Columbia University Press

Oil is an unusual commodity in that individual decisions can have an outsized effect on the market. OPEC+’s choice to increase production, for instance, might send prices falling, affecting both oil producers and consumers worldwide. What do the leading oil market players consider before making a fateful move?

Oil Leaders offers an unprecedented glimpse into the strategic thinking of top figures in the energy world from the 1980s through the recent past. Ibrahim AlMuhanna—a close adviser to four different Saudi oil ministers during that period—examines the role of individual and collective decision making in shaping market movements. He analyzes how powerful individuals made critical choices, tracking how they responded to the flow of information on pivotal market and political events and predicted reactions from allies and adversaries. AlMuhanna highlights how the media has played an increasingly important role as a conduit of information among multiple players in the oil market. Energy leaders have learned to manage the signals they send to the market and to other relevant players in order to avoid sending oil prices into a spiral.

AlMuhanna draws on personal familiarity with many of these individual decision makers as well as his participation in decades of closed-door sessions where crucial choices were made. Featuring revelatory behind-the-scenes perspective on pivotal oil market events and dynamics, this book is a must-read for practitioners and policy makers engaged with the global energy world.

Shortlist, 2024 Best in Business Book Awards, Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing

Today, every business is talking about digital transformation. With the acceleration of new technologies, every organization knows it must adapt to survive. But by their own admission, 70 percent of businesses are failing to transform. Across industries, established companies are held back by bureaucracy, inertia, and old ways of working. How can businesses break through to drive real change?

The Digital Transformation Roadmap provides every leader with the answer. Acclaimed author and C-suite advisor David L. Rogers argues that businesses must transform not just products and business models—they must transform the organization itself. Based on two decades of research and advising companies around the world, Rogers identifies the five biggest barriers to digital transformation: vision, priorities, experimentation, governance, and capabilities. He then shows how any business can evolve by heeding the lessons of companies such as Disney, Walmart, Mastercard, Air Liquide, and the New York Times Company.

The Digital Transformation Roadmap provides a practical blueprint for organizational change, illustrated with real-world case studies and step-by-step planning tools. Rogers shows every leader how to think beyond the churn of new technologies and rebuild their organization for a world of constant change.

Why do poets write about animals? What can poetry do for animals and what can animals do for poetry? In some cases, poetry inscribes meaning on animals, turning them into symbols or caricatures and bringing them into the confines of human culture. It also reveals and revels in the complexity of animals. Poetry, through its great variety and its inherently experimental nature, has embraced the multifaceted nature of animals to cross, blur, and reimagine the boundaries between human and animal.

In Poetry and Animals, Onno Oerlemans explores a broad range of English-language poetry about animals from the Middle Ages to the contemporary world. He presents a taxonomy of kinds of animal poems, breaking down the categories and binary oppositions at the root of human thinking about animals. The book considers several different types of poetry: allegorical poems, poems about “the animal” broadly conceived, poems about species of animal, poems about individual animals or the animal as individual, and poems about hybrids and hybridity. Through careful readings of dozens of poems that reveal generous and often sympathetic approaches to recognizing and valuing animals’ difference and similarity, Oerlemans demonstrates how the forms and modes of poetry can sensitize us to the moral standing of animals and give us new ways to think through the problems of the human-animal divide.

The nineteenth century in the United States witnessed the end of slavery and the expansion of another form of confinement: the asylum. How did enslaved and free Black people encounter psychiatric institutions? How were notions of mental disability used to reinforce slavery and Jim Crow? And how did Black people express alternative ideas about individual and communal mental health?

Diana Martha Louis explores Black experiences and views of mental disability in the nineteenth century, shedding light on the lives and struggles of the “colored insane.” She demonstrates how psychiatric discourses made Blacks “mad” both by inflicting real psychological harm within asylums, plantations, jails, and society writ large and by constructing mental disorders according to prevailing notions of race, class, gender, and sanity. Yet even as white medical professionals pathologized the enslaved as suffering from “drapetomania” (runaway slave syndrome), portrayed slavery as beneficial to Black mental health, or cast African-derived spiritual beliefs and practices as signs of madness, Black people developed their own complex perspectives on mental disability.

Louis considers the lives and writings of Black intellectuals and cultural figures including James McCune Smith, Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Tubman, and Charles Chesnutt, as well as a group of Black women who were incarcerated in Georgia Lunatic Asylum, showing how mental disability was entangled with questions of freedom, spirituality, and self-determination. Combining literary and historical analysis, Colored Insane is a rich account of nineteenth-century Black Americans’ experiences of mental illness and wellness.

For many years, Diane Ravitch was among the country’s leading conservative thinkers on education. The cure for what ailed the school system was clear, she believed: high-stakes standardized testing, national standards, accountability, competition, charters, and vouchers. Then Ravitch saw what happened when these ideas were put into practice and recanted her long-held views. The problem was not bad teachers or failing schools, as conservatives claimed, but poverty. She denounced privatization as a hoax that did not help students and that harmed the public school system. She urged action to address the root causes of inequality.

In this passionate and timely memoir of her life’s work as a historian and advocate, Ravitch traces her ideological evolution. She recounts her personal and intellectual journey: her childhood in Houston, her years among the New York intelligentsia, her service in government, and her leftward turn. Ravitch shares how she came to hold conservative views and why she eventually abandoned them, exploring her switch from championing standards-based curriculum and standardized testing to arguing for greater investment in professional teachers and in public schools. Bringing together candid reflections with decades of research on education, Ravitch makes a powerful case for becoming, as she calls herself, “an activist on behalf of public schools.”

John Dewey is among history’s most celebrated thinkers on democracy and education, yet he has often been underappreciated and misunderstood as a philosopher. This book paints a fresh portrait of Dewey as not only a reformer of schooling but also a profound theorist of human development, whose vision of the centrality of education to democracy, philosophy, and flourishing can still inspire us today.

What can we learn from this great thinker as we face challenges such as widespread drudgery and disaffection, estrangement among individuals and groups, and a crisis of democracy? This book supplies the answers, offering a bold new account of Dewey as an educational theorist who is essential for our troubled times.

Revealing the true scope of Dewey’s educational vision, this book provides a new perspective on a neglected aspect of the philosophical tradition. Growing People presents an alternative canon—running from Plato to Rousseau to Du Bois—that recasts philosophy in terms of education and, in so doing, opens new pathways for social critique and the liberation of human potential.

What does it mean to write a literature of the present? In the early twentieth century, Arabic and Hebrew writers faced a parallel predicament. Modern literature aspired to reflect the contemporary moment, yet the Middle Eastern present seemed incompatible with dominant literary forms, especially the novel. Projects of “cultural awakening” implied that Arabs and Jews were somehow inhabiting the present wrongly. Arabic and Hebrew writers found themselves grappling with the simultaneous necessity and impossibility of narrating the present—and achieved strikingly similar literary solutions to this challenge.

This book develops a new theory of the emergence of modernist literary forms through a series of parallel readings of Arabic and Hebrew prose. Situating literary production in projects of modernization, settler colonialism, and state building, Shir Alon traces the proliferation of what she calls “static forms.” These literary forms articulate a modern present experienced as stuck, suspended, or absent, embodying the lived temporalities of Orientalist fantasies of origin, regimes of productive and reproductive labor, and the routine violence of occupation. Static Forms positions writers such as Mahmud al-Masʿadi, Sonallah Ibrahim, Elias Khoury, Adania Shibli, S. Y. Agnon, Y. H. Brenner, and Yishayahu Koren as innovators and theorists of global modernism, writing the present as a series of suspensions of modernity’s narrative of progress.

What does it mean to trust in a world shaped by violence and inequality? This book investigates the fraught pursuit of democratic policing in Brazil, where trust is both a necessity and a precarious gamble. Marta-Laura Haynes follows police officers and favela residents through patrols, crime scenes, fishing trips, drumming circles, and neighborhood gatherings to reveal how trust is not simply given or earned—but actively performed, negotiated, and also refused. These stories show how trust intersects with local ideas of citizenship, legitimacy, race, and power while also exposing the pervasive and often generative role of mistrust.

