700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators
Arab Imago has a dual personality. It explores the undiscovered history of indigenista, or indigenous, photography of the Arab world. I am particularly interested in the earliest decades of photography,...
The Prometheus Bomb is an account of the building of the atomic bomb that ended combat in the Pacific theater of World War II. The book focuses on how breakthroughs...
Essentially this book was written in an attempt to explain to the interested lay reader why a curious phenomenon still called 'the Cuban Revolution' had managed to survive for so...
I first became interested in the problem of Soviet suicide after reading a footnote about a dramatic spike in suicides among Bolsheviks (or Communists) during the 1920s. Such an outburst...
Black Culture, Inc. addresses the question, “What role can business play in contributing to racial equity and the public good more broadly?” In the book I show how ethnic community...
Socialist realism was arguably the 20th century’s most successful artistic phenomenon, especially if measured in terms of quantitative output and geographical reach. Yet socialist realism remains notoriously difficult to define....
Part of developing our taste for certain comic books—and the same applies for novels, music, art, films, and the like—is our refining of our aesthetic sensibility. This typically happens at...
A fascinating cast of characters populate the pages of the book—individuals who contributed to shaping the idea of Galicia over the course of two centuries.I write about Habsburg emperors like...
The Apartment Plot argues for the dominance and centrality of the apartment plot from 1945 to 1975.What I am calling “the apartment plot” are narratives in which the apartment figures...
Consider the 1982 “bite mark case” in Newport News, Virginia, that resulted in a murder conviction and death sentence for Keith Allen Harward, who was incarcerated for 33 years before...
Transatlantic Fascism investigates how Mussolini’s propaganda endeavors included the fascist rethinking of Argentine history, fascist transatlantic flights and the extensive use of radio, cinema, cartoons and bribes.However, if the Italians...
The book relates primarily to theories and practices of postmodernism and globalization, two of the most central intellectual trends of the last few decades. The book shows how the arrival...
I hope readers look first at the table of contents, to see the whole range of topics covered in the book: from printing language to book-related insults, and from scientific...
Chapter One, “Modernism in Europe and America,” outlines the book’s major arguments. It also focuses on the urban aspects of modernism, the cultural importance of cities like Vienna, Berlin, Paris,...
Opening my book to pages 64 and 65, you will sit beside Belzoni as he drew the tumbled wonders of Karnak. It is a safe bet that having done so,...
Stunning beauty abounds in nature. We see it everywhere we look. The brilliant colors and dances of butterflies and fishes, the songs of crickets, frogs, and birds, and even the...
Forget technology and weather for now. I want to spend some of my few allotted words talking about something else: China’s much neglected military tradition.Western scholars—like the famous Victor Davis...
For a closer look, I would direct the reader to the section on the relationship between Theodore (“Ted”) Rousseau and Bruno Lohse. Rousseau, the former OSS officer who interrogated Lohse...
Reclaiming Modernity explores a pervasive but largely unexamined mental attitude, Americans’ fond recollection of the not-so-distant past, and elements of material culture associated with that near past. I call this...
It has been strongly asserted by some regulators, including the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, that the Dodd-Frank Act now permits the safe resolution of any systemically important financial institution that...
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...
I show how looking at paintings and reading literature depend on how sensory perception and understanding are formed and transformed by the way in which we ourselves are first formed,...
The argument of Beyond Belief, Beyond Conscience rests on two claims about the importance of religious liberty to our broader constitutional tradition. First, of all the rights we possess, the...
What’s the dumbest social ritual you’ve partaken in? Fraternity hazing, perhaps? Or maybe debating a lunch mate over who gets the privilege of picking up the tab? How about pretending...
Like many law professors, I began my career by doing two judicial clerkships—basically, serving as a staff lawyer for a federal judge. I spent one year in the chambers of...
There are different explanations of why the Cold War ended. What is distinctive about your interpretation of it?The two most popular explanations are that the Cold War ended when it...
Relevance can be an accident. When I started working on this project in 2010, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway had just published Merchants of Doubt, their account of organized science...
While Crack is, as books go, on the slim side, it covers a lot of ground. While I hope the chapters on the history of cocaine, the lure of crack,...
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...
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,...
Paper Machines outlines the story of the card index in manifold ways: as a library catalogue, as a collection for thinkers, and as a tool for office efficiency. And yet...
There is much to interest readers in my book beyond a debate about narrow academic curriculum. In one chapter, “Trump’s Philosophers,” I explore how educational demands to “preserve our Western...
In the fourth chapter, “Palestinian Spokesmen,” I discuss little-known dimensions of two famous Palestinian writers: Mahmoud Darwish and Ghassan Kanafani. While Darwish is best known for his poetry and Kanafani...
King of the Lobby is about power, politics, money, and lobbying in Washington in the Gilded Age. It is about delicious food, fine wines, and good conversation and how one...
Walled States, Waning Sovereignty emerges from several decades of politically engaged scholarship.I am a political theorist by vocation, which means that my thinking about the world is refracted through my...
My hope is that the book’s opening paragraph will do what a lead paragraph is supposed to do: make browsers want to read on.I open with the young French army...
The motivation for the book comes from the uncertain future that faces humanity. The twentieth century, as I wrote in my previous book, The Big Ratchet, was an extraordinary time...
The United Nations has declared 2025 the Year of Quantum Science and Technology to mark the 100th anniversary of our foundational model of the atomic world, quantum mechanics. This model...
For decades the dominant theoretical framework for film studies (and for the humanities in general) has been a strong version of what is called “social constructionism.” The basic idea here...
Many blue-collar, manual labor, and service jobs that were once low-status have become “cool” in today’s economy. In fact, jobs like bartender, distiller, barber, and butcher have gone from providing...
I am a scholar of Buddhism—we call ourselves Buddhologists—focusing on late Indian Buddhism (roughly from the fifth to twelfth centuries) and on Tibetan Buddhism. My early work was on Indian...
Madness is something whose mysteries puzzle us still. The loss of reason, the sense of alienation from the common sense world the rest of us imagine we inhabit, the shattering...
All computational models of the brain and cognitive activity produced so far are either idealizations, making the models hypothetical, or approximations, making the models inexact descriptions of their target phenomena,...
In Jazz Icons, I argue that jazz history is now dominated by iconic figures who have taken on an almost God-like status.When musicians and fans discuss the life and music...
As an historian, everything I do is anchored in a concern with the past presented in what I hope is a lively narrative. In walking along that path in this...
I started Listed when I was working in Washington, DC, as a policy fellow with the American Association for the Advancement of Science. At the time the Endangered Species Act...
My big question is: Why do people stay with lives, forms, and fantasies of life that don’t work?How do we learn to associate certain things with our fantasies of the...
One area of literary culture from this period presented a striking puzzle. Whereas most serious writers looked at mass culture with disdain and alarm, there were important exceptions. I came...
If a potential reader were to pick up my book, I like to believe that were they to turn to a random page, they would immediately be intrigued and drawn...
A Free and Responsible Press is a classic, but many of the Commission’s most incisive and prescient observations didn’t make it into the book. As the transcripts of their meetings...
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