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The ability to develop new vaccines quickly is essential to national security and public health. Historically, the U.S. has excelled at responding to national health emergencies. World War II-era programs...

Long Shot - In a nutshell

Frederick Luis Aldama

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...

Your Brain on Latino Comics - The wide angle

Françoise Baylis

If someone were fanning through the pages of this book at a local bookstore or library, I would encourage them to peruse the first chapter “Targeting a Single Gene: Huntington’s...

Altered Inheritance - A close-up

Marcus Boon

The book is intended to be a primer on copying: each chapter examines some aspect of copying, from the core philosophical issue as to what a copy is, the history...

In Praise of Copying - The wide angle

Jan Plamper

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....

The Stalin Cult - A close-up

Thomas M. Nichols

I actually did not intend to write a book on preventive war. A lot of people assumed I became interested in the subject because of the 1991 Gulf War, or...

Eve of Destruction - The wide angle

Ann Fabian

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...

The Skull Collectors - The wide angle

Miles Ogborn

After a number of years researching, writing and teaching on global history (and what I call global historical geography) I was struck with two things. First, the unappealing nature of...

Global Lives - The wide angle

Mary Beth Norton

I first realized that the gendered terminology of public and private had a history while I was working on a book about social and political life in early New England...

Separated by their Sex - The wide angle

Ethan Tussey

The complexity of the procrastination economy is best displayed by the mobile culture on the commute. In chapter three, I examine this culture by analyzing the creative process behind Spotify’s...

The Procrastination Economy - A close-up

Jonathan Gottschall

My career has focused on bridging the gap between the estranged cultures of the humanities and sciences. How can we use science to better understand fiction? And what can scientists...

The Storytelling Animal - The wide angle

Wendy Z. Goldman

The front cover of the book reproduces a very powerful painting and is worth looking at carefully. Dmitri Zhilinskii, the artist, painted it from memory. It depicts his own father’s...

Inventing the Enemy - A close-up

Jeffrey C. Alexander

We need to move away from a mechanistic, materialist, interest-based view of political struggles. Every class, every ethnicity, every gender—and every political campaign—has a fair amount of free space to...

The Performance of Politics - The wide angle

David Livingstone Smith

In 2006, I was researching wartime propaganda and was struck by the extent to which enemies are represented as less-than-human creatures. Turning to the relevant research literature, I discovered that...

Making Monsters - The wide angle

Mark McGurl

A reader riffling through the pages of my book might be struck to see that a work of literary history has so many diagrams. What’s up with that? Don’t we...

The Program Era - A close-up

Peter W. Wilson

Until this book, I never wrote about or taught anything related to childhood. I came to this project initially through my interest in film and urbanism. As I wrote and...

The Thirty Years War - The wide angle

M. Gigi Durham

There has been a great deal of public discussion lately about the sexualization of girlhood, from the provocative Bratz dolls for toddlers (described by Margaret Talbot in The New Yorker...

The Lolita Effect - The wide angle

Pamela Robertson Wojcik

Unhomed examines America’s ambivalent and shifting attitude toward placelessness through marginalized figures of mobility in film. The book examines films that show characters as unhomed and placeless, mobile rather than...

Unhomed - In a nutshell

Matthew E. Kahn

My critics have “granted me” the point that developed free market cities have the ability and the capacity to cope with many aspects of climate change. But they have countered...

Will poor nations suffer greatly from climate change?

Youssef Cassis

How far have bankers been held responsible for the outbreak of financial crises? Charles Baring, the first Lord Revelstoke, the firm’s senior partner, took the brunt of the Baring Crisis...

Crises and Opportunities - A close-up

Alice Echols

Hot Stuff is a cultural history of disco that is at once scholarly and popular. The book charts disco’s trajectory—from its steamy beginnings in Manhattan’s gay clubs through its Blob-like...

Hot Stuff - In a nutshell

R. Keith Schoppa

One of the most desperate decisions people in any culture must make in the wake of war, ethnic cleansing, epidemic, or famine is to flee their homes and become refugees....

In a Sea of Bitterness - The wide angle

Richard Ned Lebow

We are multiple, fragmented, and evolving selves who, nevertheless, believe we have unique and consistent identities.What accounts for this illusion? Why has the problem of identity become so central to...

The Politics and Ethics of Identity - In a nutshell

George Cotkin

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...

Morality's Muddy Waters - The wide angle

Wendy Brown

The first few pages of Chapter One take the reader on a visual and textual tour of some of the new walls:Of the new walls striating the globe… best known...

