All the threads

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

More than a traditional biography this book takes on the form of a popular science exploration, inviting the readers on a journey through the changing landscape of Earth science. Interwoven with the story of Inge Lehmann’s achievements is the history of Earth Science which underwent a revolution during her long and eventful life....

If I Am Right, and I Know I Am

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

Manga’s First Century is about the history of manga. It says 1905 to 1989 in the subtitle, but actually it jumps back immediately to the 1860s, when periodicals first emerged in Japan. It is about 125 years, give or take, which is a long time for a modern history. I am making the argument that manga is a modern thing that emerges out of modernity in Japan. Exploring where periodicals started in Japan, and what...

Manga's First Century

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Infinity is inconceivable but not inscrutable.

Infinity. Inconceivable! Agreed. Inscrutable! Nope. The infinite is hard to grasp. Does the universe extend without bound beyond what we can observe? Would we want to be immortal? Will this boring movie go on forever? Infinite time, space, wealth, love …

A Guide to Infinity

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

A four-dimensional hypercube has 32 edges. Here’s why. Start with a simple line segment. It has only one edge...

A Guide to Infinity

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

This book is about Steven Spielberg's 1977 film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. A lot of people assume this is special effects driven film and about “wow” and “wonder”—which it is—but it's also about alienated lost masculinity. Part of what I argue—and I think this is the new angle to the book—is that in the beginning of the 70s films by Paul Schrader, Martin Scorsese, Hal Ashby, Kubrick and others...

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

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

Challenge Problem - A rectangle has 4 edges and a cube has 12 edges. How many edges does a four-dimensional hypercube have?

A Guide to Infinity

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What passes for art history is criticism in disguise, and there will be a period when Rembrandt is not admired.

The title Rethinking American Art applies both to me and to the field—it’s constantly being rethought. My hope is that anyone interested in history, collecting, or American culture will take a look. American history itself is constantly reinterpreted—the facts are the same, but interpretations change...

Rethinking American Art

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Energy's worth depends on its entropy.

Entropy is a concept that's almost as important as energy, but far less widely understood. The book explains how until the 1850s the two concepts were confused, and that a clear understanding of what entropy really is was reached only in 1947...

Entropy

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Diversity is where social and biological understandings of race blur together, and the blurring runs in both political directions.

The introduction would provide the best sense of what the book covers and what it hopes to accomplish. Here is a quote: “One might have thought that the biologization of race, with its eugenic overtones, was primarily driven by voices from the Right. While this has often been the case, we also see well well-meaning liberals

The Uses of Diversity

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Diversity is where social and biological understandings of race blur together, and the blurring runs in both political directions.

I came to this book through my decades-long engagement with issues at the intersection of race, science, law and justice. I began over thirty years ago by exploring sites of the legal management of identity. This led me into the arena of privacy law and the ways in which it serves as a principle for managing individual identity in the face of intrusive market force and state policies...

The Uses of Diversity

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The question to ask of the Global South is when it is, and only cosmopolitanism survives as an answer.

The book looks to modern and contemporary literature and film from Turkey and Iran. The chapters examine the temporalities of the late Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami and the Turkish Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk. They interpret other Middle Eastern modernist writers including the poets Forough Farrokhzad and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, as well as the Ottoman novelist Ahmet Midhat Efendi...

The Dialectic of Cosmopolitan Time

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The question to ask of the Global South is when it is, and only cosmopolitanism survives as an answer.

The first two words of the book are Edward Said. His body of work continues to inspire debate within postcolonial studies almost 50 years after the publication of his 1978 hit, Orientalism. I’m less interested in that specific text than in the misunderstandings or scholarly lacunae it generated. A focus on Orientalism also obscures his incredible range, which included classical music...

The Dialectic of Cosmopolitan Time

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Time is also cultural, political, and shaped by power.

The book asks not where the Global South is—a fair question in its own right—but when it is. After the colonial era, many postcolonial writers felt an acute sense of belatedness. They considered the “true present” to be somewhere else—namely, in Europe...

