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If a reader were to browse at random in the book, where would s/he find a representative section that brought its central thesis most clearly to the fore? No single...
Youth in a Suspect Society takes as its major organizing idea the notion that youth are under assault in ways that are entirely new. My assumption is that young people...
Chapter 5 adopts a rigorous definition of what externalities are, identifies a wide range of external social benefits of higher education, presents and evaluates the empirical evidence for each, and...
When we talk about the history of photography, we largely mean the history of European and American photography. Then, we attach the “other” photographies: Indian, South American, African, Arab, etc....
Scholars of the presidency argue about whether what the president says matters. We wonder if anyone is listening; if they are, whether the president has the ability to persuade them;...
Becoming Batman is an examination of a superhero. I was trying to answer a simple question: Is it actually possible for any human to attain the skills and abilities of...
Is this what you would call a golden age of research?It's a combination of things. There has been a huge amount of excavation work and research over the past 150...
Empire for Liberty tells a story the broad outline of which will be familiar to many readers: the growth of the American empire from its inception to the present. But...
Denial is something we encounter in many aspects of modern life, and there is an entire psychological literature dealing with the topic. In this book, we are focused on a...
Chapter 1 of Life After Privacy is an ideal first look for the average reader. This chapter examines our curious, conflicted relationship to privacy. We may say that privacy is...
One of the reasons Trucking Country appeals to general interest readers outside of the academy is my attention to the cultural history of trucking, particularly the Hollywood movies and Nashville...
There are many cases in my book that should be of particular interest to an inquisitive reader wanting to find out what happened, why, and what the punishment might have...
“Why do we care about diversity?” Assuming that biological and, to a lesser extent, cultural diversity are accepted as important values in current Western society, how did this come to...
Entropy is both a property of matter and a device for selecting probability distributions in light of data. Hence it's an enormously useful tool that should be widely understood. The book explains how entropy gives insight into several aspects of the energy transition...
As recently as the 1930s there were no creative writing programs, and now there are hundreds. My book The Program Era is a literary history of postwar America that puts...
While the final paragraph of the introduction is perhaps the best synopsis of the book’s argument (page 18), my favorite paragraph in the book is on page 277.This paragraph tells...
A Nice Place to Visit explores how four American cities – Baltimore, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis – coped with the problems of economic decline after World War II, and...
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...
A book is usually not considered a machine—though it is common to use paper as one of the book’s core elements and a machine to print its pages.If you open...
Age of Fracture began in my attempts to explain modern America to myself and to my students. Having made a pledge that I would take my courses right up to...
During the recent Olympic Games a common cliché was to talk about China’s “coming out party,” meaning that China was finally opening out to the world. The key point of...
A Synthesizing Mind is my intellectual memoir. It’s a ‘memoir’ in the sense that I reflect on my life; it’s ‘intellectual’ in that it focuses chiefly on my life as...
My book is called The Parrot in the Mirror: How Evolving to Be Like Birds Makes Us Human. This book initially grew out of a single conversation as I was...
The book begins by plunging us into what is in many ways the heart of the story. Thus for the reader browsing in the bookstore, the opening pages are as...
Property is both a technical legal subject and an important part of everyday life. So I have tried to write an account that does justice to both without losing either...
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...
These days, families stream their pleasures in various activities: a child’s first dance performance; hiking on a fall day; joyful and serious rites of passage; home-cooked meals; and holiday parties....
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...
Start at Chapter One and read about the Satellite, Etzler’s mysterious machine, a cross between a plow and the Batmobile. The Satellite encompasses Etzler’s entire scheme, all his knowledge of...
Thanks to extraordinarily rich archives, the reader can get much closer to every aspect of life and death during Mao’s Great Famine than ever before. But nothing illustrates the desperation...
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