All the threads

Todd Haynes's I'm Not There is a more insightful account of Dylan's life than A Complete Unknown.

Sometimes a director doesn't need dialogue to make a point — just the right famous face walking into the room. This is about star personas as narrative shorthand, from a shadowy folk-club cameo that spells doom for a fictional singer to what we're really watching when a fraying legend takes the stage.

I'm Glad I'm Not Me: Bob Dylan on Film

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Folk tradition is a mode of adaptation, governed by custom and transmitted by showing rather than teaching.

Chicago, 1892: a Polish Jewish girl newly arrived from a shtetl is invited to a Christmas party at Hull-House and says she cannot go, because she might be killed. She goes anyway, without telling her mother. What she wrote about that night — the candles, the carols, children from all corners of the earth, most of them underfed, none of them afraid of each other — is one answer to what a common life might mean.

Our Common Life: Folksong from the Front Porch to the Concert Hall

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Folk tradition is a mode of adaptation, governed by custom and transmitted by showing rather than teaching.

Folklore lived and folklore studied — this is mostly about how the music gets learned and handed on. "I can't teach you, but I can show you," said one veteran barn-dance performer, and that is the whole pedagogy. Even the cover painting turns out to hold two real people, a schoolteacher and his daughter, whose lives trace the same arc from enclave to wider world and back.

Our Common Life: Folksong from the Front Porch to the Concert Hall

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Folk tradition is not a survival preserved against change but a mode of adaptation.

Musicians born at either end of the turn of the twentieth century, showing how tradition can be constant and supple at once, guided not by rules but by observing, doing and venturing. Sid Harkreader, Ola Belle Reed, Bill Monroe, Joe and Odell Thompson, Uncle Dave Macon and many more. As one of them put it: "It's AWYC. Any Way You Can."

Our Common Life: Folksong from the Front Porch to the Concert Hall

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What happens when your own memories become someone else’s story?

Memory is not a recording but a constant reconstruction.

We tend to think of memory as a kind of imperfect recording device. Something happens, we remember it, and gradually the picture becomes less accurate. But memory is much stranger than that.

Testament

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Almost nowhere on earth is naturally inaccessible any more, only politically, yet the expeditionary career is closing anyway.

In 1984 an ornithological team in southwestern Ecuador learned that the Shuar, convinced they were prospecting for gold, had ordered them killed rather than let them leave with what they had found. Weeks under siege, camp moved daily, and an exit that nearly cost two lives. And still worth it, for the birds — many of them now vanishing fast.

Travels on the Edge: A Naturalist's Notes From the Back of Beyond

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What does it take to be in the right place when history is made?

Almost nowhere on earth is naturally inaccessible any more, only politically, yet the expeditionary career is closing anyway.

Three new frogs in the Andes, new fish in the Orinoco, swarming locusts charted across Africa, seven expeditions to Mongolia and a camel caravan across the Gobi. Also house arrest in China, the fall of the Berlin Wall, a pope's last audience, and Hemingway's grandsons in Cuba. A behind-the-scenes account of what expeditionary travel is actually like.

Travels on the Edge: A Naturalist's Notes From the Back of Beyond

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Whether a television musical episode works turns on production mechanics, not on the quality of the singing or the story.

The chapter that best captures the whole project is, oddly, the one about a famous 1990 flop. Watching that failed experiment closely complicates the tidy story of television's "golden ages" arriving in discrete periods. The same year gave us Twin Peaks — and the failures turn out to be part of the same expansion.

Breaking into Song: Television Musicals from Glee to Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

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Whether a television musical episode works turns on production mechanics, not on the quality of the singing or the story.

From NBC Opera Theater and Great Performances to Schmigadoon, by way of end-credit product placement on 1990s WB dramas. Individual pieces of this have been studied — MTV, theme songs, the Beatles on Ed Sullivan — but rarely the whole arc. Including the unglamorous question of why some musical episodes work and others simply don't.

Breaking into Song: Television Musicals from Glee to Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

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Music on television is one continuous subject, not a set of separate ones.

Music and television is a pairing so obvious it has gone almost entirely unexamined. Not just the musical episodes and specials and series, but soundtracks, synergistic network deals, and the programs that once carried music to viewers who had no other way of hearing it.

Breaking into Song: Television Musicals from Glee to Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

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Bee signals evolved among spies and competitors, so a colony's stop signal matters as much as its waggle dance.

Inside a dark, crowded hive, one bee butts her head against a dancer and makes a short, sharp beep. That easily missed detail opens a much larger idea: that a society needs brakes as much as it needs signals, and that communication is often about restraint. A close look at how colonies weigh danger, doubt, and competing information.

The Language of Bees

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Inefficiency, bulk and persnicketiness are the source of analog's appeal, not costs paid despite it.

Vinyl is back, cassettes are back, board-game cafés are everywhere — all of it slower and more breakable than the digital version a tap away. Borrowing a method from American pragmatism, this is a slow, deliberately personal attempt to ask not what analog is worth in the abstract, but what we actually get out of living with it.

The Love of Analog: Meditations on Value

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Black churches file over 60 percent of church bankruptcies, and nothing on the church's side explains it.