The Dialectic of Cosmopolitan Time

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Rum was invented, not discovered, and its decisive innovation was the idea that trash could be made into treasure.

I tried to tell a story when writing The Invention of Rum, and like most stories this one is probably best enjoyed from the beginning. If readers start with the introduction, they will …

The Invention of Rum

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

Kanpai, the History of Sake is about Japan's traditional alcoholic beverage, sake, which is often called rice wine, because it's made out of rice, but it's really not made like wine. When you make wine, you have fruit, typically grapes, and those already have sugar in them. You can let nature run its course, and those will naturally ferment. But with rice, you need to use a special mold called 'koji'...

Kanpai

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Silence is a political technology in its own right, and it outlives the regime that installed it.

I would begin with the preface where I describe my first meeting with Krum Horozov, one of the most candid survivors I interviewed. In the late spring of 2006, I stood at the door of his apartment not yet knowing that this encounter would define the years to come. Horozov, an eighty-one-year-old former political prisoner, had spent eleven years in camps and prisons...

Unsilencing

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Emergency swap lines between central banks depend more on personal trust than on treaties, rules or state power.

For anyone who stumbled upon Bankers’ Trust in a bookstore, I’d hope they’d open to the first pages, where the story begins not with numbers or charts, but with people....

Bankers' Trust

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Language is many nested processing routines rather than one faculty, and the dual stream model is the organizing fact.

If browsing, I'd hope readers encounter some of the case studies I describe to illustrate key concepts. The famous neurologist and author, Oliver Sacks, was a master of using neurological...

Wired for Words

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Silence is a political technology in its own right, and it outlives the regime that installed it.

Unsilencing belongs to the global conversation about how societies remember—or refuse to remember—state violence. It speaks to the legacy of the gulag but also to the aftermath of authoritarianism everywhere, from past dictatorships to the lives of today’s refugees and political prisoners. The book is also a meditation on silence itself—how it becomes a political technology...

Unsilencing

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Language is many nested processing routines rather than one faculty, and the dual stream model is the organizing fact.

In its broadest scope, the book addresses the age-old mind-body problem: how does the 3-pound hunk of meat in our heads give rise to our ability to perceive the world, understand it, and act within it successfully? Although this problem falls under the broad umbrella of cognitive neuroscience, language is a unique testbed in that it involves many aspects of cognition within ...

Wired for Words

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Language is many nested processing routines rather than one faculty, and the dual stream model is the organizing fact.

I teach a course on the neural architecture of language at the University of California, Irvine. The first assignment I give my students is to pick a day and see how long they can go without using language: insert some earplugs and carry on with no talking, no texting, no reading, no language-based media. Most give up before the day is half over, reporting frustration, boredom, and isolation...

Wired for Words

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Emergency swap lines between central banks depend more on personal trust than on treaties, rules or state power.

Bankers’ Trust: How Social Relations Avert Global Financial Collapse sits at the crossroads of international political economy, financial history, and the study of power and trust in global governance. It asks enduring questions: how do countries cooperate under pressure...

Bankers' Trust

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Great minds think differently.

This book examines the blurring of the distinction between social understandings of race and biological understandings of genetic variation, showing how the concept of diversity is often deployed in ways that threaten to biologize race or undermine efforts to address racial injustice. Diversity serves a special role here precisely because, over the past half century, it has become ...

The Uses of Diversity

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Tennis is a cultural generator, and the reason to watch it is that the court exposes character.

If a reader finds The Art of Tennis in a bookstore, I hope, first of all, that they look at the cover, and they realize that this should be fun. I think the cover is very skillfully painted in a lighthearted way. This is supposed to be just like the fun of watching a game, the fun of playing, and so on. And then I hope the person will open the book and realize that he or she is in for some surprises. This is not going to be...

The Art of Tennis

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Rolling Stone's changes between 1967 and 1987 were pragmatic adaptations to a changing audience and country, not selling out.

As a historian, one of my primary professional goals is to help people better understand the past. The recent past especially can seem familiar and encourage the mistaken belief that people and conditions in, say..

