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Mutual-aid structure makes radical religious groups lethal, so governments should compete with them in providing benign services.

The final chapter of Radical, Religious, and Violent examines religious radicalism in a historical context. Having established earlier in the book why religious radicals can be lethal terrorists and especially...

Radical, Religious, and Violent

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Radical religious groups are lethal because of their mutual-aid structure, not their theology.

My book offers a fresh way of understanding insurgency and terrorism. I outline a constructive approach to confronting localized insurgencies like those in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the international terrorism...

Radical, Religious, and Violent

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Mutual-aid structure makes radical religious groups lethal, so governments should compete with them in providing benign services.

Why are the Taliban such a threat in Afghanistan? And why are violent radical Islamists such resilient terrorists? You won’t believe this but the answer is communism. I’m not kidding....

Radical, Religious, and Violent

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Film viewing is tactile contact between two bodies, the viewer's and the film's own.

The full-bodied, mutual suffusion of film and viewer is illustrated graphically and literally by The Big Swallow (James Williamson, 1901). The film begins with a medium-long shot of a gentleman...

The Tactile Eye

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Film viewing is tactile contact between two bodies, the viewer's and the film's own.

The Tactile Eye emerged as a response to my own craving for what anthropologist Paul Stoller calls “sensuous scholarship.” I was inspired by certain film and art history scholarship in...

The Tactile Eye

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Watching a film is tactile contact between two bodies, the viewer's and the film's own.

In Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep (2006), Gael García Bernal plays a frustrated artist with a penchant for quirky handmade objects and stop-motion animation who falls in love with...

The Tactile Eye

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Modern consumer society was born out of religious fervor rather than its defeat.

The idea that interiors reveal personalities is such a truism of contemporary culture that it is difficult to imagine that it was not always so. While the well-to-do in previous...

Household Gods

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Modern consumer society was born out of religious fervor rather than its defeat.

My book began as an inquiry into the origins of consumer demand. In the past two decades, economic historians have established that consumer demand provided an important catalyst for industrialization....

Household Gods

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Modern consumer society was born out of religious fervor rather than its defeat.

Household Gods is a history of the British love-affair with the domestic interior from the age of mass manufacture to modernism. In no other country was domesticity so celebrated and...

Household Gods

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Without civic friendship embodied in laws and customs, only a sham justice of the powerful can reign.

In the book’s preface I dive into what I has been much overlooked in the modern period: the importance of friendship, how it seems to differ for women, and not...

On Civic Friendship

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Without civic friendship embodied in laws and customs, only a sham justice of the powerful can reign.

Despite the major transformation of consciousness occasioned by the 20th century women’s movement, and on a scale that suggests powerful historical forces are at work, the modern political state is...

On Civic Friendship

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Justice depends on civic friendship, a reciprocal good will built into laws and customs.

Historically speaking, theorizing the nature of the political state from a feminist point of view is in its earliest stages. So my book offers a novel feminist account of the...

On Civic Friendship

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Routine protection orders, sought whether or not the woman wants one, amount to a state-imposed de facto divorce.

In many jurisdictions, the moment a misdemeanor domestic violence arrest enters the system, prosecutors routinely seek a protection order banning the alleged assailant from the home, whether or not the...

At Home in the Law

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Routine protection orders, sought whether or not the woman wants one, amount to a state-imposed de facto divorce.

The image of the home as a place of coercion and abuse has gained ground in our culture. The notion that the home shields subordination within its walls is becoming...

At Home in the Law

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Domestic violence law turned the home from a man's castle into the place where the crime is.

At Home in the Law argues that the past 40 years have witnessed important transformations in the legal idea of what the home is. For centuries the familiar adage, a...

At Home in the Law

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Critical Theory's real American reception came after the New Left imploded, in the seminar room.

In the wake of 1968, Herbert Marcuse and, by extension, his former colleagues from the Frankfurt School became forever linked with the student protests of that era. While most of...

The Frankfurt School in Exile

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Critical Theory took hold in America in the seminar room, not the streets of 1968.