Far from being a stable foundation for democracy, trust in this context is a high-stakes wager, shaped by local hierarchies of race, gender, and class. In response, communities develop what Haynes calls “untrusting”: a mode of engagement that refuses blind faith in the state and instead turns mistrust into a form of care, resistance, and survival. By illuminating the contradictions and complexities of trust in Brazil, Untrusting challenges reductive narratives of policing and offers a nuanced perspective on how democratic ideals are contested and reimagined by people on the ground. Challenging the idea that distrust is merely a barrier to progress, Haynes shows how it can be a resource for agency, dignity, and alternative visions of justice.

The most powerful brands don’t just capture attention—they ignite change. Branding as a Cultural Force invites readers to reimagine branding as a force for good, one that shapes culture, sparks movements, and drives meaningful social impact.

Going beyond traditional branding, Robin Landa explores how companies play pivotal roles in shaping culture, advancing causes, and forging emotional connections with their audiences. While most branding guides focus on commercial success, this book emphasizes how brands can align with their audiences’ values to drive social transformation. Through real-world case studies and practical strategies, it reframes branding as a tool for influence, advocacy, and activism.

A standout feature of this book is a series of exclusive interviews with leading voices in branding, design, and advertising. These creative professionals share how they craft resonant campaigns, build cultural legacies, and stay grounded in core values, offering insights for building brands that stand for more than just profit.

Branding as a Cultural Force provides actionable guidance on telling authentic brand stories, aligning with consumer values, and creating shareworthy campaigns. With a distinctive focus on the intersection of brand purpose and cultural impact, this book challenges readers to rethink branding as a vehicle for systemic change.

Robert Jervis (1940–2021) was a titan in the field of international relations. Part political scientist, part psychologist, part historian, and part policy analyst, he drew on a vast array of theoretical approaches and empirical methods to develop keen and distinctive insights on a wide range of topics. From academic political science to the policy world, the scope of Jervis’s influence is astonishing.

Bringing together top scholars in political science, international relations, and history, this book offers a deep dive into Jervis’s pathbreaking scholarship and its legacy across disciplines. The authors consider how his work reshaped subjects such as nuclear strategy, arms control, deterrence theory, structural realism, diplomatic history, intelligence analysis, and the causes of war. They further discuss Jervis’s leadership on the CIA’s declassification board, which provided a bridge between academics and the intelligence community, and his influence as a public intellectual. The contributors also pay tribute to Jervis as a mentor, colleague, and friend who worked to build and sustain a broad intellectual community. Offering a wide-ranging overview of Jervis’s most important contributions to many fields, this book provides a deep understanding of Jervis’s scholarly work, which continues to inspire new generations of scholars who seek to follow in his footsteps.

Political theology is widely discussed but little understood. Across the humanities and critical social sciences, even in popular discussion of current events, it has become a buzzword. Yet there is no consensus about its very definition.

This field-changing interdisciplinary book brings together three of the leading voices in political theology—a Christian theologian, a critical theorist, and an anthropologist—to offer new entry points to understand religion and politics. They explore similarities and differences in their approaches, guiding readers through scholarship in their own fields while also advancing a shared vision that speaks to crucial questions of justice in the contemporary world.

Rejecting the notion that political theology is a closed field with an established canon, the authors show it to be an open-ended, lively conversation that welcomes new participants. They demonstrate how voices and approaches from decolonial theory, Black studies, feminist and queer theory, new materialism, and ethnography, both in the Global North and in the Global South, are transforming the field.

This book addresses concerns about political theology’s ties to authoritarian and antidemocratic movements, demonstrating that an engaged political theology sheds critical light on volatile topics such as populism, racism, and ethnoreligious nationalism. At once accessible to students and groundbreaking for scholars, What Is Political Theology? provides a state-of-the-art global understanding.

Recent years have seen a striking resurgence of anti-imperial and anticolonial rhetoric on the international stage, from Global South to Global North and from the Left to the Right. Why do states deploy these forms of rhetoric in global politics? How do practitioners from the so-called non-Western world differ in their use and performance of rhetoric, and in what ways do they shape international order?

Sasikumar Sundaram provides a bold new theory of rhetoric as power politics, demonstrating how non-Western states challenge their silencing within the Western-led international order. He argues that, in the deeply hierarchical international system, states in the lower rungs resort to rhetorical performances in order to be heard. Through anti-imperial and anticolonial rhetorical statecraft, states such as India, Brazil, and China seek to expose and exploit the contradictions in the legitimating principles, norms, and rules of the international system—and, in so doing, pursue and exercise power. Today, as Russia, Europe, and even the United States engage in anti-imperial and anticolonial rhetoric, Sundaram shows why lessons from the non-Western world are crucial to recognizing the dynamics of power politics and global disorder. A bracing challenge to established theories of power in international relations, Rhetorical Powers underscores the need to address enduring forms of silencing within the international order.

What’s the secret to keeping your balance? The ear does more than hear: it helps us stay stable by perceiving movements and gravity. Elegant sensors deep within the skull detect every twist, turn, and tumble, powering swift reflexes that keep vision and balance steady. This is the vestibular system. It’s primordial and ubiquitous: every animal has one, and even plants have a rudimentary version. It works so well that we take it for granted—until it fails. How does this remarkable system function? What happens when it goes haywire? How can modern medicine treat vestibular disease?

The Great Balancing Act tells the story of the vestibular system, from T. rex hearing organs to cochlear implants, and from the unsung power of hair cells to inner-ear problems in outer space. Combining neuroscience, history, and medicine, Jeffrey D. Sharon—a vestibular doctor and researcher—explains the sense of balance using accessible language and wry humor. He recounts how pioneering scientists solved the mysteries of the vestibular system and shows why it is necessary for spatial reasoning and abstract thought. Sharon explores the devastating consequences of vestibular problems such as vertigo, dizziness, and imbalance, offering an expert, patient-friendly look at emerging and future treatments. Engaging and entertaining, this book invites readers to discover a little-known yet vital part of ourselves.

Mrs. Dalloway is a novel about almost everything. The story of a single day in London after the First World War, it travels backward and forward in time and consciousness, venturing beyond the ordinary world into epic, mythic, and mystical modes. The novel is a work of extraordinary richness, as much for its interwoven webs of meaning as for its moral and psychological vision.

Edward Mendelson explores the novel’s deepest questions, focusing on the core themes of medicine, empire, and love. He traces how Virginia Woolf thought and wrote, considering the complexities and resonances of her works. Mendelson casts Mrs. Dalloway as an extended protest against authorities that wield power over others and a defense of the equality of inner lives. He also examines the place of the book in literary history going back to Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare as well as its influence on later writers from Erich Auerbach through Zadie Smith. Both incisive and passionate, this book is at once a wide-ranging critical study of Virginia Woolf’s writing and a love letter to a great novel.

For years, 20 to 40 percent of the runaway and homeless youth (RHY) population have identified as LGBTQ+, a vastly disproportionate share relative to the general population. These youths experience lower rates of family reunification compared with their heterosexual and cisgender counterparts, and there are few LGBTQ+-affirming programs and services to which they can turn.

This book offers a comprehensive review of best practices, current policies, and the latest research regarding LGBTQ+ runaway and homeless youth. Elaine M. Maccio and Kristin Ferguson describe the prevalence and demographics of LGBTQ+ youth in the context of the larger RHY population, sharing current understandings of sexual orientation and gender identity. Combining empirical data with vivid case vignettes, they delve into the lives and experiences of LGBTQ+ RHY, considering a range of issues, including physical and mental health, risk and protective factors, and parents and families. Maccio and Ferguson identify available and ideal support mechanisms, providing a detailed look at practice, programs, policies, and advocacy. The book concludes with practical recommendations to improve well-being and promote positive outcomes.

LGBTQ+ Runaway and Homeless Youth is the preeminent reference and resource for students, instructors, practitioners, service providers, researchers, policy makers, and other stakeholders who are invested in improving the lives of this vulnerable population.

Conservatives have disagreed about many things, but they have long been united by the belief that the mainstream—or “liberal”—media is biased against them. Why did conflict with the press become so central to conservative identity, and how has antipathy toward the media shaped the modern conservative movement? A. J. Bauer traces how decades of right-wing criticism of the “liberal media” reshaped US news culture and came to define conservative politics.