Rolling Stone and the Rise of Hip Capitalism

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Rolling Stone's changes between 1967 and 1987 were pragmatic adaptations to a changing audience and country, not selling out.

When I decided to write about Rolling Stone and read previous works about the magazine, I realized that I needed a new angle. It seemed like a good idea to try to produce a narratively focused cultural history. It’s a book that tells a “story,..

Rolling Stone and the Rise of Hip Capitalism

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Rolling Stone's changes between 1967 and 1987 were pragmatic adaptations to a changing audience and country, not selling out.

This book is about a seemingly crazy idea that turned into one of the most remarkable publishing successes of the twentieth century. In 1967, Jann Wenner, a 20-year-old Berkeley dropout, and Ralph J. Gleason, a 50-year...

Rolling Stone and the Rise of Hip Capitalism

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You cannot know a bias led you wrong without already knowing the truth, so thinking should be about process.

If you pick up the book, then you’ll probably begin at the beginning: In the Old Town of Edinburgh, many years ago, there was a shop that sold curiosities. Every day, as people walked by the shop, they looked in the window. They looked at the curious things...

Radical Thinking

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Inge Lehmann discovered the Earth's solid inner core in 1936.

If I Am Right, and I Know I Am is the story of a woman who changed our understanding of the planet but never received the recognition she deserved. It is the first biography of Inge Lehmann, the Danish geophysicist who discovered Earth’s solid inner core in 1936. I didn’t want to write a traditional scientific biography. I wanted to write a book...

If I Am Right, and I Know I Am

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Rum was invented, not discovered, and its decisive innovation was the idea that trash could be made into treasure.

A book that takes this long to write is bound to have multiple origin stories. One came from my attempts as an undergraduate to think about Caribbean taverns as one place where many different …

The Invention of Rum

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Silence is not the absence of speech or memory but a historical agent and a political technology in its own right.

Unsilencing is the first comprehensive study of the Bulgarian gulag— a network of forced-labor camps and prisons that operated throughout the communist era from 1945 to 1989. Referred to as “Little Siberia,” these camps interned thousands without trial, subjected them to inhumane conditions, and silenced them for decades. Drawing on two decades of archival research, oral history interviews...

Unsilencing

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Fashion is significant precisely because it is superficial, and psychoanalytic concepts are the right instruments for reading clothes.

The appearance of a book is very important to me. I was playing with different images, but none of them were quite right. I wanted a fashion image, but I also wanted it to say psychoanalysis. We hired a graphic designer to do things for the museum exhibitions, and we have a very good one who works under the name Sarko (Steven Sarkowski). He came up with this wild graphic lettering, which really...

Dress, Dreams, and Desire

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You cannot know a bias led you wrong without already knowing the truth, so thinking should be about process.

The book actually began as a ‘critical thinking’ course at the University of Edinburgh. However, having done research on the history of ‘critical thinking’, I took a different approach to...

Radical Thinking

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Music is a biological force that does what no single drug can, and medicine massively underuses it.

Good Vibrations is written so that readers can open it anywhere and immediately find something that speaks to them. You can simply turn to a chapter that connects with what matters to you right now: perhaps the sections about emotional wellbeing, stress reduction, and resilience; or those about ...

Good Vibrations

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You cannot know a bias led you wrong without already knowing the truth, so thinking should be about process.

Radical Thinking is a book about how we make sense of the world, and how we can make more sense of it. But it’s not a typical ‘critical thinking’ book. It’s ‘radical’ (from the Latin radic, meaning ‘root’) because it’s about the roots - the foundations - of what we think. In other words, it’s about the things that shape our thoughts...

Radical Thinking

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Music is a biological force that does what no single drug can, and medicine massively underuses it.

Good Vibrations builds on a scientific and cultural shift in how we understand music. For a long time, music was considered “just entertainment”: pleasant, but biologically unimportant. In the book,...

Good Vibrations

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Hobbes and his contemporaries founded modern politics by redefining the Bible's political terms.

Pages 53-54 frame Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, usually read as a work of secular political thought, as an intervention in the theological-political of his time:Hobbes was explicit, in his autobiography, about...

