700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators
The immigration courts are dysfunctional. As of November 2022, there were more than 2 million cases pending nationwide. Many people wait years to have their cases heard, while others (as...
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...
All the Missing Souls explains for the general reader atrocity crimes in the modern understanding—genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes—and the unique law that frames these crimes in the...
A Book Forged in Hell is about one of the most important and controversial books in Western history, one that continues to be vitally relevant today.Writing in May, 1670, the...
I began exploring the relationship between schools and inequality after reading the 1992 article entitled “Summer Setback” by Doris Entwisle and Karl Alexander. The authors showed that gaps in math...
In the aftermath of the recent financial crisis, we heard many critiques of speculation for having contributed to the problem, and many defenses of speculation as necessary for robust markets....
The chapter with the most sidewalk appeal is probably Chapter Two, “Shirley Temple as Streetwalker.” I argue that film starring Shirley Temple and Jane Withers, the Little Orphan Annie Comic...
In 1956 the president of IBM, Thomas Watson Jr., hired the industrial designer and architect Eliot Noyes, charging him with reinventing IBM’s corporate image at every level, from the logo...
I wrote Eve of Destruction hoping to get people to understand that the previous era of warfare—one in which there were at least some rules about when and why states...
I wrote this book keeping in mind a number of audiences. Scholars of modernism who remain narrow in their scope and clearly need to understand it in a genuinely global...
Sustainability is all the rage. Political and business leaders talk earnestly and passionately about going green. A growing number of books, movies, and public conversations signal a general unease about...
The volatility and possibility of recent gender history makes Chapter Seven especially interesting to general readers. “Where Does Sex Divide: Feminism, Sexuality and the Structures of Gender since 1960” starts...
The fun thing about writing a book about an emerging phenomenon is that there is always something surprising to learn.If I could direct readers to any part of the book,...
When it first dawned on me that Rammohun and Sahajanand were nearly exact contemporaries my immediate thought was: What a wonderful opportunity to bring into view the character and complexity...
When I began working on The Skull Collectors, human remains seemed to be causing trouble everywhere. In the 1990s, new states in Eastern Europe unburied and sorted out the Soviet...
Making Monsters is about the phenomenon of dehumanization, a phenomenon that is implicated in the most hideous acts that human beings have inflicted upon one another. Perpetrators of mass violence...
Age of Fracture is a book about the ideas and arguments that now shape our times. It is about the ways in which conceptions of society and selves that were...
Weather, as defined by meteorologists, is the state of the atmosphere as it affects life over a period of a few minutes, or at most a few days. This distinguishes...
The end of chapter 2, pages 95-100, just before the book’s gallery of photos, deals with one of the biggest questions I faced when doing the research: why, in fact,...
I would like to highlight just two passages.The first is from the start of Chapter 2:In early 1865, Abraham Lincoln was the most powerful man in the Western Hemisphere. He...
At the end of the American Civil War, tens of thousands of pioneer families took Horace Greeley’s advice to “go West.” Streaming across the Mississippi, they settled in Iowa and...
Memory, Trauma and History is comprised of essays that fall into five overlapping subject areas: history and memory; psychoanalysis and trauma; postmodernism, scholarship, and cultural politics; photography and representation; and...
The most important practical lesson of the book comes from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s attempt to use silver as a political weapon to achieve domestic objectives while ignoring international consequences.During the...
If a person were randomly opening the book I think I’d want them to flip to page 177, the beginning of Chapter Six, “Exceptionally Yours: Racial Escape Hatches in the...
One of the remarkable observations detailed in this book is how hearing involves more than the ear. Our senses operate in such a way that there is an intertwining between...
In a Sea of Bitterness is a narrative-rich study of spatial and social displacement during the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945.I describe an array of Chinese people and institutions that chose...
Good Vibrations is written so that readers can open it anywhere and immediately find something that speaks to them. You can simply turn to a chapter that connects with what...
The “American tradition” in this book’s subtitle is not a particular method of tormenting the body. It refers instead to the debates that Americans have waged regarding torture. At the...
Your browsing reader might be attracted by the striking cover of the book, which shows a dying man making his will, while a friend leans forward at his bedside, looking...
Despite what TV dramas may suggest, the American trial has become an endangered species. In 2002, less than 2 percent of civil cases ended at trial, down from 12 percent...
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...
This book takes a fresh look at the so-called “Asian Tiger” success stories of South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. While these countries have been much lauded for their incredible postwar...
This project was a natural outgrowth of my earlier book, Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism. That book, written before Donald Trump announced his candidacy, predicted a major disruption of the...
The book opens with the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, because it so dramatically illustrates the consequences of constitutional fundamentalism. In Charlottesville, we saw the collision of...
We have a misconstrued perception of who the “bad guys” are. In reality, (almost) all of us are violators of laws, regulations, contracts, and ethical norms. Various studies on the...
64% of the US population — which includes the middle class — has a high school education or less, a pattern also found in the UK and EU countries. This...
My book looks at what happened to American literary culture when a new world of mass culture—tabloid newspapers, amusement parks, early cinema, Wild West shows—began to dominate public life. Most...
Start at Chapter One and read about the Satellite, Etzler’s mysterious machine, a cross between a plow and the Batmobile. The Satellite encompasses Etzler’s entire scheme, all his knowledge of...
In some ways, a history of late twentieth-century utopianism fits neatly into histories of the twentieth century. Many scholars have emphasized that efforts to realize sweeping revisions to the structure...
The Holy Roman Empire’s history is central to the European experience and the question of European identity. Founded with Charlemagne’s coronation on Christmas Day 800, it lasted just over a...
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...
The long and short of short fiction is that it’s been mostly ignored in literary history. We literary critics have a distinct bias towards novels. The genre is supposedly narratively...
I started working on this project quite accidentally. When I was a graduate student at NYU during the mid-90s, I spent a lot of time hanging out downtown. I would...
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...
Chapter 5 opens with an anecdote, a true story.A few years back I was giving a talk in Taiwan about the state of the biotech sector there. The government had...
There is a short section devoted to the painting reproduced on the book’s cover, which is Rosso Fiorentino’s Dead Christ (1527), a very strange painting and nothing less than a...
I wrote The Gulf Stream for the science and history enthusiasts as much as for those wishing an introduction to one of the last vestiges of wilderness on Earth.In pages...
I would hope that the browser who picked up Through Amateur Eyes in a bookstore would turn to the image section in the middle of the book.The archival images that...
Counterfactuals are “what-ifs.” They change a feature of the past in the expectation of changing the present. The antecedent (the change introduced in the past) is connected to the consequent...
I arrived at this project because I was interested in tracing the development of an idea.We are frequently told that Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring “launched” the environmental movement after its...
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