In a letter of June 29, 1940, Max Horkheimer eloquently developed one of the metaphors that became central to the history of Critical Theory in America. Writing to the actress...

The Frankfurt School in Exile

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Critical Theory's real American reception came after the New Left imploded, in the seminar room.

My book aims to challenge what I consider to be some pervasive views about the Frankfurt School during its period of exile in the United States and to re-evaluate the...

The Frankfurt School in Exile

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Modern money is bank credit, therefore debt, and debt has replaced God as the guarantee of human cooperation.

Capital growth begins with borrowing for investment. For all economic activity is limited by the supply of money: there is always so much more that could be done, if only...

Theology of Money

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Modern money is bank credit, therefore debt, and debt has replaced God as the guarantee of human cooperation.

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

Theology of Money

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Debt has replaced God as the guarantee of human cooperation.

While the paradigm frequently offered for understanding our society is freedom of the market, the reality of most people’s experience of economic life is one of constraint. Why is this? It...

Theology of Money

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A 300-seat Upper West Side theater, more than critics or journals, taught a generation to see film as art.

In the section On Location, I recount the opening of the New Yorker Book Store with Pete Martin and Austen Laber. Pete was the co-founder, with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, of the...

The New Yorker Theater and Other Scenes from a Life at the Movies

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A 300-seat Upper West Side theater, more than critics or journals, taught a generation to see film as art.

The sixties was a golden age in cinema, turbulent in politics, transitional in urban change. We were lucky, there at the hub where time and place converged: French New Wave,...

The New Yorker Theater and Other Scenes from a Life at the Movies

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A 300-seat Upper West Side theater taught a generation to see film as art.

This memoir is an inside account of the New Yorker Theater that my husband Dan and I opened on March 17, 1960. An Art Deco relief of Diana the Huntress...

The New Yorker Theater and Other Scenes from a Life at the Movies

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Self-consciousness grows out of the fear of being rejected.

I hold that to be ignored and rejected by others means psychological death. Around page 225 in the book, I illustrate this idea by what I understand to be the...

Others in Mind

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Self-consciousness grows out of the fear of being rejected, and to be ignored is psychological death.

Other in Mind is neither just another dry academic book, nor a self-help book. It is about sharing what I see as a crucial aspect of what makes us part...

Others in Mind

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Self-consciousness grows out of the fear of being rejected, and to be ignored is psychological death.

Others in Mind is a book about self-consciousness: how it originates and how it shapes our lives. Self-consciousness is arguably the most important and revealing of all psychological issues. Why...

Others in Mind

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Biological weapons are living things indistinguishable from civilian biomedicine, so verification and intelligence fail structurally.

On February 5, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell issued a dire warning to the United Nations Security Council in an effort to convince the international community that Iraq possessed...

Living Weapons

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Biological weapons are not like nuclear or chemical weapons, because they are living things.

Biological weapons are the least well understood of the so-called weapons of mass destruction, or WMDs. Despite the growing awareness of the threat posed by biological weapons, the history of...

Living Weapons

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Biological weapons are living things indistinguishable from civilian biomedicine, so verification and intelligence fail structurally.

The proliferation of biological weapons—BW for short—to states or terrorists is one of the most pressing security issues of the twenty-first century. At a time when the United States enjoys...

Living Weapons

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The protocols of cross-cultural trade set Mocha's hierarchy, layout and architecture, which is why it had no caravanserais.

This book intervenes in one of the long-standing issues in Middle Eastern studies regarding the shape and analysis of the Arab city. Urban scholars agree that the conception of the...

The Merchant Houses of Mocha

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The protocols of cross-cultural trade set Mocha's hierarchy, layout and architecture, which is why it had no caravanserais.

I embarked on the first stages of research for this book over ten years ago as a graduate student at UCLA, where I was doing my PhD in Islamic art...

The Merchant Houses of Mocha

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Cross-cultural trade shaped Mocha's social order and its buildings, not only its economy.

Most people associate the word mocha with coffee. For some it may be a type of coffee bean with a rich deep taste, usually from Yemen or the Horn of...