In the 1940s, progressives saw the newspaper industry as a reactionary bastion and supported regulations such as the Fairness Doctrine to ensure a wider range of viewpoints over the airwaves. Anticommunist campaigners soon borrowed tactics from their foes, adapting claims of structural media bias and fostering skepticism toward mainstream outlets. Bauer tracks the conservative turn to media activism, demonstrating how allegations of bias bridged the gap between relatively mainstream figures such as William F. Buckley and more extreme groups like the John Birch Society. Bauer considers key moments from Texas oilman H. L. Hunt’s bankrolling of the supposedly nonpartisan Facts Forum in the 1950s to Spiro Agnew’s tirades against the media elite and the rise of watchdog groups such as Accuracy in Media in the 1970s. By cultivating grassroots hostility toward the press, conservatives built an audience base for the right-wing media sector that emerged after the Reagan administration lifted the Fairness Doctrine. From Rush Limbaugh to Fox News to today’s right-wing podcasts and influencers, this book shows why conservative media ultimately eclipsed the movement that enabled it. In recounting the long history of conflict between conservatives and the press, Bauer offers a compelling new origin story for today’s polarized media environment.

One of the greatest challenges facing any start-up is “crossing the chasm”: bridging the gap between early adopters and mass-market buyers. Yet many promising businesses struggle even to reach the chasm. Often, founders leap in with money and a dream only to hit a wall. How can start-up founders diagnose and fix problems in order to arrive at this critical point?

Edward G. Amoroso provides an indispensable guide for start-ups looking to get off the ground and scale up to the next level. Getting to the chasm, as he illustrates through dozens of real-world case studies, requires long-term vision. Founders must focus on their core belief system—not simply what they do but why they are in business in the first place. Buyers connect with start-ups based on shared beliefs, and any founding team that does not understand this secret will struggle to build relationships with customers. Amoroso shares field-tested guidance for businesses in different spaces and stages on crafting a compelling message, understanding customers, benchmarking against competitors, and leveraging what makes a company irreplaceable. For founders, venture capital teams, private equity firms, investors, and readers with an interest in entrepreneurship, Reaching the Chasm is the roadmap for early-stage start-up success.

Panels often suffer from lackluster, disorganized discussions despite the presence of qualified experts. Frequently, the fault lies with poorly prepared moderators who fail to manage the panel effectively, resulting in a frustrating experience for audiences, panelists, and organizers alike. A well-trained moderator is essential for ensuring a successful panel by preparing thoroughly and engaging both the panelists and the audience.

This book, written by an experienced moderator who has led panels of all sizes, offers a comprehensive start-to-finish guide to facilitating a panel. It covers everything from understanding the panel’s purpose and audience to selecting the right participants, conducting pre-panel preparation, and managing potential disruptions. Included are multiple checklists and sample documents to assist moderators throughout the process. The book also provides valuable insights for panelists, helping them improve their performance and contribute more effectively.

As panels become more prominent at conferences and events, the pressure to perform well has increased. A well-prepared and engaging panel provides exposure, resulting in opportunities for moderators and panelists to grow their brands and advance their careers. This essential book equips panel participants with the tools they need to excel and make a lasting impression.

For more than a decade, Al Filreis has taught a free online course about experimental poetry, known as “ModPo,” that has drawn some 435,000 students from 179 countries. Online classes even a fraction of ModPo’s size have been criticized as impersonal and unengaging. But the citizens of ModPo have formed a generous and enduring intellectual community as together they read poems typically dismissed as difficult and inaccessible.

In The Classroom and the Crowd, Filreis reflects on his decades of experience as a founder of participatory literary communities and teacher of online courses, demonstrating that student-centered education offers new possibilities for humane social networking. Introducing readers to ModPo participants and their open-ended, round-the-clock conversations, he shows how online learning can not only be accessible and educational but also deepen our commitment to democracy. Filreis argues that the emphasis on collaborative learning, space for discussion, and the inherent openness of poetry allows for a sense of community, continuity, and even intimacy that often eludes other online educational endeavors. ModPo embodies principles underlying both modern poetics and cooperative education: Writers and readers, like teachers and learners, create meaning together; many voices are clearer than one; and democracy is a creative practice. Proposing an optimistic vision of mass learning, this book contends that asynchronous education has surprising advantages over the traditional classroom, that panics about a crisis of attention and the death of reading are overblown—and that instead of logging off, we should all start reading with a crowd.

From social science and biomedical research to government and media reporting, statistics on racial and ethnic disparities are everywhere. The numbers we typically encounter, however, are not straightforward comparisons. Researchers analyze data using adjustments such as regression models that are intended to address bias and confounding factors. Yet many common statistical practices produce misleading results, and some have flawed assumptions that inadvertently misrepresent the inequalities between groups.

Jay S. Kaufman offers a clear and accessible guide to understanding the use and abuse of statistics on racial and ethnic disparities. Examining dozens of real-world examples spanning medicine, economics, education, and criminal justice, he shows how typical statistical practices—no matter how well-intentioned—have obscured the realities of injustice, with significant consequences for public policy. Kaufman considers how to select and apply statistical adjustments responsibly and systematically, and he proposes ways to improve the explanation and analysis of racial and ethnic inequalities.

Written for readers without a background in statistics, this book provides an essential introduction to quantitative reasoning in terms of social justice. The Race Variable is appropriate for undergraduate and graduate courses across the medical and social sciences—including sociology, demography, public health, epidemiology, medicine, and public policy—that focus on racial and ethnic disparities, and for all readers interested in the statistical foundations of our understanding of inequality.

After the Chinese Civil War, the Kuomintang imposed authoritarian rule on Taiwan in the name of anticommunism. The White Terror, as martial law and state repression were known, would last for decades, casting a pall of uncertainty and fear over Taiwanese society—and its legacies still haunt Taiwan today. Kaori Lai’s Portraits in White explores everyday life under the White Terror, illuminating how the violence of martial law pervades even the most mundane moments.

The book is composed of three novellas, each telling the story of an ordinary person. Mr. Ch’ing-chih, a schoolteacher, keeps his head down and avoids harming others despite pressure to do intelligence work. Ms. Wen-hui, an old woman who had served as a housekeeper for elites of different backgrounds since the Japanese occupation, faces death alone in the digital age. Ms. Casey, discriminated against for not being of mainlander descent, moves to Europe and must navigate the politics of diaspora. Even if only alluded to obliquely, the White Terror always hovers in the background, shaping the characters’ experiences and inner worlds. Elegantly written and keenly observed, Portraits in White provides a panoramic view of the ways authoritarianism seeps into daily life.

Why is the official narrative of the history of the Catholic Church so discordant with the archival sources of the Middle Ages? From the fifteenth century down to the present day, the Church has constructed an identity and a past at odds with what the records show—expanding the authority and power of the papacy in ways that have striking broader political implications.

This audacious and nuanced book explores how the Church has repeatedly invented and reinvented itself through a constant back-and-forth between narratives of the Middle Ages and modernity. Bénédicte Sère excavates and traces this history through seven pivotal concepts in long-standing debates over papal power and the nature of the Church. Providing critical readings of the medieval sources on which later positions have been based, she chronicles how the Church has officially interpreted—and misinterpreted—its own past in order to serve the needs of the present and to create a narrative for posterity.

Drawing on a wide range of classic and recent works published in French, German, Italian, and English, this book offers a bold reinterpretation of Church history and historiography. Inventing the Church also speaks more broadly to questions concerning the interpretation of foundational documents, the uses of history, and the ways institutions interact with their own pasts.

Against a backdrop of xenophobic and ethnonationalist fantasies of linguistic purity, Poetry After Barbarism uncovers a stateless, polyglot poetry of resistance—the poetry of motherless tongues. Departing from the national and global paradigms that dominate literary history, Jennifer Scappettone traces the aesthetic and geopolitical resonance of “xenoglossic” poetics: poetry composed in the space of contestation between national languages, concretizing dreams of mending the ruptures traced to the story of Babel. As global migration, aerial bombardment, and the wireless telegraph shrank distances with brute force during the twentieth century, visions of transcultural communication emerged in the hopes of bridging linguistic difference. At the same time, evolving Fascist ideologies denied the reality of cultural admixture and the humanity of the stranger.

