2073 Micro Interviews

700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators

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S. Jonathan Wiesen

This book emerged out of a sense of uncertainty as to how to understand the years that Gertrude Stein spent in Vichy, France, from 1940 through 1944.My previous book on...

Creating the Nazi Marketplace - The wide angle
Allan C. Hutchinson

This book makes a strong argument against the widespread perception, inside and outside the legal profession, that law is somehow an inanimate set of abstract rules which are the product...

Is Eating People Wrong? Great Legal Cases and How They Shaped the World - In a nutshell
Harold James

One of the most dramatic bubbles of the 2000s occurred in the art market, above all in contemporary art. For fine art overall, the most widely quoted index, the Mei...

The Creation and Destruction of Value - A close-up
Nicholas Dungan

Gallatin’s life demonstrates the value of continental European heritage in American history. His statue stands in front of the United States Treasury building, next to the White House, within eyeshot...

Gallatin - The wide angle
Philip E. Auerswald

We have all heard that we’re about to become obsolete, irrelevant. Or if not us, then, certainly, our children. No number of coding camps will help them. And definitely not...

The Code Economy - The wide angle
Charles T. Clotfelter

Like many Americans who grew up following football and basketball, I simply took it for granted that athletic teams sponsored by universities would compete in highly publicized games and that...

Big-Time Sports in American Universities - The wide angle
Nicholas Fox Weber

The Art of Tennis is really a celebration of different qualities of tennis. It celebrates the impact tennis has had on literature, on fashion, on music, on ballet, on theater. It also celebrates the beauty of the game itself, not just when it's well played, but the capacity of the game to reveal human character. To reveal generosity, or to reveal bigotry. To reveal kindness, or the lack thereof. There is an indescribable...

The Art of Tennis - In a nutshell
Simon Lailvaux

This book is about the often amazing athletic abilities that animals possess. It aims to explain how and why evolution has equipped certain animals with the capacity to do things...

Feats of Strength - In a nutshell
Keith Roberts

This is the first book to trace the genesis of modern business in Western antiquity. The time span stretches from prehistoric times to the late 7th century AD.The Origins of...

The Origins of Business, Money, and Markets - In a nutshell
Thomas Borstelmann

I have been writing and teaching U.S. and world history for more than three decades, for 12 years at Cornell and then 17 years at Nebraska. I have been primarily...

Just Like Us - The wide angle
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
Erin E. O'Connor

The hot parts, of course! This includes two chapters, “Fire and Sweat” and “Materia Erotica". In "Fire and Sweat," I get my first taste, so to speak, of intracorporeality. I'm...

Fire Craft - A close-up
David N. Livingstone

The idea that all human beings are descended from Adam has been a long-standing conviction in the West. Indeed it’s been a central doctrine among the monotheistic religions more generally....

Adam’s Ancestors - In a nutshell
Garett Jones

The Culture Transplant debunks the view that immigrants fully assimilate in a generation or two. This is something my fellow economists know—we have vast empirical literatures showing that, for instance,...

The Culture Transplant - The wide angle
Tim Lomas

Translating Happiness celebrates the idea that untranslatable words – terms without an exact equivalent in our own language – can expand our emotional, intellectual, and even experiential horizons. Such words...

Translating Happiness - In a nutshell
Michael Long

All of the chapters are sectional in structure, with section headers. Anyone not interested in following the threads of the big arguments through the whole book might still find it...

Beautiful Monsters - A close-up
Melinda Blau

Throughout my career, I wrote books and articles about intimate relationships. When I made a move from New York City to Northampton, Massachusetts in 1990, I left all my everyday...

Consequential Strangers - The wide angle
Sarah Maslen

My book examines the tricks of the trade and forms of collective support for crafting our largely unconscious practices of hearing. As we live our daily lives, our hearing generally...

Learning to Hear - In a nutshell
Matthew E. Kahn

I can certainly imagine that parts of Bangladesh will flood and sea level rise may submerge parts of the nation. But I would be surprised if such dramatic changes could...

Will poor nations suffer greatly from climate change?
David T. Courtwright

For fans of psychobiography, Nixon is the gift that keeps on giving.Even after he reached the White House in 1969, Nixon still had to live with his ulcers and his...

No Right Turn - A close-up
Pamela Robertson Wojcik

The book addresses a few different fields of inquiry. These include film genre, and writing on genre by people like Rick Altman. They also include ideas about urbanism. I focus...

Unhomed - The wide angle
William J. Cook

You wake up in the morning and find that you need to visit a number of cities or towns before returning in the evening. What is the shortest possible route...

In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman - In a nutshell
Sarah Maza

A chapter that I hope readers will find as exciting to read as I did to write is entitled “Letters to the Judge.”In the French criminal justice system, the initial...

Violette Nozière - A close-up
Santiago Zabala

Other historians, especially in the last ten years, have written about this suspected conspiracy. Indeed, as an undergraduate student, I myself abridged the one extant judge’s account of the trials....

Signs from the Future - The wide angle
John Stauffer

One of my favorite moments in Douglass and Lincoln’s relationship was at Lincoln’s second inaugural, when they met for the last time. It was as though in four years, the...

