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When people talk about animals they disclose their assumptions about each other.

When I began work on my first book, animals were not universally acknowledged as respectable subjects of historical research. The book was published by Harvard University Press in 1987, and...

Noble Cows and Hybrid Zebras

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When people talk about animals they disclose their assumptions about each other.

Disciplines like zoology and veterinary medicine have always taken animals seriously as the subject of research. In the humanities and social sciences, the field sometimes known as “animal studies” began...

Noble Cows and Hybrid Zebras

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The Nozière case gripped France because the parents were recognizably people like us.

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

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The Nozière case gripped France because the parents were recognizably people like us.

There is only one previous book about this case, an account of the bare facts of the matter published in French in 1975. I happened to read it a few...

Violette Nozière

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The Nozière case gripped France because the parents were recognizably people like us.

Violette Nozière tells the story of a high-profile criminal case that took place in Paris in 1933-34. An eighteen-year-old girl, the only child of a striving lower-middle-class couple, carefully devised and...

Violette Nozière

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Classicism and the pictorial innovations of Italian art, 1490 to 1540, were instruments of reforming religious art.

There is a short section devoted to the painting reproduced on the book’s cover, which is Rosso Fiorentino’s Dead Christ (1527), a very strange painting and nothing less than a...

The Controversy of Renaissance Art

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Italian Renaissance art reformed religious art rather than breaking away from it into secular art.

The Italian Renaissance has always been understood as the foundation of European art. The entire artistic tradition through Picasso stems from the extraordinary achievements of early 16th century artists. Traditionally, this...

The Controversy of Renaissance Art

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Classicism and the pictorial innovations of Italian art, 1490 to 1540, were instruments of reforming religious art.

This book puts Italian art of the period 1490-1540, in the context of the religious controversy that dominated the era. This is the period before the Council of Trent, before the...

The Controversy of Renaissance Art

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Fundamentalism is a way of believing, so the New Atheists and the biblical literalists hold the same position.

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

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Fundamentalism is a way of believing, so the New Atheists and the biblical literalists hold the same position.

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...

In Defense of Religious Moderation

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Fundamentalism is not a religious creed but a way of believing.

The current debate around religion in America has been dominated by fundamentalists and atheists. The fundamentalists have managed to set a tone for political discourse in America in which no one...

In Defense of Religious Moderation

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Information overload is ancient, and selecting, summarizing, sorting and storing are still how we cope.

My favorite chapter is the one on note-taking (chapter two). It is about how students and adults in the Renaissance were taught and encouraged to take notes. Humanist pedagogues argued that...

Too Much to Know

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Information overload is ancient, and selecting, summarizing, sorting and storing are still how we cope.

This book illustrates the long history of the basic moves of information management on which we still rely today, even with digital tools. I call them the 4S's: selecting, summarizing,...

Too Much to Know

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Information overload is not a modern condition.

This book is about how the feeling of being overloaded with information, especially things to read, isn't a recent phenomenon. Similarly the tools for coping with overload, notably by managing...

Too Much to Know

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Cuban art of the 1990s asked how a people lives with disenchantment after building the sky.

Juan Francisco Elso’s “Por América” is one of the many remarkable works that I write about. An effigy of José Martí, it is an exquisitely painful portrait, depicting the Cuban...

To and from Utopia in the New Cuban Art

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The chastened Cuban art of the 1990s asked how a people lives with disenchantment after building the sky.

My own engagement with Cuban art began in 1985, the result of a happy accident. I was immediately fascinated by the work that my peers in Havana were making: it...

To and from Utopia in the New Cuban Art

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The chastened Cuban art of the 1990s asked how a people lives with disenchantment after building the sky.

What happened in Cuba was basically the collapse of a dream. That’s obvious, but nonetheless painful. Specifically in the arts, the 1980s was a time of incredibly energetic and critical creativity,...

To and from Utopia in the New Cuban Art

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Adolescent boys have openly intimate male friendships and lose them in late adolescence to culture, not to maturation.

Research consistently reveals that friendships are key to all aspects of wellbeing. So we should be alarmed by the findings of loss of friendships and increased feelings of distrust among...

Boys' Friendships and the Crisis of Connection

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Boys lose their intimate friendships in late adolescence to culture, not to growing up.

Why have we, as a culture, ignored the intimacy in boys’ friendships for so long, despite the fact that research has revealed such intimacy among boys over the past century? And...

Boys' Friendships and the Crisis of Connection

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Adolescent boys have openly intimate male friendships and lose them in late adolescence to culture, not to maturation.