England’s Israel and the Foundations of Modern Political Thought‍

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We tend to think of modernity as a time when religion could be set aside without this having a major effect on public discourse. But this understanding of modernity is...

England’s Israel and the Foundations of Modern Political Thought‍

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Modern secular politics was conceived inside mid-seventeenth-century England's theological fight.

England’s Israel and the Foundations of Modern Political Thought explores how foundational ideas of modern politics that are usually considered secular were, in fact, born out of deep …

England’s Israel and the Foundations of Modern Political Thought

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What passes for art history is criticism in disguise, and there will be a period when Rembrandt is not admired.

I don’t have the faintest idea who the audience is for this book. I just thought it would be good to write a book, so my wife and I spent...

Rethinking American Art

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Rum was invented, not discovered, and its decisive innovation was the idea that trash could be made into treasure.

The Invention of Rum is my attempt to answer how people living in the Atlantic world invented rum and subsequently wrestled with the wide-ranging implications of its production and …

The Invention of Rum

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What passes for art history is criticism in disguise.

Rethinking American Art: Collectors, Critics, and the Changing Canon is about the real history of art. Most books on art history are written from the point of view of the author…

Rethinking American Art

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Music is a biological force that does what no single drug can, and medicine massively underuses it.

Good Vibrations builds on a scientific and cultural shift in how we understand music. For a long time, music was considered “just entertainment”: pleasant, but biologically unimportant. In the book,...

Good Vibrations

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Tennis is a cultural generator.

I take an immense amount of pleasure in writing. This may sound trite, but life is full of hardship—God only knows that. And life is full of a lot of...

The Art of Tennis

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Tennis is a cultural generator, and the reason to watch it is that the court exposes character.

The Art of Tennis is really a celebration of different qualities of tennis. It celebrates the impact tennis has had on literature, on fashion, on music, on ballet, on theater. It also celebrates the beauty of the game itself...

The Art of Tennis

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Altman's refusal of genre commitment is what separates him from New Hollywood and what killed him in the marketplace.

Martin Scorsese comes up in the book, along with Peter Bogdanovich, Sidney Lumet, and other important directors of the 70s. I contrast Altman to a number of them, including Scorsese, because those other directors have genre commitments that Altman doesn't have.

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Fashion is significant precisely because it is superficial, and psychoanalytic concepts are the right instruments for reading clothes.

I first read Interpretation of Dreams when I was about 14 or 15, and I left school when I was 15, and lived in a commune. I never finished high school, but I eventually went to college. And then, in graduate school, I went to Yale to get my PhD in Modern European Cultural and Intellectual History. I had an epiphany when I realized fashion is part of culture, and I can do fashion history...

Dress, Dreams, and Desire

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Levitt proved affordable housing could be built at enormous scale, and that same solution produced today's shortage.

There are wonderful pictures sprinkled throughout the book, and I’d love for bookstore browsers to take a look. They’ll see pictures of people camped out overnight in the frigid cold,...

Perfect Communities

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Levitt proved affordable housing could be built at enormous scale, and that same solution produced today's shortage.

A key point of the book is to show that it was once possible to build affordable housing on an enormous scale, and that we can still learn something from...

Perfect Communities

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Levitt proved affordable housing could be built at enormous scale, and that same solution produced today's shortage.

Perfect Communities tells the story of Levittown, America’s iconic postwar suburb. It’s really the story of Levittowns, plural, because there were four in the United States, eight in France, and...

Perfect Communities

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Which central bank gets an emergency swap line depends less on treaties, rules or formal institutions, and more on trust of individuals involved.

As the title suggests, this book is about the personal and social relationships that govern the global economy. I wanted to tell a story of global finance that focuses not...

Bankers' Trust

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Reading by touch reshaped sighted culture, forcing a reevaluation of what reading is.

By Touch Alone is a book about both the history of disability and the history of books. While my current research is guided by the insights of Critical Disability Studies,...

By Touch Alone

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Reading by touch reshaped sighted culture, forcing a reevaluation of what reading is.