The Merchant Houses of Mocha

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Accident proneness died because engineers moved safety from sorting people to redesigning environments.

A reader of this book would probably be most struck by the many instances of commonplace accidents that one seldom or never thinks about. Human error is everywhere. Workers try...

Accident Prone

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Accident proneness died because engineers moved safety from sorting people to redesigning environments.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, worldwide 1,200,000 people died in traffic accidents alone. A hundred years earlier, industrial accidents were already being counted in the millions. Economic costs...

Accident Prone

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Accident proneness died not from disproof but because safety shifted from sorting people to redesigning environments.

Everybody knows the idea, now usually humorous, that some people have more accidents than other people. Accident proneness was once a technical term, used to separate some people, identified as...

Accident Prone

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Scientists may advocate during agenda setting, where framing power sits, and are disciplined into objectivity as policy formalizes.

The book offers a systematic explanation of the changes in role-expectations that scientists who participate in environmental policymaking will face. It is rocky terrain that, for some scientists, is difficult...

Science in Environmental Policymaking

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Scientists may advocate during agenda setting, where framing power sits, and are disciplined into objectivity as policy formalizes.

I came to this subject with a longstanding interest in the role of scientists in US policymaking. Growing up as the daughter of a climate scientist, I gained early exposure...

Science in Environmental Policymaking

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The rules for scientists in policymaking shift with each stage of the process.

In this book, I examine the awkward position that scientists find themselves in when they enter environmental policy debates. In such debates experts try to square their appeal as objective,...

Science in Environmental Policymaking

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The German cameral sciences were fiscal propaganda written by men hunting salaries and promotions.

Schloss Friedenstein, the seventeenth-century palace that Ernst the Pious of Gotha built, is a good place to do research: on one side, in the east wing, the old research library;...

The Disordered Police State

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The German cameral sciences were fiscal propaganda written by men hunting salaries and promotions.

I was trained in the history of science, a field much concerned with the relationship between discourse and practice. This influenced the course of my research, which was driven by...

The Disordered Police State

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The German cameral sciences were fiscal propaganda, not descriptions of what administrators did.

The narcissistic present forever seeks itself in the past. Though the living try to winnow meaning from the chaos of history, they often discover only themselves among the dead generations....

The Disordered Police State

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Thought is not portable, and wandering is a legitimate way of organizing knowledge.

I would hope that readers “browsing” would first look at the book’s cover. It is a dreamy image of water taken on the Hudson River by artist Ellen Kozak. I...

Thinking in Place

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Thought is not portable, it always begins in a particular place.

The book really does reflect my years of thinking and training as an intellectual—as a public intellectual. Each of the essays evolved in response to a place and then to...

Thinking in Place

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Thought is not portable, and wandering is a legitimate way of organizing knowledge.

Thinking in Place is a collection of nine essays written over the last five years of moving around the world. Each essay is located in a place but sometimes the places...

Thinking in Place

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The present crisis is 1931, a banking crisis spreading by contagion, for which no macroeconomic answer exists.

One of the most dramatic bubbles of the 2000s occurred in the art market, above all in contemporary art. For fine art overall, the most widely quoted index, the Mei...

The Creation and Destruction of Value

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Today's crisis is not 1929 but 1931, a banking crisis with no quick macroeconomic fix.

Ten years ago, I began writing a book on the phenomenon of globalization, in part in order to try to understand the bitter debate which pitted globalization protesters against international...

The Creation and Destruction of Value

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The present crisis is 1931, a banking crisis spreading by contagion, for which no macroeconomic answer exists.

The Creation and Destruction of Value focuses on parallels and differences between the current financial crisis and the Great Depression, and asks whether today’s crisis—like that of the Great Depression—might...

The Creation and Destruction of Value

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Japanese confinement was a continental pattern, from British Columbia to Mexico and Hawaii, with momentum built before Pearl Harbor.

If I had to select at random a section to commend to a reader, I think I would choose the section of Chapter 5 that deals with the history of...