Why would one kind of congregation turn to the bankruptcy system three times as often as any other? After ruling out geography, denomination, and leadership, one factor remains — and it points straight at the lending market. A look at subprime church loans, banks that said no, and the legal process that finally forced lenders to the table.

Forgive Us Our Debts: How Black Churches Use Bankruptcy to Survive

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Listening is not passive but an active, unsettling act.

My criticism of technology stems from my love for it. We shouldn’t underestimate the democratic value of the internet. For the first time in history, people from all backgrounds could make themselves heard. The backlash has been huge, though. False promises, fake news, prejudice, hate-speech, and bias are all jumbled into a frantic hype-cycle. Who still cares to listen and why is it important? And how is it done?

Listening

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The Stepford Wives was made by women who have themselves been erased from its history.

Betty Friedan called it a rip-off of the women's movement, and that verdict has shaped fifty years of argument about the film — as has a screenwriter's famously catty complaint about the director casting his own wife. Newly opened archives in Beverly Hills, London and New York tell a different story about who actually made the thing. Authorship here is messier, and far more female, than the myth allows.

The Stepford Wives

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Almost nowhere on earth is naturally inaccessible anymore, only politically so.

Fifty years as photographer, chronicler and historian of expeditions for a Philadelphia natural history academy, in places that were beautiful, remote and reachable under conditions almost nobody will have again. Stand-alone essays from a career that was, by design, a throwback to an earlier era.

Travels on the Edge: A Naturalist's Notes From the Back of Beyond

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The amoeba is not biology's simpleton.

A biography of the blob everyone can draw: a wavy outline with a spot in the middle, reputed to be biology's simpleton, in fact carrying the largest genome of any organism and solving problems no software has matched. The difficulty is imaginative — we can picture a hawk taking a songbird, but not an amoeba chasing bacteria. The human cast is its own reward: a suspected murderer, a self-infecting German scientist, and the inventor of the orgasmatron.

A Is for Amoeba: The Story of Life in a Single Cell

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Bee signals evolved among spies and competitors, so a colony's stop signal matters as much as its waggle dance.

Great discoveries often begin when what you observe refuses to match what you expected. This is the winding, failure-strewn path — feeders ignored, experiments raided by monkeys, storms and turf wars with aggressive bees — that turned a stray “beep” in a hive into a career studying how ecology shapes information itself.

The Language of Bees

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Failure is not secretly good for us, and creative lives are made by continuation, not by talent destined to win.

In 1897 a savage reception drove a twenty-four-year-old composer to stop writing for years—one critic said his symphony belonged to the inhabitants of hell. His slow, doubt-ridden return, and his later reinvention in exile, become a case study in what persistence actually looks like when failure changes the terms of the work.

The Mess That Made Them: How History's Greatest Artists Failed, Floundered, and Made Something Brilliant Anyway

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The Tralfamadorians entered Slaughterhouse-Five only in 1967, borrowed from the alien-abduction culture around Betty and Barney Hill.

One autumn night in 1961, a New Hampshire couple saw something hovering over the road—and one of its occupants reminded them of a Nazi officer. That widely publicized abduction story handed a struggling novelist the missing frame for his Dresden book, and turned a war memoir into a meditation on trauma, free will, and time itself.

Vonnegut's War: The Making of Slaughterhouse-Five

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Black churches file far more bankruptcies than other churches because of predatory lending.

Every year, small congregations — most of them Black churches — file to reorganize in bankruptcy court, and they do so at three times the rate you'd expect. Behind the fight to keep a spiritual home lies a quieter story about who gets offered fair credit and who doesn't. A story of triumph, and of skewed lending.

Forgive Us Our Debts: How Black Churches Use Bankruptcy to Survive

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Dylan belongs to film history as an icon, not a biographical subject.

For more than half a century, one folk singer's face has been quietly rewriting the movies it appears in — as actor, documentary subject, music-video fixture, and even unreleased director. This is an argument for taking that filmography seriously, and a corrective to the tidy myths a recent hit biopic spun around the night an icon “went electric.”

I'm Glad I'm Not Me: Bob Dylan on Film

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Analog's inefficiency, bulk and fussiness are the source of its appeal, not its cost.

Why do inefficient, fragile, expensive things — vinyl, board games, used paperbacks — keep winning us back in an age of frictionless digital everything? A personal, argument-free investigation that trades abstract philosophy for a bottom-up hunt through one collector's own shelves, and lands on three values hiding inside the objects we choose to keep.

The Love of Analog: Meditations on Value

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Religious credence is a form of imagining, continuous with children's make-believe, and its imperviousness to evidence is the job.

A charismatic "prophet" speaks in tongues, overcome by the Holy Spirit—then opens his eyes to check his watch. That small gesture, drawn from an ethnography of Vineyard churches, opens a window onto how the mind runs two maps at once: one tracking the sacred, the other quietly keeping time.

Religion as Make-Believe: A Theory of Belief, Imagination, and Group Identity

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Forty years of deregulation, not excessive regulation, shrank the public markets and delayed IPOs.

The collapse of a $32 billion crypto empire in a matter of days exposed a company with no CFO, no reliable audits, and not a single investor on its board. This close-up shows how a "founder-friendly" financing model and super-voting shares let the people in charge escape accountability — and why the same governance failures keep recurring across today's most celebrated startups.