To explore blind people’s experiences of reading in nineteenth-century Britain and America and to better understand sighted people’s reception of the advent of raised-print books, I...

By Touch Alone

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Reading by touch reshaped sighted culture, forcing a reevaluation of what reading is.

By Touch Alone explores the experiences of the first generations of blind people who learned to read by touch. Exploring the reading lives of English-speaking blind people and the material...

By Touch Alone

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Americans' fond recollection of the recent modern past is a defensible appraisal of things actually lost.

Like any proud author, my expectation is that the browsing prospective reader might find delight by turning to virtually any page in my book. However, I will limit myself to...

Reclaiming Modernity

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Americans' fond recollection of the recent modern past is a defensible appraisal of things actually lost.

As I recount in the Preface to Reclaiming Modernity, while conducting research in Sheffield, England, in the early 1990s, I encountered what I at first took to be a linguistic...

Reclaiming Modernity

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Americans' fond recollection of the recent modern past is a defensible appraisal of things actually lost.

Reclaiming Modernity explores a pervasive but largely unexamined mental attitude, Americans’ fond recollection of the not-so-distant past, and elements of material culture associated with that near past. I call this...

Reclaiming Modernity

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Fashion is significant precisely because it is superficial, and psychoanalytic concepts are the right instruments for reading clothes.

Dress, Dreams, and Desire is a book on the cultural history of fashion and psychoanalysis. It traces how psychoanalytic ideas have influenced fashion and how we interpret fashion. On the one hand, you have Freud's writings, where he barely mentions clothing or fashion at all. Just tiny little intriguing slivers, like the libido for looking, or the attraction of concealment. And yet, when you look at his...

Dress, Dreams, and Desire

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Public distrust of science follows from disengagement rather than argument, and jargon is what drives readers away.

When I think of a browser in a bookstore, looking around, and happening upon my book, I hope it will spark curiosity, and they will wonder what is it? What...

Phenomenal Moments

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Public distrust of science follows from disengagement rather than argument, and jargon is what drives readers away.

I was always interested in science. I am a very curious person, and most importantly, I am a very visual person. And so, I have always asked myself the question...

Phenomenal Moments

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Public distrust of science follows from disengagement rather than argument, and jargon is what drives readers away.

The main point I am trying to make in this book is to introduce the idea that science is everywhere. Everything we see. Everything we touch. Everything we look at....

Phenomenal Moments

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Warnings are not predictions, their whole force is the pressure they exert on the present.

I hope that readers who are simply browsing the book will immediately recognize the difference between “philosophical warnings” and “trigger warnings.” While the latter aims to alert students and viewers...

Signs from the Future

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Warnings are not predictions, their whole force is the pressure they exert on the present.

Signs from the Future originates from my earlier works—Why Only Art Can Save Us: Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency (2017), and Being at Large: Freedom in the Age of...

Signs from the Future

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Warnings are not predictions, their whole force is the pressure they exert on the present.

This book explores the importance of warnings, our tendency to ignore them, and strategies to address this critical issue. I believe the 21st century is characterized by a widespread failure...

Signs from the Future

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A counter-strand of modernism running from Wagner to the Bauhaus pursued wholeness, and installation art descends from it.

There are key quotes in the book that signal this idea of radical unity. For example, even though you might not think about Paul Cézanne’s paintings in terms of the...

Unseparate

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A counter-strand of modernism running from Wagner to the Bauhaus pursued wholeness, and installation art descends from it.

Network theory is described in the structural relationship of things quite familiar to all of us now, as terms we hear all the time: hubs, nodes, dropped signals, latency, software...

Unseparate

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A counter-strand of modernism running from Wagner to the Bauhaus pursued wholeness, and installation art descends from it.

This book began with a question about all the installation art and performance that I was seeing in the early 2000s in New York galleries and museums, wondering where this...

Unseparate

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No single agricultural model can be optimal, because the physical constraints agriculture works within vary in time and place.

The book’s essence: only facts. My work on the geophysics of food “…has thrust me into an intense multidimensional public debate. One aspect involves the tension between idealistic, small-scale, “local”...

