700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators
Who first imagined robots?Most historians believe that automatons were first developed in the Middle Ages. Some philosophers of science claim that it was impossible for anyone in ancient times to...
I am a historian of science, but rather than focus on the achievements of great thinkers—Darwin’s theory of natural selection, say, or Einstein’s theory of relativity—I am interested in the...
One thing I ask often is this: what is the value of “correct” grammar? It seems to me that correctness has gotten a bad reputation: most people think it’s an...
From Utopia to Apocalypse is a study of political upheaval and revolutionary change, as they are portrayed in works of speculative and science fiction. It is my contention that science...
The book begins with an execution. Frederik Coyet, the leader of the Dutch colony that Koxinga captured, has been blamed for the lost colony, even though it wasn’t his fault....
One of the most notable developments in international trade after the end of the Cold War has been the explosion of preferential trade agreements (PTAs). In 1990, there were about...
The Great Delusion is about the unrealistic expectations we all have about what this tired and picked-over planet can provide us. It is about economic growth, the belief that a...
Issues of inclusiveness and cultural identity are at the center of contemporary debates in fields from politics to entertainment. Many educators have been accused of succumbing to “political correctness” for...
I’d like the browsing reader to come, first, to the general introduction to my book – here I outline the principles and scope, the personal experiences that led me to...
Page 55 contains some of the most interesting visual evidence that my book offers, with both methodological and historical significance. On this page, readers will find the “Distinctive Jewish Names,”...
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,...
In addition to my new interpretation of Japanese sexology and sex practices in Asia, the three middle chapters of the book focus on the most commercially popular of Japan’s mass...
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...
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...
Inventing Iron Man is a kind of sequel to my earlier book Becoming Batman. That book was about asking how far can our biology take us toward the performance of...
The Last Utopia assesses how deeply rooted in history the notion of “international human rights” is.I have long been fascinated by this question since human rights—together with the advocacy and...
I set out to provide the reader with a detailed overview of the global illegal trade in African wildlife. The illegal trade involves the poaching, trafficking and consumption of common...
As an historian of ideas, I’m keenly interested in people’s convictions and how they change. I’ve been especially curious about the way ordinary Americans have revised their understandings of the...
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...
There is a section in the book that many readers might find particularly amusing, on the relation between occultism and spiritualism concerning Atlantis. One of the primary characters involved here...
The Man in the Dog Park describes the experience of homelessness from a homeless point of view. Co-authored with a homeless man, the book is based on scores of interviews...
There is no doubt in my mind that the place to start with this book is the illustrations. _Beauty Imagined _ includes over thirty color plates, and others in black...
Readers have riveted onto different things. Some are most struck by the world of one hundred years ago, which I try to recreate in the first chapter. How prostitution was...
At each exhibit, you’ll learn about a different seemingly insane ritual used to organize human life and learn a different lesson about how to use economic logic to find its...
Because the book presents an historical case study of U.S. v. IBT, it would best be approached chronologically.The Timeline (pages xix—xxi in the book) is a thumbnail overview of the...
As German nationalists conceived it, the German “nation” was for most of its history an empire. It was first embodied in the Holy Roman Empire; later in the “second” empire,...
This book is a passionate, sometimes critical and frustrated intervention into the current dominant politics of food. Public campaigns, and journalistic writing often dumb down complex questions into banal slogans:...
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...
For someone who felt passionately about cities from a very young age, my formal education actually took place away from them. Early on I was aware of the ways in...
This is a book about power in a great period of the European Middle Ages. All societies have governments, right? And surely so in the famously progressive twelfth century? No,...
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