Authors who write xenoglossic verse occupy languages without a perceived birthright or sanctioned education; they compose in ecstatic “orphan tongues” that rebuff nationalist ideologies, on the one hand, and globalization, on the other, uprooting notions of belonging ensconced in nativist metaphors of milk, blood, and soil while rendering the reactionary category of the barbarian obsolete. Raised within or in the wake of fascism, these poets practice strategic forms of literary and linguistic barbarism, proposing modes of collectivity that exceed geopolitical definitions. Studying experiments between languages by immigrant, refugee, and otherwise stateless authors—from Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven to Emilio Villa, Amelia Rosselli, Etel Adnan, LaTasha N. Nevada-Diggs, Chika Sagawa, and Sawako Nakayasu—this book explores how poetry can both represent and jumpstart metamorphosis of the shape and sound of citizenship, modeling paths toward alternative republics in which poetry might assume a central agency.

In the second half of the twentieth century, poetry leapt out of books and became an interdisciplinary public form. Poetry entered bureaucratic systems of organization like index card catalogues; it pushed the boundaries of privately owned public parks. Keegan Cook Finberg argues that poetry became an increasingly capacious force during this period because it could speak directly to the degradation of the social-democratic notion of the public.

Poetry in General explores how poets expanded their practice into the realms of politics, work, and everyday life from 1960 to the present, from the apex of the welfare state to an era of privatization and austerity. It considers a compelling array of figures—including Yoko Ono, George Brecht, Frank O’Hara, Amiri Baraka, Bernadette Mayer, Eleanor Antin, Adrian Piper, and NourbeSe Philip—whose works draw on conceptual techniques to transform official documents and spaces. Finberg shows how these public texts expose the mechanisms of the neoliberal consensus about work and leisure, the state’s facilitation of capitalism, and enduring racial and gender inequities. She also provides politically charged ways to interpret and critique racial capitalism, antiabortion legislation, and mass debt. A new literary and institutional history of postwar poetics, this book shows how poetic experiments address the privatization of collective life and rethink the category of the public.

When children are born with sex attributes that do not fit expectations about male and female anatomy, it is standard medical practice to make their bodies look as “normal” as possible. Doctors seek to reduce or remove intersex characteristics through early childhood surgery—cutting down clitorises, remaking penises, and even performing sterilizations. For decades, intersex medicine has sparked outrage from patient groups, lawmakers, intergovernmental organizations, and scholars. It has been condemned for causing trauma, scars, nerve damage, and the loss of bodily autonomy. Yet it continues.

Iain Morland, an intersex scholar and advocate—and a former patient—explores why medicalization is so embedded in contemporary society and how to challenge it. He provides breakthrough accounts of the traumatic effects of surgery, the consequences for attachments between children and parents, and the paradoxes of the pursuit of normality. Weaving together theoretical analysis with autobiographical insights, Morland grapples with the complexity of dismantling intersex medicine. Accessibly written and passionately argued, this book exposes the contradictions of the medical management of intersex. With a bold mix of critical theory, psychology, queer theory, and philosophy, it provides fresh insights for scholars of intersex, gender, sexuality, and science, as well as for activists and their allies.

In the wake of the September 11 attacks, US officials identified the so-called battle for hearts and minds as the “second front” in the war on terror. A wave of funding flowed into public diplomacy in the Middle East, seeking to change views of the United States through Arabic-language communications—often while hiding the traces of American origins. To what extent did this vast propaganda apparatus sway Arab public opinion? Which ideas and actors shaped American public diplomacy in this period? What are the lessons for information strategy today?

This groundbreaking book tells the story of American propaganda campaigns in the Middle East after 9/11, drawing on in-depth interviews with key players and previously classified documents. Nathaniel Greenberg shows how the United States tried to control perceptions of its response to 9/11 through news and entertainment, and reveals that Arab governments and unofficial actors were involved—knowingly or not—in distributing US propaganda. He explores the institutions, strategy, and rhetoric deployed in the war on terror, placing them in the context of American and Soviet influence campaigns during the Cold War. Greenberg argues that US government-backed broadcasting laid the groundwork for global information warfare, such as the rise of competing Russian and Chinese state media operations. Shedding light on the ideological underpinnings of American propaganda in Arabic after 9/11, The Long War of Ideas offers new insight into soft power in the twenty-first century.

Data scientists appeared suddenly in the early 2010s and quickly became ubiquitous. Institutions, from established corporations to start-ups, universities to government agencies, scrambled to recruit specialists. Somehow, a loose band of computer experts and hackers integrated established technologies and methodologies—and some questionable ideas—into a distinct profession. Where did data science come from, and why did it gain broad recognition?

Inside Data Science examines how data scientists defined their professional role and identity, offering an empirically rich and theoretically grounded account of the emergence of a new field. Philipp Brandt met data science’s early protagonists in New York City’s start-up spaces, coffee shops, and lecture halls, where they displayed a puzzling combination of enthusiasm and uncertainty. At these seemingly casual gatherings, data scientists devised the machinery for seeing the world through data sets while also analyzing the social context of their technical work. Retracing their conversations, Brandt demonstrates how the data scientist role emerged from the collective processing of personal struggles navigating the uncharted space between statistical expertise and coding skills. Offering a novel analytical lens and critical perspective on data science, this book shows how the interplay of personal reflection, technical rigor, and collective scrutiny gave the big-data era, for better or for worse, a human face.

Chapter 11 corporate bankruptcy proceedings are commonly thought of as a tool to protect the broader economy from the failure of large firms, even though the biggest players reap the greatest rewards. In the conventional telling, modern corporate reorganization began in the 1890s, with J. P. Morgan leading a noble effort to protect bondholders from the depredations of corporate insiders. What does this story leave out, and how do the true origins of bankruptcy law shed light on its present-day uses and abuses?

To Protect Their Interests is a groundbreaking historical account of how corporate bankruptcy became what it is today—a forum for battles between well-heeled insiders. Stephen J. Lubben strips away the myths surrounding the history of corporate restructuring, showing that it emerged a decade before Morgan, when the robber baron Jay Gould strove to keep control of his railroad by working out a compromise with a handful of wealthy investors. The 1885 restructuring of Texas and Pacific Railway set the pattern for future corporate reorganizations: insider dealing, elite manipulation of the legal system, and judicial deference. Lubben traces the evolution of the bankruptcy system through a series of major cases involving companies such as W. T. Grant and Toys “R” Us, demonstrating that it has always been a way for the powerful to maintain power. Revealing the sordid origins of bankruptcy law, this book also considers the limited prospects for reform.

Earth has existed for an immense period of time—an almost unimaginable 4.6 billion years. If we ventured far enough into the past, would we reach a time when our planet was fundamentally different? Did it always have landscapes like those we see today, sculpted by wind, rain, and the forces of plate tectonics? When did Earth turn into the distinctive “blue planet” where life could emerge and evolve?

Geologist Simon Lamb shows that the key to answering these questions lies in ancient rocks from the days when the planet was young. His research in remote southern Africa looks at some of the oldest known rocks—some more than 3.5 billion years old—which have survived unfathomable spans of geological time. He takes readers on a journey of scientific discovery, walking—and sometimes diving—through landscapes from the time of the earliest known forms of life. Lamb unearths a violent world of natural disasters and climate change in the deep ocean, along ancient shorelines, and amid rising mountains. In so doing, he shows how geologists work and think, and how they read rocks and decipher what they tell us of the past. Finding the foundations of our world, The Oldest Rocks on Earth sheds light on why Earth is the only planet known to harbor life and what this might tell us about our future.