Planetary Eating

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No single agricultural model can be optimal, because the physical constraints agriculture works within vary in time and place.

The widely divergent views on agriculture, and the wildly disparate organizations whose focus is food systems, share one, and only one, foundational assessment: modern agriculture is broken. What to do...

Planetary Eating

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Agriculture is planetary science under another name — nobody can speak cogently about food and environment while remaining uneducated about it.

Planetary Eating is a very rigorous examination of the mechanisms of human–planet interactions, agriculture and food production, and consumption set in motion. While other books address the environmental problems associated...

Planetary Eating

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Nashville is a political text about the wreckage of 1968, Vietnam and Watergate, and unreadable without that frame.

The close-upThe cover of the book is truly beautiful. I was very happy with the press, and I had some creative input on the work that their wonderful designer did....

Nashville

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Nashville is a political text about the wreckage of 1968, Vietnam and Watergate, and unreadable without that frame.

I write about the politics of media –right-wing and conservative media, mainstream network television news, and journalism history. My era is the 60s and 70s, and the Nashville book is...

Nashville

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Nashville is a political text about the wreckage of 1968, Vietnam and Watergate, and unreadable without that frame.

This book is about Robert Altman's 1975 film Nashville, which is a quintessential 1975 film, but also relevant for the present moment of political cynicism, polarization, and violence. While the...

Nashville

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Economics cannot explain why we love dogs, but it explains the nitty-gritty of living with them.

Each chapter offers interesting research findings interpreted from an economic perspective. “Chasing the Tale” reviews what evolutionary biology tells us about the transformation of wolves into dogs. It also considers...

Dog Economics

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Economics cannot explain why we love dogs, but it explains the nitty-gritty of living with them.

We are fond of dogs. Although it would be a bit of a stretch to say that we are also fond of economics, we certainly appreciate its usefulness in understanding social interaction and...

Dog Economics

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Economics cannot explain why we love dogs, but it explains the nitty-gritty of living with them.

People and dogs share thousands of years of co-evolution. The nature of their relationship has also evolved, moving largely from dogs as workmates to dogs as pets. Especially in contemporary...

Dog Economics

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A statistical dog life in the United States is worth about $10 thousand.

Each chapter offers interesting research findings interpreted from an economic perspective. “Chasing the Tale” reviews what evolutionary biology tells us about the transformation of wolves into dogs. It also considers...

Dog Economics

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A statistical dog life in the United States is worth about $10 thousand.

We are fond of dogs. Although it would be a bit of a stretch to say that we are also fond of economics, we certainly appreciate its usefulness in understanding social interaction and...

Dog Economics

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People and dogs share thousands of years of co-evolution. The nature of their relationship has also evolved, moving largely from dogs as workmates to dogs as pets. Especially in contemporary...

Dog Economics

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Secession is a false solution to American polarization, and the attempt would almost certainly produce great violence.

There are two sections that I hope browsers would encounter. The first is from a section at the beginning called the Year of Two Presidents. It is a fictional vignette...

The Disunited States

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Secession is a false solution to American polarization, and the attempt would almost certainly produce great violence.

I have written several books and articles on the dynamics of secession historically and globally. In an earlier book, Secession and the Sovereignty Game: Strategy and Tactics for Aspiring Nations...

The Disunited States

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Secession is a false solution to American polarization, and the attempt would almost certainly produce great violence.

The book is about secession in America. There is a growing interest in secession, or what some refer to as a national divorce between Red and Blue America. There is...

The Disunited States

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Models of the mind are idealized like frictionless planes, and idealization does not buy antirealism.

All computational models of the brain and cognitive activity produced so far are either idealizations, making the models hypothetical, or approximations, making the models inexact descriptions of their target phenomena,...

The Idealized Mind

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Models of the mind are idealized like frictionless planes, and idealization does not buy antirealism.

My interest in discussions about scientific modeling, idealization and scientific realism started with a coauthored paper “The Literalist Fallacy and the Free Energy Principle: Model-building, Scientific Realism and Instrumentalism”, published...