Walled States, Waning Sovereignty - A close-up

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

Lesley A. Sharp

I’ve long been interested in the moral underpinnings of human life on collective (shared) and personal (private) levels of experience. Indeed, the “ethics” of everyday life—or what Gregory Bateson referenced...

Animal Ethos - The wide angle

Shaj Mathew

The book asks not where the Global South is—a fair question in its own right—but when it is. After the colonial era, many postcolonial writers felt an acute sense of belatedness. They considered the “true present” to be somewhere else—namely, in Europe...

The Dialectic of Cosmopolitan Time - In a nutshell

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 - A close-up

Barry Friedman

Most people who think about it, no doubt, consider the US Supreme Court to be the protector of minority and constitutional rights against majority oppression.But is that right?In The Will...

The Will of the People - In a nutshell

Frederick Luis Aldama

Your Brain on Latino Comics provides readers with an understanding of how comic books in general work to move us and to engage our critical faculties and imagination. It also...

Your Brain on Latino Comics - A close-up

Bethany Moreton

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 - In a nutshell

Michael A. Ryan

The third and fifth chapters might be particularly engaging to the reader.The fifth chapter, “To Condemn a King,” encapsulates perfectly the many intellectual points that I take within my study.In...

A Kingdom of Stargazers - A close-up

Eli Berman

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 - In a nutshell

Nicholas Fox Weber

War is in our genes. Humans are “hard wired” to divide the world into “us” versus “them.” Men have a penchant for rape. We have all encountered claims like these...

The Art of Tennis - The wide angle

Thomas Borstelmann

I have been writing and teaching U.S. and world history for more than three decades, for 12 years at Cornell and then 17 years at Nebraska. I have been primarily...

Just Like Us - The wide angle

Sylvia Lavin

I’d like readers to fall into the lush and alluring image of Pipilotti Rist’s Pour Your Body Out, like Alice fell into Wonderland. A short read later, I’d like them...

Kissing Architecture - A close-up

Ariella Azoulay

I began work on this book at the beginning of the second intifada. In hindsight, I can say that observing the unbearable sights presented in photographs from the Occupied Territories...

The Civil Contract of Photography - The wide angle

Carolyn J. Dean

One claim I make in different ways in the book—and very explicitly in chapter 3—is that to be really credible, a victim has to appear to have mastered his or...

Aversion and Erasure - A close-up

Richard Pomfret

The first three pages of the Preface set the scene. If you are in a bookstore that allows more leisurely browsing the thirteen-page Introduction sets out the principal arguments—this is...

The Age of Equality - A close-up

Jeff Schlegelmilch

When I first endeavored to write this book, I was thinking about what I would tell an elected official who asked what they needed to know about disasters. Or if...

Rethinking Readiness - The wide angle

Christopher Rea

E.B. White said that “humorists fatten on trouble,” and in modern China there’s been plenty of that to go around. One of the broad concerns of my book is to...

The Age of Irreverence - The wide angle

Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu

There was a time when the boutiques that are now so familiar in New York’s landscape were just small tenement buildings, with boarded up windows and bricked up facades.When I...

The Beautiful Generation - In a nutshell

Ana Siljak

In the simplest terms, this book is about Russia’s first female terrorist. On January 24, 1878, a young woman named Vera Zasulich posed as an ordinary petitioner to gain admission...

Angel of Vengeance - In a nutshell

Jeannie Suk

While getting my PhD at Brandeis University, I studied public administration and administrative law with Professor Peter Woll. A classic issue in those fields is the control of experts, especially...

At Home in the Law - The wide angle

Tsuyoshi Hasegawa

In recent years, we have witnesses the overthrow of authoritarian regimes and the difficulties new regimes have in their transition to liberal democracy. This book provides a clue to understanding...

Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution - The wide angle

Stephen Schryer

I hope that readers will begin with my introduction, which lays out the basic terms of my argument. However, casual readers might prefer to start with one of the chapters...

Fantasies of the New Class - A close-up

Larry Bennett

The Third City is an unconventional interpretation and explanation of contemporary Chicago.By exploring this iconic American city, I comment on broader trends in American urbanism. And what I mean by...

The Third City - In a nutshell

Charles R. Butcher

Page 6, which shows the difference between the number of states that are included in the data that underpin our book, compared to the number of states identified in existing...

Before Colonization - A close-up

Garrett L. Brandon

“That’s not my fingerprint, your honor,” said the defendant, after FBI experts reported a “100-percent identification.”They were wrong.The judge sided with the FBI and ordered the defendant, Brandon Mayfield detained...