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Nearly half of adult cancer deaths worldwide are preventable.

While extending lives, we’re ignoring the origins of a brewing crisis. In our era of mindboggling, exorbitant therapeutic advancements, prevention remains the best medicine....

Outsmarting Cancer

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Ethics belongs not to the tool but to the hand that holds it.

Higher education has been especially eager to host this debate, which should not surprise. A system dependent on controlling the transmission of knowledge has every incentive to place itself at the center of any grand moral reckoning about a technology that threatens to route around it...

The Ethics of AI Are the Ethics of You

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De Gaulle became the one thing Churchill never managed to be, a great peacetime leader.

De Gaulle is very tall, socially awkward, quite cold, extraordinarily austere in his personal tastes. Churchill is short, very charming, not always entirely trustworthy...

The Last Titans

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The alphabet only looks fixed, and the right to adjust its letters belongs to every population that uses them.

Consequently, English has at a glance never seemed more united – but a glance only reveals half the story. What the eye misses the ear picks up: the spoken language...

Why Q Needs U

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Mazzy Star's album is about a Los Angeles being gentrified, and Hope Sandoval must be heard as a Mexican-American woman.

And at the end of the day, having grown up in LA, having grown up with Mazzy Star as the soundtrack of my life, I just wanted to do something that blended the personal with the research...

Mazzy Star’s So Tonight That I Might See

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Mathematics produces roughly a million new pages a year, and asking for the biggest, fewest and weirdest drives that growth.

A mathematical proof is a type of story. It has a beginning (statement of the theorem), an end (QED), and a middle (the proof itself). The better the story, the better the proof...

Reaching for the Extreme

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Social networks can be modeled by giving each person a random vector of interests.

How do connections form in complex networks? One elegant answer comes from the random dot product graph, a model that imagines every individual as a vector of interests and uses their dot product to reveal the hidden structure of social worlds.

Random dot product graphs

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The genres that matured around 1969, rock criticism and true crime among them, produced the post-truth order we live in.

Yet as an academic historian, I learned to approach the stories that people tell about the world as participating in larger projects to “invent” or “produce” or “construct” that world in some way...

The Musical Lives of Charles Manson

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The genres that matured around 1969, rock criticism and true crime among them, produced the post-truth order we live in.

To really understand a piece of writing, you must grasp its unity. And that unity can be grasped only by discovering how a work is one—and in that same moment, many...

The Musical Lives of Charles Manson

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Enver Hoxha is not explained by Albania, he was an ordinary twentieth-century tyrant of the Leninist type.

This is the challenge for historians, especially when you're teaching. It is to explain to students why an idea that obviously ended so badly was so attractive...

Enver Hoxha

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The Declaration's vagueness is deliberate, which makes originalism a misreading of its design.

Thomas Jefferson spent seventeen days in a second-story loft at the Graff House in Philadelphia working on the draft. He gets all the credit, but a good chunk of the Declaration was removed or added largely by Ben Franklin...

Declaration

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Unaffordable medicine is a standing economic choice, not a fact like gravity.

First, Abandon Binaries All Ye Who Enter Here. Lived life and therefore history are more complicated than simple oppositions...

The Apothecary’s Wife

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Modern architecture's interpenetration of inside and outside came from a turn-of-the-century breathing culture, with the lung as model.

Yet this is essentially what our lungs do: they blur the boundary between inside and outside and, although they are internal organs, maintain a constant connection to the external world. I began to see an analogy...

Breathing Space

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The tension between femininity and feminism is a late-twentieth-century artifact, and it is already dissolving among the young.

The Object Lessons series excels at connecting objects to larger implications. Ultimately, I hope my readers will become more curious about how something as banal as lipstick connects to sexuality, power, gender identity, and class...

Lipstick

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AI-driven design should deepen our physical contact with the world, not add complexity.

Post-Digital Humanism is the idea that digital tools should ultimately deepen our physical, emotional, and sensory relationship with the real world rather than detach us from it. Post-digital Humanism doesn’t mean after technology...

Post-Digital Humanism

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Diversity is a two-century-old principle, not a 1970s invention to justify affirmative action.

That old aphorism that great minds think alike is completely wrong; great minds think differently, and when they work together make great decisions and discoveries...

The Diversity Principle

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Mass childhood pickiness is a mid-twentieth-century historical phenomenon, not a natural developmental stage.

