2073 Micro Interviews

700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators

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Timothy Brennan

The main argument of Secular Devotion, I suppose, will appear to some people as outrageous. I am saying that popular music in the Americas is popular in part because it...

Secular Devotion - In a nutshell
Robert Alter

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...

Pen of Iron - A close-up
Timothy Snyder

I'm a historian of eastern Europe, I'm a specialist in this region.I've noticed that in general my colleagues avoid the larger tragedies that struck the lands we've studied, such as...

Bloodlands - The wide angle
Christopher Rea

E.B. White said that “humorists fatten on trouble,” and in modern China there’s been plenty of that to go around. One of the broad concerns of my book is to...

The Age of Irreverence - The wide angle
Rachel Herz

The general rubric under which the concepts of this book are laid out is evolutionary biology. The core positions are about how and why the emotion of disgust aids in...

That’s Disgusting - The wide angle
Richard H. Immerman

In fundamental respects, I’ve been writing this book my entire professional life. Yet, no less fundamentally, the book is the product of “presentist” concerns.I became a historian in part because...

Empire for Liberty - The wide angle
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
Jeffrey A. Lockwood

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...

Six-Legged Soldiers - The wide angle
Rachel Herz

That’s Disgusting is about the enigmatic and paradoxical nature of being human told through the lens of the emotion of disgust, our repulsions and our attractions, and the very fine...

That’s Disgusting - In a nutshell
Harvey Cox

The book deals with economic history in conjunction with religious history, and the interaction of the two. I use the capitalized Market to indicate a market system that has exceeded...

The Market as God - The wide angle
Joshua Shannon

Probably the part of the book I like best is the chapter on Donald Judd’s Minimalist sculptures; if someone were to casually flip through and land on a section to...

The Disappearance of Objects - A close-up
Frederick Luis Aldama

Your Brain on Latino Comics provides readers with an understanding of how comic books in general work to move us and to engage our critical faculties and imagination. It also...

Your Brain on Latino Comics - A close-up
Mark Traugott

Although it was only in the course of the nineteenth century that the barricade emerged as the preeminent symbol of the modern revolutionary tradition, its origins can be traced as...

The Insurgent Barricade - In a nutshell
Pablo Piccato

We tend to assume that freedom of speechnaturally accompanies other democratic rights. But the construction of the virtual and physical spaces where modern individuals could publicly and freely use their...

The Tyranny of Opinion - The wide angle
Joyce Appleby

I’d like my fresh reader to read the introduction carefully because it lays out my argument and makes the assertions that the text must back up. Many believe that capitalism...

The Relentless Revolution - A close-up
Francesco Duina

Broke and Patriotic is an effort to better understand and give voice to an important segment of the population that most of the country so often neglects. It also speaks...

Broke and Patriotic - The wide angle
Brad Gregory

Instead, the Reformation influenced the eventual emergence of closed-universe atheism because of the unending doctrinal controversies that followed in its wake. The controversies unintentionally sidelined explicitly Christian claims about the...

Science and religion are not incompatible
Kathy Peiss

Zoot Suit is a history of one of the most famous “street styles” of the 20<sup id="">th</sup> century. With its broad shoulders, tapered long jacket, pegged pants, and swinging key...

Zoot Suit - In a nutshell
Lucas Richert

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...

Break On Through - In a nutshell
Christopher L. Eisgruber

Justice Stevens permitted me to include in the book an anecdote that illustrates how differently judges and legislators behave when dealing with politically controversial issues. While I was clerking for...

The Next Justice - A close-up
Richard Bronk

My starting point for The Romantic Economist was an observation made during seventeen years working in the world of finance. I was struck by an important mismatch between the way...

The Romantic Economist - In a nutshell
E. Paul Zehr

The main concept under the surface of Becoming Batman is that of stress and adaptation. All responses of the body to exercise, training, and skill learning involve the principle that...

Inventing Iron Man - The wide angle
Andie Tucher

Not Exactly Lying stands apart from the flood of recent writing on the phenomena of misinformation, disinformation, and journalistic deception. Donald Trump did not, as he claimed, invent the term...

Not Exactly Lying - In a nutshell
Jeffrey C. Alexander

We need to move away from a mechanistic, materialist, interest-based view of political struggles. Every class, every ethnicity, every gender—and every political campaign—has a fair amount of free space to...

The Performance of Politics - The wide angle
Jonathan S. Burgess

Browsing readers would enjoy the first chapter of the book, in which the mythological “biography” of the hero is established, especially his childhood, often by relying on the evidence of...