A Tragedy of Democracy

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Japanese confinement was a continental pattern, from British Columbia to Mexico and Hawaii, with momentum built before Pearl Harbor.

This book is the final product of a long train of circumstances and developments. It was more than ten years ago that I started doing research on the signing of...

A Tragedy of Democracy

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Japanese confinement was a continental pattern, not just a wartime mainland American story.

My book offers a new look at a familiar subject, Executive Order 9066 and the removal and confinement of West Coast Japanese Americans during World War II (commonly called the...

A Tragedy of Democracy

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The marriage of evangelical religion to free-market economics is a product of the service economy.

For me, the most fascinating parts of this story took place outside the stores: in a stadium of college students cheering for capitalism, a theme park about free enterprise with...

To Serve God and Wal-Mart

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The marriage of evangelical religion to free-market economics is a product of the service economy.

Histories of the long, prosperous liberal consensus in the middle of the twentieth century looked back to the specific experience of the industrial North. The people and institutions of the...

To Serve God and Wal-Mart

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The marriage of evangelical religion to free-market economics is a product of the service economy.

For more than a generation, the conservative counterrevolution in America blurred the distinction between the invisible hand of the market and the all-powerful hand of God. In the “culture wars”...

To Serve God and Wal-Mart

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States punish violators of international law badly, so they violate it with impunity when benefits exceed costs.

International courts have appeared in the news lately. The public seems vaguely aware of their existence and in some quarters there seems to be an expectation that they can try...

The Perils of Global Legalism

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States punish violators of international law badly, so they violate it with impunity when benefits exceed costs.

International legal scholars have, with only a few exceptions, taken a largely uncritical approach to the international legal institutions that they study. Compliance with international law is taken for granted,...

The Perils of Global Legalism

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Compliance, not content, is the central problem of international law.

The book criticizes an attitude I call “global legalism,” the faith or hope that international law can solve the word’s problems even though the world is a largely anarchical place,...

The Perils of Global Legalism

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Philosophy is not too abstract to bear on dying.

Field Notes lends itself to browsing, starting and stopping here and there. One of the interesting things about early responses to the book is that people’s interests and concerns draw...

Field Notes from Elsewhere

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Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida are what make a septic shock or a cancer diagnosis thinkable.

The point of departure for the book is a severe illness I suffered in December 2005. As a result of a biopsy, I went into septic shock and suddenly fell...

Field Notes from Elsewhere

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Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida are what make a septic shock or a cancer diagnosis thinkable.

Having taught philosophy and religion at Williams College for thirty-six years and now at Columbia University, I had long considered writing a book that would bring together abstract ideas and...

Field Notes from Elsewhere

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The Dark Ages are dark only because the surviving descriptions were written by outsiders.

A browsing reader might find the chapters on craft production and trade most revealing. The archaeology shows us that even small communities during the so-called Dark Ages belonged to complex...

Barbarians to Angels

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The Dark Ages look dark only because outsiders wrote the surviving descriptions.

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

Barbarians to Angels

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The Dark Ages are dark only because the surviving descriptions were written by outsiders.

My book is about the peoples who are often referred to as “barbarians” during the period commonly known as “the Dark Ages.” I argue that far from being the uncivilized...

Barbarians to Angels

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Consumer activism is one continuous American political tradition, not a series of separate boycotts.

This morning, October 1, 2009, I picked up the New York Times to notice a full-page ad on the back of the news section. It was prepared and paid for...

Buying Power

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Consumer activism is one continuous American political tradition from the 1760s on, and it is not a progressive one.

Long distance solidarity is perhaps the key concept I explore in this book. Consumer activists were among the first Americans to declare that moral agency should not be dictated by...

Buying Power

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Consumer activism is one continuous American political tradition from the 1760s on, and it is not a progressive one.

Buying Power traces the origins and development of consumer activism in America from the 1760s to the present. Historians and other scholars have written about discrete boycotts or closely conjoined...

Buying Power

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Islamic science grew from the needs of a new empire and competition among displaced bureaucratic families.

