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How to Read a Wedding Dress - A close-up

Although the book covers such iconic examples as Grace Kelly, Jacqueline Kennedy and Beatle wife Pattie Boyd, I would perhaps hope that it would first fall open on pages covering the choices of ordinary women who had to be inventive to be fashionable. A favourite example can be found on page 61, where a glamorous fashion...

Lydia Edwards

Magic Is Made of Statistics and Marketing

Some people have genuinely not recovered emotionally from the shock of a machine mimicking human language so fluently. We believed that language was uniquely ours...

EP Pajo

The Last Titans - In a nutshell

I'm tempted to say one of the unique things about my book is that there's less of it. There are a lot of very long biographies of Churchill and de Gaulle, and what I hoped, in a funny kind of way, by putting the two men together,

Richard Vinen

Enver Hoxha: Twentieth-Century Tyrant - In a nutshell

Communism was one of the most alluring alternatives to becoming modern, especially in countries with poor financial resources and lacking social capital. Dictatorships are a response to insecurity and the crisis of self-confidence...

Artan R. Hoxha

Why Q Needs U - In a nutshell

But another benefit comes from an appreciation of how the alphabet works (or sometimes doesn’t work), because we today are a chapter in its long story. The alphabet is a testament to innovation, and every population...

Danny Bate

The Musical Lives of Charles Manson - In a nutshell

I try to understand how the different genres that emerged or entered maturity in the late 1960s – including rock music criticism, true crime, gonzo journalism, science fiction...

Nicholas Tochka

Artificial Intelligence Is Intelligence That Is Built, Not Born

Artificial intelligence is an act of mimicry. We design systems we fully and deliberately control to reproduce our own ability to purposefully manipulate matter. What we build has no soul. What we build has no biological intent...

EP Pajo

Picky - In a nutshell

So the argument that pickiness is natural and inevitable doesn’t hold up. That’s extremely hard for parents to hear. I try to understand mass pickiness as a historical phenomenon that has shaped...

Helen Zoe Veit

Friction - In a nutshell

From the DNA in our bodies to the formation of planets in the universe, friction is present and that’s what makes it such an intriguing force. However, friction is arguably the most underappreciated force in our lives...

Jennifer R. Vail

A Four-Eyed World - The wide angle

I’m extremely near-sighted. I’ve worn glasses since childhood. If I misplaced them, I’d need glasses to find my glasses. My vision is so bad that I need them to cross the street. But I’m embarrassed to say that, for most of my life, I didn’t give them much thought. When I was kicking around the idea...

David King Dunaway

Reaching for the Extreme - In a nutshell

If you want financial reasons for the importance of mathematics, that’s a pretty clear answer. But there are other reasons too, which I think are more important — among them the subject’s intrinsic beauty, the element of surprise....

Ian Stewart

Enver Hoxha - In a nutshell

What’s unique about the Enver Hoxha: Twentieth-Century Tyrant is that we don’t actually have a decent scholarly biography of Enver Hoxha. There is some work—Blendi Fefziu has a book, which is fairly standard, even in its title...

Robert C. Austin

Charlotte Brontë's Life Through Clothes - A close-up

Clothes are, and always have been, a vital part of our daily lives. Few things walk with us so closely. The garments that we wear literally mould themselves to our bodies, even becoming imbued with our DNA...

Eleanor Houghton

Lipstick - In a nutshell

Lipstick is really a metonym for larger systems of adornment, especially feminine adornment. Though it’s part of the Object Lessons series, the book, Lipstick, is not a comprehensive history of the object. Other books have done that quite well...

Eileen G’Sell

Mura Dehn - In a nutshell

Mura Dehn is this fascinating woman. When I first came in contact with her, nobody knew who she was. I did my dissertation on her, and in the 30 years since, she has become very famous in some circles. When Bloomsbury approached me I had just retired, and I had a list, as long as my leg, of things that I was gonna do...

Kim Chandler Vaccaro

Opera Wars - The wide angle

I’ve been living with opera since I was fourteen. I trained as a classical vocalist, went to a music conservatory, and was a freelance opera singer for a decade in the United States. Around the same time, I started a small opera company producing shows, and I began writing lyrics and libretti...

