700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators
Great Books, Bad Arguments looks at three of the most famous texts in Western political thought and asks whether the proposals advanced by Plato, Hobbes, and Marx for the avoidance...
This book is a substantial revision and expansion of my influential February 2009 report for the UN Environment Programme.In October 2008, the global economy was reeling from a spate of...
This book deals with a basic question: What’s the best way to get people to behave themselves?Modern legal, policy, and management experts often assume human beings are selfish creatures who...
I have had some enraged responses from knee-jerk modernists. Their reaction relates to the actual ideas that this book is about, which is that in order to understand Jeanneret we...
The book examines three cases: the Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1945-6, at the end of the Second World War; the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in South Africa at...
The Age of Equality is aimed as a counterweight to the short-term perspective of media discussion of economic affairs.I am constantly struck by the gap between what we teach students...
What is this book all about?Tyrants on Twitter makes three main points. The first point is that we’ve been experiencing a period globally for about the last 15 years of...
My work concerns democracy, culture and political engagement. Scholars usually analyze democracy through the study of liberal political regimes and movements or post-authoritarian transitions. In contrast, I have focused on...
Like other more commonly acknowledged inventions from stone axes to the wheel, number words radically shifted the human story. So the book relates to other work in anthropology that seeks...
I’ve got two of these. The first is on pages 16-17, where I talk about what this book is not. Unlike most of the writings on the topic, The Language...
Are human beings innately violent? And when scientists give us an answer to this question, should we believe them? Killer Instinct is a history of debates about human nature. My...
The Lolita Effect promises girls that they can experience joyful sexuality and femininity, but only at a price: the price of conforming to the restrictive ideals it imposes on the...
Violette Nozière tells the story of a high-profile criminal case that took place in Paris in 1933-34.An eighteen-year-old girl, the only child of a striving lower-middle-class couple, carefully devised and...
The Lolita Effect addresses the media sexualization of young girls. In the book, I draw a distinction between healthy, age-appropriate concepts of sexuality that should develop as children mature, and...
North Korean restaurants are tourist attractions in many cities, and are often the closest the average person will ever get to North Koreans. And indeed, they were one of the...
I was trained in the history of science, a field much concerned with the relationship between discourse and practice. This influenced the course of my research, which was driven by...
There are many forgotten heritages in Western history, but the issue of Arabic influence is particularly contested because the heritage has its roots in a culture that suffers from Western...
It was as a child living in Japan that I first began to wonder about the connection between culture and foreign affairs. In the 70s and 80s China kept exploding...
The beginning of Chapter Two sets the stage for understanding what an unusual position Twain occupied at the end of his life.Due to his longevity, Twain had almost become a...
I begin the book with the stories of a number of men who were members of the Moorish Science Temple, the Commandment Keepers Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation, and Father Divine’s Peace...
I came to this book when I was finishing my first book, The Novel Art, which was about how early twentieth century American writers negotiated their relation to mass culture...
Instead, the Reformation influenced the eventual emergence of closed-universe atheism because of the unending doctrinal controversies that followed in its wake. The controversies unintentionally sidelined explicitly Christian claims about the...
The fourth chapter, “Consuming: The Palace Bridal Chamber” perhaps best illustrates the larger arguments and tensions at this book’s heart.This chapter initially grew out of my interest in honeymoon suites—I...
New World A-Coming examines a set of religious movements founded in the early twentieth-century urban north whose members refused the racial category of Negro and rejected Christianity in favor of...
If a reader were to flip open the book at a random place, I hope they would encounter one of the eccentric scientists pursuing their research with a singular focus...
While searching for answers to Hamsun’s support for the Third Reich, I was struck by several things. First, I felt that the critical texts about Hamsun were too narrowly focused...
The fun thing about writing a book about an emerging phenomenon is that there is always something surprising to learn.If I could direct readers to any part of the book,...
If a reader were to browse at random in the book, where would s/he find a representative section that brought its central thesis most clearly to the fore? No single...
I recommend a new reader turn to the chapter on the first year of infancy. Most people who spend time with infants (including their parents) think they are just playing...
Although I didn’t know it at the time, this book took root during a visit years ago to the National Gallery of Art when I happened upon Antoine Vollon’s Mound...
How Economics Shapes Science focuses on how costs and incentives—core concepts in economics—shape the practice of science, especially the practice of science at universities.Costs matter: they play a role in...
With the exception only of the Civil War, Americans faced in the Depression of the 1930s the most wrenching and divisive domestic crisis in their history. An economic structure that...
Parallel Public examines experimental art from the final years of East Germany in relation to state power. In the book, I argue that these artists did not practice their art...
The Death and Afterlife of Achilles looks at all types of ancient evidence about Achilles to reconstruct the basic outlines of his death and afterlife. For literary evidence, the Homeric...
Chapter One, “Modernism in Europe and America,” outlines the book’s major arguments. It also focuses on the urban aspects of modernism, the cultural importance of cities like Vienna, Berlin, Paris,...
This book is about a conflict between American ideals and our social reality. Although we embrace the ideal of racial equality, in myriad studies in numerous fields there is abundant...
They say not to judge a book by its cover or by the images contained within it. I have to say, however, I spent a lot of time thinking about...
For a reader “just browsing” the book, there is a natural inclination to skip ahead to chapter three and some of the specific sections there. In that chapter, I take...
The title is an almost absurdly clear description of the book, but the truth is, until my editor suggested that title to me, I wasn’t quite sure that what I...
The financial crisis opened the door to massive public interventions in the Western economies. In many nations, governments responded to the threats of illiquidity and insolvency by making huge investments...
Why do we tell stories—or, for that matter, engage in any of the arts? In a world of unsparing biological competition, how could a successful species afford an unflagging appetite...
My interest in these historical events is a product of our times. Prior to 2004 it is unlikely that I would have written a book about torture in the United...
In the last weeks, I received many queries about my book due to the IBM computer Watson winning on the game show Jeopardy! over two (human) champions. I was asked...
Most historians who have had occasion to mention Bancroft have castigated him as a villainous traitor. Yes, he was a spy, but in my book I argue that he was...
My intellectual trajectory in coming to this book stems from my longstanding interest in France.I’m an American who has studied France and its history for the past 30 years. I...
Breaking the Devil’s Pact<strong id=""> </strong>is a case study of the 22+ years of effort on part of federal prosecutors, federal judges and court-appointed monitors to purge organized crime influence...
In the Prologue to my book, I offer a summary of my theory of the human self and explain the conceptual linkage between the definition of the human and the...
For me, the key chapter of Twilight is the short chapter on Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb.Many people today have only the vaguest notion of the these two young men...
On the one hand, this book addresses the well-known literature on Orientalism, and argues that singing Turks were not understood as simply exotic “others” on the European stage. On the...
Since the 1970s, there has been a tendency in America to see inequalities in society solely through the lens of race. Our understanding of the Wounded Knee massacre has reflected...
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