700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators
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 book’s title is drawn from a late nineteenth century case—which is also the focus of the second chapter.Four men were shipwrecked in the mid-Atlantic. After over three weeks at...
Quarks to Culture involves a new, big picture perspective of the universe. Now, by universe I do not mean the astronomical cosmos that the word usually refers to. I mean...
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...
An excerpt from the chapter on Japan’s biological warfare program, Unit 731:Merely dumping bacteria into the enemy’s water hadn’t infected enough people to trigger an outbreak. A new approach was...
In Cuba in Revolution I have gone away from the common tendency to present the Revolution’s trajectory as a series of often unrelated ‘phases’, a confusing zigzag experience of contradictory...
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,...
Washington, D.C. may be the most studied national capital in the world. There are dozens of guidebooks to Washington’s monuments and countless specialized studies of individual projects, landscape plans, and...
A Most Enterprising Country asks why North Korea still exists, and locates the country’s survival in its economy’s interconnectedness with the global economy. It argues, while overall, North Korea remains...
North Korean restaurants are tourist attractions in many cities, and are often the closest the average person will ever get to North Koreans. And indeed, they were one of the...
These two “close-ups” might compel readers:The first is the book’s collection of images. The portfolio, chapter images and the book’s cover capture the extraordinary moment in New York’s history in...
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...
Camps are unavoidable functions of our contemporary moment, registering local and global forces at their earliest stages and thus signaling trend, crisis, and identity. These malleable spaces conform to our...
By taking into account recent archaeological discoveries and reinterpreting ancient literary sources, I tell Philip’s story in my book, and I reassess the impact of his reign. In doing so,...
Why have we, as a culture, ignored the intimacy in boys’ friendships for so long, despite the fact that research has revealed such intimacy among boys over the past century?And...
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...
In 1790-91, France became the first European country to make the Jews full and equal citizens. Considered a backward population in need of “regeneration” by Enlightenment reformers, the French Jews...
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...
I do not think I can privilege one part of the book over another, but the Preface would be sufficient to draw the reader into the book, since it gives...
The book’s larger project is to describe the importance of the Hollywood cinema in founding those disciplinary practices that helped institutionalize contemporary scientific approaches to the study of the individual...
When I commenced research for this book, I planned to focus predominantly on understandings of, and responses to, species endangerment and extinction. Yet archival materials and other primary sources revealed...
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...
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...
I begin with the fact that, along with the United States, no country was more important in the twentieth century than was the Soviet Union. And it may also be...
These days, families stream their pleasures in various activities: a child’s first dance performance; hiking on a fall day; joyful and serious rites of passage; home-cooked meals; and holiday parties....
Encouraged by therapists, people search for their inner selves. Groups and corporations develop “identities,” to which their members are “invited” to internalize. Political leaders encourage us to distinguish ourselves from...
The first and biggest part of my book is about how we take the president for granted as the symbolic, cultural and institutional center of democracy, and how we take...
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...
One of my favorite passages in the book comes in the third chapter, which looks at Agfa’s German factories (particularly the Wolfen factory) during the weeks and months after World...
How do you propose to regulate social media?The key part of the proposal is to ban Chinese and Russian state agents from US social media platforms. In order to do...
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