Home-cooked food can be more pleasurable than anything from a box. Kids can access that pleasure. Pleasure includes taste, sharing...

Picky

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Mass childhood pickiness is a mid-twentieth-century historical phenomenon, not a natural developmental stage.

Pleasure matters. Pickiness reduces pleasure for kids and parents. Parents are stressed because they don’t want picky kids and fear doing the wrong thing. I want to be part

Picky

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The destruction of Guatemalan democracy was propelled from outside the United States.

These forces built the very foundations of the CIA’s operations. The first plot, Operation PBFORTUNE, was started by the dictators and backed by United Fruit..

Caribbean Blood Pacts

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Glasses shape how their wearers are seen, and eyewear's price is driven by concentration of ownership, not materials.

I’m particularly fond of the part where I look at how glasses are portrayed in books. When eyewear first began to appear in literature, a whiff of sulfur or mystery hung over it; if glasses helped people see, what other powers might they possess? Besides sharpening vision, writers have imagined glasses revealing secrets...

A Four-Eyed World

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Prince's innovation was blending the Black and white sounds of a city that segregation had split in two.

This book is for Prince fans, music lovers, and the curious who want to learn about the city that produced arguably the most innovative and talented musician in history...

Prince’s Minneapolis

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Prince's innovation was blending the Black and white sounds of a city that segregation had split in two.

I explore how phenomena—prison-like containment in Chicago, music in Minneapolis, New York’s built environment—are shaped by place and time...

Prince’s Minneapolis

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Prince's sound was born of Minneapolis, not of genius alone.

One of the main ideas in this book is that music is connected to geography; it originates from a specific place. The social factors shaping that place...are reflected in the music...

Prince’s Minneapolis

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Early-life adversity speeds up puberty because reproducing early is adaptive.

Almost all discourse about nature and nurture only focuses on genetics when it comes to the nature side of things, ignoring natural selection, adaptation, and the fundamental goal of all living things...

The Nature of Nurture

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Brain mapping and intervention do not in themselves violate autonomy, the damage runs through unauthorized access to brain information.

I thought that most philosophers were not paying enough attention to the neurobiological basis of our conscious mental states, and how brain dysfunction can ...

Neuroethics

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Brain mapping and intervention do not in themselves violate autonomy, the damage runs through unauthorized access to brain information.

A third case shows how deep brain stimulation can benefit patients with Parkinson’s disease by restoring motor function and identity impaired and disrupted...

Neuroethics

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The real danger of brain science is unauthorized access to brain information, not the techniques.

Deep brain stimulation can restore motor control in people with Parkinson’s disease. Yet access to information about a person’s brain from neuroimaging...

Neuroethics

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Mathematics produces roughly a million new pages a year, and asking for the biggest, fewest and weirdest drives that growth.

Most applications of mathematics are hidden behind the scenes. No one wants to have to learn spherical trigonometry to use their car’s satellite navigation...

Reaching for the Extreme

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Friction is a designable tool, and tuning it is worth up to twenty percent of global energy consumption.

...we instinctively manipulate friction all the time. We use carts with wheels to help move heavy objects. We buy new tires when our treads wear out so our cars grip the road better...

Friction

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What matters about reason is the capacity to revise the rules of thinking.

What’s important about reason is not building up from certain foundations, but our ability to continually revise the rules that govern the way in which we think, and indeed how we live...

The Revenge of Reason

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Hope Sandoval of Mazzy Star has to be heard as a Mexican-American woman.

They’re a band that never wanted fame, and I mean that quite literally. They were with independent labels, they’re publishing stuff on their own, and they’re refusing to rush...

Mazzy Star’s So Tonight That I Might See

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White wedding dresses existed well before Queen Victoria, and the typical historical bride wore cotton, net or gauze.

Although the book covers such iconic examples as Grace Kelly, Jacqueline Kennedy and Beatle wife Pattie Boyd, I would perhaps hope that it would first fall open on pages covering the choices of ordinary women who had to be inventive to be fashionable. A favourite example can be found on page 61, where a glamorous fashion...

How to Read a Wedding Dress

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AI is implemented statistics, and its most immediate danger is the fear being manufactured by those who profit from it.

Some people have genuinely not recovered emotionally from the shock of a machine mimicking human language so fluently. We believed that language was uniquely ours...

Magic Is Made of Statistics and Marketing

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De Gaulle became the one thing Churchill never managed to be, a great peacetime leader.