Untamed Unicorns

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Bee communication is as much about restraint as about recruitment.

Bees don't just tell one another where to go — they also signal where not to go, mark flowers with scent, and even eavesdrop on rivals. This is a tour of communication as evolution actually built it: waggle dances, stop signals, and warnings shaped by predators, competitors, and spies. An invitation to follow very small animals into a world dense with messages we usually miss.

The Language of Bees

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New Year's resolutions fail because of sequence, since no goal holds without an honest accounting of the year behind you.

Opening The Janus Plan at random, Jobert E. Abueva would want a reader to land on Step One: Ponder the Past, and its disarming question—what did this year actually try to teach you? He shares the book's core passage on Janus's two doors, and the "Stitch Notes" and rituals that give a serious practice its lightness and play.

The Janus Plan: A No-Resolutions Path to Begin Your Year with Intention

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New Year's resolutions fail because of sequence, since no goal holds without an honest accounting of the year behind you.

Jobert E. Abueva places The Janus Plan at the crossroads of behavior-change psychology, the world's threshold traditions (teshuvah, Japan's Oosoji, Ethiopia's Enkutatash), and his own burnout at the peak of a Fortune 500 career. His insight: burnout was a sequencing problem—charging forward year after year without ever honestly looking back.

The Janus Plan: A No-Resolutions Path to Begin Your Year with Intention

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New Year's resolutions fail because of sequence, not content.

Most New Year's resolutions are gone by February—and Jobert E. Abueva argues the problem is the approach, not the goals. The Janus Plan, named for the two-faced Roman god of thresholds, insists you cannot design a meaningful future without first taking an honest look at your past. Built around a six-step framework and the metaphor of weaving, it is a book meant to be read slowly.

The Janus Plan: A No-Resolutions Path to Begin Your Year with Intention

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Baseball has no inherent character and captures nothing essential about the United States.

Was the game really transformed overnight when the data nerds took over, and has money only recently corrupted a once-pristine sport? A closer look at two durable myths, and the long history of numbers, commerce, and complaint that shows how much of "what's ruining the game" has actually been there all along.

Out of the Ballpark: How to Think About Baseball

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Immigrant labor is visible everywhere, and what is invisible is the inequality.

Backstrap weaving is one of the earliest forms of weaving on earth, and its traditions — from Maya brocade to Korea's 1,500-year-old mosi cloth — are vanishing fast. After months of learning from the last practitioners, a new project links the two lineages and brings the technique to workshops in Chicago and Utah, because holding on to cultural heritage is activism too.

Action in Artwork

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Soleil Ô's complicated French origins do not disqualify it from African cinema.

A debut feature from 1970 that is a documentary, an essay film, a work of autofiction, live action and animation at once — African, French, both, neither. Out of circulation for decades, it left behind a literature that cannot agree on what year it was made or which country made it. Sorting the record out turns out to matter, because the complications are the point.

Soleil Ô

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Failure is not secretly good for us, and creative lives are made by continuation, not by talent destined to win.

What if the story of great art isn't lonely genius but stubborn, assisted, interrupted persistence? Drawing on his own burnout and return to writing, the author reads famous biographies against the grain—paying attention to the money, luck, help, and course-corrections that usually get tidied out of the myth.

The Mess That Made Them: How History's Greatest Artists Failed, Floundered, and Made Something Brilliant Anyway

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Making the abutting property owner responsible for the public sidewalk is the central error of American sidewalk law.

Whose neighborhoods get smooth, walkable pavement—and whose are left to crack and crumble? Drawing on interviews and street-level observation across four states, a look at how sidewalk quality tracks wealth and race, and why the people with the least access to cars and transit depend on it the most.

Sidewalk Nation: The Life and Law of America's Most Overlooked Resource

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The problem with AI agents is accountability, not capability.

The public argument about AI has been about what it says. Meanwhile a different class of system has been quietly acting — screening applications, pricing insurance, routing patrol cars, closing claims — at a speed no review process was built to match, and usually without the person affected knowing a decision occurred. The problem isn't capability; it's that when something goes wrong, responsibility scatters and everyone in the chain has a defensible answer except the person harmed.

Agent Nation: How Autonomous AI Is Rewriting the Rules of Society—and What We Can Do About It

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The Stepford Wives was made by women who have been erased from its history.

A film about women being replaced turns out to have replaced a good many of them behind the camera too — an actress fired after sixty-five scenes were already shot, a costume designer, a casting director, a sound editor, an electronic music pioneer, all written out of the story since. Archival production records show how those swaps happened and who won the fights that caused them. The erasure rhymes uncomfortably with the film's own plot.

The Stepford Wives

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Ripeness has been detached from season and sold as permanent availability, and what resists it is the withheld.

One evening before dinner was served, I placed on each guest's setting a small carton of locally produced tomato paste, accompanied by a pair of scissors. I introduced the project – the notions on seasonality, coming of age, and, of course, tomatoes before we were served and invited everyone to cut a corner and squeeze the tomato paste onto their plates and table—drawing, and playing with their food.

