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In the introduction I make what is probably the book’s most counterintuitive claim—that science fiction and lyric poetry are intimately interconnected.From page 11 to page 63 of Do Metaphors Dream,...

Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation - A close-up

Inderpal Grewal

Readers encountering my book might first turn to the chapter on Hurricane Katrina, which captures the context of the book, both with regard to the problems of a retreating welfare...

Saving the Security State - A close-up

Mark Galeotti

At the start of each chapter is a scenario illustrating the themes it is addressing, and while the first is a speculative near-future one (a Chinese operation to seize control...

The Weaponisation of Everything - A close-up

Matthew E. Kahn

To tackle climate change, we must reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. In an economy in which there are more people who are growing richer over time, the only way we...

Climatopolis - A close-up

Andrew Ross

Who Built Israel? The given wisdom is that Jewish settlers did. Unused to manual labor, they learned on the job and made “new Jews” of themselves according to the doctrine...

Stone Men - A close-up

Jesse LeCavalier

In this book, I look at the back of house operations of Walmart to better understand the relationship between logistics, architecture, and urbanism. While logistics has always been a part...

The Rule of Logistics - In a nutshell

Kendall Hoyt

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

Long Shot - The wide angle

Nicholas Dungan

Albert Gallatin contributed as fully as any other statesman to the welfare and independence of the young United States, yet he has been largely forgotten by history.Born in Geneva in...

Gallatin - In a nutshell

Gregory Hickok

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 - In a nutshell

Edward B. Barbier

Many observers of economic policy enacted during the 2008-9 recession will have noted that some governments included many investments in energy efficiency, clean energy, waste management and other environmental improvements...

A Global Green New Deal - A close-up

Marcus Boon

The book is intended to be a primer on copying: each chapter examines some aspect of copying, from the core philosophical issue as to what a copy is, the history...

In Praise of Copying - The wide angle

Don Lincoln

We have come to understand that all the matter we have ever observed is made of a scant hundred chemical elements. The past century has shown that the atomic elements...

The Quantum Frontier - The wide angle

Shaj Mathew

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 - The wide angle

Michael E. Mann

The Madhouse Effect is, by design, a book that readers can just pick up, skim through, and find a page that both engages and informs. If a reader were to...

The Madhouse Effect - A close-up

David J. Helfand

This book is about nothing. Or at least 99.999999999999% bits of nothingness. And yet it is about everything – all that you can touch, see, taste, smell, and feel, and...

The Universal Timekeepers - In a nutshell

Richard J. McNally

Nearly half of Americans have suffered from mental illness at some point in their lives. One quarter has been mentally ill during the previous year. These figures come from the...

What Is Mental Illness? - In a nutshell

Shane Hamilton

I began research on this project not so much because I was fascinated with truckers, trucking culture, or big rigs, but because I wanted to understand how transformations in rural...

Trucking Country - The wide angle

Philip Pomper

Lenin’s Brother follows my earlier work on Lavrov, Nechaev, Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin. The book allowed me to revisit Lenin’s entry into the revolutionary movement—a fateful moment. Most historians agree...

Lenin's Brother - The wide angle

Robert Hassan

Analog is about how we live our lives today—with digital technology. The book is about analog; but it is also about digital because both technological forms are inextricably conjoined in...

Analog - In a nutshell

Mark McGurl

A reader riffling through the pages of my book might be struck to see that a work of literary history has so many diagrams. What’s up with that? Don’t we...

The Program Era - A close-up

Timothy Morton

If I were yelling at someone from a fast moving train and had only one chance to say one thing about my book before they went out of earshot, I...

The Ecological Thought - A close-up

Michael E. Mann

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

The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars - The wide angle

Wendy Steiner

The Real Real Thing shows early 21st</sup>-century culture wrestling with new media, technology, and science. The book is the third in a loose trilogy that began with The Scandal of...

The Real Real Thing - The wide angle

Erin E. O'Connor

The answer to is, in large part, constituted by a personal path - so much so that it constitutes the book's Prologue. I come from a family of makers and...

Fire Craft - The wide angle

Robert L. Kelly

On the first page of The Fifth Beginning, I recount an incident from the late 1980s, early in my teaching career. I had given a closing lecture in which I...

