2073 Micro Interviews

700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators

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Kelly Oliver

Throughout Western history, philosophers have suggested that what is human is determined by what we eat. Whether they think that we are what we eat (like Rousseau and Herder) or...

Animal Lessons - A close-up
Albena Azmanova

My thinking on judgment as a faculty triggered by a sense (or rather, a sensation) of injustice was first prompted by my involvement with the struggle against the communist regime...

The Scandal of Reason - The wide angle
David A. Weintraub

I have had two careers and this book meets at their intersection. As a Village Voice and Spin rock critic and editor, I came in at the end of the...

Life on Mars - The wide angle
Lynn Keller

The concept of the “self-conscious Anthropocene,” introduced in the book’s title, is one of the book’s innovations and points to its larger significance. The term Anthropocene was introduced in 2000...

Recomposing Ecopoetics - The wide angle
Lynn Meskell

I would like readers to look closely at UNESCO’s high-profile Nubian Monuments Campaign, coming as it did right after the disastrous Suez crisis. In the twilight of empire, during just...

A Future in Ruins - A close-up
Ann Campbell Keller

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 - The wide angle
Hal Foster

The First Pop Age takes up these matters above all: how Pop art folds painting and photography into one another; how, in doing so, it combines the effect of immediacy...

The First Pop Age - In a nutshell
Wendy Steiner

The Real Real Thing shows early 21st</sup>-century culture wrestling with new media, technology, and science. The book is the third in a loose trilogy that began with The Scandal of...

The Real Real Thing - The wide angle
Ethan B. Katz

I first became interested in this topic because of a few long-standing interests: French history, Jewish history, and the past and present of the struggle between Jews and Arabs in...

The Burdens of Brotherhood - The wide angle
Tonio Andrade

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....

Lost Colony - A close-up
Charles A. Kupchan

This is the first book to tell the fascinating story of American isolationism across the full arc of U.S. history. The United States that we know today has dominated global...

Isolationism - In a nutshell
Noah Horowitz

The business of contemporary art has changed immeasurably over the last half century. What was essentially a small, insider trade clustered in a few key avant-garde capitals has expanded into...

Art of the Deal - In a nutshell
Michelle Baddeley

Copycats and Contrarians takes on the idea, promulgated by some economists, that humans are selfish and independently-minded creatures, who use complex mathematical rules to solve problems. This book argues that...

Copycats and Contrarians - In a nutshell
David T. Courtwright

For fans of psychobiography, Nixon is the gift that keeps on giving.Even after he reached the White House in 1969, Nixon still had to live with his ulcers and his...

No Right Turn - A close-up
Shaj Mathew

The book looks to modern and contemporary literature and film from Turkey and Iran. The chapters examine the temporalities of the late Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami and the Turkish Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk. They interpret other Middle Eastern modernist writers including the poets Forough Farrokhzad and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, as well as the Ottoman novelist Ahmet Midhat Efendi...

The Dialectic of Cosmopolitan Time - A close-up
Paul Fleming

Were a browsing reader to open my book at random, he or she could do worse than opening up to the third chapter, which deals with the average artist. Here...

Exemplarity and Mediocrity - The wide angle
Randolph Roth

The relationship between violence and feelings about government has often tracked separately by race in this country. In the last five decades, the black homicide rate peaked between 1971 and...

On the ultimate causes of various kinds of homicide
Inderpal Grewal

Security is often thought of as a topic for international relations or law and limited to topics such as policing, militarism or terrorism. Over the last decade, there has been...

Saving the Security State - The wide angle
Bruce Thomas Boehrer

One bit of Animal Characters should interest anyone who has ever wondered about the history of cats and their relationship with human beings. In it I unearth a centuries-long tradition...

Animal Characters - A close-up
Jason Pine

The Alchemy of Meth, to me, is really about the second part of the title, A Decomposition. It is steeped in the materials of meth making, but it is also...

The Alchemy of Meth - In a nutshell
Juliana M. Pistorius

When I tell people that I study opera in South Africa, they almost always say, “I didn’t know there’s opera there!” Fact is, there’s a very vibrant operatic culture in...

Postcolonial Opera - The wide angle
Sharon Haar

Chicago occupies a particular place in the development of American urbanism. Urban reform movements, the city beautiful movement, modern architecture, and urban renewal and public housing were developed and tested...

The City As Campus - A close-up
Inderpal Grewal

Empires wax and wane, and what we are seeing today is the slow and gradual waning of U.S. empire in the new century. I call this phase of U.S. empire...

Saving the Security State - In a nutshell
J.C. Sharman

Twenty years ago, if a leader from a country like Nigeria looted billions of dollars from his own country and stashed the money in the United States, the US had...

The Despot's Guide to Wealth Management - In a nutshell
Bruce Gordon

The biography seeks to capture the dynamic nature of Calvin’s character; to illuminate how heady interaction with influential friends and enemies, unexpected events, and spiritual and intellectual growth shaped the...