THE AGE OF TOMATO

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Religious credence is a form of imagining, continuous with children's make-believe, and its imperviousness to evidence is the job.

If belief isn't one thing but two, everything shifts. A look at why our matter-of-fact beliefs update instantly with evidence while our identity-defining ones resist it—and how that same dynamic drives not only religion but political polarization, because, as the argument goes, anything can be sacralized.

Religion as Make-Believe: A Theory of Belief, Imagination, and Group Identity

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The Tralfamadorians entered Slaughterhouse-Five only in 1967, borrowed from the alien-abduction culture around Betty and Barney Hill.

First published in 1969, the novel spoke to a country reckoning with Vietnam—and it speaks just as sharply to 2026, an age of polarization, far-right resurgence, and wars that displace millions. Is a good war possible? Is a just one? A look at why this darkly funny anti-war book still offers a moral vision of kindness and decency amid absurdity.

Vonnegut's War: The Making of Slaughterhouse-Five

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In noisy fields like health and politics the truth hides under variability and is recoverable only by averaging.

Fifteen hundred stage 1 breast cancer patients, deemed at low risk according to MammaPrint but high risk according to clinical assessment, were divided into two groups: half of them had chemotherapy while the other half followed MammaPrint's advice and went without.

To Think Like a Statistician

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Failure is not secretly good for us.

We meet great artists backward—through the masterpieces, with the ending already known—so their greatness starts to look inevitable. But nobody lived it that way. A book about the long, uncertain middle of creative lives, and a pointed skepticism toward the comforting idea that failure is secretly good for us.

The Mess That Made Them: How History's Greatest Artists Failed, Floundered, and Made Something Brilliant Anyway

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Baseball has no inherent character and captures nothing essential about the United States.

The specialized lingo makes the sport look like a closed world of arcane obsessives, but it's precisely its sheer visibility that makes it worth thinking about. A historian's account of how following and talking about a game becomes a way into understanding modern life—and why writing about it meant setting aside a lifelong fan's love.

Out of the Ballpark: How to Think About Baseball

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Seventeenth-century Rome had a deliberate papal meat program, Urban VIII driving consumption to a pound a day per person.

Four butchers executed in front of the Pantheon for turning their neighbors into sausage—a gruesome spectacle that opens onto something much larger. Behind it lies the route live animals took through a half-empty ancient city, and the ecological toll of wringing so much meat from the surrounding land.

The Barberini Butchers: Meat, Murder, and Warfare in Early Modern Italy

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Lincoln's rise was contingent, and the sense of its inevitability is an artifact of how 1860 is taught.

A one-term congressman with a threadbare résumé walks into a convention hall built just for the occasion and walks out the nominee. Step inside the roaring room for the electric moment the tide turned, and the raucous, hoarse-throated celebration that spilled into the streets.

He Has the People: Abraham Lincoln and the Election of 1860

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American health care's separate dysfunctions have one cause, the neoliberal capture of political economy after 1980.

In 1970 Milton Friedman told corporate executives their only duty was to shareholders—and set off a shift whose shockwaves still move through American medicine. From an Adam Smith epigraph to the Business Roundtable's flip-flops, a look at how "shareholder value" reshaped what a corporation owes anyone at all.

America's Wrong Turn: US Health Care in the Neoliberal Era

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American health care's separate dysfunctions have one cause, the neoliberal capture of political economy after 1980.

A question students kept asking—"what happened to U.S. health spending in the early 1980s?"—became a five-and-a-half-year hunt for an answer. The trail runs through Reagan-era deregulation, a political scientist's model of American "regimes," and the realization that the mystery and the medicine both trace back to neoliberalism.

America's Wrong Turn: US Health Care in the Neoliberal Era

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American health care's many separate problems have one cause, the neoliberal turn after 1980.

Trust in American health care has collapsed—from 78% in 1975 to 28% today—and the usual suspects (premiums, medical debt, consolidation, private equity) are treated as separate problems. What if they are all symptoms of one thing: the neoliberal turn that remade the U.S. economy in the 1980s, and swept medicine up in its wake?

America's Wrong Turn: US Health Care in the Neoliberal Era

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Forty years of deregulation, not excessive regulation, shrank the public markets and delayed IPOs.

Why do securities laws exist at all? The answer runs back to the 1929 crash and the New Deal conviction that sunlight is the best disinfectant. This piece follows how narrow, sensible exemptions to disclosure quietly expanded until secrecy became a matter of choice for some of the largest and most powerful companies in the economy.

Untamed Unicorns

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Heritage is a biased story about the past turned into a product, and the local is itself a global idea.

Every dish contains a whole world — a tangle of history, culture, and memory that only multiplies with each ingredient. From compiling an index of every food named to building a five-step "toolkit" for protecting culinary heritage from below, this is a reflection on writing about food as an act that shuttles constantly between the intimate and the immense. What can any of us actually do to re-value the traditions on our plates?

Against Heritage

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Immigrant labor is visible everywhere, and what is invisible is the inequality.

Nonggi are traditional Korean folk banners, made collectively around the harvest to motivate, bless, and speak to the gods — even to carry them. In multi-day workshops with an immigrant rights organization, community members paint, embroider, and photo-transfer their hopes onto eight-foot banners over sixteen slow hours, drawing out the stories that shorter projects never reach.