I'm tempted to say one of the unique things about my book is that there's less of it. There are a lot of very long biographies of Churchill and de Gaulle, and what I hoped, in a funny kind of way, by putting the two men together,

The Last Titans

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Scatman John's stutter was the mechanism of his art, and overcoming is the wrong frame for disability.

This book sits at the intersection of music, disability, recovery culture, and visibility politics. It asks who gets to be seen, who gets to be famous, why we demand perfection from public figures, and what responsibility comes with a platform - especially when the body or voice ...

Scatman John

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Communism was one of the most alluring alternatives to becoming modern, especially in countries with poor financial resources and lacking social capital. Dictatorships are a response to insecurity and the crisis of self-confidence...

Enver Hoxha

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The alphabet only looks fixed, and the right to adjust its letters belongs to every population that uses them.

But another benefit comes from an appreciation of how the alphabet works (or sometimes doesn’t work), because we today are a chapter in its long story. The alphabet is a testament to innovation, and every population...

Why Q Needs U

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Black social dance from jazz through hip-hop is one continuum, and it made the American body.

What’s really fascinating is that Mura Dehn had to flee the Russian Revolution. Her father was an intellectual, and they lived in Odessa. They had to flee so fast they didn’t even bring their passports or birth certificates or anything like that. They got on a boat. Her father spoke many languages, so did her mother, and so did Mura. Odessa was a highly intellectual, artistic...

Mura Dehn

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The genres that matured around 1969, rock criticism and true crime among them, produced the post-truth order we live in.

I try to understand how the different genres that emerged or entered maturity in the late 1960s – including rock music criticism, true crime, gonzo journalism, science fiction...

The Musical Lives of Charles Manson

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Modern architecture's interpenetration of inside and outside came from a turn-of-the-century breathing culture, with the lung as model.

I call the resulting breathing culture and the architecture it produced respiratory modernism. It describes a new approach to modern architecture...

Breathing Space

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Natural intelligence is a property of life. Artificial Intelligence is what you get when biology is stripped out of it.

Artificial intelligence is an act of mimicry. We design systems we fully and deliberately control to reproduce our own ability to purposefully manipulate matter. What we build has no soul. What we build has no biological intent...

Artificial Intelligence Is Intelligence That Is Built, Not Born

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Mass childhood pickiness is a mid-twentieth-century historical phenomenon, not a natural developmental stage.

So the argument that pickiness is natural and inevitable doesn’t hold up. That’s extremely hard for parents to hear. I try to understand mass pickiness as a historical phenomenon that has shaped...

Picky

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The tension between femininity and feminism is a late-twentieth-century artifact, and it is already dissolving among the young.

For me to explore the fraught nature of femininity within academia—and which persists within the professional realm more broadly—is something I do not take for granted. It’s something I have been preoccupied by personally and intellectually for at least the last 30 years. I was very lucky...

Lipstick

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Confidence about animal consciousness outruns the evidence, and skepticism here helps animals rather than harming them.

I want a ‘just browsing’ reader to the first chapter first. That will tell them whether this is a book they want to read. They may put it down in disappointment, preferring instead a book that tells them clearly which animals are conscious and which are not. Or they may find the whole idea

Who is Conscious?

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Friction is a designable tool, and tuning it is worth up to twenty percent of global energy consumption.

From the DNA in our bodies to the formation of planets in the universe, friction is present and that’s what makes it such an intriguing force. However, friction is arguably the most underappreciated force in our lives...

Friction

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Glasses shape how their wearers are seen, and eyewear's price is driven by concentration of ownership, not materials.

I’m extremely near-sighted. I’ve worn glasses since childhood. If I misplaced them, I’d need glasses to find my glasses. My vision is so bad that I need them to cross the street. But I’m embarrassed to say that, for most of my life, I didn’t give them much thought. When I was kicking around the idea...

A Four-Eyed World

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Today’s mathematics is far-ranging, diverse, and creative — not remotely like its typical public image.

If you want financial reasons for the importance of mathematics, that’s a pretty clear answer. But there are other reasons too, which I think are more important — among them the subject’s intrinsic beauty, the element of surprise....

Reaching for the Extreme

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Opera's fights over casting, blackface and new work are labor and power conflicts as much as aesthetic ones.