The Idealized Mind

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Models of the mind are idealized like frictionless planes, and idealization does not buy antirealism.

Milk production at a dairy farm was low, so the farmer wrote to the local university, asking for help. A multidisciplinary team of professors was assembled, headed by a...

The Idealized Mind

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Japan's railways used competition among Western manufacturers to extract locomotive technology, obliging German firms to disclose their processes.

I hope that they would take a moment to compare the photograph on page 186 with the locomotive photograph on page 187. Although the two locomotives appear very similar, there...

Trading Locomotives

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Japan's railways used competition among Western manufacturers to extract locomotive technology, obliging German firms to disclose their processes.

Let me share my personal perspective on my research journey. My interest began with the fascinating question of Japan's industrialization. How did Japan, a small island nation viewed by the...

Trading Locomotives

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Japan's railways used competition among Western manufacturers to extract locomotive technology, obliging German firms to disclose their processes.

In this book, I examined the history of Japan’s railroads, focusing on the locomotive trade and technological development from a global perspective. As railroads were a key industry of the...

Trading Locomotives

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Policy research organizations have become partisan policy demanders, and partisan trust has replaced objectivity as the policy world's currency.

There is one particular example in the book that especially highlights its main themes. In 2017, the Heritage Foundation released a new edition of its “Election Fraud Database,” an empirical...

Partisan Policy Networks

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Policy research organizations have become partisan policy demanders, and partisan trust has replaced objectivity as the policy world's currency.

Early in my graduate school career I was exposed to an increasingly popular theory of political parties as “extended networks”. Proponents argue that we need to move beyond formal party...

Partisan Policy Networks

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Policy research organizations have become policy demanders and party allies rather than producers of information.

This book examines how many policy research organizations, like think tanks, have transformed from non-partisan information producers into partisan allies pursuing ideological policy goals. Most policymaking today is structured by...

Partisan Policy Networks

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Film is a chemical product before it is a medium, and its raw materials carry a history of violence.

One of my favorite passages in the book comes in the third chapter, which looks at Agfa’s German factories (particularly the Wolfen factory) during the weeks and months after World...

Tales of Militant Chemistry

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Film is a chemical product before it is a medium, and its raw materials carry a history of violence.

This book is tied to two threads in my previous work. I studied filmmaking in college, and have long been fascinated by film as a physical medium: what it feels...

Tales of Militant Chemistry

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Film is a chemical product before it is a medium, and its raw materials carry a history of violence.

This book asks what happens when we take something we’re familiar with and consider it in an unfamiliar light. The “thing” in question is film: not films, the things we...

Tales of Militant Chemistry

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The registers of sovereign states behind statistical International Relations are biased toward Europe and the Americas and leave Africa, Asia and the Middle East blank for the nineteenth century.

Page 6, which shows the difference between the number of states that are included in the data that underpin our book, compared to the number of states identified in existing...

Colonization

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There were more states in 1825 than there are today, and European colonialism destroyed most of them.

Our book relates to big questions such as what counts as a state in the international system and how many states there were at different points in time. These are...

Colonization

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There were more states in 1825 than there are today, and European colonialism destroyed most of them.

This book corrects a Eurocentric picture of International Relations (IR) that has dominated the study of international relations over the past decades, and especially the statistical study of IR. If...

Colonization

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All solidarity is selective, in the state as in the household, and always contingent on group membership.

While my colleagues might zero in on one of the concepts the book examines (economic moralities, scales of solidarity, Facebook families, etc.) I hope that a reader who is just...

Selective Solidarity

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The household is at the center of the global economy rather than beneath it.

The book is located, in its theory and methods, at the intersections of linguistic and economic anthropology. Inverting the classic concept of “moral economy,” Selective Solidarity...

Selective Solidarity

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All solidarity is selective, in the state as in the household, and always contingent on group membership.

Selective Solidarity is an ethnography about middle-class Senegalese families in Paris. It foregrounds the experiences of the French-born children of educated immigrants from Dakar, to consider how young people learn...

Selective Solidarity

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