Action in Artwork

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Religious belief is a form of imagining, like children's make-believe.

What if religious belief is less like accepting a fact and more like a grand game of make-believe? Drawing an analogy from children who form groups around imaginary heroes, a philosopher argues that "religious credence" is a distinct mental attitude—chosen, bound up with sacred identity, and, unlike ordinary belief, largely immune to evidence.

Religion as Make-Believe: A Theory of Belief, Imagination, and Group Identity

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America's opioid crisis is the wreckage of a dismantled global system for stabilizing medical opium, not corporate greed.

Ten thousand farmers gather to cheer a politician’s empty promises, scoring poppies by hand exactly as their great-grandparents did—only it is 1981, not the 1880s. A single rally opens onto a hidden world where peasant labor, state power, and global capital collide, and it suggests why “crisis” may be the wrong word for what came next.

Markets of Pain

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Making the abutting property owner responsible for the public sidewalk is the central error of American sidewalk law.

A pandemic's worth of neighborhood walks turned into a question: why has the law almost everywhere made the property owner next door responsible for the public walkway out front? Where property law, local government, and the First and Fourth Amendments all meet the pavement, most of what happens turns out to be a policy choice we get to make.

Sidewalk Nation: The Life and Law of America's Most Overlooked Resource

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A diverse community can still maintain white dominance.

One of the wealthiest and most racially diverse suburbs in the country tells itself three things: that it is harmonious, that it has no racial inequality, and that these facts make it superior to everywhere else. Two years and 150 interviews later, the harmony turns out to be real — and to rest on an unspoken bargain about which racial realities may be named out loud. Diversity, it turns out, is not the same thing as equity.

Diversityland: Hiding Racial Inequality in an American Suburb

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Slaughterhouse-Five's aliens were borrowed from 1960s alien-abduction culture.

It changed how we write about war, got banned and burned, inspired rock bands, and put phrases into the language—yet the story behind the novel is as gripping as the book itself. A POW digging corpses from the ruins of firebombed Dresden, a discredited historian, and a strange leap into alien abduction: how a masterpiece took twenty-four years to find its shape.

Vonnegut's War: The Making of Slaughterhouse-Five

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Seventeenth-century Rome had a deliberate papal meat program, Urban VIII driving consumption to a pound a day per person.

It began with a lurid pamphlet about butchers who ground human flesh into sausage near the Pantheon. Chasing whether the tale was true led to a stranger truth: an unsustainable flood of meat into a single city, and the political collapse that came when the supply lines finally broke.

The Barberini Butchers: Meat, Murder, and Warfare in Early Modern Italy

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In noisy fields like health and politics the truth hides under variability and is recoverable only by averaging.

Sports, economics, politics, the stock markets, are all extremely noisy human activities that it pays to examine with a dose of statistical caution. Chapter 5 of my book offers a scorecard for reading the medical news. Should you believe that saunas cut the risk of strokes? That obesity is tied to liver cancer? That older fathers have sicker babies?

To Think Like a Statistician

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Lincoln's rise was contingent, and the sense of its inevitability is an artifact of how 1860 is taught.

History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. A long-ago election, held as the country tore itself apart over slavery, speaks uncomfortably to our own moment of fragile institutions and contested democracy—and to what it means when voters have to choose in the middle of a crisis.

He Has the People: Abraham Lincoln and the Election of 1860

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Baseball has no inherent character and captures nothing essential about America.

What does it actually mean to say baseball "means" something? A case for dropping the tired clichés about national character and instead treating the game as an object of inquiry—one whose meanings accumulated over time, across North America, East Asia, and the Caribbean, and alongside every other form of modern mass entertainment.

Out of the Ballpark: How to Think About Baseball

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America's opioid crisis is the wreckage of a dismantled global system for stabilizing medical opium, not corporate greed.

How does a humble crop, scraped by hand in the fields of central India, connect overdose deaths in America to the development dreams of newly independent states? Following the poppy across the century between empire and epidemic, a historian of agriculture uncovers the people and systems that quietly supplied the world’s pain relief—and the pride of families still producing a drug the world has almost stopped buying.

Markets of Pain

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A statue's value is conferred by the people who interact with it, not by those who paid for it.

The lives of statues then can take unexpected twists. While some are ready to write the obituary of the public statue, the appearance in many places of new monuments to honour modern-day heroes, whether the leaders of independence struggles or top-flight football players, demonstrates that the genre continues to thrive.

Voices in Stone: The Lives of Public Statues

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Immigrant labor is not invisible, but its inequality is.

Textiles and immigrant justice grew up side by side — a seamstress mother in a dry cleaning store, a childhood in the Central Valley where the labor was visible and the inequality was not. When the two finally met, the result was a practice of communal making where impacted people are centered, stories surface over slow stitching, and the finished work goes on to march: over 4,000 protest banners, checked out like library books and carried into the streets.

Action in Artwork

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Nostalgia is itself a form of speculative fiction, and that is what links fandom to reactionary politics.

