2073 Micro Interviews

The brief Epilogue of Memos from the Besieged City, like many aspects of this book, pivots on its two epigraphs. The first is from Walt Whitman’s ambiguously democratic and imperialist...

Memos from the Besieged City - A close-up

Naked City - The wide angle

True Sex discusses the lives of eighteen individuals who were assigned female at birth but who lived as male in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century. By...

True Sex - In a nutshell

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 - A close-up

This is a book about a geopolitical space—Galicia—that existed for a very precisely limited historical epoch.Galicia was created—I would say “invented”—in 1772 at the time of the partitions of Poland,...

The Idea of Galicia - In a nutshell

The immigration courts are dysfunctional. As of November 2022, there were more than 2 million cases pending nationwide. Many people wait years to have their cases heard, while others (as...

The Accidental History of the U.S. Immigration Courts - In a nutshell

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 - The wide angle

The book ended up longer than I anticipated—in part because the evidence that I accumulated in Cairo, London, and Washington, proved to be so rich and the story so compelling...

The Muslim Brotherhood and the West - A close-up

If you were to flip through the book in a bookstore, you might land somewhere around pages 85-90, or if not there somewhere else in chapter 3: “Anti-Prague.” The chapter...

Einstein in Bohemia - A close-up

I make two basic claims in the book. First, I argue that the dominant mode of understanding conspiracy theory is flawed. Academics and journalists have wrongly assumed that conspiracy theories...

Conspiracy Theories - In a nutshell

Histories of disco emphasize the antagonism between rock and disco, and with good reason. Rock publications covered the glitter-ball world begrudgingly and/or sneeringly. Rock radio was even more hostile. Punk...

Hot Stuff - A close-up

Two phenomena led me to this project. A number of people close to me are recovering addicts of one sort or another, and when I attended meetings with them I...

The Insurgent Barricade - The wide angle

Woman Lawyer: The Trials of Clara Foltz is primarily a biography of an important figure in American legal history. Very famous in the late nineteenth century, she has been largely...

Woman Lawyer - In a nutshell

The premise of American nationhood in the nineteenth century was fully imbued with the presumption of possession of Cuba. The island insinuated itself into the American sense of nation, and...

Cuba in the American Imagination - The wide angle

I would hope readers pay close attention to Chapter 5, An Epidemics of Mob Justice, pp. 167-191, especially the graphic cases, 170–177. Also, I would like readers to pay attention...

Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution - A close-up

I came to the subject as an outsider to the field of management: as an historian with a broad interest in the social sciences and in public policy. I was...

The Tyranny of Metrics - The wide angle

Did you live in a dormitory? Do you have fond memories of it, or were you plotting your escape from the moment you moved in? Many people live in residence...

Living on Campus - In a nutshell

Italy in Early American Cinema traces the formal and ideological history of an aesthetic tradition, the Picturesque, from its original association with Italian landscapes to its deployment in early American...

Italy in Early American Cinema - In a nutshell

Between 1933 and 1945, when both Hitler and Stalin were in power, their two regimes murdered some fourteen million people in the lands between Berlin and Moscow, which I call...

Bloodlands - In a nutshell

Life on Mars is about both the astronomers who have made claims about the existence of past or present life on Mars and about those discoveries themselves. It is about...

Life on Mars - In a nutshell

In fact, I’d want the reader to really take a good look at the cover of the book. The photograph comes from a Stasi surveillance file of a groundbreaking art...

Parallel Public - A close-up

When you go to a doctor and the doctor gives you information about your body, the doctor makes a crucial assumption: Even though you are not a medical expert you...

Quarks to Culture - The wide angle

Calexico takes the reader to a border unlike the stereotypes.The lawlessness of some border flashpoints dominates border news. The bulk of Americans, those of us living far from the 2,000...

Calexico - In a nutshell

I first realized that the gendered terminology of public and private had a history while I was working on a book about social and political life in early New England...

Separated by their Sex - The wide angle

In the simplest terms, this book is about Russia’s first female terrorist. On January 24, 1878, a young woman named Vera Zasulich posed as an ordinary petitioner to gain admission...

Angel of Vengeance - In a nutshell

I hope that readers “just browsing” the book would start on page 1. I deliberately used one of my interesting historical examples to catch readers’ attention. The book’s introduction begins...