GIANTS - A close-up
Dean Keith Simonton

The marketing people at MIT Press asked me to pick out a brief excerpt from the book that might provide the best entry. I answered that the four-page Prologue would...

The Genius Checklist - A close-up
Peter S. Wells

Ever since enrolling in a PhD-program in Economics, I have been troubled by the excessive abstraction whereby economists treat money. While past thinkers, from Aristotle and Plato to Karl Marx...

Barbarians to Angels - The wide angle
Gary Steiner

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote that “in all essential respects, the animal is absolutely identical with us… The difference lies merely in the accident, the intellect, not in the...

Animals and the Moral Community - A close-up
Andrew Sayer

My book examines the role of values, reason and ethics, and concern with dignity in everyday life. It’s about everyday morality and immorality—banal goodness as well as banal evil. While...

Why Things Matter to People - The wide angle
Ian Merkel

Beyond its specific contributions to the historical field, this book responds to two major challenges of our present moment: 1) to recognize the contributions of Latin America and the “Global...

Terms of Exchange - The wide angle
Jeannie Suk

In many jurisdictions, the moment a misdemeanor domestic violence arrest enters the system, prosecutors routinely seek a protection order banning the alleged assailant from the home, whether or not the...

At Home in the Law - A close-up
Maha Nassar

Most of the existing scholarship on Palestinian citizens of Israel revolves around Israeli policies and majority-minority relations. This approach reflects in part the dominance of anthropologists and sociologists and social...

Brothers Apart - The wide angle
Thomas Wheatland

Picturing American Modernity is concerned with understanding how new (and old) forms of mass entertainment such as moving pictures, world’s fairs and expositions, electric light displays, live reenactments such as...

The Frankfurt School in Exile - The wide angle
Jon Butler

Browsing readers might try Chapter 5, “God’s Urban Hothouse.” Anyone doubtful about religiosity in early and mid-twentieth-century Manhattan might profitably turn to this chapter, which describes Manhattan as a modern...

God in Gotham - A close-up
Marc Egnal

Several principles shape the book. First, the story of the coming of the Civil War and its aftermath is told with a focus on individuals. Readers will encounter lawmaker Thaddeus...

Clash of Extremes - The wide angle
Brent R. Stockwell

In 1957, during a cleanup of his lab at the pharmaceutical company Roche, Leo Sternbach discovered an old flask containing a chemical he had synthesized previously, but discarded for lack...

The Quest for the Cure - A close-up
Keith Wrightson

Between 2009 and 2010, I spent 16 months conducting intensive fieldwork in a Miao and a Dong minority village-town in Qiandongnan Prefecture, Guizhou Province. Situated closely above the southwest border...

Ralph Tailor’s Summer - The wide angle
Kathy Peiss

Zoot Suit takes issue with historians and other scholars who interpret everyday life and culture largely as expressions of power and politics.In this view, subcultural styles are a form of...

Zoot Suit - The wide angle
Ann Campbell Keller

The book offers a systematic explanation of the changes in role-expectations that scientists who participate in environmental policymaking will face. It is rocky terrain that, for some scientists, is difficult...

Science in Environmental Policymaking - A close-up
Barry McCrea

The first paragraph in the Introduction is about a family memory which prompted the book in the first place.On page 11 I discuss fairytales looking at the problem of maturation...

In the Company of Strangers - A close-up
Bruce Gordon

The biography seeks to capture the dynamic nature of Calvin’s character; to illuminate how heady interaction with influential friends and enemies, unexpected events, and spiritual and intellectual growth shaped the...

Calvin - The wide angle
Despina Stratigakos

The first image in the book depicts a woman builder making repairs to the roof of Berlin’s town hall. Balanced on a ladder high atop the city, this young woman...

A Women’s Berlin - A close-up
Tobias Boes

Although Thomas Mann’s War is primarily a book about the 1930s and 1940s, I embarked on the project because of my interest in contemporary literature. This connection came full circle...

Thomas Mann's War - The wide angle
Philip G. Cerny

Our understanding of world politics in the “modern” world (i.e. the past couple of centuries) has been dominated by the “inside/outside distinction.”On the one hand, “domestic” politics, the inside, involves...

Rethinking World Politics - In a nutshell
Jan Plamper

This book is about Joseph Stalin’s personality cult—where it came from, how it changed over time, and how it was made. In spite of its subject matter, I hope the...

The Stalin Cult - In a nutshell
Tim Lomas

The book draws on numerous theoretical and empirical paradigms. Perhaps foremost among these is the linguistic relativity hypothesis (LRH), also popularly known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. This paradigm holds that...

Translating Happiness - The wide angle
Andrew Scull

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...

Madness in Civilization - In a nutshell
Sibyl A. Schwarzenbach

Despite the major transformation of consciousness occasioned by the 20th century women’s movement, and on a scale that suggests powerful historical forces are at work, the modern political state is...

On Civic Friendship - The wide angle
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
Kirsten Fermaglich

Page 55 contains some of the most interesting visual evidence that my book offers, with both methodological and historical significance. On this page, readers will find the “Distinctive Jewish Names,”...

A Rosenberg by Any Other Name - A close-up

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