It's beyond the scope of any single book to provide a framework for preemptively stopping reactionary activity. But through analyzing the affective economies — the emotions circulating in these controversies — I demonstrate the various ways that looking to the interactions of fans of speculative fiction can enable us, be it scholars or the general public, to really understand these reactionary groups' formation, their communication, and their continuation.

Nostalgic Futures: The Reactionary Fantasies of Speculative Fiction Fandoms

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Chicago's kitchenette was a productive form that set the terms of national housing policy, not a symptom of shortage.

A celebrated civil-rights drama and the family that grew wealthy from the very apartments it depicts turn out to be tangled together in surprising ways. This close reading resists easy heroes and villains, showing how people working within unjust systems can fund real change while remaining caught in those systems' contradictions.

A Kitchenette to Fit Your Needs

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Making property owners responsible for the sidewalk out front is the central error of American sidewalk law.

We walk over it every day without a second thought, yet this thin strip of public space is where fights over commerce, protest, policing, homelessness, free speech, and accessibility all collide. A case for treating an overlooked civic resource as the contested, high-stakes ground it actually is—and for rethinking who should be responsible for it.

Sidewalk Nation: The Life and Law of America's Most Overlooked Resource

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Lincoln's rise was contingent, not fated.

We treat some outcomes as inevitable—of course the log-cabin boy became president at the nation's hour of crisis. But what if we took the sheer contingency of the past seriously? A case for narrative history that restores human agency, chance, and the sense that things could have gone very differently.

He Has the People: Abraham Lincoln and the Election of 1860

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Seventeenth-century Rome's meat abundance was a deliberate papal program.

For a few decades in the seventeenth century, Rome was flooded with an astonishing amount of meat—at times a pound of it per person, per day. Why did feeding a city so much lamb and pork become a statement of religious and political power in the age of the Reformation? A story of faith, appetite, and the artisans who moved meat from pasture to table.

The Barberini Butchers: Meat, Murder, and Warfare in Early Modern Italy

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Computers transformed American politics through databases and direct mail, and the spectacular simulation ventures are the footnote.

What are the ways to produce new models and prototypes within the computational imaginary of politics? Mainstream games rarely reflect alternatives. As Jim Gasperini noted when making Hidden Agenda, discussed in the last chapter, "No matter how fantastic the fantasy, no matter how simulated the simulation, the outlines of our familiar reality will always be discernible underneath."

SimPolitics: America's Quest to Solve Politics with Computers

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Forty years of deregulation, not too much regulation, shrank the public stock markets.

America's biggest startups are raising trillions in private markets while sidestepping the disclosure rules that once protected investors and the public. This conversation traces how four decades of deregulation shrank the public markets, let companies stay private for decades, and handed founders nearly unchecked power. It asks what that shift means for ordinary people locked out of an insular, network-driven financing system.

Untamed Unicorns

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The opioid crisis grew from the collapse of a global medical opium system, not corporate greed.

The opioid crisis is almost always told as a uniquely American tale of corporate greed. But what if it was really the wreckage of a global system, built over more than a century to supply the world with morphine, codeine, and pain pills? This is the hidden history of legal opium—the crop that moved from hand-scored poppy fields through treaties and monopolies into the medicine cabinets of the West.

Markets of Pain

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A statue's value is conferred by the people who interact with it, not by those who paid for it.

Excepting the wondrous creations of the Greek god Hephaestus, and the statue of the murdered Commendatore in Mozart's opera Don Giovanni, statues are themselves passive and emotionless participants in their biographies. The lives of statues are really the lives of the humans who interact with them. The book tells their stories.

Voices in Stone: The Lives of Public Statues

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Heritage is a biased story about the past turned into a product, and the local is itself a global idea.

Why compare fine dining across three continents? Because zooming out reveals that no celebrated chef is truly exceptional — each one recycles the same nostalgic dreams of primitiveness and wildness that writers have leaned on for centuries. Seen from this vantage, even "the local" turns out to be a thoroughly global idea, and the plate becomes a way to think through the entangled political, ecological, and cultural crises of the Anthropocene.

Against Heritage

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In noisy fields like health and politics, truth hides under variability and only averaging recovers it.

Is it a good idea to think like a statistician? A confident Yes here, admittedly by someone who earns his living doing so. We live in a random universe, where truth most often lies hidden beneath a fog of noise. Statistics is the science of peering through the fog and learning from experience, especially experience that arrives in sometimes contradictory pieces: Did the COVID vaccines save or cost lives? Is sugar good or bad for you?

To Think Like a Statistician

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Computers transformed American politics through databases and direct mail, and the spectacular simulation ventures are the footnote.

What I hope people take away is both a skepticism that computers can fix politics, and better demands for claims that it will. Especially in the next election cycle, how can we assess accurately the hype. My book helps readers distinguish between what's new and what's just someone who knows the rules of the game, trying to oversell the new tool or piece of software.

SimPolitics: America's Quest to Solve Politics with Computers

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Chicago's kitchenette was a productive form that set the terms of national housing policy, not a symptom of shortage.

What starts as a literary curiosity turns into an archival scavenger hunt across sociology, public-housing records, and — improbably — a health-sciences library. This is the story of chasing a nearly invisible housing form through the archive, and of what history's cycles of segregation, migration, and neglect can teach us about the housing pressures of our own moment.