The Fifth Beginning - A close-up

David M. Struthers

The near-continuous movements of people and of ideas are two themes that flow through the work. Migration from within the United States and across international boundaries increased the population of...

The World in a City - In a nutshell

John Kricher

The existence of a balance of nature has been a dominant part of Western philosophy since before Aristotle. But the science of ecology and evolutionary biology together demonstrate that there...

The Balance of Nature - In a nutshell

Kendall Hoyt

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

Long Shot - In a nutshell

Susan S. Fainstein

The concluding chapter of the book briefly traces the broad historical forces that formed the context for present urban policies. It explains the effects of national policies on metropolitan areas...

The Just City - A close-up

Greg Robinson

My book offers a new look at a familiar subject, Executive Order 9066 and the removal and confinement of West Coast Japanese Americans during World War II (commonly called the...

A Tragedy of Democracy - In a nutshell

Shaj Mathew

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 - A close-up

Rachel Herz

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

That’s Disgusting - In a nutshell

Thomas M. Nichols

In chapter 4 I show how the move toward preventive military action is really an international phenomenon. Perhaps the most frustrating thing I found in writing the book is that...

Eve of Destruction - A close-up

Robert Hassan

Analog begins with an introductory chapter on retro analog consumer technologies such as vinyl records, single-lens reflex cameras, music cassette tapes, and so on, and how these and many other...

Analog - A close-up

Stephen F. Cohen

On page 116 I pose the question: How is the historic end of the Soviet Union to be explained? This is a question discussed in most American high schools and...

Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives - A close-up

Jennifer Scanlon

Rorotoko’s readers may find Helen Gurley Brown’s attempts to “queer up” her publications interesting. As time went on, Brown learned that equating sex with heterosexuality sold magazines and paid her...

Bad Girls Go Everywhere - A close-up

Michael A. Ryan

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

A Kingdom of Stargazers - A close-up

Philip Pomper

In the book’s last chapter, I try to explain Vladimir’s development, showing how family history shapes people and how parents and siblings interact in complex ways.The Ulyanov family and its...

Lenin's Brother - A close-up

Theodore M. Porter

While diligent readers who behave according to the plan should recognize the coherence of this project, it has, I admit, an inescapably far-flung character. The long chapter titles attest to...

Genetics in the Madhouse - A close-up

Lynn Keller

The concept of the “self-conscious Anthropocene,” introduced in the book’s title, is one of the book’s innovations and points to its larger significance. The term Anthropocene was introduced in 2000...

Recomposing Ecopoetics - The wide angle

John C. Burnham

Everybody knows the idea, now usually humorous, that some people have more accidents than other people. Accident proneness was once a technical term, used to separate some people, identified as...

Accident Prone - In a nutshell

Barry Friedman

Throughout history there has been one main claim leveled at the Supreme Court: that when it strikes down laws on the basis of the Constitution, it is interfering with democracy....

The Will of the People - The wide angle

Jacob Darwin Hamblin

I have a hard time deciding what is the best entry point for this book. Some people will be fascinated by the story about the CIA collaborating with a Japanese...

The Wretched Atom - A close-up

Ryan D. Griffiths

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 - A close-up

Mark V. Tushnet

We think that the book’s cover is a terrific “provocation” for thinking about the problem. We hope that readers (viewers?) will ask themselves, “Why is this covered by the First...

Free Speech Beyond Words - A close-up

Mark Bartholomew

By some counts, the average American is exposed to over three thousand advertisements each day. It is not just the number, but the nature of these ads that are different...

Adcreep - In a nutshell

Walter W. McMahon

64% of the US population — which includes the middle class — has a high school education or less, a pattern also found in the UK and EU countries. This...

Higher Learning, Greater Good - The wide angle

Samuel Zipp

The Idealist is the story of one man, a world-circling journey, and an influential book. But it is more than that, too. It’s a story about an idea and a...

The Idealist - In a nutshell

Edward Ashford Lee

Many books you buy these days give a story that could have been presented in three pages, but since nobody buys a three-page book, had to be expanded to 200....

The Coevolution - A close-up

Mark Vernon

One line might appear quickly to a person who picked up the book and started flicking through the pages. It’s in the introduction and is these words. “If the doors...