Calvin - The wide angle
Ayanna Thompson

There are plans in the works for a multiracial film version of Macbeth. Like the famous 1936 production that Orson Welles directed in Harlem, this adaptation is to be set...

Weyward Macbeth - In a nutshell
Roger E. Backhouse

The Puzzle of Modern Economics starts by looking at the financial crisis of 2008, when the Queen of England opened a new building at the London School of Economics and...

The Puzzle of Modern Economics - The wide angle
Robert Tubbs

The most contentious of the standards and conventions of “real” journalism, as I’ve found in my dual career as historian and journalist, has long been the ideal of objectivity. Having...

What is a Number? Mathematical Concepts and Their Origins - The wide angle
Robert E. Hegel

There are many cases in my book that should be of particular interest to an inquisitive reader wanting to find out what happened, why, and what the punishment might have...

True Crimes in Eighteenth-Century China - A close-up
Garett Jones

The Culture Transplant debunks the view that immigrants fully assimilate in a generation or two. This is something my fellow economists know—we have vast empirical literatures showing that, for instance,...

The Culture Transplant - The wide angle
Larry Bennett

Like any proud author, my expectation is that the browsing prospective reader might find delight by turning to virtually any page in my book. However, I will limit myself to...

Reclaiming Modernity - A close-up
Nancy L. Rosenblum

Distaste of parties and partisanship is palpable and widespread. While party activists battle one another each claiming they are on side of the angels, critics demonize them all and praise...

On the Side of the Angels - In a nutshell
Thomas N. Bisson

In Chapter VI, on pages 484-499, I open the discussion of “politicised power” with a new reading of the notorious assassination of Thomas Becket on 29 December 1170. Here, one...

The Crisis of the Twelfth Century - A close-up
Nicholas Fox Weber

The close-upIf a reader finds The Art of Tennis in a bookstore, I hope, first of all, that they look at the cover, and they realize that this should be...

The Art of Tennis - A close-up
Mark Fenster

I came to political consciousness in the 1970s. The first president I remember was Richard Nixon, and the first political controversies I remember were Watergate and the latter days of...

Conspiracy Theories - The wide angle
Roland Burke

Two sections of the book exemplify its arguments and their significance—and it would be wonderful if, in the hands of a reader, the volume serendipitously fell open at them, preferably...

Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights - A close-up
Arnold Weinstein

The Lives of Literature tackles the central, all-too-unasked, question that undergirds my teaching and writing career: why read literature? It’s the question all students ponder—why read these books?—and it seems...

The Lives of Literature - In a nutshell
Michael S. Neiberg

Dance of the Furies is an attempt to understand 1914 by taking a wider view of European society. Instead of focusing on the perhaps dozen or so men whose decisions...

Dance of the Furies - In a nutshell
Thomas Dumm

The title is an almost absurdly clear description of the book, but the truth is, until my editor suggested that title to me, I wasn’t quite sure that what I...

Loneliness as a Way of Life - In a nutshell
Ann Blair

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

Too Much to Know - In a nutshell
Charles A. Kupchan

I would encourage readers to start with the Preface. There they will find a concise summary of the intellectual journey that prompted me to write Isolationism and of the book’s...

Isolationism - A close-up
Theodore E. Stebbins Jr.

The title Rethinking American Art applies both to me and to the field—it’s constantly being rethought. My hope is that anyone interested in history, collecting, or American culture will take a look. American history itself is constantly reinterpreted—the facts are the same, but interpretations change...

Rethinking American Art - A close-up
Eric Gordon

I started writing this book as part of my graduate work in media studies. I was interested in cities and found myself attracted to how cities were represented in films....

The Urban Spectator - The wide angle
Dennis C. Rasmussen

Fears of a Setting Sun tells the story of how most of the American founders came to feel deep anxiety, disappointment, and even despair about the government and the nation...

Fears of a Setting Sun - In a nutshell
Bruce Gordon

After five hundred years John Calvin remains the object of admiration and loathing. For some he is revered as the great reformer of the sixteenth century whose legacy embraces both...

Calvin - In a nutshell
Elaine Forman Crane

Witches, Wife Beaters, and Whores combines people, history, and law. The book is composed of six stories about early Americans and how brushes with the law affected everyday life.If the...

Witches, Wife Beaters, and Whores - In a nutshell
Michael A. Ryan

In A Kingdom of Stargazers I analyze the nebulous and tendentious practice that astrology occupied within the culture of the later Middle Ages, a period characterized by profound and multiple...

A Kingdom of Stargazers - In a nutshell
William J. Cook

A home of TSP studies is the field of applied mathematics known as operations research. The focus of the field is the creation of methods to improve decision making, in...

In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman - The wide angle
John Stauffer

One of my favorite moments in Douglass and Lincoln’s relationship was at Lincoln’s second inaugural, when they met for the last time. It was as though in four years, the...

GIANTS - A close-up
Michael Schudson

This book has a specific origin in a book I published in 1998. In The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life, I argued that the character of American...

The Rise of the Right to Know - The wide angle

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