The Death and Afterlife of Achilles - A close-up
Larry Bennett

The Third City is an unconventional interpretation and explanation of contemporary Chicago.By exploring this iconic American city, I comment on broader trends in American urbanism. And what I mean by...

The Third City - In a nutshell
Edward Ashford Lee

Many books you buy these days give a story that could have been presented in three pages, but since nobody buys a three-page book, had to be expanded to 200....

The Coevolution - A close-up
Elspeth Probyn

My book explores how we eat the ocean, in many ways, every day, sometimes without knowing it. Of course we know when we consciously eat fish – battered, breaded, grilled,...

Eating the Ocean - In a nutshell
Herbert S. Terrace

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...

Why Chimpanzees Can't Learn Language and Only Humans Can - The wide angle
Rachel Weiss

I have always been interested in applying the techniques of archaeology to understand peoples who were described by others but who left no written record themselves. Julius Caesar’s descriptions of...

To and from Utopia in the New Cuban Art - The wide angle
Miles Ogborn

Global Lives aims to offer an introduction to global history between 1550 and 1800. Focusing on Britain’s changing relationships with the rest of the world, it sets out the contours...

Global Lives - In a nutshell
Niobe Way

I found Jean Wade Rindlaub’s archive at the Schlesinger Library in the course of researching my first book, Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to the Well-Set Table. In that book...

Boys' Friendships and the Crisis of Connection - The wide angle
Francesco Boldizzoni

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...

Foretelling the End of Capitalism - The wide angle
Alex Rosenberg

Most people think of atheism as one big negative. But there is much more to atheism than knockdown arguments that there is no God.There is the whole rest of the...

The Atheist's Guide to Reality - In a nutshell
Louise Shelley

There is more than one business model of human trafficking and there are enormous variations in human trafficking in different regions of the world. This book examines all forms of...

Human Trafficking - In a nutshell
Jonathan Petropoulos

For a closer look, I would direct the reader to the section on the relationship between Theodore (“Ted”) Rousseau and Bruno Lohse. Rousseau, the former OSS officer who interrogated Lohse...

Göring's Man in Paris - A close-up
Steven Nadler

A Book Forged in Hell is about one of the most important and controversial books in Western history, one that continues to be vitally relevant today.Writing in May, 1670, the...

A Book Forged in Hell - In a nutshell
Joseph Wong

Chapter 5 opens with an anecdote, a true story.A few years back I was giving a talk in Taiwan about the state of the biotech sector there. The government had...

Betting on Biotech - A close-up
Paula Stephan

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...

How Economics Shapes Science - In a nutshell
George Cotkin

A book reveals itself in its fullness, in its sweat and swagger. But if you must rivet attention on one thing in this volume then I would hope that it...

Morality's Muddy Waters - A close-up
Gary Steiner

Animals and the Moral Community is divided into two parts. In the first, I examine historical and contemporary debates surrounding the question of the mental capacities of animals. In the...

Animals and the Moral Community - The wide angle
David L. Hu

The cover of the book is a water strider—an insect that stands on water as if it were land. As the animal rows, it generates waves on the water surface,...

How to Walk on Water and Climb up Walls - A close-up
William Egginton

I would hope your casual reader would first happen upon some of the pages in which I discuss how moderates and fundamentalists believe in very different ways.Religious moderation is a...

In Defense of Religious Moderation - A close-up
Herbert S. Terrace

I recommend a new reader turn to the chapter on the first year of infancy. Most people who spend time with infants (including their parents) think they are just playing...

Why Chimpanzees Can't Learn Language and Only Humans Can - A close-up
Henry M. Cowles

I think a lot of these points come together in Chapter 6, which is called “Animal Intelligence.” The title gives a pretty good sense of what’s in there: scientists trying...

The Scientific Method - A close-up
David Farber

Crack tells the story of the young men who bet their lives on the rewards of selling “rock” cocaine, the people who gave themselves over to the crack pipe, and...

Crack - In a nutshell
Philip Goodchild

I am a philosopher of religion by training, but one shaped by a radical tradition of European philosophy, being influenced especially by Spinoza, Schelling, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Bergson, Heidegger, Derrida and...

Theology of Money - The wide angle
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
Dan Immergluck

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...

Foreclosed - A close-up
Scott Peeples

At an American Literature conference about eight years ago, I presented a paper with the title “No Place Like Home”, which proposed that what the field of Poe biography had...

The Man of the Crowd - The wide angle

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