700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators
I come to the question of religious belief as a scholar of literature and philosophy. And the Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges is a great influence for this work.As I...
Histories of disco emphasize the antagonism between rock and disco, and with good reason. Rock publications covered the glitter-ball world begrudgingly and/or sneeringly. Rock radio was even more hostile. Punk...
The most important practical lesson of the book comes from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s attempt to use silver as a political weapon to achieve domestic objectives while ignoring international consequences.During the...
It is hard to choose just one from the plentitude of examples—from all corners of the world—for how not to promote entrepreneurship.But here is a striking case.In 1970s and 1980s,...
I would hope that the browser who picked up Through Amateur Eyes in a bookstore would turn to the image section in the middle of the book.The archival images that...
I am particularly intrigued with the story of public housing, where one would least expect to encounter “communities of citizens.”The early history of the movement to provide decent shelter at...
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,...
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...
The Co-Presidency of Bush and Cheney opens a new door into understanding the dynamics between the president’s office and the vice president’s office. Material for the book was gathered over...
One of my favorite sections in the book is about how the Reagan administration disciplined the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in the 1980s.The IDB was founded in 1959 to provide...
When did America take a right turn? Most people think it began with the chaos of the 1960s, the unraveling of the New Deal coalition, the rise of the New...
The second chapter of the book provides a broad historical account of the importance of the Anglo-American trial and the fierceness with which the Founding Fathers defended it. The story...
There are so many encounters, described in the book, which continue to affect me. Maybe the reader would stumble on one of them and see its poignancy.A strapping, homeless, youth...
North Korean restaurants are tourist attractions in many cities, and are often the closest the average person will ever get to North Koreans. And indeed, they were one of the...
Mathematicians know two things that others do not. They know first that all mathematics flows from a few fundamental principles. Second, they know that aesthetic considerations provide both the motivation...
Foretelling the End of Capitalism looks back into the past to answer key questions for our time. But this has nothing to do with the uses of the past one...
From analyses of thousands of commercial and academic public opinion surveys covering presidents from Truman to Trump, with results detailed in 54 tables and 93 figures, I argue that modern...
It is perhaps already trite, these days, to observe that we live in a world chiefly defined by interdependencies. But it wasn’t always so.Until the “age of ecology,” ushered in...
Italy in Early American Cinema traces the formal and ideological history of an aesthetic tradition, the Picturesque, from its original association with Italian landscapes to its deployment in early American...
In this regard, it is instructive to look at the difference between Soper and Donald A. Henderson. Soper died in 1977, before the last case of smallpox was identified and...
Why have the obvious answers to life’s relentless questions been hard to recognize even by many atheists?The most serious obstacle to accepting science’s answers to the persistent questions is one...
Some people have told me that the most interesting part of the book was the chapter on Rudy Giuliani and his decision making. I don’t agree. I think the chapter...
The end of chapter 2, pages 95-100, just before the book’s gallery of photos, deals with one of the biggest questions I faced when doing the research: why, in fact,...
To be meaningful, a proposal to reform the health care system needs to be more than just visionary, it must address the complex issues of how the system will actually...
While the context of each chapter is found in the stories about each individual moment of convergence, I believe the access to high level executives throughout the industry provides the...
People check their mobile phones over 80 times every day, and while that frequency may alarm us as we survey a crowd of people hunched over their phones, it is...
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...
This book examines the War of 1812 between the American republic, the British empire, and their Indian allies.Most of the fighting took place in the hotly contested region between Montreal,...
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...
A half century ago a “radical caucus” formed in the American Psychiatric Association. The group, while somewhat small, felt that mental medicine needed to change in the US. The caucus...
Casualties of Credit offers a cultural history of early modern money. In exploring the intellectual underpinnings of the seventeenth-century English Financial Revolution, I uncover how people conceived of money and...
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...
This book is about nothing. Or at least 99.999999999999% bits of nothingness. And yet it is about everything – all that you can touch, see, taste, smell, and feel, and...
The Future of Education is an attempt to do precisely what its subheading suggests—reimagine our schools from the ground up. The book begins with a scenario in which a priestess...
We tend to view cosmopolitan science as a universal form that is practiced in many places. But, does modern knowledge itself become transformed in the midst of its peregrinations? Relatedly,...
Birthright sets out to recount, for the first time, the real-life saga of James Annesley, which not only captivated eighteenth-century Britain but inspired five novels, most famously Robert Louis Stevenson’s...
Each of the chapters begins with a case study, the first-person story of an individual who held, or discovered, a family secret. A close friend of mine browsed through the...
I’d draw the attention of your “browser” to the book’s first chapter.The first chapter of Cinema in an Age of Terror discusses The Battle of Algiers, a film by the...
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...
Göring’s Man in Paris is about three things: first, it is a detailed portrait of a Nazi art plunderer (Dr. Bruno Lohse); second, it tells the story of what happened...
I first became interested in the history of children’s literature when I was working on the writings of Geoffrey Chaucer. Chaucer was viewed as the “father of English Literature,” and...
I have a hard time deciding what is the best entry point for this book. Some people will be fascinated by the story about the CIA collaborating with a Japanese...
I came to see the War of 1812 as a civil war between kindred peoples, recently and incompletely divided by the revolution. To call the War of 1812 a “civil...
I have always been concerned about the role that theory might play as a resource in providing both a language and a context for understanding and addressing important social issues....
In the first chapter, I delve into examples to show how rules affect an artwork’s meanings. In 1991, Felix Gonzalez-Torres created a work called <a href="https://www.artic.edu/artworks/152961/untitled-portrait-of-ross-in-l-a" target="_blank" id="">“Untitled” (Portrait of...
Power at Ground Zero tells the epic story of how the site of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan was rebuilt after the terrorist attack of 9/11. The destruction...
The discussion and arguments are generally easy to follow. Even so, my guess is that the casual reader will most likely turn first to the graphics, which were chosen to...
While my colleagues might zero in on one of the concepts the book examines (economic moralities, scales of solidarity, Facebook families, etc.) I hope that a reader who is just...
Nature is hard to find these days. Six and half billion people spread across the entire planet draw so many resources from the earth and emit so much waste into...
I would be happy for the reader to land anywhere in the book; it is written to engage him or her at any point.But any reader might as well begin...
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