2073 Micro Interviews

700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators

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Gary C. Jacobson

At the heart of the book are the data. A look at chapter 3 would be a good way to get a feel for my approach. The material in this...

Presidents and Parties in the Public Mind - A close-up
Donald S. Lopez Jr.

As someone who went to college in the 1970s and was interested in “Eastern Philosophy” as it used to be called, I read The Tibetan Book of the Dead and...

The Tibetan Book of the Dead - The wide angle
George C. Galster

The first few pages of the first chapter explain why Making Our Neighborhoods, Making Our Selves provides an important, new way of looking at neighborhoods that transcends the narrow perspectives...

Making Our Neighborhoods, Making Our Selves - A close-up
Alastair Bonnett

In the early 1990s I got involved with one of the more outré forms of geography, known as psychogeography. This involved a lot of unplanned, drifting walks and purposely getting...

Beyond the Map - The wide angle
Moshik Temkin

My book, as is probably obvious from its title, is a history of the Sacco-Vanzetti affair, which began in 1920 as a local criminal case in which two Italian-born resident...

The Sacco-Vanzetti Affair - In a nutshell
Katrin Pahl

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

Tropes of Transport - The wide angle
Brian Boyd

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

Why Lyrics Last - The wide angle
Donald S. Lopez Jr.

Princeton University Press has started a new series entitled “Lives of Great Religious Books,” and my book is one of the three inaugural volumes.The idea behind the series is that...

The Tibetan Book of the Dead - In a nutshell
Benjamin R. Cohen

Most of the chapters begin with a story about a con man or a point of confusion and mistrust in the world of nineteenth century foods. The first chapter introduces...

Pure Adulteration - A close-up
Lynn Keller

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

Recomposing Ecopoetics - A close-up
Kiran K. Patel

Project Europe offers a radically different interpretation of the European Union’s history. It shifts the focus away from the motives and driving forces of European integration to the concrete effects...

Project Europe - In a nutshell
Daniel T. Rodgers

Age of Fracture is a book about the ideas and arguments that now shape our times. It is about the ways in which conceptions of society and selves that were...

Age of Fracture - In a nutshell
David S. Powers

Muhammad Is Not the Father of any of Your Men is about the Islamic assertion that Muhammad was the last in a series of prophets sent by God to mankind...

Muhammad is Not the Father of any of Your Men - In a nutshell
Andrew Feenberg

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

Technosystem - A close-up
James B. Jacobs

Throughout my career, my specialty has been criminal law, criminal procedure, and criminology.My interest in labor racketeering began in the mid 1980s when I served as a consultant for...

Breaking the Devil’s Pact - The wide angle
Craig Stanford

My own involvement with chimpanzees came about fortuitously. In the late 1980s, I was conducting my doctoral research in Bangladesh on a previously little-known monkey called the capped langur. I...

The New Chimpanzee - The wide angle
John Tully

Our questions here are not terribly practical ones in the United States. No one really advocates for regulating art or music as such. True, Nazi Germany did suppress “degenerate” art...

The Devil’s Milk - The wide angle
Vladimir Kogan

<br>If someone was just browsing, I would encourage them to start with the first sentence of the first chapter: “June 7, 2023, was the day a group of homophobic Armenians...

No Adult Left Behind - A close-up
Henry A. Giroux

In many ways, Youth in a Suspect Society is motivated by a sense of outrage and a sense of hope.While youth have always represented an ambiguous category, they have within...

Youth in a Suspect Society - In a nutshell
Theodore M. Porter

When I began graduate school in 1977, the history of science was mainly about theories. I had been drawn to the field by the work of Thomas Kuhn, whose famous...

Genetics in the Madhouse - The wide angle
Tom Mould

In 1976, Ronald Reagan hit the campaign trail with an incredible story about a woman committing massive welfare fraud. The story caught fire and launched the most devastating symbol of...

Overthrowing the Queen - In a nutshell
Lynn M. Morgan

It was a beautiful day in June on the campus of Mount Holyoke College. I had planned to go strawberry picking, but I found myself instead in the basement of...

Icons of Life - The wide angle
Claudia Calirman

The book is organized thematically in four chapters on different kinds of “dissident practices:” Political Practices, Discursive Practices, Transgressive Practices, and Practices of the Self. The selection of the artists...

Dissident Practices - The wide angle
Katrin Pahl

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

Tropes of Transport - A close-up
Allan C. Hutchinson

Much legal education treats law as an autonomous discipline that can be separated from and studied without any necessary resort to politics, philosophy, sociology and the like. Instead, I have...