My longitudinal research with hundreds of boys over the past twenty years has indicated that boys’ friendships, particularly during early and middle adolescence, are deeply intimate. They sound more like...

Boys' Friendships and the Crisis of Connection

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Big-time sports is a core university function, sustained by trustees and regents who insist on competitive teams.

Because my approach was agnostically empirical, the book ended up packed with information not previously known or associated with universities. Here are a few examples. I addressed a question that has been...

Big-Time Sports in American Universities

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In universities where it exists, big-time sports is a core function, not an appendage.

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

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Big-time sports is a core university function, sustained by trustees and regents who insist on competitive teams.

The United States is the only country with universities that participate in what amounts to commercial sports entertainment. Why this happened in America and not elsewhere is interesting to contemplate. James...

Big-Time Sports in American Universities

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A discovery claim in big physics is settled by eighteen months of fractious collective argument, not by insight.

There are two quite different aspects of the work to which I would want to draw a reader’s attention. The first aspect is what most of the book is about;...

Gravity’s Ghost

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A discovery claim in big physics is settled by eighteen months of fractious collective argument, not by insight.

I’ve been doing this kind of work since 1972 when I was a graduate student doing my PhD.In that year I drove 5,000 miles in an old car, a big...

Gravity’s Ghost

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A discovery in big physics is settled by long collective argument, not by insight.

How do physicists decide that some data might constitute a discovery? The way to find out is to watch. For 18 months I watched physicists arguing about a burst of data...

Gravity’s Ghost

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Science fiction refers to reality, and what people call realism is low-intensity science fiction working on easy referents.

In the introduction I make what is probably the book’s most counterintuitive claim—that science fiction and lyric poetry are intimately interconnected. From page 11 to page 63 of Do Metaphors Dream,...

Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation

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Science fiction refers to reality, and what people call realism is low-intensity science fiction working on easy referents.

Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? challenges two key misconceptions about science fiction. The first misconception, which I already addressed, is the notion that science fiction is devoted not to...

Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation

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Science fiction refers to real things that resist straightforward representation.

The main purpose of Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? is to offer a science-fictional theory of representation. Most people think of science fiction as a genre devoted not to the...

Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation

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The gendered public-private divide was invented in early eighteenth-century England by Dunton, Addison and Steele.

I may be perverse, but my favorite parts of the book are those that detail men’s most misogynistic or outrageous comments about women’s interest in public affairs.I think, for example,...

Separated by their Sex

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The gendered public-private divide was invented in early eighteenth-century England by Dunton, Addison and Steele.

I first realized that the gendered terminology of public and private had a history while I was working on a book about social and political life in early New England...

Separated by their Sex

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The gendered divide between public and private was invented in early eighteenth-century England.

Separated by their Sex examines the origins of a crucial concept: the notion that the world is divided into realms we call public and private. A gendered public-private divide—in which the...

Separated by their Sex

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The computer runs on the manipulation of discrete written symbols, not on language, and Lacan's Symbolic Order is cybernetic.

Are we turning into Freudian robots anytime soon? This is a question I was greatly tempted to put to a psychoanalyst. It turns out that French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan showed...

The Freudian Robot

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The computer runs on the manipulation of written symbols, not on language.

As someone who trained in comparative literature, I have been taught to focus on literary text and ignore science and technology. I was among the first generation of graduate students...

The Freudian Robot

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The computer runs on the manipulation of discrete written symbols, not on language, and Lacan's Symbolic Order is cybernetic.

I wrote this book to ask some new questions about our relationship to modern technology. As the world is constantly being changed by new technological inventions, what is the psychic...

The Freudian Robot

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Bancroft was a Loyalist, not a traitor, and Franklin was not his accomplice.

Most historians who have had occasion to mention Bancroft have castigated him as a villainous traitor. Yes, he was a spy, but in my book I argue that he was...

Edward Bancroft

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Bancroft was a Loyalist, not a traitor, and Franklin was not his accomplice.

Edward Bancroft’s story offers new perspectives on a variety of topics: the history of espionage, French involvement in the American Revolution, the operation of the British government, and the character...

Edward Bancroft

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Edward Bancroft was a Loyalist, not a traitor.

Edward Bancroft was born in Westfield, Massachusetts, in 1745 and died in England in 1821. He is most famous (or infamous) today because from 1777 to 1783 he lived in...

Edward Bancroft

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Property has no true nature.

Chapter 7, “Owning Fame,” is about the rise of property rights in the names and images of famous people. I bookend the chapter with the stories of two celebrities, Jenny...

American Property

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Property has no true nature.

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...

American Property

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Property has no true nature.

