has excelled at responding to national health emergencies. World War II-era programs...

Long Shot

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US vaccine innovation has been falling, not rising, since World War II.

I think the casual reader might be surprised to discover that the military made significant contributions to over half of the vaccines developed in the twentieth century. Just as military interest...

Long Shot

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The attack on the hockey stick was not scientific skepticism but an industry-funded campaign.

In the beginning of the prologue I draw upon a specific recent event: the theft of thousands of scientists’ emails, including many of mine. This is the world in which...

The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars

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The attack on the hockey stick was an industry-funded campaign built on fallacious statistics.

Readers familiar with some of the great debates in the history of science may appreciate the book’s attempt to place the modern debate over human-caused climate change in the broader...

The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars

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The attack on the hockey stick was an industry-funded campaign built on fallacious statistics.

This book tells my personal story, that is, the story of a young scientist, driven by a curiosity about the natural world, who found himself wandering, essentially by accident, into...

The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars

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The belief that science renders religion untenable rests on unexamined metaphysical assumptions with medieval roots.

The view that the findings of science are incompatible with claims of revealed religion per se is widespread—but mistaken. In the first chapter of The Unintended Reformation I explain why many intellectuals today think that science...

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Science does not make religion untenable or lead to atheism.

Instead, the Reformation influenced the eventual emergence of closed-universe atheism because of the unending doctrinal controversies that followed in its wake. The controversies unintentionally sidelined explicitly Christian claims about the...

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What worked for Taiwan, Korea and Singapore in electronics does not transfer to biotech, where governments bet blind.

Everyone is talking about innovation. In the current era of the global knowledge economy, it is generally agreed upon that innovation is the engine of economic growth. Making new things...

Betting on Biotech

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What worked for Taiwan, Korea and Singapore in electronics does not work for biotech.

Chapter 5 opens with an anecdote, a true story. A few years back I was giving a talk in Taiwan about the state of the biotech sector there. The government had...

Betting on Biotech

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What worked for Taiwan, Korea and Singapore in electronics does not transfer to biotech, where governments bet blind.

While I was doing field research during the 1990s for an earlier book, Healthy Democracies, I came across a great deal of government and industry documents focused on the imperatives...

Betting on Biotech

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Emotion is the syntax of Hegel's Phenomenology, and dialectic is a means of reconciling oneself to being torn.

Hegel is not a very agreeable philosopher—that much can probably be agreed upon. But the very fact that he has come to stand both for the cold imperialism of an...

Tropes of Transport

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Emotion is the syntax of Hegel's Phenomenology, and dialectic is a means of reconciling oneself to being torn.

For people who leaf through Tropes of Transport, I would want to bribe the goddess of chance to let the pages part at one of the points where I discuss...

Tropes of Transport

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Emotion is not a topic in Hegel's Phenomenology but the syntax of the text.

I am trained in philosophy and literary analysis. My particular take on the intersection of philosophy and literature consists in using the tools of a literary scholar to analyze a...

Tropes of Transport

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Florentine humanism owed far more to medieval traditions than has been recognized.

As an historian I have always been interested in the problem of defining historical periods and understanding the transitions between them. How, for example, did the Middle Ages, with its religious,...

Savonarola

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Florentine humanism owed far more to medieval traditions than has been recognized, which is why Savonarola captivated the city.

This is a biography of Girolamo Savonarola the fifteenth century penitential preacher who captivated Florence, the first city of the Renaissance, with his prophecies of civic glory and millennium. Fra Girolamo...

Savonarola

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Florentine humanism owed far more to medieval traditions than has been recognized, which is why Savonarola captivated the city.

I would like your browsing reader to begin with the Prologue. There they will look back from the scaffold on which the fallen prophet and his two lieutenants met their...

Savonarola

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Burke and Hare were the predictable product of a supply structure in which a cadaver was worth six months' wages.

Here is an excerpt from the first chapter. I hope readers think of it as a true-crime, historical CSI.On Halloween, 1828, sometime before 11 pm, Hugh Alston, a grocer in...

The Anatomy Murders

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Burke and Hare were not aberrant monsters but the product of a market for corpses.

The Burke and Hare anatomy murders were a sensation in their own day, the first serial killings to be reported in the popular press. The story traveled wherever newspapers were...

The Anatomy Murders

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Burke and Hare were the predictable product of a supply structure in which a cadaver was worth six months' wages.

The anatomy murders were serial killings carried out by William Burke and William Hare, two Irishmen resident in Edinburgh, Scotland. They murdered 16 people in the course of a 12-month...