I use the example of Copernicus, who literally picked up from Arabic texts almost all of the mathematical theorems he needed for the construction of his astronomy; these theorems were...

Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance

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Islamic science grew from the practical needs of a new empire, not the hobbies of caliphs.

The first two chapters of the book propose a completely new reading of this period. I don’t believe that things drop from heaven. That all of a sudden one caliph...

Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance

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Islamic science grew from the needs of a new empire and competition among displaced bureaucratic families.

This book started almost ten years ago. Initially, I wanted to know what were the conditions under which a civilization could produce science afresh. I was trained in ancient Semitics, and...

Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance

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In every New York City fiscal crisis since the Depression the financial elites won.

Some people have told me that the most interesting part of the book was the chapter on Rudy Giuliani and his decision making. I don’t agree. I think the chapter...

Follow the Money

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In every New York City fiscal crisis since the Depression the financial elites won.

Just as importantly, who was responsible for those decisions? I became a fiscal analyst and eventually put those tools to work in government and then in academia...

Follow the Money

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In every New York City fiscal crisis since the Depression the financial elites won.

America has had three revolutions: 1776, 1929 and Ronald Reagan’s New Federalism. The signs of the coming third American revolution were evident in 1975 when New York City experienced its...

Follow the Money

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Consumer society once meant access for everybody and now means individual choice for those who can afford it.

Two chapters might provide some real surprises to readers. Chapter five deals with activist networks. Today, networks are a common feature of the political landscape. Non-governmental organisations, labour unions, social movements,...

Prosperity for All

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Consumer society once meant access for everybody and now means individual choice for those who can afford it.

The book is very much a product of my training as a social historian. That is, I have attempted to uncover the hopes and aspirations of ordinary groups of people....

Prosperity for All

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Consumer society once meant access for everybody and now means choice for those who can afford it.

At its broadest level, Prosperity for All is about the changing meaning of consumer society over the past half century. I argue that whereas access to the benefits of consumer...

Prosperity for All

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Black dandyism is not frivolity but a mode of critique.

In order to illustrate the way that a black dandy can embody complex and even competing notions of blackness, meet “Dandy Jim, from Carolina,” a theatrical figure made famous by...

Slaves to Fashion

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Black dandyism is critique, a self-conscious study of the fashions that define you.

Slaves to Fashion began with a footnote I encountered in graduate school. While auditing a class on W.E.B Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, I came across a troubling...

Slaves to Fashion

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Black dandyism is critique, a self-conscious study of the fashions that define you.

Slaves to Fashion is a cultural history of the politics of black fashion and dress since the creation of the black diaspora, from the slave trade to the present. Dress...

Slaves to Fashion

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The Greeks and Romans were more skeptical of their dreams than credulous.

In truth, the best place to start is the beginning. The book is carefully structured and non-repetitive, so it is best to read the Introduction first, and keep going. Whether...

Dreams and Experience in Classical Antiquity

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The Greeks and Romans were more skeptical of their dreams than credulous.

We do not know why we dream, or what if anything our dreams may mean – though some theories are much more plausible than others. In these circumstances it is...

Dreams and Experience in Classical Antiquity

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The Greeks and Romans were more skeptical about their dreams than credulous.

From the Iliad onwards, via Aristophanes and the gospel of Matthew, to Augustine and beyond, Greek and Latin texts in many genres are constellated with dream-descriptions. The best ancient minds,...

Dreams and Experience in Classical Antiquity

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Governments cannot dictate how venture markets evolve, and most attempts have wasted billions.

It is hard to choose just one from the plentitude of examples—from all corners of the world—for how not to promote entrepreneurship. But here is a striking case. In 1970s and 1980s,...

Boulevard of Broken Dreams

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Governments cannot dictate how venture markets evolve.

The financial crisis opened the door to massive public interventions in the Western economies. In many nations, governments responded to the threats of illiquidity and insolvency by making huge investments...

Boulevard of Broken Dreams

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Governments cannot dictate how venture markets evolve, and most attempts have wasted billions.