When Richard Newman died in Los Angeles in 1997, his body was taken to the county coroner’s office for a routine autopsy. Two years later, Newman’s father learned that the...

American Property

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Migration is the engine of human progress, and today's restriction is the historical anomaly, not the openness it replaced.

This book addresses a wide range of readers, and does not require any prior knowledge of the subject. But, even for specialist readers, the book contains enough which is new. Exceptional...

Exceptional People

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Migration is the engine of human progress, and today's restriction is the historical anomaly, not the openness it replaced.

Current debates about migration are generating a great deal of heat, but very little light. The book argues that migration has been a key driving force for economic growth and...

Exceptional People

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Migration has been the engine of human progress and of every major civilization.

Discussions about migration in the media and elsewhere are limited by a lack of perspective of international migration’s historical role, contemporary impacts, and future prospects. Exceptional People addresses these gaps....

Exceptional People

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American culture conquered the world because it was never purely American, having borrowed European high modernism first.

Chapter One, “Modernism in Europe and America,” outlines the book’s major arguments. It also focuses on the urban aspects of modernism, the cultural importance of cities like Vienna, Berlin, Paris,...

Modernist America

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American culture conquered the world because it was never purely American, having borrowed European high modernism first.

This is my fourth, and by far my broadest, examination of modern American culture. My first two books focused almost exclusively on American culture. The first, Radical Visions and American Dreams,...

Modernist America

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American culture conquered the world because it was never purely American.

Modernist America is a history of American culture in the 20th and early 21st centuries. It focuses on literature, painting, architecture, advertising and design, classical music, jazz, Broadway musicals, movies,...

Modernist America

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The free-market growth that caused climate change is also what will let households and firms adapt to it.

To tackle climate change, we must reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. In an economy in which there are more people who are growing richer over time, the only way we...

Climatopolis

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The free-market growth that caused climate change is also what will let households and firms adapt to it.

I am an academic economist and most of my research has focused on the quality of life of cities. Most economists agree that the key for long run city sustainability is...

Climatopolis

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The free-market growth that caused climate change will also help us adapt to it.

The core theme of Climatopolis is ironic. Free market capitalist growth has caused climate change—but the same individualist forces will help us to adapt to climate change. My starting point is...

Climatopolis

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The common law develops by breaking with its past, and it is nothing more than what lawyers make it.

The book’s title is drawn from a late nineteenth century case—which is also the focus of the second chapter. Four men were shipwrecked in the mid-Atlantic. After over three weeks at...

Is Eating People Wrong? Great Legal Cases and How They Shaped the World

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The common law develops by breaking with its past, and it is nothing more than what lawyers make it.

Much legal education treats law as an autonomous discipline that can be separated from and studied without any necessary resort to politics, philosophy, sociology and the like. Instead, I have...

Is Eating People Wrong? Great Legal Cases and How They Shaped the World

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The common law develops by breaking with its past, not step by logical step.

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

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The United States became truly independent in 1815, not 1783.

I wrote this book for the reader—I wanted the reader to be able to participate in a good story, and for Albert Gallatin to come alive in the pages. But I...

Gallatin

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The United States became genuinely independent in 1815, when Gallatin's Treaty of Ghent put it on equal footing with Britain.

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

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The United States became genuinely independent in 1815, when Gallatin's Treaty of Ghent put it on equal footing with Britain.

Albert Gallatin contributed as fully as any other statesman to the welfare and independence of the young United States, yet he has been largely forgotten by history. Born in Geneva in...

Gallatin

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Terrorism is a contest over who gets to occupy the position of the victim.

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...

Cinema in an Age of Terror

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Terrorism is a contest over who gets to occupy the position of the victim.

I became interested in this topic because of previous research I had done on postcolonial theory. The book engages deeply with postcolonial theory and the interest in that discipline in...

Cinema in an Age of Terror

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Terrorism is a contest over who gets to occupy the position of the victim.

This book is about the ways that cinema teaches us how the idea of occupying the position of the victim is central to the dynamics of terrorism. I became interested in...

Cinema in an Age of Terror

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The Tibetan Book of the Dead is more an American book than a Tibetan one.

In Tibet, there is a genre of books called terma, which means “treasure” in Tibetan. According to Tibetan Buddhist belief, in the eighth century, a great Indian master named Padmasambhava...

The Tibetan Book of the Dead

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The Tibetan Book of the Dead is more an American book than a Tibetan one.

As someone who went to college in the 1970s and was interested in “Eastern Philosophy” as it used to be called, I read The Tibetan Book of the Dead and...