This is tricky. A lot of people see the word opera or a horned helmet and think it’s not for them. They think it’s hard work. My first hope is that they’re not turned off and actually open the book. Once they do, it’s clear this is not your grandmother’s opera book. There’s serious research...

Opera Wars

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The dismissive behavior from Western Marxists diminishes the importance of the lessons that can be retrieved from the half-century of extreme-left dictatorships.

What’s unique about the Enver Hoxha: Twentieth-Century Tyrant is that we don’t actually have a decent scholarly biography of Enver Hoxha. There is some work—Blendi Fefziu has a book, which is fairly standard, even in its title...

Enver Hoxha

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Black social dance from jazz through hip-hop is one continuum, and it made the American body.

I started dancing professionally in California. I had been a jazz dancer growing up. My first teacher—and my closest teacher in my youth—was a vaudeville hoofer. So there was not much technical training; there was an incredible amount of passion. She was tap. She was jazz. She wasn’t doing the steps; she wasn’t just teaching “shuffle off to Buffalo.” She inhabited it. She embodied the whole thing...

Mura Dehn

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Brontë's surviving garments are evidence of the same weight as her letters, novels and portraits.

Clothes are, and always have been, a vital part of our daily lives. Few things walk with us so closely. The garments that we wear literally mould themselves to our bodies, even becoming imbued with our DNA...

Charlotte Brontë's Life Through Clothes

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Energy's worth depends on its entropy, so a kilowatt hour of electricity and one of gas are different goods.

The story of Sadi Carnot is captivating - the young military engineer with no hope of advancement on account of a notorious father, who established wonderfully general results by pure thought. A genius who died before anyone understood his work. Almost as remarkable is that of brewer James Joule whose hobby...

Entropy

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The Public Theater is in effect America's national theatre, and it works by managing rather than resolving a contradiction.

The book is pretty expansive, and so I would imagine any lover of theatre would find something in the manuscript that grabs them. I intentionally wrote an academic book for a wide audience. It’s not a difficult read but at the same time, it really dives deep into the role of theatre in contemporary America...

One Public

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White wedding dresses existed well before Queen Victoria, and the typical historical bride wore cotton, net or gauze.

This book follows the structure of my previous publications How to Read a Dress (2017/2021) and How to Read a Suit (2020). Both were born out of a wish to create an academic, yet accessible guide to ‘reading’ historical fashion, teaching the reader to recognise and date changing silhouettes...

How to Read a Wedding Dress

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White wedding dresses existed well before Queen Victoria, and the typical historical bride wore cotton, net or gauze.

How to Read A Wedding Dress is a visual, annotated history of one of life’s most symbolic and significant garments: the wedding dress. Examples focus particularly on the trend for white which became a global phenomenon from the late nineteenth century onwards...

How to Read a Wedding Dress

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The genial, racially progressive Mark Twain is a manufactured figure, and maintaining it requires forgetting what Clemens actually wrote.

While there are moments where my critique of Twain is sharp, I also find a poignancy in his flaws and a deep humanism in his efforts to move beyond them. Other writers...

The Ghosts of Mark Twain

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Confidence about animal consciousness outruns the evidence, and skepticism here helps animals rather than harming them.

My motivation for writing this book was – to put it bluntly – annoyance. What annoyed me so much was the certainty with which people now talk about animal consciousness and what animals feel, using evidence that, in my view, simply did not stand up to scrutiny. This posed a problem

Who is Conscious?

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The tension between femininity and feminism is a late-twentieth-century artifact.

Lipstick is really a metonym for larger systems of adornment, especially feminine adornment. Though it’s part of the Object Lessons series, the book, Lipstick, is not a comprehensive history of the object. Other books have done that quite well...

Lipstick

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Glasses shape how their wearers are seen.

A Four-Eyed World is a cultural history of one of humanity’s greatest inventions—eyeglasses—that explores their origins, their future in technology, and more. Along the way, I look at everything from the history of deficient eyesight to the stigma surrounding glasses—how people really feel about those who wear them....

A Four-Eyed World

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Black social dance from jazz through hip-hop is one continuum, and it made the American body.

Mura Dehn is this fascinating woman. When I first came in contact with her, nobody knew who she was. I did my dissertation on her, and in the 30 years since, she has become very famous in some circles. When Bloomsbury approached me I had just retired, and I had a list, as long as my leg, of things that I was gonna do...

Mura Dehn

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A cloud is a flux in continual self-modification, and Impressionist brushwork records it more faithfully than a photograph.

