700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators
There’s a rather quirky moment in the book which I hope might attract a casual reader’s eye. It’s important because I think it shows how powerful a perfectly absurd idea...
Typically, the origins of modern Hinduism are traced to a single place, a decisive moment, and a compelling religious figure. The place is Bengal or, to be more specific, Calcutta....
Chapter two of the book focuses on the writer Ben-Lévi (the pseudonym of Godchaux Weil, 1806-1878) who published a dozen short stories, as well as many non-fiction pieces, in the...
The photographs by Torbjørn Rødland on pages 216-217 showcase a gimmick he often uses in his images: a hand entering from an invisible space outside but also entirely specific to...
The book’s chapter 5 is titled “Education Bubble.”When considering the financial problems of higher education, it is important to look at the issue from the side of both students and...
To explore blind people’s experiences of reading in nineteenth-century Britain and America and to better understand sighted people’s reception of the advent of raised-print books, I draw on a wide...
Slab City is known as the “last free place.” This remote settlement in the southern California desert occupies a decommissioned World War II military camp. Only its slabs and tank-rutted...
Emancipation After Hegel provides an introduction to Hegel that reimagines Hegel’s project and at the same time engages in contemporary political debates. When I started thinking about the book, I...
For more than a century city planners have aspired not only to improve the physical living conditions of urban residents but to strengthen civic ties through better design of built...
International legal scholars have, with only a few exceptions, taken a largely uncritical approach to the international legal institutions that they study. Compliance with international law is taken for granted,...
This book is about buying and selling in Nazi Germany. It seeks to understand how the daily business of producing, marketing, shopping, and consuming took place under a racist dictatorship....
The Rape of Mesopotamia is about the series of missteps, missed opportunities, and miscommunications that led to the massive looting of Iraq’s cultural heritage after the U.S. invasion in 2003....
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...
Today, headlines from France depict the country’s Muslims and Jews as ever, inevitably in conflict. Numerous commentators suggest Muslim attacks against Jews are the newest chapter in an age-old anti-Jewish...
I hope that a potential reader would flip through the book and find unexpected images or startling juxtapositions thereof. He might ask why a more familiar modernist painting by Kandinsky...
Money Games chronicles how sports and entertainment have continued to converge throughout history. The pace at which this convergence has been happening is covered in the book’s nine chapters. My...
Animals inhabit diverse environments: our homes, our settlements, agricultural land, the wild. Some animals never directly encounter human beings. Others are deliberately created by us. Do these different contexts and...
There are more styles of human music than there are human societies. But underlying all of them, even paleolithic styles, which can be deduced from surviving instruments in caves made...
A “just browsing” reader would be well-served by reading the very short, 3-page Preface to get a better sense of what the whole book is about. Indeed, the scope of...
I’d like a casual reader to start at the beginning, with the Introduction. That’s because in the Introduction, using recent media stories, I set up the key debate I pursue...
The Interface is an attempt to explain how computing became an essential aspect of everyday life. This wasn’t always the case, and it wasn’t always certain that it would be.Since...
There was a moment in the thirteenth century, when the great polymath Albertus Magnus held in his hand an exquisitely wrought ancient onyx cameo. He went on to describe it...
The rise and demise of world communism was one of the great dramas of the 20th century. It was born in wars (World War I, World II), and offered an...
Understanding animal motion requires application of physics, material science, and robotics.Take an insect walking on water called the water strider. Its legs are covered in the hairiest surface in the...
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...
I hope that your “browsing reader” glances at the Prologue, the pages one through six. One informed reader said this must be the best short overview of Stalin’s terror ever...
Places are human geographies of space. They name and attribute natures to spaces, marking them and frequently ranking them as self or other, desirable or undesirable, masculine or feminine. “Home”...
I hope that readers “just browsing” the book would start on page 1. I deliberately used one of my interesting historical examples to catch readers’ attention. The book’s introduction begins...
All too often scholars understand Islamism as a channel for material discontent, or else in terms of rational choice theory, which holds that most, if not all, forms of human...
I hope they would start with the prologue, where I talk about my first experiences as a Rolling Stone reader back in the 1970s and how it contributed to my intellectual awakening and influenced my subsequent career.It foregrounds one of the book’s main points—that Rolling Stone was far more...
Macaulay: The Tragedy of Power is a cultural biography of Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay (1800-1859). The eclipse of his reputation may suggest that there’s nothing deader than a dead empire....
I wrote this book to help me work my way out of a teaching problem.I simply could not explain the outbreak of the war to my students in one or...
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...
The history of China’s interactions with Western cultures is fraught with misunderstandings, especially on the part of the West. Based on information supplied by pioneering Jesuit missionaries in China at...
The Word on the Streets enters in a rather thorny place in modernist studies. In my mind—and I make the claim in the book—the field of modernist studies has been...
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...
Slaves to Fashion began with a footnote I encountered in graduate school. While auditing a class on W.E.B Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, I came across a troubling...
The New York Times once published a piece that described mobile device users as a “cretins” who “lovingly hug” their devices “with a look of rapt idiocy.” The year was...
At its broadest level, Prosperity for All is about the changing meaning of consumer society over the past half century. I argue that whereas access to the benefits of consumer...
Traditionally, the arts have been valued for providing a sphere of imaginary, virtual experience, in contrast to the reality of everyday life. But today, as our profiles and avatars stand...
In the course of presenting this narrative interpretation of the rise and demise of world communism, I address some of the key questions that animate debate among both advocates and...
Some readers will be familiar with the better-known aspects of the feminist anti-pornography movement, particularly efforts led by Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon in the mid-1980s to pass new legislation....
Foretelling the End of Capitalism looks back into the past to answer key questions for our time. But this has nothing to do with the uses of the past one...
Most of the chapters begin with a story about a con man or a point of confusion and mistrust in the world of nineteenth century foods. The first chapter introduces...
Mysteries of Sex invites the reader to suspend the belief that men are men and women are women and explore two intertwined phenomena. The book asks first of all just...
When the Arab Spring began, I had an unusual vantage point. Living in the United Arab Emirates as a visiting professor, I was teaching one of the first human rights...
Most readers tell me they are most intrigued by the Machiavellian politics that define chimpanzee social life; and indeed, increasing evidence of violence may shed light on the nature of...
I’ve been doing this kind of work since 1972 when I was a graduate student doing my PhD.In that year I drove 5,000 miles in an old car, a big...
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 beginning of Chapter Two sets the stage for understanding what an unusual position Twain occupied at the end of his life.Due to his longevity, Twain had almost become a...
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