The Tibetan Book of the Dead

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The Tibetan Book of the Dead is more an American book than a Tibetan one.

Princeton University Press has started a new series entitled “Lives of Great Religious Books,” and my book is one of the three inaugural volumes. The idea behind the series is that...

The Tibetan Book of the Dead

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Postwar writers who thought literary education could reform capitalism from within helped weaken the American welfare state.

I hope that readers will begin with my introduction, which lays out the basic terms of my argument. However, casual readers might prefer to start with one of the chapters...

Fantasies of the New Class

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America's weak welfare state is partly the work of writers who saw themselves as its conscience.

As a Canadian who specializes in American literature, I’ve always been fascinated by the weakness of the U.S. welfare state compared to that of other first world nations. The reasons...

Fantasies of the New Class

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Postwar writers who thought literary education could reform capitalism from within helped weaken the American welfare state.

In the decades after World War II, the United States experienced an unprecedented boom in higher education. This boom altered the demographics of American society, creating a growing, educated middle...

Fantasies of the New Class

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Sports and entertainment have converged so far that the money is increasingly made away from the event itself.

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...

Money Games

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Sports and entertainment have converged so far that the money is increasingly made away from the event itself.

It is sometimes hard to fully appreciate the way in which the sports industry has grown, both organically and systematically—and how the business parlays fans’ insatiable appetite for sports into...

Money Games

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In sports, the money is increasingly made away from the event itself.

Money Games chronicles how sports and entertainment have continued to converge throughout history. The pace at which this convergence has been happening is covered in the book’s nine chapters. My...

Money Games

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Postwar treason verdicts followed popular emotion and politics, not conduct, which is why Iva Toguri alone was charged.

The chapter entitled “Iva Toguri and the Trial of Tokyo Rose” raises profound questions about the operation of post war justice and particularly the pernicious influence of the Japanese-American community...

Treason on the Airwaves

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Postwar treason verdicts followed popular emotion and politics, not conduct, which is why Iva Toguri alone was charged.

As a child after the Second World War, I had often heard the grown ups talking about “Tokyo Rose,” the husky-voiced Japanese siren who supposedly taunted our soldiers in the...

Treason on the Airwaves

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Postwar treason verdicts followed popular emotion and politics, not what the accused had done.

Traitors in wartime have a long history. During World War Two, both Allied and Axis governments used enemy nationals to broadcast propaganda. When the war ended, the victors prosecuted a...

Treason on the Airwaves

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The middle of the country has not declined, it has remade itself.

One of the best examples of how the heartland is changing can be found near Kansas City, in Johnson County, where builders are putting together new housing developments and constructing...

Remaking the Heartland

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The middle of the country has not declined, it has remade itself.

At the end of the American Civil War, tens of thousands of pioneer families took Horace Greeley’s advice to “go West.” Streaming across the Mississippi, they settled in Iowa and...

Remaking the Heartland

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The middle of the country has not declined, it has remade itself.

Remaking the Heartland examines the profound social transformation that has taken place in the middle of the United States during the past half century. This is a region known for...

Remaking the Heartland

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Politics is a practice of freedom, not a search for right norms.

A browser, who simply starts at the beginning and reads through the initial discussion of American exceptionalism, will see how our most familiar political practices and beliefs include a distinctive...

Political Theology

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Politics is a practice of freedom, and the modern state occupies the place the church vacated.

If politics plays out on a field of ultimate meanings, then political theory must give way to political theology. Theology here refers not to any of the sectarian beliefs but...

Political Theology

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Politics is a practice of freedom, and the modern state occupies the place the church vacated.

This is a small book about a large topic: politics as a practice of freedom. I attempt to turn political theory away from its obsessive concern with abstract norms of...

Political Theology

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Literacy is critical discernment, not recitation, and criticism that stays inside disciplinary strictures fails the ethical obligation of reading.

The brief Epilogue of Memos from the Besieged City, like many aspects of this book, pivots on its two epigraphs. The first is from Walt Whitman’s ambiguously democratic and imperialist...

Memos from the Besieged City

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Literacy is critical discernment, not recitation.

The migration of intellectuals and academics made refugees by the politics and wars of mid-twentieth-century Europe consolidated the emergence of comparative literature as a field in the American university system...

Memos from the Besieged City

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Literacy is critical discernment, not recitation, and criticism that stays inside disciplinary strictures fails the ethical obligation of reading.

Memos from the Besieged City is a series of “reports” to and about certain cultural ancestors whose work has defined cultural traditions and practices in the humanities and human sciences. The...

Memos from the Besieged City

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Rubber's history is industrial capitalism in miniature, and its murderous extraction has only been relocated, not abolished.