If someone were to approach the book at a bookstore and pick it up to browse through, I think initially it would be the beautiful pastel “look and feel” that would first catch their attention, which is soothing and pleasing to the eye...

Clouds

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Infinity is inconceivable but not inscrutable, and mathematics contains several mutually inequivalent infinities.

Mathematics is not a dreary sequence of equations and calculations. Many ideas are brought to life through pictures. I hope that a casual bookstore browser might open this Guide to Infinity

A Guide to Infinity

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Manga dates from the 1860s rise of periodicals, and fans, not only the industry, made the medium.

The book has been in a few bookstores. I got tagged by a comic shop in the Lower East Side in Manhattan on Instagram that's carrying it. There's at least one other bookstore in San Francisco that's carrying it. For a person looking at it in a store, the cover is quite good,...

Manga's First Century

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Manga dates from the 1860s rise of periodicals, and fans, not only the industry, made the medium.

I am an independent scholar. This was my dissertation, and I always meant to publish it. I revised this so many times, but it is still largely based on the dissertation. I did a lot more reading for the book and more research during the book revision phase. Shout out to Mercari in Japan for sources! When I was doing my dissertation research, I lived in Tokyo. I spent a lot of time in the National Diet Library...

Manga's First Century

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Leaving women's unpaid household and caregiving labor out of the economic account is a value judgement.

“In My Cowboy Era” is a great subsection to stumble upon in the “Our Economic Power Era” introduction. My hope is that readers would naturally open the book to this page. In addition to giving a flavor of the entirety of the book, it encourages readers to think about their own best gritty, hard-working era ...

Swiftynomics

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Opera's fights over casting, blackface and new work are labor and power conflicts as much as aesthetic ones.

Opera Wars is very much an examination of where the opera industry currently stands and all of the pressure points and conflicts that have emerged from having this four-century-old art form collide with contemporary society. I divide the book into eight key battlegrounds...

Opera Wars

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Opera's fights over casting, blackface and new work are labor and power conflicts as much as aesthetic ones.

I’ve been living with opera since I was fourteen. I trained as a classical vocalist, went to a music conservatory, and was a freelance opera singer for a decade in the United States. Around the same time, I started a small opera company producing shows, and I began writing lyrics and libretti...

Opera Wars

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The Public Theater is in effect America's national theatre, and it works by managing rather than resolving a contradiction.

I have a special interest in oral histories and anthropology, and have tailored my theatre writing around those interests. Big questions that arise: How does a cultural institution serve its community? How does The Public reflect the mores and mythologies of twenty-first century America? Is it possible...

One Public

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The Public Theater is in effect America's national theatre, and it works by managing rather than resolving a contradiction.

One Public explores the contemporary story of one of the most influential theatres in America. While the study covers the colorful history of The Public from its founding by Joseph Papp, the focus of the manuscript is the trajectory of a theatrical impulse, and how the Public nurtures plays from the workshop phase...

One Public

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Meibutsu is one interlinked system of named, famous and regional things, rooted in elite connoisseurship rather than regional food.

Meibutsu may take so many forms that it’s hard to single out a representative example, but one that I found particularly fascinating, because it exemplifies the cultural specificity of the meibutsu value system, is an ancient piece of aromatic agarwood in the Shōsōin Imperial Storehouse on the grounds of Nara’s Tōdaiji temple. Agarwood was a luxury commodity i

Exemplary Things

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Confidence about animal consciousness outruns the evidence.

Many people are fully convinced that animals such as dogs, cats and other mammals are conscious, but what about all the others? What about, birds, fish, octopuses and even crabs and insects? If a dog is conscious, what about the fleas living in the dog’s fur?

Who is Conscious?

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Scatman John's stutter was not an obstacle he overcame, but the mechanism of his art.

In the 1990s, a middle-aged, stuttering jazz pianist unexpectedly became the best-selling male artist in Europe, outselling even Michael Jackson. His name was John Paul Larkin. But the world knew him as Scatman John. John was a lifelong stutterer...

Scatman John

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Close Encounters is a transition film, and the redemption it grants is available only to the man.

If someone picks the book in a bookstore and they've already seen the film, I would want them to start thinking about this other way of interpreting the film as being transitional. I would want them to learn some new things about the production history. But I don't see it as taking the place of the film. I don't see it as substituting for the experience of it. One thing that was very nice was that the BFI allowed...