A Kitchenette to Fit Your Needs

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Ripeness has been detached from season and sold as permanent availability, and what resists it is the withheld.

Nineteenth-century theatre thus operated as a densely social and often unruly space, where attention was dispersed and porous. Contemporary "social theatre" extends this condition into a more open and continuous field of exchange, where gestures of approval and disapproval circulate instantaneously. This raises questions of temporality and agency: what is seasonal—the act, the incident, or its reception?

THE AGE OF TOMATO

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Nostalgia is itself a form of speculative fiction, and that is what links fandom to reactionary politics.

One of the best authors to do this kind of storytelling is Ted Chiang, who writes short stories where there's this technology, this novum, this thing dropped into the world. The story isn't really about that — it's about people interacting with it. He'll present people who are very positive about it and people who are very negative. So they're really these sociological takes on how the world is different because of this technology.

Nostalgic Futures: The Reactionary Fantasies of Speculative Fiction Fandoms

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Macaroni and cheese endures because it keeps finding new cultural work, not because it tastes good.

Told in eight scenes, this close-up follows macaroni and cheese from Juliette Corson's 1877 fifteen-cent dinners for the poor through the anti-Italian cholera panic of the 1880s and the tariff fights of the 1890s. The resolution is pure irony: Americans planted durum wheat at home and, by World War I, were exporting it back to the very countries whose "imported" macaroni still filled their shelves.

The Epic History of Macaroni and Cheese: From Ancient Rome to Modern America

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The cartoon is a form of architectural criticism, and often a more effective one than the essay.

That small, brilliant joke encapsulates an entire debate that had been raging for years about the "readability" of modern architecture, about the relationship between museums and artworks, and between museums and the city itself. Dunn distilled all of it into a single drawing and a single line.

Alan Dunn: The Cartoonist as Architectural Critic

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Heritage is not history but a biased story about the past turned into a product.

Culinary "heritage" isn't really the past — it's a product, something bought, sold, and traded on in the present. Comparing food revivals from the American South to the New Nordic kitchens of Noma to the traditional ingredients of India, this is a polemical argument that our nostalgia for old foods is bound up with regressive politics and a looming ecological reckoning. What if the truest way to honor the past is to go back more honestly?

Against Heritage

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A statue's value comes from the people who interact with it, not those who paid for it.

The genesis of Voices in Stone lay in the realisation that this debate on the destruction of monuments is an unsatisfactory starting point to understand them. It recalls G. K. Chesterton's caution that before deciding to remove a fence, it would be well to ensure that you understand why it was put up in the first place.

Voices in Stone: The Lives of Public Statues

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Computers changed American politics through databases and direct mail, not grand simulations.

Every election night, the experts ask the same question: what will the voters do? Listen to the grammar. Millions of people, treated as a system you can predict, model, run. Politics was supposed to be the one thing we insisted stayed irreducibly human. Somewhere it quietly became a computation.

SimPolitics: America's Quest to Solve Politics with Computers

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Turtles are as endangered as primates, and their apparent invulnerability is exactly what makes them easy to take.

A turtle pulled into its shell looks invulnerable — a jewel box that nothing can touch. Craig Stanford explains why that impression is an illusion: the same animals are flattened by cars and mailed to China in unmarked boxes. From arrow-poison frogs in Colombia to Komodo dragons in Indonesia, his close-up is a meditation on how easily something ancient and well-armored can vanish.

Cold-Blooded Murder

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Turtles are as endangered as primates, and their apparent invulnerability is exactly what makes them easy to take.

He wrote me this lovely letter, an actual letter, answering all my questions, and I'm sure he got many letters from kids. I wrote him back, and we had this correspondence that went on for a couple of years. Eventually he would write the answers in the margins of my letters

Cold-Blooded Murder

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Humans sleep less than any other primate, and that is an adaptation produced by sociality, not a deficit.

You have to have a big brain for sleep to really matter. Circadian rhythms, though — the first eukaryotes and prokaryotic life on the planet — had to time their behaviors adaptively. So the framing of the book is: why do we do what we do? Why do we experience the kinds of symptoms we do in the modern world? And the answer is a 1.5-billion-year-old answer. It goes back to the first life on this planet

The Sleepless Ape: The Story of Sleep in Human Evolution

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Cinema's ethical value lies in indeterminacy, and Ozu's direct-address shots stage an encounter that refuses judgment.

From a historical and transnational viewpoint, Ozu's ambiguous and mysterious camera movements allow us multi-directional reading, which I think is an example of the ethics of indeterminacy. By way of discussing Ozu films, I want to foster readers' historical awareness and political consciousness.

Ozu and the Ethics of Indeterminacy

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Cinema's ethical value lies in indeterminacy, and Ozu's direct-address shots stage an encounter that refuses judgment.

However, I have been hesitant to write a book on a single director because, when I think of the historiography of Japanese cinema studies, it has been heavily inclined to the study of authorship. Besides, there are already many wonderful books on Ozu. Donald Richie. David Bordwell. Shigehiko Hasumi, to name a few. Why should I add another book to the packed bookshelf?

Ozu and the Ethics of Indeterminacy

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Ozu's films draw their ethical force from refusing to settle on one viewpoint.