The Anatomy Murders

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The Japanese invasion did not make nationalists of China's refugees, for them the war was a localizing phenomenon.

One of the most desperate decisions people in any culture must make in the wake of war, ethnic cleansing, epidemic, or famine is to flee their homes and become refugees....

In a Sea of Bitterness

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The Japanese invasion did not make nationalists of China's refugees, for them the war was a localizing phenomenon.

In a Sea of Bitterness is a narrative-rich study of spatial and social displacement during the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945. I describe an array of Chinese people and institutions that chose...

In a Sea of Bitterness

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The Japanese invasion made China's refugees cling to their native place, not to the nation.

If a browsing reader picked up a copy of the book, I would hope that the Introduction entitled “The Thousand-Person Pit” would hook him or her. An account of an...

In a Sea of Bitterness

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Disgust is the instinct that has to be learned, and it is a luxury of abundance.

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...

That’s Disgusting

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Disgust is the instinct that has to be learned, and it is a luxury of abundance.

That’s Disgusting is about the enigmatic and paradoxical nature of being human told through the lens of the emotion of disgust, our repulsions and our attractions, and the very fine...

That’s Disgusting

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Disgust is an instinct that has to be learned.

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...

That’s Disgusting

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The Stalin cult was manufactured without a manufacturer, since no central cult institution could exist in a collectivist polity.

The Stalin Cult crosses disciplinary boundaries: it is both history and art history and it speaks to the fields of symbolic politics, the high politics of Stalinism, socialist realist visual...

The Stalin Cult

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The Stalin cult was manufactured without a manufacturer, since no central cult institution could exist in a collectivist polity.

This book is about Joseph Stalin’s personality cult—where it came from, how it changed over time, and how it was made. In spite of its subject matter, I hope the...

The Stalin Cult

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The Stalin cult was manufactured without a single manufacturer.

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....

The Stalin Cult

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Salesman routing is no toy problem, an efficient algorithm for it would solve genetic sequencing and processor design too.

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...

In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman

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The traveling salesman problem is not a toy but the same problem as genetic sequencing and processor design.

You wake up in the morning and find that you need to visit a number of cities or towns before returning in the evening. What is the shortest possible route...

In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman

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Salesman routing is no toy problem, an efficient algorithm for it would solve genetic sequencing and processor design too.

In the hands of your browsing reader, I'd like the book to fall open to a pair of pages displaying two paintings by Julian Lethbridge, Traveling Salesman and Traveling Salesman...

In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman

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Astrology troubled the later Middle Ages because it straddled science, magic and faith at once.

The third and fifth chapters might be particularly engaging to the reader.The fifth chapter, “To Condemn a King,” encapsulates perfectly the many intellectual points that I take within my study.In...

A Kingdom of Stargazers

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Astrology troubled the later Middle Ages because it straddled science, magic and faith at once.

This is my first single-authored monograph and, as such, is a direct outgrowth of the dissertation that I defended from the University of Minnesota’s Department of History in 2005. In...

A Kingdom of Stargazers

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Medieval astrology was contested not because it was irrational but because it straddled science, magic and faith.

In A Kingdom of Stargazers I analyze the nebulous and tendentious practice that astrology occupied within the culture of the later Middle Ages, a period characterized by profound and multiple...

A Kingdom of Stargazers

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American cities stayed quiet after the early 1970s because violence turned inward and collective action was suppressed.

The book’s Prologue tells a story of murder and marginalization in the badlands of Philadelphia, a place where an explosive collision between urban transformation and rightward moving social politics has...

Why Don't American Cities Burn?

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American cities stopped burning not because conditions improved but because violence turned inward.

If you come across this book in a bookstore, I hope you will browse the Prologue, “The Death of Shorty,” and that it will draw you in to the rest...

Why Don't American Cities Burn?

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American cities stayed quiet after the early 1970s because violence turned inward and collective action was suppressed.

Why Don’t American Cities Burn? is about the collision between urban transformation and rightward moving social politics. A series of economic, demographic, and spatial changes have transformed American cities, producing an...

Why Don't American Cities Burn?

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The five tribunals built in the 1990s ended head-of-state immunity for atrocity crimes in fact, not merely in aspiration.

All the Missing Souls explains for the general reader atrocity crimes in the modern understanding—genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes—and the unique law that frames these crimes in the...

All the Missing Souls

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The five tribunals built in the 1990s ended head-of-state immunity for atrocity crimes in fact, not merely in aspiration.

Leadership impunity for the commission of atrocity crimes is on the losing side of history now. To understand why the highest political and military leaders are increasingly at risk of indictment...

All the Missing Souls

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