Breadfruit trees are staples of the tropics, bearing cantaloupe-sized green-skinned fruits whose taste and texture resemble potatoes. More than three thousand years ago, breadfruit fueled the Pacific voyages of discovery that settled islands throughout Oceania. In the late eighteenth century, the British expedition that ended with the mutiny on the Bounty aimed, but failed, to introduce breadfruit to the West Indies as food for enslaved African laborers on sugar plantations. A later voyage resulted in the fruit’s widespread distribution and complicated role within modern Caribbean food cultures. In recent years, breadfruit has been touted as a tool for sustainable development and as a “superfood” with both health benefits and culinary versatility.

Russell Fielding tells these stories and many others, exploring breadfruit’s fascinating global history and varied present-day uses. Bringing together extensive research and vivid travelogues, including learning directly from local agriculturists, chefs, scientists, and holders of traditional knowledge, he provides an immersive narrative of breadfruit’s contributions. Fielding argues that breadfruit’s history comprises two journeys: first, from its origins in Southeast Asia across the Pacific; and second, its transplantation to the Caribbean. Today, a third journey is taking place, one that is spreading breadfruit throughout the world.

Engagingly written and compellingly argued, this book draws timely lessons from breadfruit’s past to forecast its future potential.

During the interwar years, Vietnamese society witnessed a rapid change in the way women looked. Rejecting the model of a sequestered maiden with blackened teeth and long hair, they embraced a vivid palette of colors—and a colorful lifestyle to match. Before the war, Vietnam would have seemed like an unlikely place for a beauty industry to thrive. Virtuous young women were expected to hide their natural beauty, not manipulate it with makeup or flaunt it at a beauty contest. Yet ordinary women began seeking out the latest fashions—to great public consternation.

Christina E. Firpo explores the development of beauty culture in this period, showing how women’s faces and bodies became contested sites for envisioning what it meant to be Vietnamese in the modern world. She considers dress patterns, lip-lining tutorials, hairstyles, physiques, and beauty pageants alongside new technologies of media, transportation, and leisure and the anxieties they provoked. The everyday decisions women made about their appearance, Firpo argues, were ways to stake a claim to the roles they wanted to play in the new society taking shape around them. Drawing on a vast array of sources, Beauty and the Nation offers fresh insight into the tumultuous political, economic, social, and cultural changes that swept across Vietnam during this crucial period.

We tend to think about movie stars as either glamorous or relatable. But in the 1920s and 1930s, when the Hollywood star system was taking shape, a number of unusual stars appeared on the silver screen, representing groups from which the American mainstream typically sought to avert its eyes. What did it mean for a white entertainment columnist to empathize with an ambiguously gendered Black child star? Or for boys to idolize Lon Chaney, famous for portraying characters with disabilities?

Hollywood’s Others explores the affective ties between white, non-disabled audiences and the fascinatingly different stars with whom they identified—but only up to a point. Katherine Fusco argues that stardom in this era at once offered ways for viewers to connect across group boundaries while policing the limits of empathy. Examining fan magazines alongside film performances, she traces the intense audience attachment to atypical celebrities and the ways the film industry sought to manage it. Fusco considers Shirley Temple’s career in light of child labor laws and changing notions of childhood; shows how white viewers responded to Black music in depictions of the antebellum South; and analyzes the gender politics of conspiracy theories around celebrity suicides. Shedding light on marginalized stardoms and the anxieties they provoked, Hollywood’s Others challenges common notions about film’s capacity to build empathy.

Literary celebrity in the nineteenth century emerged from a miscellaneous array of trending print forms, including antislavery writing, which was a popular, consumable form of literature in the period. Antislavery print culture could function as a pop culture, leveraging cultural myths about gender and authorship through print forms that connected readers with writers: printed collections of author signatures, descriptions of writers’ homes, autobiography, biography, and travel writing. The Rise of Celebrity Authorship traces surprising relations among figures and across shared forms in the period: What do antislavery forms and figures tell us about literary celebrity and the networks of transatlantic print culture?

Sarah Danielle Allison illuminates the collective creation of celebrity by tracing unexpected connections within this anarchic nineteenth-century literary marketplace. Bringing together book history with more recent computational approaches, The Rise of Celebrity Authorship shifts focus from the conventional literary work of major writers to the breadth of print forms circulating around them. Allison considers a variety of texts adjacent to the novel, including Edgar Allan Poe’s satire of autograph collecting, antislavery gift books, and a Southern travelogue by the Swedish writer Frederika Bremer. She draws striking parallels between two starkly different 1858 texts: Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Brontë, which sought to unearth the reality behind Jane Eyre, and Josiah Henson’s autobiography, which circulated as the life of the “original Uncle Tom.” A rich account of the competing and complementary forces that shape images of authors, this book reveals the collaborative work of literary production and celebrity.

Poets, literary critics, and lovers of poetry often speak of the “music of poetry.” The Sounds of Poetry Viewed as Music gives substance to the metaphor by building on recent research in linguistics and music theory to propose a theory of the sounds of poetry conceived in musical terms. It develops a rule-based methodology for assigning normative readings to the rhythms and contours of poetic lines. Each component of the theory is compared to earlier treatments both in traditional prosody and in generative metrics and intonational phonology. The theory’s predictions correspond well to recorded readings by poets and actors. The book also advances an original hierarchical treatment of syllabic rhyme, alliteration, and assonance.

The Sounds of Poetry Viewed as Music is a deeply interdisciplinary project. On one hand, it offers a detailed, rigorous treatment of the perceptual organization of poetic sounds. On the other, it supports Darwin’s claim that music and language have a common ancestry in expressive vocalization. This book will engage lovers of poetry, literary scholars, musicians, and philosophers and cognitive scientists interested in the intersection of the musical and linguistic capacities.

In Mongolian Buddhism, texts, rituals, and images are deeply interwoven, yet they are typically studied separately. This book is a groundbreaking interdisciplinary exploration of Mongolian Buddhism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, drawing on previously unexamined writings and artworks to shed new light on the intricate interrelationships that define this tradition.

Vesna A. Wallace and Uranchimeg Tsultemin—a religious studies scholar and an art historian—combine their expertise to demonstrate how textual and visual imagery have built and maintained Mongolian Buddhist community and identity over time. They show that individual and collective acts of imagination are central to a vast range of contemplative, ritual, liturgical, and artistic practices, shaping religious and cultural experience and tradition. Wallace and Tsultemin track the transmission and development of Buddhist belief and practice through a vast range of textual and visual sources. This book also considers how Mongolian Buddhist scholars, contemplatives, and artists expressed their religious views and social concerns in response to the political events of their times. Highlighting little-known treasures of Mongolian culture and featuring extensive illustrations, Art and Imagination develops pioneering insights into Mongolian Buddhist texts, objects, and practices.

A pioneering politician and diplomat, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit (1900–1990) was an Indian icon, admired worldwide for her brilliance and glamour. Eleanor Roosevelt called her “the most remarkable woman” she had ever met. Madame Pandit, as she was widely known, moved in elite global circles even as she worked to improve the lives of millions. She traded quips with Winston Churchill, worked alongside Albert Einstein, and was detained for the attempted assassination of Benito Mussolini. She even came out of retirement to campaign against her own niece, Indira Gandhi, to stop an authoritarian takeover and save Indian democracy.

The Remarkable Madame Pandit is the definitive biography of India’s greatest modern diplomat. Manu Bhagavan chronicles Pandit’s life and times, from her upbringing in an illustrious family to her role in her country’s fight for independence and through her globe-trotting career bridging East and West. Pandit was India’s first woman cabinet minister, an ambassador to the United States and the Soviet Union, and the first woman elected president of the UN General Assembly. Her influence extended well beyond these formal roles: she became one of the most prominent international voices for peace while paving the way for women in many fields. Based on eight years of research using material in five languages from seven countries, this book tells Madame Pandit’s gripping story in full—and in so doing, retells the history of India and the world in the twentieth century.

Excavations at the famous Mawangdui tomb site in south-central China (early-to-mid-second century BCE) have unearthed many kinds of writing, including documents made of silk, wood, and bamboo as well as a wide range of inscribed artifacts. This book is an interdisciplinary study of these varied forms of writing, exploring the different roles that texts played in the lives and afterlives of Chinese elites during the Han dynasty.

