700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators
International courts have appeared in the news lately. The public seems vaguely aware of their existence and in some quarters there seems to be an expectation that they can try...
This book is about how American politics affects the multilateral development banks—or “the banks,” for short. The best known of these is the World Bank, but several regional banks that...
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...
While I was doing field research during the 1990s for an earlier book, Healthy Democracies, I came across a great deal of government and industry documents focused on the imperatives...
The decade-long, vituperative debate about the aggression instinct is the subject of chapter 5. The earlier chapters, 1 through 4, provide the lead-up, introducing the characters and the stakes on...
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...
Each chapter offers interesting research findings interpreted from an economic perspective. “Chasing the Tale” reviews what evolutionary biology tells us about the transformation of wolves into dogs. It also considers...
The retrieval of Craddock’s life from the vaults of vice suppression offers an entryway into major religious, cultural, and political issues of her day—and, often enough, of our own as...
The history of China’s interactions with Western cultures is fraught with misunderstandings, especially on the part of the West. Based on information supplied by pioneering Jesuit missionaries in China at...
The book is about famine, one of the greatest catastrophes that could befall any community. It offers a clear, non-technical overview of a fraught topic and of a wide-ranging, multi-disciplinary...
A few basic tropes characterize writing on the art market.Economists focus almost exclusively on the auction trade, and paintings in particular. The reason is straightforward enough: auction sales are public...
In 1790-91, France became the first European country to make the Jews full and equal citizens. Considered a backward population in need of “regeneration” by Enlightenment reformers, the French Jews...
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...
In the media spotlight, ruthlessly dedicated Chinese students and their superb performance in international testing continue to fuel global interest in China’s education system. This, however, tells only a partial...
The book arcs from the waning of Victorianism to the collapse of Communism and the rise of European Islam. Throughout, it investigates the shifting fortunes of prostitution and marriage, of...
All scholarship involves being diligent in seeking and finding of patterns. It doesn’t matter what the field is. We might be considering cultural studies, anthropology, botany, chemistry, linguistics: It doesn’t...
Most countries in medieval Europe were monarchies, ruled by a royal or imperial family, a dynasty, so politics at the top level was shaped by the births, marriages, and deaths...
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 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 nature of this book is that it is full of close-ups. It is made of the details of people’s lives, and the ways that they shaped and were shaped...
The rise and demise of world communism was one of the great dramas of the 20th century. It was born in wars (World War I, World II), and offered an...
Good Vibrations builds on a scientific and cultural shift in how we understand music. For a long time, music was considered “just entertainment”: pleasant, but biologically unimportant. In the book,...
Spinoza’s Treatise is very much a product of its time—especially the immediate context of the Dutch Golden Age, with its heady mix of economic wealth, political liberalism, religious dissent, scientific...
Chicago occupies a particular place in the development of American urbanism. Urban reform movements, the city beautiful movement, modern architecture, and urban renewal and public housing were developed and tested...
If I could look over the shoulder of a reader browsing through my book in a bookstore and whisper advice about how best to spend fifteen minutes of sampling the...
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,...
One Nation Undecided (Princeton University Press, 2017) is a natural sequel to my last book, Why Government Fails So Often, and How It Can Do Better (Princeton University Press, 2014).Why...
Among the scientific, historical, and military themes in Six-Legged Soldiers, the reader will find three “big picture” ideas, all of which are cause for curiosity and concern.Using insects as weapons...
Historical breadth will hopefully make Foreclosed particularly useful beyond the near term. But the timing of the book is not coincidental. I have a proximate objective of using lessons from...
Everyone knows that research costs money, of course. But I think for many of us it is surprising just how much research costs—and just how expensive “small scale” science can...
For a quick zoom, I refer the reader to Mumler’s most famous spirit photograph and to the passages where he recounts this strange visitation in his memoirs, The Personal Experiences...
Some book titles are mysterious or allegorical, providing no obvious clue of what the darn things are about. No danger of that here. I’ve written a book about the long...
Camps are unavoidable functions of our contemporary moment, registering local and global forces at their earliest stages and thus signaling trend, crisis, and identity. These malleable spaces conform to our...
A section of Chapter 8 on the ascendancy of Reagan to the presidency is titled “It’s the Ideology, Stupid.” President Reagan is a central character in the book, because he...
The book is illustrated with original photographs of “Poe places” by Michelle Van Parys; it also contains a number of archival images, including contemporary maps of the cities where Poe...
One of the key objectives in Program Earth is to rework theories of sensing by decentering the human subject that is meant to be the key locus through which sensation...
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...
The Real Real Thing shows early 21st</sup>-century culture wrestling with new media, technology, and science. The book is the third in a loose trilogy that began with The Scandal of...
Each reader, of course, will be more interested in some of the issues than in others, and the book’s organization facilitates their ability to pick-and-choose with that in mind. For...
We are fond of dogs. Although it would be a bit of a stretch to say that we are also fond of economics, we certainly appreciate its usefulness in understanding...
Thirtyfour Campgrounds examines the standardization and modernization of the contemporary campground as a familiar setting in the American landscape.Campgrounds celebrate a unique form of American ingenuity in which intersecting narratives...
My interest in the topic of public art and modernism in Los Angeles grew out of a lifelong concern with artistic and literary censorship. Early in my career, I learned...
At the heart of the book are the data. A look at chapter 3 would be a good way to get a feel for my approach. The material in this...
If browsing, I'd hope readers encounter some of the case studies I describe to illustrate key concepts. The famous neurologist and author, Oliver Sacks, was a master of using neurological...
Contemporary art seems chaotic. Works can be made out of materials ranging from <a href="https://creativetime.org/projects/karawalker/" target="_blank" id="">sugar</a> to <a href="https://www.tanyabonakdargallery.com/artists/62-sarah-sze/works/10366-sarah-sze-second-means-of-egress-orange-2004/" target="_blank" id="">ladders</a> to <a href="http://www.janineantoni.net/gnaw" target="_blank" id="">lard</a>. Parts may be...
The book is related to and draws on a wide range of theories and research in education and related social science fields, including economics, sociology, demography, political science, and criminology....
In the book’s last chapter, I try to explain Vladimir’s development, showing how family history shapes people and how parents and siblings interact in complex ways.The Ulyanov family and its...
Based on the real-life experiences of its creators, David Simon and Ed Burns, the HBO series “The Wire,” is regarded by some as among the greatest cultural documents of our...
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...
My book aims to challenge what I consider to be some pervasive views about the Frankfurt School during its period of exile in the United States and to re-evaluate the...
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