As a film studies scholar, I believe cinema has an ethical purpose for the world. I began seriously thinking about the relationship between myself as a film viewer and the reality of the world for the first time when I co-translated Kiju Yoshida's Ozu's Anti-Cinema, one of the foundational works of Ozu studies in Japan, into English in 2003.

Ozu and the Ethics of Indeterminacy

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Chicago's kitchenette was not just a symptom of housing shortage but shaped national housing policy.

How did a single, cramped style of apartment come to reshape an entire city's identity? This conversation traces how mid-century Chicago's subdivided "kitchenette" apartments moved from real estate boards and housing policy into fiction, drama, and the daily lives of Black families arriving during the Great Migration. It's a story about how a building type became a way of understanding a city — and the people priced into its smallest rooms.

A Kitchenette to Fit Your Needs

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Macaroni and cheese endures because it keeps finding new cultural work, not because it tastes good.

The hard problem of food history is telling a true story without flattening it into gastromythology. Following macaroni and cheese from Cato's Rome through medieval mobility, English Macaroni Fashion, and the Jefferson–Hemings myth, she uses Restorative History to recover the African American women written out of the dish's American story—right up to the yellow box of Kraft Dinner.

The Epic History of Macaroni and Cheese: From Ancient Rome to Modern America

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Nothing counts as human thought unless it is universal, and a science that never leaves the West cannot show that.

I do indeed talk to everyone—the barista, the salesclerk, the Uber driver (I once almost missed a meeting because the Uber driver, who was from Morocco, and I were having an in-depth chat about Moroccan sheep, and he had photographs to show me). I am drawn to what other people think and do.

How We Think

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Nostalgia is itself a form of speculative fiction, imagining a past that never was.

What I'm looking at is less what the media itself is saying and more how people get attached to it — how they begin to police it and say, this is the way it has to be. When The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power comes out, and there are Black elves and Black dwarfs, and people throw a fit — well, why do you care? What is it about your vision of this imagined world that has you so opposed to the presence of diversity?

Nostalgic Futures: The Reactionary Fantasies of Speculative Fiction Fandoms

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Performer and audience really communicate, expectation running both ways, and the fans, not the artist, own the songs.

I try to make scenes and experiences like these accessible to readers, even though it's difficult to fully capture the joy and intensity they create in words. But I think it is important because it gives us a chance to challenge the sociological idea that the interaction between artists and fans is merely "parasocial." There are simply too many examples showing that these relationships are experienced as meaningful and real.

Springsteen Fandom: A Lifetime Conversation

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The commercial internet was made in the city of San Francisco, not in Silicon Valley, and the reason is cultural.

In terms of the smaller stories, I'm a little biased because some of them are my story. The chapter three about The Industry Standard — how good is that? I don't know, but I think it's pretty good. So I would say The Industry Standard story is one of my favorites. Another one I would point to is the story of the Google buses.

City on the Edge: Technology, Politics, and the Fight for the Soul of San Francisco

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Ripeness has been detached from season and sold as permanent availability.

What resists this condition is the private, the silent, the unknown, the unread, the unseen, the unspoken, the untouched, the unsmelled, the unheard—those dimensions that require time to be expressed. All life, in its material and immaterial form, demands duration that is stretched, slow, and unedited.

THE AGE OF TOMATO

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The neurological record arbitrates the LLM-versus-linguistics fight, and it supports a modular brain with partly innate language.

The computer metaphor permeates our lives for good reasons, but we need to be mindful of how we harness it to enhance our thoughts, and beware of hurdles and pitfalls along the path. This is what I've been trying to do, and I truly hope that the specifics of my view would be apparent to each and every reader.

How Deeply Human Is Language?

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A dish endures not because it tastes good but because it keeps doing new cultural work.

Tasty is not enough to become an icon. Plenty of delicious things vanish. The ones that endure survive because they do cultural work — signaling refinement to one era, feeding families cheaply in the next, and quietly becoming "comfort" in a third. The staying power was never in the flavor.

The Epic History of Macaroni and Cheese: From Ancient Rome to Modern America

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Melville's samurai is an invention, with an epigraph that exists in no Bushido and no Hagakure.

Equity, diversity, and inclusion should be the top priority in society. There is no doubt about that. They are a basic human right. However, are we sometimes becoming too defensive to avoid being offensive? Is it becoming difficult to critique others' thoughts? I think there is a clear difference between critiquing and criticizing.

Le Samouraï

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Mass cat-keeping began only in the 1950s and 60s, so pet cats are one percent of the human-cat relationship.

Humans had begun to establish permanent settlements where they practised agriculture and stored food, mainly grain. The grain attracted rodents and the rodents attracted wildcats, who soon became indispensable for dealing with the rodent problem. Over thousands of years, as they became fixtures in human settlements, wildcats evolved into cats

Cats: A History

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Mass cat-keeping began only in the 1950s and 60s, so pet cats are one percent of the human-cat relationship.

But cats rarely entered the historical record except tangentially. It's likely that all elite households had cats to keep the mouse population down, but family portraits far more often show a dog than a cat – presumably because they had a relationship with the dog or the dog was of a prestigious breed.

Cats: A History

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