Examining documents and artifacts from the Mawangdui tombs in comparative perspective, Luke Waring demonstrates that early Chinese writing should be understood as part of the material and visual cultures of its time. Written texts were used to do more than simply preserve and transmit important information: they were also work tasks, storage items, performance aids, apotropaic talismans, aesthetically pleasing patterns, display pieces, possessions, and burial objects. Writing was even integrated into older, perhaps more powerful modes of cultural expression such as ritual performance and material display. Waring argues that manuscripts and inscribed objects were always things, artifacts that had powerful effects on the world that created them. Comprehensively researched and lavishly illustrated, Writing and Materiality in Ancient China offers a new understanding of the textual cultures of the early Western Han.

Buried within a lost world, astonishing evidence reveals the behavior of extinct animals, giving us a glimpse at both everyday and epic events. If we look at these discoveries carefully, the untold stories of these magnificent creatures come into view, breathing new life into the prehistoric past.

The Secret Lives of Dinosaurs tells the remarkable tales of ancient animals through some of the most distinctive and unusual fossils ever found, offering an intimate, behind-the-scenes look into the story of life in deep time. Venturing hundreds of millions of years into the past, Dean R. Lomax takes us on a journey through the grand cycle of life, infused with anecdotes from his own adventures and sprinkled with a touch of dinosaur humor.

These fossils tell real-world stories of prehistoric parenting, the quest for survival, and the endless struggle between predator and prey. Unbelievable moments are captured: saber-toothed cats clashing, mega-millipedes mating, dinosaurs swimming. From ammonite eggs to mosasaur mealtimes, and from a pregnant ichthyosaur that chowed down on a bird to the mammal that took down a dinosaur, these behaviors challenge what we thought we knew about the prehistoric world.

This book looks into the private moments of long-extinct creatures as never before, letting us see them not just as fossils in a museum but as living, breathing animals with personalities and emotions. Vivid illustrations by Bob Nicholls bring these incredible stories to life in full color.

Today, global life expectancy is well over seventy years—a dramatic increase from historical norms. Living longer means we need to think about how to keep aging bodies healthy. Evidence suggests that regular exercise is the most important modifiable factor that can increase the chances of aging with agility. But what motivates some of us to engage in exercise enthusiastically and others to avoid it like the plague?

Through rich storytelling and nuanced analysis, Michelle Pannor Silver shows how our perceptions of aging shape the way we take care of our bodies. Based on interviews conducted over the course of nearly a decade, this book shares the stories of people who embody the notion of aging with agility. Their life experiences vary widely, including former elite athletes and coaches, people living with chronic pain, those leading sedentary lives, and some who came to be in peak shape later in life. Each person’s story offers valuable insights on how we can adjust our habits and embrace aging with vitality and purpose.

Engaging and conversational, Aging with Agility brings together personal narratives and rigorous research to challenge common assumptions about exercise and longevity. This book will inspire readers to find new models of healthy aging—and collectively rethink social norms about the later stages of life.

There is a persistent gap in life expectancy between Black people and their white counterparts in the United States. It is a direct result of structural racism within American society and has nothing to do with genetic differences. In past eras, scientific racism sought to shift the blame to the supposed physical inferiority of people of African descent. Even today, medicine labors under false beliefs derived from nineteenth-century racial thinking, harming patients who are not of European descent.

Why Black People Die Sooner is a powerful and rigorous examination of the ways racism shapes health and disease. Joseph L. Graves Jr. demonstrates that the medical profession still fails to grasp basic facts about race, tracing how deep-rooted falsehoods have perpetuated the disparity between Black and white lifespans. He equips readers with the tools to dispel the fallacies and errors of racialized medicine, including an understanding of evolutionary biology and human biological variation. Graves also debunks common misconceptions about race and health on topics such as high blood pressure, sickle cell disease, the microbiome, infectious diseases, and cancer. Why Black People Die Sooner closes by offering a sweeping vision for dismantling medical racism, from professional training to clinical practice through biomedical research. Timely and bracing, this book reveals why medicine keeps misunderstanding race—and how we can make it change.

From the United States to China and from Brazil to India, an authoritarian approach to news is spreading across the world. Increasingly, the media is no longer a check on power or a source of objective information but a means by which governments and leaders can propagate their versions of reality, however biased or false.

Martin Moore and Thomas Colley show how states are battling to control and shape the news in order to entrench their power, evade scrutiny, and ensure that their political narratives are accepted. Combining in-depth analyses of seven countries with a compelling range of stories and characters from around the world, they demonstrate the unprecedented scale and scope of governments’ efforts to take control of the media. Dictating Reality details how Xi’s China, Putin’s Russia, Modi’s India, AMLO’s Mexico, Bolsonaro’s Brazil, and Orban’s Hungary have all sought, in their different ways, to exploit news to manufacture alternative realities—and how their methods have taken hold in the United States, the United Kingdom, and other democracies. Combining keen analysis of contemporary world events with years of original research, this book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how authoritarian leaders use the media, why more and more people are living in different realities, and the ways democracy is under threat.

Once, it was thought, a scandal was the kiss of death for a political career. Today, however, surviving scandal seems to be the norm. Donald Trump has weathered—and even perhaps benefited from—controversies that would have been unimaginable for virtually any other candidate. Prominent figures in both parties have won elections and remained in office despite credible allegations of wrongdoing. Do scandals still matter? When and why do voters punish politicians or give them a free pass?

Charting the changes from Watergate to the present, this book is a rigorous and compelling investigation of the politics of scandals. Bringing together wide-ranging survey data, innovative experiment design, and historical analysis, Brandon Rottinghaus demonstrates how political polarization, affective partisanship, fading trust in media, and the spread of misinformation have diminished the resonance of controversies. Although scandals still fell many politicians, there is a clear trend over time for fewer voters to be swayed by them. In a polarized world, scandals take only a modest toll on politicians’ approval ratings, survival in office, ambitions, and legacies. In many cases, partisans accept—or even embrace—misbehavior from members of their own party and revel in scandals affecting the opposing party. Challenging conventional wisdom with extensive data, this book illuminates the declining significance of scandals and the consequences for democratic accountability.

At the peak of imperial expansion in World War II, Japan touted itself as a multiracial paradise. The state, eugenicists, and media supported intermarriage and adoption as tools of empire, encouraging “blood mixing” to fuse diverse populations into one harmonious family. Yet after defeat in World War II, a chorus of Japanese policy makers, journalists, and activists railed against Japanese women who consorted with occupying American men and their mixed-race children. Why did Japan embrace “mixed blood” as an authoritarian empire yet turn to xenophobic racial nationalism as a postwar democracy?

Tracing changing views of the “mixed blood” child, Japan Reborn reveals how notions of racial mixture and purity reshaped Japanese identity. Kristin Roebuck unravels the politics of sex and reproduction in Japan from the invasion of Manchuria in the 1930s to the dawn of US-Japan alliance in the 1950s, uncovering eugenic ideas and policies that policed the boundaries of kinship and country. She shows how the trauma of defeat sparked an abhorrence of interracial sex and caused a profound devolution in the social status of “mixed” children and their Japanese mothers. She also unpacks how Japan’s postwar identity crisis put pressure on the United States to bring Japanese brides and “mixed blood” children into the Cold War American family. Shedding light on the sexual and racial tensions of empire, occupation, and the Cold War, this book offers new ways to understand the shifting terrain of Japanese nationalism and international relations.

In the United States, the bottom 50 percent of households hold only 1 percent of the nation’s wealth. Scholars and commentators have long viewed democracy as the antidote to economic inequality, but US electoral politics bears little resemblance to a struggle between the haves and the have-nots. What makes extreme disparities of wealth and income so persistent, and why has the political process failed to address the problem?

Based on data from an innovative experiment, this book presents a bold new theory that shows why American politics revolves around status differences, not class conflict. Analyzing a sample of nearly 2,600 participants, the authors investigate whether Americans are more likely to support a social-change organization if it explicitly opposes racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and religious bigotry or if it focuses exclusively on economic equality. Drawing on the results, they argue that privileged groups’ desire to preserve their status is the primary obstacle to forming progressive alliances. Status hierarchies are at the heart of political polarization, which stalls legislative efforts to reduce economic inequality or tackle pressing issues such as climate change, gun violence, and access to health care. Rigorous and timely, Politics and Privilege demonstrates why an agenda that simultaneously addresses economic and status inequalities is essential to progressive politics today.