Coffee Nation - A close-up

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 - A close-up

Inventing the Enemy grew out of my previous book, Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin, which described the impact of the terror on the unions, workers, and industry....

Inventing the Enemy - The wide angle

I’d like to imagine that a reader picking up this book might be able to flip to the chapter that addresses a particular medium that interests them—e.g. graphics, industrial design,...

The Interface - A close-up

The Lives of Literature tackles the central, all-too-unasked, question that undergirds my teaching and writing career: why read literature? It’s the question all students ponder—why read these books?—and it seems...

The Lives of Literature - In a nutshell

The Iraq invasion of 2003 was justified by the Bush administration on the grounds of national security. But all of the principal advisors of the administration of president George W....

Why Nations Fight - A close-up

At the heart of Unending Capitalism (and my two other books) is the concept of consumerism. Consumerism—especially compared to identity, race, ethnicity, gender, and class—is underappreciated as a driving force...

Unending Capitalism - The wide angle

The photographs by Torbjørn Rødland on pages 216-217 showcase a gimmick he often uses in his images: a hand entering from an invisible space outside but also entirely specific to...

Theory of the Gimmick - A close-up

As of 2010, perhaps more than half of the world’s population lives in polities where religion not only has remained public but also has been playing a key role in...

Constitutional Theocracy - The wide angle

As citizens, our relationship to the laws shouldn’t be one of blind obedience; it should reflect critical engagement and sound judgment. In fact, we have a political obligation as democratic...

Civil Passions - The wide angle

Measuring Tomorrow is essentially a guide to the well-being and sustainability transition and as such aims to make four contributions. First, while we have several insightful historical accounts of GDP’s...

Measuring Tomorrow - The wide angle

Mount Helicon, sacred to the muses, looked down upon the great marsh of Copaïs, graveyard of cities. In heroic times men had cleared the limestone caverns that drained Copaïs to...

Song of Wrath - A close-up

One of the most notable developments in international trade after the end of the Cold War has been the explosion of preferential trade agreements (PTAs). In 1990, there were about...

Investing in Protection - In a nutshell

[I recount the story of a shirtless Nabokov catching butterflies in the mountains of Utah in 1943 and responding only slowly to John Downey, a student stopped beside the coal...

Stalking Nabokov - A close-up

A Dream Interpreted within a Dream grapples with the allusive and elusive place dreaming occupies in the panorama of human experience. Drawing on a variety of contemporary academic disciplines, I...

A Dream Interpreted within a Dream - In a nutshell

A reader encountering Relationscapes in a bookstore might find themselves attracted to the front cover, which is a reproduction of a painting by Australian Aboriginal artist Emily Kngwarreye. This might...

Relationscapes - A close-up

My book is about a historic change that occurred a century ago in the way people view human differences, illustrated through the work and life of a major artist. Today,...

Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity - In a nutshell

In the decades after World War II, the United States experienced an unprecedented boom in higher education. This boom altered the demographics of American society, creating a growing, educated middle...

Fantasies of the New Class - In a nutshell

I live in two worlds. I fled my native Iraq in 1991 during the Gulf War, and after almost two years in horrific refugee camps in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait,...

Shoot an Iraqi - In a nutshell

Places are human geographies of space. They name and attribute natures to spaces, marking them and frequently ranking them as self or other, desirable or undesirable, masculine or feminine. “Home”...

Pineapple Culture - The wide angle

I have lived in, observed, and written about Chicago for approximately 30 years.My academic home is the Political Science Department at DePaul University. I earned my Ph.D. in Urban Planning...

The Third City - The wide angle

I come to the question of religious belief as a scholar of literature and philosophy. And the Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges is a great influence for this work.As I...

In Defense of Religious Moderation - The wide angle

The Performance of Politics offers a new explanation for Barack Obama’s victory in 2008. Rather than demographics, strategy, and money, the argument focuses on cultural meaning making, symbolic creativity, and...

The Performance of Politics - In a nutshell

Multitasking isn’t something new to the twenty-first century: our species was designed for it! On the cognitive, linguistic, and social level, humans are highly adapted to doing and thinking about...

A Prehistory of Ordinary People - In a nutshell

There has been much debate over the last decade about expanding our discipline to create a global history of art, but what precisely are the new methods and protocols for...

Istanbul Exchanges - The wide angle