Caitlin Vincent

One Public - In a nutshell

One Public explores the contemporary story of one of the most influential theatres in America. While the study covers the colorful history of The Public from its founding by Joseph Papp, the focus of the manuscript is the trajectory of a theatrical impulse, and how the Public nurtures plays from the workshop phase...

Kevin Landis

Who is Conscious? In a nutshell

Many people are fully convinced that animals such as dogs, cats and other mammals are conscious, but what about all the others? What about, birds, fish, octopuses and even crabs and insects? If a dog is conscious, what about the fleas living in the dog’s fur?

Marian Stamp Dawkins

The Alchemy of the Stutter - In a nutshell

In the 1990s, a middle-aged, stuttering jazz pianist unexpectedly became the best-selling male artist in Europe, outselling even Michael Jackson. His name was John Paul Larkin. But the world knew him as Scatman John. John was a lifelong stutterer...

Gina Waggott

Charlotte Brontë's Life Through Clothes - In a nutshell

In a nutshell, this richly illustrated biography explores Charlotte Brontë’s life through the garments she left behind, pieces that, until now, had remained largely unexplored.Collectively, these material witnesses...

Eleanor Houghton

When Harry Met Sally... - The wide angle

The book relates to now-traditional ideas within the discipline of Film Studies, that there are significant insights as well as pleasures to be gleaned by the very close analysis of...

Tamar Jeffers McDonald

Clouds - The wide angle

The main concept that we are trying to express is the inner character of clouds, their inherent transient behaviour, that they are not singular independent “snapshots” (such as photos on Instagram), but that they exist as part of a “flux”. Clouds are in constant..

Edward Graham

A Guide to Infinity - The wide angle

This tour of mathematical infinities was inspired by my granddaughter Shlomit who, some years ago, called me to ask: What is the number before infinity? A fantastic question!

Edward Scheinerman

Futurism - In a nutshell

This book offers a synthetic account of the Futurist movement, founded in 1909 by the poet and impresario F.T. Marinetti. Exasperated by Italy’s association with ancient ruins and Renaissance masterpieces – at the expense of a truly contemporary culture – Marinetti called for a radical tabula rasa. Artistic treasures and literary canon ...

Ara H. Merjian

Radical Romanticism - A close-up

So, you’re at the bookstore. You come upon Radical Romanticism and, flipping through its opening pages, you read a passage on a dream in Wordsworth’s Prelude. A man awakens in a desert, is handed a shell shaped like a book, and hears within it “a loud prophetic...

Mark S. Cladis

Entropy - The wide angle

Entropy is both a property of matter and a device for selecting probability distributions in light of data. Hence it's an enormously useful tool that should be widely understood. The book explains how entropy gives insight into several aspects of the energy transition...

James Jeffrey Binney

The Ghosts of Mark Twain - The wide angle

Many of us have been shocked by the brazen denials and revisions of racial and racist history that have been occurring all over the country. However, this whitewashing of American culture is nothing new. In fact, Toni Morrison suggests, in her seminal book on the intersections of race and metaphor in America, Playing in the Dark

Ann M. Ryan

Exemplary Things - In a nutshell

Exemplary Things investigates the history of a Japanese cultural keyword, meibutsu, and the pervasive influence it has had in shaping consumption practices in Japan. It's a term that has no exact anglophone equivalent. Japanese commodity culture developed in the 15th century, and in Exemplary Things, I show how

Christine M. E. Guth

Rebels at the Gates - In a nutshell

Rebels at the Gates is about the United States Civil War in the 1860s. Of course, entire forests have been filled with pages of books on the American Civil War, and rightfully so. It was clearly one of the defining events in American history. However, my angle is new and unexplored...

Robert P. Watson

Swiftynomics - In a nutshell

Swiftynomics is about understanding women as economic agents of change. Taylor Swift is its muse. The book highlights the often-ignored economic activities that women contribute to their families, communities, and the economy through economic growth. I delve into themes of reinvention and masterminding to explain how we grow, advance, and continue...

Misty L. Heggeness

2134 Micro-Interviews