Models change our worlds. From global carbon flux models to regional coastal flood prediction maps, climate-related models influence how we know our environment, how we build our cities, and how we act on a climate-altered planet. Yet such models typically require specialized knowledge to navigate, and because the climate crisis is inherently multidimensional, technical expertise in isolation is not enough.

Climate Changed examines models and their imperfect yet central role in understanding the relationship between global climate dynamics and the human-built environment. It compares and synthesizes the methods and function of models in disciplines ranging from architecture and planning to climate science and natural hazards research. This book considers how disparate models are woven together to understand the climate crisis, underscoring the necessity of combining locally situated and transdisciplinary knowledge with climate science to navigate current and future cataclysmic changes. It highlights the challenges and consequences of disciplinary boundaries, siloed scientific knowledge, and uneven data and develops ways to overcome these limitations.

As the world faces the effects of climate change, climate scientists are debating the future of their field; architects, engineers, and planners are designing in the context of climate change; and society at large is grappling with how to take action. This book brings those communities together to chart a path forward.

Ammonites swam in Earth’s ancient seas for nearly 400 million years, diversifying into more than 10,000 species before meeting their demise during the end-Cretaceous mass extinction. These spiral-shelled invertebrates are among the most abundant fossils in the geologic record, found from snowcapped Himalayan peaks to parched South American arroyos. People around the world have long been drawn to the mystery and beauty of ammonite fossils. These preternaturally preserved creatures have inspired age-old myths and legends, and studying their secrets has spurred crucial scientific discoveries.

Jodi Summers—an accomplished journalist and passionate fossil collector—guides readers through the entire arc of ammonite history. She explores the evolution, proliferation, extinction, and fossilization of these captivating cephalopods, situating the story in the progression of deep time. Summers also prospects prime fossil-hunting locations, sharing tips and inside scoops for enthusiasts and collectors in search of notable specimens. She takes us along on her globe-spanning journeys: from the desert to the seashore, up mountains and down canyons, to the backrooms of natural history institutions and the floors of fossil shows.

We Dig Ammonites features hundreds of lavish color photographs of rare specimens that showcase the splendor of these magnificent mollusks. This book is an ode to one of the world’s most compelling fossils and an invitation to catch a glimpse of vanished epochs.

After the research psychologist Barbara Blatchley’s husband and partner of thirty-six years passed away, her life changed utterly. Seeking to understand the pain and confusion she felt, Blatchley began exploring the psychology and neuroscience of bereavement. Why does grief last so long and hurt so much? How do we come to terms with loss?

In Sorrow’s Long Road, Blatchley interweaves an engaging and reader-friendly look at the research on grief with her powerful personal narrative. Beginning with the day of her husband’s death, she traces the questions that loss raised and the answers that science provides. Blatchley examines the psychology of love and attachment, detailing how we bond with others and what happens when those bonds are broken. She considers the storm of emotions that the bereaved experience, as well as both the physical and psychological effects of grieving. Blatchley maps out how we adapt to the changes that loss brings and find a new identity afterward. In addition to her own experiences, she shares the stories of other people who have suffered a loss and struggled to recover, illustrating how grief changes over time.

Accessibly written and deeply empathetic, Sorrow’s Long Road humanizes the science, showing how psychology and neuroscience can help us make sense of the darkest times in our lives.

In the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), two European rivalries—between England and France and between Prussia and Austria—collided to spark a global conflagration. In the United States, it is known as the French and Indian War, a precursor to the Revolutionary War. In India, by contrast, it marked a new stage on the path toward British colonial rule. The war saw Spain’s decline and Russia’s rise; territories from Quebec to the Philippines changed hands. From Europe to the Americas, Africa, and South Asia, people across continents were swept up in clashes that began in faraway places and spread like wildfire.

The World in Flames is a bottom-up history of the Seven Years’ War, exploring this epochal conflict from the perspective of contemporaries around the globe. Drawing on hundreds of eyewitness accounts, Marian Füssel offers a sweeping portrait of warfare and everyday life during the cataclysm. He vividly narrates battles and sieges from the viewpoints of bakers, generals, and everyone in between, tracing the roles of mercenaries and trading companies as well as regular troops. Füssel emphasizes how contemporaries perceived and understood the global nature of the conflict. At once a media war and an economic war for commodities such as sugar and fur, a war of emerging nationalism and a last religious war, the Seven Years’ War was a laboratory of modernity, combining the old world and the new. A groundbreaking, world-spanning microhistory, this book shows us the first truly global military conflict in a new light.

Disasters arise from the convergence of natural and social forces. Earthquakes, cyclones, floods, droughts, and other catastrophic events disproportionately affect the most vulnerable people, whether the poor in wealthy countries or the inhabitants of less developed countries. In a warming world, climate-related disasters threaten to become even more hazardous.

This primer provides readers with a fundamental understanding of disasters and their consequences. John C. Mutter and Sonali Deraniyagala—a natural scientist and an economist—share their expertise in straightforward language, showing why an interdisciplinary approach is necessary to understand the causes and effects of these multifaceted events. This book first explains the natural science of why and how disasters occur and then investigates their significance for economic development across communities and countries, focusing on growth, inequality, and reconstruction. It features a wide range of global case studies, including earthquakes in Turkey and Haiti, hurricanes in the United States, drought in Ethiopia, and cyclones in Myanmar and Bangladesh. Disasters and Human Development will be useful for undergraduate and graduate courses, and it is relevant and accessible to practitioners and other interested readers.

Modernism is typically thought of as focusing on the new and now, not looking backward at historical catastrophes. Yet in many surprising, often submerged ways, the transatlantic slave trade shaped the works of both Black and white writers. This book reveals how modernists turned to the Middle Passage—and, in so doing, upended Western ideas about time and space, race and gender, and the category of the human.

Bringing together Afro-diasporic and Black studies scholarship, modernist aesthetics, and environmental studies, Laura Winkiel presents a new literary history of modernism from the perspective of the Atlantic and its role in slavery and colonization. She examines the works of African, Caribbean, British, and US writers including Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Jean Rhys, Amos Tutuola, and Virginia Woolf, as well as later interlocutors such as Marlon James and Jamaica Kincaid. Paying particular attention to settings on shorelines, deltas, archipelagos, and the ocean, Winkiel argues that allusions to the slave trade make visible the exploitative structural relations between the metropolis and the colonies and between the liberal subject and its others. By turning to the ocean and its violent histories, this groundbreaking book rethinks the fraught relationship of modernism and race.

Syaman Rapongan—one of the Indigenous Tao people of Orchid Island near Taiwan—calls himself an “ocean writer.” His works blend Tao folklore and accounts of maritime life with keen critique of the social, psychological, and ecological harms of colonialism. Eyes of the Ocean is his literary autobiography, both a powerful story of survival in a settler state and a masterful portrait of the Indigenous artist as a young man.

In colloquial and vivid prose, Syaman Rapongan depicts Tao beliefs in ghosts, practices of exorcism, and the parallel worlds that exist alongside the human realm. He recounts his difficulties speaking Mandarin in school, his experiences of racial discrimination and exploitation in Taipei, and his decision to return to Orchid Island to rediscover his cultural heritage, as well as his travels to visit other Indigenous artists in places such as Greenland. Eyes of the Ocean also tells the story of Syaman Rapongan’s formation as a writer, a practitioner of a genre of his own creation: colonial ocean island literature.

Introducing English-language readers to one of the leading Indigenous writers in Taiwan, this book shares a profound and deeply humane vision of Oceanic art and identity.

Meritocracy—advancing and rewarding people based on their talents and hard work—is a widely embraced ideal across education, business, and government. It drives modern talent management systems designed to attract, screen, and retain the most qualified and highest-performing individuals. But although meritocracy largely replaced patronage and favoritism linked to class, wealth, or family connections, today it has come under scrutiny for contributing to social inequalities and reinforcing systemic biases. Why did what was once heralded as a progressive solution to inherited privilege come to perpetuate unfairness and inequity? What can go wrong when organizations rely on merit as their guiding principle? How can today’s leaders address these failures?