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

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Brontë's surviving garments are evidence of the same weight as her letters, novels and portraits.

This interdisciplinary book engages with material culture, literary biography, historical scholarship, feminist theory, and dress studies. It explores questions of identity — emotional, societal, and physical — and shows how garments embody both inner

Charlotte Brontë's Life Through Clothes

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Brontë's surviving garments are evidence of the same weight as her letters, novels and portraits.

In a nutshell, this richly illustrated biography explores Charlotte Brontë’s life through the garments she left behind, pieces that, until now, had remained largely unexplored.Collectively, these material witnesses...

Charlotte Brontë's Life Through Clothes

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Sake has never been a fixed tradition, and pairing it with particular foods is a recent import from wine culture.

Well, if the book is in the bookstore, that's great. And if someone picks it up, even better. I'm very happy with the cover. My wife did the watercolor and...

Kanpai

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Sake has never been a fixed tradition, and pairing it with particular foods is a recent import from wine culture.

I called the book A History of Sake, because my method is mostly historical. I have looked at a lot of written documents, but I find that the more I...

Kanpai

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Romantic comedies hide their aims in plain sight, and reading them closely exposes contemporary social goals and beliefs.

The book is organised into seven main sections where I examine the film’s narrative chapters, alternating with seven shorter parts where my focus is even more micro, and I look...

When Harry Met Sally...

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Romantic comedies hide their aims in plain sight, and reading them closely exposes contemporary social goals and beliefs.

The book relates to now-traditional ideas within the discipline of Film Studies, that there are significant insights as well as pleasures to be gleaned by the very close analysis of...

When Harry Met Sally...

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Romantic comedies hide their aims in plain sight, and reading them closely exposes contemporary social goals and beliefs.

The book is a study of the 1989 romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally… written by Nora Ephron and directed by Rob Reiner. It’s one in a series of books...

When Harry Met Sally...

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A cloud is a flux in continual self-modification, and Impressionist brushwork records it more faithfully than a photograph.

The main concept that we are trying to express is the inner character of clouds, their inherent transient behaviour, that they are not singular independent “snapshots” (such as photos on Instagram), but that they exist as part of a “flux”. Clouds are in constant..

Clouds

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A cloud is not a discrete object but a flux in continual self-modification.

The book is principally about the science of clouds but its unique and distinctive feature - one that differentiates it from any other book ever published on weather and clouds – is our use of classic 18th and 19th century impressionist art to illustrate the clouds...

Clouds

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Infinity is inconceivable but not inscrutable, and mathematics contains several mutually inequivalent infinities.

This tour of mathematical infinities was inspired by my granddaughter Shlomit who, some years ago, called me to ask: What is the number before infinity? A fantastic question!

A Guide to Infinity

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Futurism's machine worship ran on Bergson and Nietzsche, not progress, and we are still in Marinetti's world.

Marinetti called World War One the “finest Futurist poem.” Rather than spout mere rhetoric, however, he and his Futurist confrères put their bayonets where their pens and brushes were. Several members served...

Futurism

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Futurism's machine worship ran on Bergson and Nietzsche, not progress, and we are still in Marinetti's world.

Futurism’s outsized ambition responded to the limited and limiting conditions of Italian modernity. It was a still chiefly agrarian country, unified for less than half a century. Its identity remained wedded to...

Futurism

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Futurism's machine worship was never rationalist or positivist.

This book offers a synthetic account of the Futurist movement, founded in 1909 by the poet and impresario F.T. Marinetti. Exasperated by Italy’s association with ancient ruins and Renaissance masterpieces – at the expense of a truly contemporary culture – Marinetti called for a radical tabula rasa. Artistic treasures and literary canon ...

Futurism

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Romanticism's radical strand treats the aesthetic imagination as an ethical power and democracy, religion and ecology as one question.

So, you’re at the bookstore. You come upon Radical Romanticism and, flipping through its opening pages, you read a passage on a dream in Wordsworth’s Prelude. A man awakens in a desert, is handed a shell shaped like a book, and hears within it “a loud prophetic...

Radical Romanticism

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Romanticism's radical strand treats the aesthetic imagination as an ethical power and democracy, religion and ecology as one question.