Boulevard of Broken Dreams is the first extensive look at the ways governments have supported entrepreneurs and venture capitalists across decades and continents. I examine the public strategies used to advance...

Boulevard of Broken Dreams

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Climate change is not a problem that can be solved.

Towards the end of the book I put forward four myths about climate change. I would hope people may recognise the truths about our relationship with climate change that each...

Why We Disagree About Climate Change

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Climate change is not a problem that can be solved, and treating it as one guarantees failure.

The idea of climate change carries quite different meanings. It is used to support different political, social and technological projects and seems to imply different courses of action. The Intergovernmental Panel...

Why We Disagree About Climate Change

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Climate change is not a problem that can be solved, and treating it as one guarantees failure.

Why We Disagree About Climate Change is about the idea of climate change—where it came from, what it means to different people in different places and why we disagree about...

Why We Disagree About Climate Change

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Bernstein's politics and his music were a single life.

I wrote the Introduction as a mise en scène that would set the stage for what comes next—a tale of presidential betrayal of an American artist (by Truman and Eisenhower)....

Leonard Bernstein

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Bernstein's politics and his music were one life, not two.

My interests in cultural politics include a project I had started before the Bernstein project—a study of the joint work by the Soviet artists Vladimir Mayakovsky and El Lissitzky, their...

Leonard Bernstein

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Bernstein's politics and his music were a single life.

I want my readers to understand Leonard Bernstein as a person whose political life was intimately bound up with his artistic life. I was inspired to begin writing this book...

Leonard Bernstein

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Veiling is not a private decision, and women should not wear the hijab.

I would want a reader who browses through my book to read pages 4 and 5 because they show in vivid terms the perils of thinking that veiling is faith...

Questioning the Veil

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Veiling is not a private decision, and women should not wear the hijab.

In the past I wrote books that were historical in nature in so far as they relied on archival research or on existing historical research; I focused on structural rather...

Questioning the Veil

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The veil controls the woman rather than being controlled by her.

This book started out as a reflection on why it is that in the past two decades a re-veiling trend has swept over the Muslim world and Muslim communities in...

Questioning the Veil

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New York's 1741 conspiracy panic was driven by the newly unleashed power of capitalism more than by racism.

Examining how the actions of individuals come together to create an immense commercial empire, Dangerous Economies is studded with the stories of a diverse array of New Yorkers, from slaves...

Dangerous Economies

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New York's 1741 conspiracy panic was driven less by racism than by newly unleashed capitalism.

Other historians, especially in the last ten years, have written about this suspected conspiracy. Indeed, as an undergraduate student, I myself abridged the one extant judge’s account of the trials....

Dangerous Economies

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New York's 1741 conspiracy panic was driven by the newly unleashed power of capitalism more than by racism.

In Dangerous Economies, I explain a shocking moment in eighteenth-century America. 250 years ago, New York was gripped by a terrible fear: that resident slaves were conspiring to torch the...

Dangerous Economies

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The record refutes the charge that commercial rap damaged the black youth who consume it most.

I think that my Chapter 4, “Gangstas, Militants, Media, and the Contest for Hip-Hop,” provides some new perspective on the intense debates surrounding the culture, and reflects a good part...

Hip-Hop Revolution

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The record refutes the charge that commercial rap damaged the black youth who consume it most.

There are many inspirations for this book. I am a huge fan of hip-hop. Like most guys around my age, I tried my hand at breakdancing as a teen. I...

Hip-Hop Revolution

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Commercial rap has not damaged the black youth who listen to it most.

Hip-Hop Revolution explores the current cultural and political landscape of hip-hop by providing a broad based historical context for the art. Beginning with the emergence of popular culture in the...

Hip-Hop Revolution

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The American honeymoon consummated the romance of consumption, the union of sentiment and commerce.

The fourth chapter, “Consuming: The Palace Bridal Chamber” perhaps best illustrates the larger arguments and tensions at this book’s heart.This chapter initially grew out of my interest in honeymoon suites—I...

Newlyweds on Tour

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