Is Eating People Wrong? Great Legal Cases and How They Shaped the World - The wide angle
Seth Lerer

I’d like the browsing reader to come, first, to the general introduction to my book – here I outline the principles and scope, the personal experiences that led me to...

Children’s Literature - A close-up
William V. Harris

From the Iliad onwards, via Aristophanes and the gospel of Matthew, to Augustine and beyond, Greek and Latin texts in many genres are constellated with dream-descriptions. The best ancient minds,...

Dreams and Experience in Classical Antiquity - In a nutshell
Charlie Hailey

When I last flipped through Camps, I paused at three moments that give a sense of the range of possibilities, realities, and complexities in the book. Each stopping point includes...

Camps - A close-up
David W. Bates

I think that the reader interested in the pressing contemporary problem of emergency power and its excesses would find the introductory chapter most interesting. There I identify the longer history...

States of War - A close-up
Mark Vernon

The greatest challenge in writing a cultural history is that its primary object of study is incredibly hard to pin down. The focus should not only be on the materiality...

Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination - The wide angle
Kelly Oliver

Animal Lessons is about how philosophers throughout Western history have used animals to make the case that humans are special. Philosophers have argued that humans are so unique that they...

Animal Lessons - In a nutshell
David Badre

Cognitive control and its mechanisms in the brain affect just about everything we do. They affect our ability to be productive, to multitask, to resist our impulses, to navigate our...

On Task - The wide angle
Kirsten Fermaglich

Page 55 contains some of the most interesting visual evidence that my book offers, with both methodological and historical significance. On this page, readers will find the “Distinctive Jewish Names,”...

A Rosenberg by Any Other Name - A close-up
Howard Gardner

In recent years, especially in the United States, our schools have focused largely on the mastery of information, which can be probed in a short answer assessment. This is exactly...

A Synthesizing Mind - The wide angle
Glenn E. Robinson

In Global Jihad I make two unique arguments. First, I provide an interpretive history of this important movement by showing how there have been four distinct iterations, or “waves”, of...

Global Jihad - In a nutshell
Louis A. Perez, Jr.

Cuba in the American Imagination examines the emergence of the idea of Cuba in the United States from the early nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth. The book...

Cuba in the American Imagination - In a nutshell
Tim Lomas

The book offers, using a cartographic metaphor, a ‘map’ of wellbeing. In that respect, I don’t have a particular preference for which ‘region’ I would hope a reader first encounters....

Translating Happiness - A close-up
Kristen Whissel

Sections of chapter 4 focus on the first feature film, Traffic in Souls (1913), short films by D.W. Griffith, such as The Lonedale Operator (1911), and Lois Weber’s amazing film...

Picturing American Modernity - A close-up
Stan Ulanski

I wrote The Gulf Stream for the science and history enthusiasts as much as for those wishing an introduction to one of the last vestiges of wilderness on Earth.In pages...

The Gulf Stream - A close-up
Susan D. Blum

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

“I Love Learning; I Hate School” - In a nutshell
Beth Bailey

I meant this book to change some conversations. Military history draws a lot of people who read serious non-fiction, but it occupies a complicated place in the academic discipline of...

America's Army - The wide angle
Mia Bloom

The book relates to the changing nature of terrorism and how different groups are either being forced or recruited into these deadly organizations.I address several underlying theories about the nature...

Bombshell - The wide angle
Harold James

Ten years ago, I began writing a book on the phenomenon of globalization, in part in order to try to understand the bitter debate which pitted globalization protesters against international...

The Creation and Destruction of Value - The wide angle
Anne Dunlop

Painted Palaces is essentially an argument against a tenacious idea in art history – that one day around 1500, artists woke up, threw off the oppression of religion, and invented...

Painted Palaces - In a nutshell
Rachel Weiss

Juan Francisco Elso’s “Por América” is one of the many remarkable works that I write about. An effigy of José Martí, it is an exquisitely painful portrait, depicting the Cuban...

To and from Utopia in the New Cuban Art - A close-up
Steven Henry Madoff

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 - A close-up
Michael J. Ryan

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

A Taste for the Beautiful - The wide angle
Andrew Feenberg

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

Technosystem - In a nutshell
Youssef Cassis

The financial crisis of 2007-2008 triggered a huge demand for history, an unprecedented urge to place the event in a historical perspective.Two questions came up time and time again. How...

Crises and Opportunities - The wide angle
Peter T. Leeson

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

WTF?! An Economic Tour of the Weird - The wide angle

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