Radical Romanticism emerges from a crossroads: environmental humanities, religious studies, political theory, decolonial thought, and literary studies. While each field provides a distinctive angle of vision, the radical Romantic interpretive framework allows me to weave these

Radical Romanticism

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Romantic imagination is not apolitical yearning but an ethical power.

At its heart, Radical Romanticism is a book about how we might live—ethically, imaginatively, and in fuller relation—at a time when so many feel unmoored by environmental upheaval, social injustice, and the fraying of democratic life. It suggests that a subset of Romanticism, when seen from a broader angle

Radical Romanticism

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Energy's worth depends on its entropy, so a kilowatt hour of electricity and one of gas are different goods.

Entropy is both a property of matter and a device for selecting probability distributions in light of data. Hence it's an enormously useful tool that should be widely understood. The book explains how entropy gives insight into several aspects of the energy transition...

Entropy

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Close Encounters is a transition film, and the redemption it grants is available only to the man.

I don't think any person's path is the same as any others. I grew up watching a lot of movies. I didn't know that could be a profession until I went to college to study in a very different area. There was a course on film appreciation, and that made me realize you could study film. And I started studying, reading, collecting books on cinema. I was very influenced by Hitchcock...

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

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The genial, racially progressive Mark Twain is a manufactured figure, and maintaining it requires forgetting what Clemens actually wrote.

Many of us have been shocked by the brazen denials and revisions of racial and racist history that have been occurring all over the country. However, this whitewashing of American culture is nothing new. In fact, Toni Morrison suggests, in her seminal book on the intersections of race and metaphor in America, Playing in the Dark

The Ghosts of Mark Twain

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The genial, racially progressive Mark Twain is a manufactured figure.

Mark Twain didn’t believe in ghosts—at least, not the sort that rattle chains or float down darkened corridors. This fact, however, appears to carry no weight in the afterlife. Only a few years after his death, a number of psychics and mediums began to conjure the ghost of Mark Twain. And with an impressive regularity, the ghostly Twain appeared on cue, keen to perform and willing to offer advice...

The Ghosts of Mark Twain

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Meibutsu is one interlinked system of named, famous and regional things, rooted in elite connoisseurship rather than regional food.

I've been fascinated with the term meibutsu for a long time. In 1993, I published a book about Japan’s industrialist collectors. While writing it, I became intrigued with the fact that...

Exemplary Things

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Meibutsu is one interlinked system of named, famous and regional things, rooted in elite connoisseurship rather than regional food.

Exemplary Things investigates the history of a Japanese cultural keyword, meibutsu, and the pervasive influence it has had in shaping consumption practices in Japan. It's a term that has no exact anglophone equivalent. Japanese commodity culture developed in the 15th century, and in Exemplary Things, I show how

Exemplary Things

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Lee's raid on Washington to take or kill Lincoln was a genuine last gamble, and it nearly worked.

One wide angle is that there’s more we don’t know about history than we do know—by a lot. It’s possible that 90 or even 99 percent of everything ever written historically has disappeared. Paper decomposes. The victors write history and scrub it clean...

Rebels at the Gates

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Lee's raid on Washington to take or kill Lincoln was a genuine last gamble, and it nearly worked.

Rebels at the Gates is about the United States Civil War in the 1860s. Of course, entire forests have been filled with pages of books on the American Civil War, and rightfully so. It was clearly one of the defining events in American history. However, my angle is new and unexplored...

Rebels at the Gates

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Leaving women's unpaid household and caregiving labor out of the economic account is a value judgement.

I began my career as an undergraduate student unsure of what to do but with a desire to make the world a better place. After studying Spanish and social work and still not feeling satisfied with an ability to make big macro change, an advisor nudged

Swiftynomics

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Leaving women's unpaid household and caregiving labor out of the economic account is a value judgement.

Swiftynomics is about understanding women as economic agents of change. Taylor Swift is its muse. The book highlights the often-ignored economic activities that women contribute to their families, communities, and the economy through economic growth. I delve into themes of reinvention and masterminding to explain how we grow, advance, and continue...

Swiftynomics

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Inge Lehmann discovered the Earth's solid inner core in 1936, and her achievement is larger for what it cost her.

If a browsing reader opened the book at random, I would hope they land on the first pages—the prologue with the mysterious love letter. That letter changed the way I understood Inge Lehmann. It is only one page. It is unsigned because the next page was missing. But its first lines open a door into a part of her life that has always been kept in the shadows. It begins...

If I Am Right, and I Know I Am

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