700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators
The “American tradition” in this book’s subtitle is not a particular method of tormenting the body. It refers instead to the debates that Americans have waged regarding torture. At the...
Measuring Tomorrow is about ending our passion for growth and engaging in the well-being and sustainability transition. Growth of Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, captures only a tiny fraction of...
Few people today except dentists will have heard of gutta-percha, but one hundred years ago it was a household word. A close cousin of rubber extracted from wild trees in...
The Sports Revolution tells the story of the impact of the Civil Rights and Second-Wave feminist movements on the world of big-time professional and collegiate sports in the United States...
The complexity of the procrastination economy is best displayed by the mobile culture on the commute. In chapter three, I examine this culture by analyzing the creative process behind Spotify’s...
Part of developing our taste for certain comic books—and the same applies for novels, music, art, films, and the like—is our refining of our aesthetic sensibility. This typically happens at...
In 2010, the world’s wealthiest art institution, the J. Paul Getty Museum, found itself confronted by a century-old genocide. The Armenian Church in Los Angeles was suing for the return...
Waste occupies a paradoxical position today: it is made to be disposable, and we want to get rid of it, but we cannot. Where at other times in history, we’ve...
After decades of disreputable status, contemporary comics are undergoing a transformation into the hard-bound graphic novel, shifting from a disposable to an enduring medium. There has also been a move...
The book moves fluidly, even unexpectedly, among chronological periods, genres, types of media, and among ways in which the “classic” has been defined since the second century C.E. All of...
I would love if a “just-browsing” reader were to land on the section explaining how LLMs work. I tried to craft an analogy that has the virtue of precision while...
The topic of this book is connected to everything! (Okay, maybe not directly to geology or health insurance. But to a gazillion other things that matter.) It’s connected to the...
The first part of the book tells a story of disappointments with our ability to forecast the future of capitalism. This story unfolds in several stages: the Victorian era (Chapter...
The idea for the book was born from a conversation with Noboru Hatakeyama, a former top official in Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry—the (in)famous MITI—in the fall of...
Denial is something we encounter in many aspects of modern life, and there is an entire psychological literature dealing with the topic. In this book, we are focused on a...
I think I would like your browsing reader to come across “Chapter 4. Multitasking and the Metal Man: How Much Can Iron Man’s Mind Manage?” This chapter is important because...
I suppose if I wanted any single moment of the book to be read by the random reader, it would be a particular battle, the battle of Cortenuova in the...
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....
The book is illustrated with original photographs of “Poe places” by Michelle Van Parys; it also contains a number of archival images, including contemporary maps of the cities where Poe...
When he died in 1851, Samuel George Morton, a Philadelphia doctor, left behind a collection of more than a thousand human skulls. Not the grisly byproduct of botched operations, but...
The Apartment Plot argues for the dominance and centrality of the apartment plot from 1945 to 1975.What I am calling “the apartment plot” are narratives in which the apartment figures...
In Discomfort Food, I argue that representations of food are profoundly evocative, able to convey material and immaterial possibilities that are inconsistent with their seemingly mundane subject matter. Depictions of...
Counterfactuals are “what-ifs.” They change a feature of the past in the expectation of changing the present. The antecedent (the change introduced in the past) is connected to the consequent...
My book is the first in English to cover the Empire’s entire history and the first in any language to offer a comprehensive reinterpretation of its place in wider European...
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...
Stunning beauty abounds in nature. We see it everywhere we look. The brilliant colors and dances of butterflies and fishes, the songs of crickets, frogs, and birds, and even the...
Crack tells the story of the young men who bet their lives on the rewards of selling “rock” cocaine, the people who gave themselves over to the crack pipe, and...
I was trained as an ethnic Americanist and wrote my first book on African American and Caribbean women’s fictions about history—mostly novels about slavery. You might think of that project...
Traditionally, the arts have been valued for providing a sphere of imaginary, virtual experience, in contrast to the reality of everyday life. But today, as our profiles and avatars stand...
This is a book about one American’s lifelong mission to explain the real Japan to the rest of the world. Edwin O. Reischauer, born in Japan in 1910 to Presbyterian...
Crash explores the role of the car crash in film history and contemporary art practice.I begin by recognizing that the histories of cinema and the automobile, born at the same...
Toward the end of the second chapter I discuss William Hazlitt’s Spirit of the Age. For me, this section embodies all the concepts I try to engage in the book.I...
The main idea of my book, Making Sense of Pakistan, is that we need first and foremost to make sense of the country’s identity crisis.This crisis, I argue, is rooted...
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...
There is more than one business model of human trafficking and there are enormous variations in human trafficking in different regions of the world. This book examines all forms of...
From analyses of thousands of commercial and academic public opinion surveys covering presidents from Truman to Trump, with results detailed in 54 tables and 93 figures, I argue that modern...
For readers just browsing, I would hope that they would open to chapter six in the book and specifically to the section on skull cults. This is the time in...
No matter where Americans live, their risk of being murdered is higher than it is in any other first-world democracy.From 1965 to 1992, the homicide rate in the United States...
In examining the evolving relationship between the West and the Brotherhood from the perspective of both sides, I was conscious of the fact that my subject did not fit easily...
Were a browsing reader to open my book at random, he or she could do worse than opening up to the third chapter, which deals with the average artist. Here...
Buying Power traces the origins and development of consumer activism in America from the 1760s to the present. Historians and other scholars have written about discrete boycotts or closely conjoined...
This topic provided the perfect opportunity for me to continue exploring the intersections of religion and race in American history. In earlier work I examined the role early sound film...
My goal was to write a detailed chronicle of an era in Chinese history that is much speculated about, but has never before been fully documented.Between 1958 and 1962, Mao...
There was a time when the boutiques that are now so familiar in New York’s landscape were just small tenement buildings, with boarded up windows and bricked up facades.When I...
Weather Matters is a history of all these phenomena. It explores the questions why and how we talk about the weather in science, the media, popular culture, and the arts....
I’m challenging a way of thinking about politics common in fields like sociology and political science—the one in which people have interests based on their jobs, their levels of education,...
The idea for this book started at a cocktail party. It was April 2011, just over a year after Obama signed the Affordable Care Act (ACA). As ACA continued to...
The Essential Engineer is about the similarities and differences between scientists and engineers, and between science and engineering, and how they relate to contemporary technological issues. The book provides historical...
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....
Mysteries of Sex invites the reader to suspend the belief that men are men and women are women and explore two intertwined phenomena. The book asks first of all just...
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