Few people today except dentists will have heard of gutta-percha, but one hundred years ago it was a household word. A close cousin of rubber extracted from wild trees in...

The Devil’s Milk

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Rubber's history is the history of industrial capitalism and imperialism in miniature.

The Austrian-American novelist Vicki Baum once wrote that what people have done to rubber is fascinating, but what is more fascinating yet is what rubber has done to people. That,...

The Devil’s Milk

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Rubber's history is industrial capitalism in miniature, and its murderous extraction has only been relocated, not abolished.

I was somewhat disconcerted to learn, while researching for The Devil’s Milk, that another author had recently published another book about rubber. The question arose: would I just be duplicating...

The Devil’s Milk

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The automaton fascinates because an artificial thing that acts alive breaches the living/dead binary, so delight and horror arrive together.

In the last weeks, I received many queries about my book due to the IBM computer Watson winning on the game show Jeopardy! over two (human) champions. I was asked...

Sublime Dreams of Living Machines

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The automaton fascinates because an artificial thing that acts alive breaches the living/dead binary, so delight and horror arrive together.

A major aspect of the West’s fascination with the automaton is that the interest in the object is an ambivalent one. The delight, amusement, and amazement that people experience in...

Sublime Dreams of Living Machines

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Automatons fascinate because a made thing that acts alive breaks the line between living and dead.

Sublime Dreams of Living Machines is about the millennia-long fascination in the West with the self-moving machine that mimics living beings, better known today by the word “robot.” There are works...

Sublime Dreams of Living Machines

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There is no single business model of human trafficking, and the trade mirrors the legitimate economy of its region.

Pages 112-138 are on the business of human trafficking.Organized crime, like all businesses is focused on making a profit, ensuring supply, and meeting demand. What sets an organized crime business...

Human Trafficking

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There is no single business model of human trafficking, and the trade mirrors the legitimate economy of its region.

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...

Human Trafficking

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There is no single business model of human trafficking.

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

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Iconoclasm is a central strand of Anglo-American modernity, and the museum and aesthetics continue it by other means.

I hope the reader would pleasurably remark first on the book’s brevity. It aims to pack a large punch in a small format. It can be read quickly.Readability aside, I...

Under the Hammer

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Iconoclasm is not something barbarians do elsewhere but a central strand of Anglo-American modernity.

Under the Hammer begins by looking outward to non-Western practice, but very quickly turns inward to my own culture. I begin with the experience of horror the world shared as the...

Under the Hammer

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Iconoclasm is a central strand of Anglo-American modernity, and the museum and aesthetics continue it by other means.

When we think of breaking images, we assume that it happens somewhere else. We also tend to think of iconoclasts as barbaric. Iconoclasts are people like the Taliban, who blew...

Under the Hammer

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Over time the Supreme Court comes into line with public opinion, so the charge of anti-majoritarian judicial review is wrong.

It is 1867. The Civil War is over, but the Union is struggling to bring the Confederate States back in. A procedure has been announced that requires ratifying the 14th...

The Will of the People

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Over time the Supreme Court comes into line with public opinion, so the charge of anti-majoritarian judicial review is wrong.

Throughout history there has been one main claim leveled at the Supreme Court: that when it strikes down laws on the basis of the Constitution, it is interfering with democracy....

The Will of the People

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Over time, the Supreme Court comes into line with public opinion.

Most people who think about it, no doubt, consider the US Supreme Court to be the protector of minority and constitutional rights against majority oppression. But is that right? In The Will...

The Will of the People

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From the mid-1970s to 2001, the ideas Americans used to grasp society broke into smaller pieces.

Each chapter of Age of Fracture brings its readers into a different facet of the age’s great debates.The opening chapter shows how the social vocabulary of the Cold War slipped...

Age of Fracture

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Between the mid-1970s and 2001 the words Americans used to grasp society broke into smaller pieces.

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...

Age of Fracture

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Between the mid-1970s and 2001 the words Americans used to grasp society broke into smaller pieces.

Age of Fracture is a book about the ideas and arguments that now shape our times. It is about the ways in which conceptions of society and selves that were...

Age of Fracture

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Obscenity law was never about sex but about degradation, and hate speech is the same act with a narrower target.

Given the conceptual similarity between obscene depictions and hate speech, it would seem likely that some guidance could be drawn from the analysis of obscenity that would help us more...

Degradation

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Obscenity law was never really about sex but about degradation.

My interest in the concept of obscenity grew out of a law school course on the topic of the rhetoric, law and culture. One of the readings was Sophocles’ play...

Degradation

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