2073 Micro Interviews

700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators

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Michael Schudson

This book examines the history of a set of transparency-related reforms that came to fruition in the 1960s and 1970s. The term “transparency” was not in general use in politics...

The Rise of the Right to Know - In a nutshell
Lynne A. Isbell

The idea of Snake Detection actually took me by surprise. I wasn’t looking for it. I was instead pursuing answers to questions that were more consistent with my academic background...

The Fruit, the Tree, and the Serpent - The wide angle
Jonathan S. Burgess

In ancient myth, Achilles is killed by Paris as he tries to invade the gates of Troy. After being buried in a magnificent mound by the sea, his shade enjoys...

The Death and Afterlife of Achilles - In a nutshell
Thomas Borstelmann

Foreignness: how have Americans thought about it? Who are we, who are they, and how are we related to each other? These questions have underpinned all of American history, as...

Just Like Us - In a nutshell
Christopher Rea

The Chinese press dubbed 1933 the “Year of Humor.” The catalyst was the Analects Fortnightly, a new magazine inspired by The New Yorker and other contemporaries, which since its launch...

The Age of Irreverence - A close-up
Shirley Anne Warshaw

How I came to write the book was that I was asked about 10 years ago to give a lecture about real women who masqueraded as men and who took...

The Co-Presidency of Bush and Cheney - The wide angle
Deborah Cohen

The idea that interiors reveal personalities is such a truism of contemporary culture that it is difficult to imagine that it was not always so. While the well-to-do in previous...

Household Gods - A close-up
Edward B. Barbier

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...

A Global Green New Deal - The wide angle
Bethany Moreton

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...

To Serve God and Wal-Mart - The wide angle
Robert Gildea

This is not just a political story, because that only tells part of what is fascinating about France in this period. What are the images we have of France in...

Children of the Revolution - The wide angle
Yuval Feldman

The book attempts to bring together three related bodies of literature and make them speak to each other. The first one is behavioral economics. Through thousands of experiments, this literature...

The Law of Good People - The wide angle
Ian Worthington

Alexander the Great of Macedonia is one of the most exciting and controversial figures of antiquity. Probably only Jesus Christ is more famous from the ancient world. Alexander was only...

Philip II of Macedonia - In a nutshell
Nicholas Fox Weber

If a reader finds The Art of Tennis in a bookstore, I hope, first of all, that they look at the cover, and they realize that this should be fun. I think the cover is very skillfully painted in a lighthearted way. This is supposed to be just like the fun of watching a game, the fun of playing, and so on. And then I hope the person will open the book and realize that he or she is in for some surprises. This is not going to be...

The Art of Tennis - A close-up
Frank A. Guridy

Since childhood, I have been passionate about sports. I played baseball in my youth, but I am embarrassed to admit that I was—and still am—a sports geek who could recite...

The Sports Revolution - The wide angle
Jacob Darwin Hamblin

A lot of people assume it’s an antinuclear book. When you put “wretched” in the title, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that it’s interpreted that way. I’ve even gotten...

The Wretched Atom - The wide angle
Erin Manning

Relationscapes attempts to develop a theory of the incipiency of movement. Initially, my main concern was to continue a line of questioning developed in my previous book, Politics of Touch,...

Relationscapes - In a nutshell
Shelley Baranowski

A brief introduction summarizes my argument, and in chapter 5 I also summarize Nazi imperialism.A reader might especially enjoy pages 139-143, chapter 3, which are about Hitler’s conceptions of “living...

Nazi Empire - A close-up
Brooks E. Hefner

The best entry point for the book is probably the introduction. I use that rather lengthy section to demonstrate the permeability of modernist boundaries and to lay out my argument...

The Word on the Streets - A close-up
Lynne Sagalyn

I have long believed that city building is a story of implementation for which plans are but the foundation for debate and action, and that action is driven by politics,...

Power at Ground Zero - The wide angle
Tobias Boes

Most readers browsing through the book in a bookstore will probably end up lingering over the fourth chapter, which has not only a catchy title (“Hitler’s Most Intimate Enemy”), but...

Thomas Mann's War - A close-up
Charles A. Kupchan

I would encourage readers to start with the Preface. There they will find a concise summary of the intellectual journey that prompted me to write Isolationism and of the book’s...

Isolationism - A close-up
Anne Dunlop

There wasn’t one moment when the book started to take shape in my mind, but I’ve been thinking about it, off and on, since I was a student. If you...

Painted Palaces - The wide angle
Louise Shelley

Human smuggling and trafficking have been among the fastest growing forms of transnational crime—because current world conditions have created increased imbalances of demand and supply. In addition, migration flows are...

Human Trafficking - The wide angle
Mark Fenster

I came to political consciousness in the 1970s. The first president I remember was Richard Nixon, and the first political controversies I remember were Watergate and the latter days of...

