700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators
Fake It investigates a set of fictional literary and art forgeries and hoaxes alongside their real-life inspirations that range from the 1660s to the twenty-first century. In the prologue, I...
Urban theorists have tried for generations to define exactly what a neighborhood is. But behind that daunting existential question lies a much murkier problem: how do you make neighborhoods productive...
I would recommend a prospective reader to start with the final chapter, on Fidel. The rest of the book tends to ignore him. Deliberately. I have always resisted the tendency...
Unlikely Collaboration is a study of the unlikely attraction of modernist intellectuals and artists to fascist and authoritarian regimes in the twentieth century. Its focus is on the particular experience...
Composing the Citizen explores how and why music is deeply valuable to society, how music helps people fulfill their human potential as individuals and members of communities.The Third Republic in...
Picking up a book in a bookstore, a lot of readers look at a book’s opening and closing pages. From these they can get a sense of the basic idea...
A Free and Responsible Press is a classic, but many of the Commission’s most incisive and prescient observations didn’t make it into the book. As the transcripts of their meetings...
I do not think I can privilege one part of the book over another, but the Preface would be sufficient to draw the reader into the book, since it gives...
Macaulay: The Tragedy of Power is a cultural biography of Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay (1800-1859). The eclipse of his reputation may suggest that there’s nothing deader than a dead empire....
The book started as an attempt on my part to combine my interests in modern American and European history. I was trained in both fields but didn’t want to write...
This book is about the lives of chimpanzees living in the tropical forests of Africa. Over the past two decades, scientists have made dramatic discoveries about chimpanzees that will change...
My critics have “granted me” the point that developed free market cities have the ability and the capacity to cope with many aspects of climate change. But they have countered...
The chapter with the most sidewalk appeal is probably Chapter Two, “Shirley Temple as Streetwalker.” I argue that film starring Shirley Temple and Jane Withers, the Little Orphan Annie Comic...
This book explores the concept of “animus” in the law of the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause. Over the last thirty years, the Supreme Court has decided several important equal protection...
What lead me to this research? I have always been interested in the visual documentation of the Holocaust, and at one point had considered writing my doctoral dissertation on the...
The relationship between violence and feelings about government has often tracked separately by race in this country. In the last five decades, the black homicide rate peaked between 1971 and...
There are a number of individual moments in the book I would want a reader to find on first browsing, so it is hard to choose only one. On balance,...
Selective Solidarity is an ethnography about middle-class Senegalese families in Paris. It foregrounds the experiences of the French-born children of educated immigrants from Dakar, to consider how young people learn...
Wounded Knee is the story of the 1890 massacre in South Dakota that left more than 250 Sioux and 25 soldiers dead.The book explains the history of the relationship between...
In 1954, Egypt’s new revolutionary regime arrested Sayyid Qutb and hundreds of other Egyptian Islamist following a Muslim Brother’s assassination attempt on President Nasser. Qutb had joined the Muslim Brotherhood,...
Clash of Extremes presents a new interpretation of the causes of the Civil War. If the prevailing explanation can be summarized in one word, “slavery,” the argument in my book...
Life After Privacy examines the grave threat to privacy in the digital age, and its political implications. Unlike other writings on the topic, Life After Privacy does not lament or...
I would hope that “just browsing” readers in a bookstore would encounter the introductory section, “Horse,” or the penultimate chapter, “Dog” first. “Horse” for the simple fact that I try...
Modernist America is a history of American culture in the 20th and early 21st centuries. It focuses on literature, painting, architecture, advertising and design, classical music, jazz, Broadway musicals, movies,...
England’s Israel and the Foundations of Modern Political Thought explores how foundational ideas of modern politics that are usually considered secular were, in fact, born out of deep …
Foreclosed describes the evolution of U.S. mortgage markets from the early twentieth century through to the subprime crisis of the late 2000s. The book details the highly mixed-economy nature of...
This book illustrates the long history of the basic moves of information management on which we still rely today, even with digital tools. I call them the 4S's: selecting, summarizing,...
I would hope readers open the book at the introduction where I describe the following:Imagine a sparkling day on Sydney’s Harbour... eating creamy Sydney rock oysters and drinking a glass...
Histories of the long, prosperous liberal consensus in the middle of the twentieth century looked back to the specific experience of the industrial North. The people and institutions of the...
In the “Prelude” I draw an analogy between what literature discovers in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries and what other (then) versions of art turned up. In the large circular...
I guess there are different ways to read this book. I designed it to make people see Silicon Valley in 3D. Like the cover does: it shows Silicon Valley in...
In Chapter VI, on pages 484-499, I open the discussion of “politicised power” with a new reading of the notorious assassination of Thomas Becket on 29 December 1170. Here, one...
Russians are famous for taking ideas to the extreme and then acting on them. That is why they created totalitarianism. Russian thinkers before Communism also tended to take ideas to...
Description of the personal efforts of distinguished past foes of corruption is a leitmotiv set up in pages 21-25 and repeated in the opening sections of each subsequent chapter.The first...
The beginning of Chapter 3 begins to lay out a different way in which we can conceive of how students learn to make sense of the world and their experience,...
The Speed Handbook is first and foremost devoted to exploring the thrill you feel when you experience intense new speeds.Of what, exactly does the thrill of speed consist? Can speed’s...
I would probably draw my reader’s attention to a chart on p. 231 that I initially made when I got the intuition that “human rights” were far more important in...
Invented Knowledge is about various strange and false beliefs that have been held and still are held about the human past; the book tells how several strains of pseudo-historical and...
Madness is something whose mysteries puzzle us still. The loss of reason, the sense of alienation from the common sense world the rest of us imagine we inhabit, the shattering...
Cuba has undergone dramatic changes during the past two decades. As global tides washed over the island in the early 1990s, Cubans did their best to remain anchored. How did...
Drawing on Art: Duchamp and Company builds on the implications of my earlier work in Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit (1995). The focus is no longer on Duchamp alone but...
The central moment of Hans Litten’s life was his cross-examination of Adolf Hitler, and this moment forms the heart of the book as well. In the narrative leading up to...
The History of Missed Opportunities explores an unrecognized, certainly an unappreciated, development in Romantic-era Britain: the discovery of everyday life as a world that had been overlooked or, as Maurice...
This book is about pirate radio, which was a major enterprise in Britain in the Sixties.I focus on a clash between two of the most important pirate entrepreneurs, which culminated...
On Location shares the voices and visions of dozens of Cuban filmmakers. With candor they explain their interest in probing subjects once considered taboo in Cuba—sexuality, domestic violence, drugs, prostitution,...
Why Don’t American Cities Burn? is about the collision between urban transformation and rightward moving social politics.A series of economic, demographic, and spatial changes have transformed American cities, producing an...
There are two fundamental conceptions that animate this book, one drawn from the history of science, and the other from the history of Central Europe.The first is the principle of...
I would hope that readers “browsing” would first look at the book’s cover. It is a dreamy image of water taken on the Hudson River by artist Ellen Kozak. I...
The essays collected in Noble Cows and Hybrid Zebras share a focus on animals but within that general topic, they vary greatly. So a reader most interested in contemporary issues...
I am an engineer. I design and build things that never before existed (mostly software, these days). For most of my life, I thought these things were my personal creations,...
We don't have paywalls. We don't sell your data. Please help to keep this running!
%2520(1).jpeg)
.png)
.jpeg)