Conspiracy Theories - The wide angle
Aditi Sahasrabuddhe

Bankers’ Trust: How Social Relations Avert Global Financial Collapse sits at the crossroads of international political economy, financial history, and the study of power and trust in global governance. It asks enduring questions: how do countries cooperate under pressure...

Bankers' Trust - The wide angle
Claude S. Fischer

I would like to highlight just two passages.The first is from the start of Chapter 2:In early 1865, Abraham Lincoln was the most powerful man in the Western Hemisphere. He...

Made in America - A close-up
Douglas B. Downey

This book is about understanding how schools influence achievement gaps. The traditional story is that schools are part of the problem and that large differences in school quality make achievement...

How Schools Really Matter - In a nutshell
Sylvia Lavin

I’d like readers to fall into the lush and alluring image of Pipilotti Rist’s Pour Your Body Out, like Alice fell into Wonderland. A short read later, I’d like them...

Kissing Architecture - A close-up
Joshua Clover

1989, in the most basic terms, is a synthesis of cultural criticism and political science, toward an understanding of a complex and important social convulsion.There is a lot of Public...

1989 - The wide angle
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
David T. Courtwright

Vice and addiction have always been with us. The Age of Addiction shows how entrepreneurs melded vices and addictions into a global economic system of limbic capitalism, outmaneuvering reformers determined...

The Age of Addiction - In a nutshell
Amanda Goodall

There are literally thousands of books on leadership on the market. And one of the common criticisms about them is that they are often anecdotal and lack convincing evidence.Also, various...

Socrates in the Boardroom - The wide angle
Robert L. Bettinger

Orderly Anarchy places the Indians of California in modern evolutionary perspective. It disputes the traditional, stage by stage, cultural evolutionary interpretation in which hunter-gatherers represent a primitive, unevolved stage of...

Orderly Anarchy - In a nutshell
Thomas J. Schaeper

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...

Edward Bancroft - A close-up
Jeffrey A. Lockwood

An excerpt from the chapter on Japan’s biological warfare program, Unit 731:Merely dumping bacteria into the enemy’s water hadn’t infected enough people to trigger an outbreak. A new approach was...

Six-Legged Soldiers - A close-up
Ruth DeFries

What Would Nature Do? is unabashedly human-centric. It is about strategies that humans—the big-brained, ingenious animal that we are—can learn from nature’s experience to improve our prospects of prospering on...

What Would Nature Do? A Guide for Our Uncertain Times - In a nutshell
Gary Saul Morson

The book’s introduction and conclusion offer a real taste of how it proceeds. In the introduction, I first describe an ancient literary form that served as my model. Called “the...

Wonder Confronts Certainty - A close-up
Ian Goldin

Current debates about migration are generating a great deal of heat, but very little light. The book argues that migration has been a key driving force for economic growth and...

Exceptional People - The wide angle
Susan Schulten

From the voyages of discovery to the digital age, maps have been essential to five hundred years of American history. Whether made as weapons of war or instruments of reform,...

A History of America in 100 Maps - In a nutshell
Stephen Prince

The chapter entitled “Ground Zero in Focus” examines several documentaries composed of candid, amateur footage shot by witnesses in Manhattan and New Jersey as the World Trade Center burned and...

Firestorm - 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
William D. Araiza

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...

Animus - In a nutshell
Bruce Thomas Boehrer

Animal Characters studies the place of nonhuman animals in Renaissance writing.Between 1400 and 1700, written and visual records tell us, Europeans began to experience the animal world in new ways....

Animal Characters - In a nutshell
Mark Fenster

In fact, two close-ups.The first is on page 17, a very brief discussion of what the book isn’t, as opposed to the remainder of the introduction, which identifies what the...

Conspiracy Theories - A close-up
Paul N. Edwards

The first decade of the 21st century has been the hottest on record. And NASA recently registered 2010 as the hottest year since instrumental observations began. On the planetary scale,...

A Vast Machine - In a nutshell
Albena Azmanova

My thinking on judgment as a faculty triggered by a sense (or rather, a sensation) of injustice was first prompted by my involvement with the struggle against the communist regime...

The Scandal of Reason - The wide angle
Lawrence Rothfield

The Rape of Mesopotamia is about the series of missteps, missed opportunities, and miscommunications that led to the massive looting of Iraq’s cultural heritage after the U.S. invasion in 2003....

The Rape of Mesopotamia - In a nutshell
Juliann Sivulka

Although books on advertising history examine representations of gender, advertising history is a gendered narrative reflecting mostly men’s rather than women’s experience in advertising. To retell the history of advertising,...

Ad Women - The wide angle
Minsoo Kang

Sublime Dreams of Living Machines is about the millennia-long fascination in the West with the self-moving machine that mimics living beings, better known today by the word “robot.”There are works...

Sublime Dreams of Living Machines - In a nutshell
Paula Lupkin

Although it engages directly with the fields of architectural history, gender studies, and urban history this book is really for anyone who has ever gone swimming, or played a game...

Manhood Factories - In a nutshell

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