In The Meritocracy Paradox, Emilio J. Castilla offers timely new answers to these fundamental questions. He analyzes the structure and culture of meritocracy inside organizations, providing real-world examples—from merit-based bonus systems in companies to admissions decisions at elite universities—to show how personal biases and other social barriers can undermine the values and outcomes these systems are meant to uphold. Castilla provides a practical, research-backed framework to help organizations achieve true fairness and opportunity for all. Drawing on successful data-based interventions, he presents concrete strategies for improving selection, hiring, evaluation, promotion, and compensation processes—revealing how motivated leaders can identify and correct shortcomings with cost-effective, targeted solutions that deliver proven results.

The Meritocracy Paradox is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand and improve the intersection of merit, fairness, and equal opportunity in contemporary organizations.

The 1960s in Japan have long been understood as a period of radical political engagement. But as political movements from Old Left Communism to New Left revolts appeared to fail in their efforts to revolutionize Japanese society, artists and intellectuals came to reject the ideals of postwar politics. Instead, they advocated withdrawing from political participation and making self-transformation the grounds for social change.

This provocative book uncovers a paradox at the heart of the 1960s: how political disillusionment became the basis for a new form of politics—a politics of the self. Examining aesthetic criticism, popular literature, avant-garde art, cinema, and political theory, Patrick Noonan argues that cultural producers in 1960s Japan cultivated what he calls an “ethos of disaffection” toward revolutionary politics and postwar society. Departing from approaches that define politics as contestation, Age of Disaffection foregrounds cultivation, or the production of ways of feeling and relating to the world in efforts to redefine the political. It presents an unorthodox account of the 1960s: withdrawal from political activity developed not as the decade ended but as it was unfolding. Noonan reveals how Japanese artists and intellectuals in this period confronted a crucial question that continues to vex efforts at radical change today: transform institutions or alter how people relate to themselves and others?

Police have remarkably broad discretion to use deadly force. Evidence shows that more than 1,000 shooting deaths occur each year at the hands of the police in the United States, disproportionately in minority communities and often under questionable circumstances. Despite public outrage, there continue to be obstacles to assessing the extent of bias and addressing the harms of police violence, including a lack of transparency and limitations on access to data.

Justice Required is a groundbreaking quantitative and qualitative investigation of police violence. Robert J. Durán and Oralia Loza provide a comprehensive data analysis of all police shootings in Denver, Colorado, over nearly forty years, highlighting persistent patterns of racial and ethnic inequality. They examine the institutional and political dynamics that thwart efforts to hold police officers accountable after controversial incidents. Durán and Loza contextualize the data with regional comparisons and enliven the analysis with vivid storytelling. Justice Required argues that while police shootings are typically treated as a criminal justice issue, they should be understood as a public health problem. Rigorous and urgent, this book provides evidence-based, data-driven solutions to prevent further loss of life and promote accountability.

During the first half of the twentieth century, China saw sweeping changes in the material conditions and practices of communication, transforming the volume, velocity, variety, veracity, and value of information. Encountering the new abstract matter of information, a generation of Chinese writers faced a crisis of literary identity: What made literature distinct from other informational genres, such as newspaper columns, financial figures, and telegrams? How was the emergent information order reshaping individual and social knowledge? And where would literature stand within this new order?

This book examines how writers of the Republican era (1912–1949) came to recognize and respond to “information.” Anatoly Detwyler investigates a wide range of literary and graphic experiments that engaged with different forms of information management, including data visualization, financial statistics, and propaganda science. These works, he argues, collectively attest to a new perceptibility of abstraction and its epistemological implications for apprehending reality. Tracing this mode of perception across fiction, poetry, and woodcut art, Seeing Through Abstraction offers a revisionist account of the development of modern Chinese literature and repositions it within the global history of the information age.

In Korea, the end of the Second World War in 1945 brought both liberation from Japanese colonial rule and the division of the nation by the triumphant Allies. The peninsula was not only decoupled from its former colonial metropole but also carved up into two halves that were subsequently incorporated into the rival blocs of the emerging Cold War order. Although the two Koreas are typically seen as isolated from each other, texts continued to circulate between them—with the assistance of colleagues from the Korean diaspora in Japan and beyond—throughout the ensuing decades.

I Jonathan Kief follows the triangular flow of texts linking North Korea, South Korea, and Japan from 1945 until the 1980s, revealing overlooked paths of interaction and exchange. He highlights the creative ways in which poets, playwrights, novelists, critics, and academics crossed boundaries of language, ideology, genre, and geography to challenge the stability of the Cold War. By showing how writers in North and South Korea engaged in dialogue via the mediation of a multiethnic set of colleagues in Japan, Triangle Republics offers a new perspective on this era, emphasizing its vibrant, dynamic, and interconnected nature.

What do Warren Buffett and Friedrich Nietzsche have in common? Why does Baruch Spinoza’s understanding of irrational emotions help explain financial markets? How did Voltaire’s success in a bond lottery arbitrage shape his writing? Can David Hume teach an investor when to buck the consensus and when to heed it?

Exploring these questions and many others, Ethan A. Everett reveals the surprising lessons we can learn about investing from major philosophers. Demystifying ideas and texts that can often seem intimidating or irrelevant, he shows how philosophical concepts can be fruitfully applied to financial markets. Everett shares how philosophers’ insights have informed his development as an investor, and he considers how great investors have embodied philosophical wisdom in their own endeavors.

Inviting and engaging, The Investment Philosophers presents evergreen insights in language that is accessible to readers who are beginning their journeys in finance and philosophy. Ranging from the birth of modern securities markets in seventeenth-century Amsterdam to recent trends like meme stocks, this book shows why a philosophical perspective can prove invaluable to challenging common assumptions in finance.

After the Cold War, the United States and its NATO allies faced crucial questions. Could Russia, their old adversary, be integrated into the liberal international order? What roles should former Soviet republics and satellite states in Eastern and Central Europe play in the Euro-Atlantic security system? These questions have taken on renewed significance since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, as Vladimir Putin has portrayed Russia as the victim of Western expansionism.

This deeply researched book offers new perspective on the NATO-Russia relationship through the eyes of Strobe Talbott, a deputy secretary of state for seven years under President Bill Clinton and the key US diplomatic broker for the former USSR. Stephan Kieninger traces the Clinton administration’s efforts to engage Russia and enlarge NATO at the same time, as elements of a new European security architecture. Drawing on Talbott’s diaries, as well as US and European archives and extensive interviews with former government officials, he sheds light on NATO’s opening, its missions in Bosnia and Kosovo, and other vexed issues. Kieninger argues that a careful look at Talbott’s statecraft rebuts Putin’s claims that the West exploited Russia’s weakness after the Cold War, demonstrating that the Clinton administration and its NATO allies sought to include Russia at every step. An illuminating and comprehensive account of US diplomacy during the Clinton years, Securing Peace in Europe provides vital insight into the complex relations between Russia and the West.

There is a standard narrative that recurs throughout popular writings on yoga and tantra, from South Asian texts to Western esoteric thought: Kuṇḍalinī is the Serpent Power. She rests coiled at the base of the spine. If awakened, this divine feminine energy rises toward the crown of the head. Some are apprehensive of Kuṇḍalinī’s intense power, fearing physical and psychological turmoil. Others seek it out, hungry for experiences, both spiritual and sensual. But what does this story leave out? What are its cultural and historical roots? What do the many ways of experiencing Kuṇḍalinī tell us about this elusive phenomenon?

The Serpent’s Tale traces the intricate global histories of Kuṇḍalinī, from its Sanskrit origins to its popularity in the West. Sravana Borkataky-Varma and Anya Foxen explore its symbolic link with the serpent, its fraught connections to sexuality, and its commercialization in the form of Kuṇḍalinī yoga. Ranging from esoteric texts to global gurus, from the cliffs of California to the charnel grounds of Assam, they show that there has never been one single “authentic” model of Kuṇḍalinī but a multiplicity of visions. Bridging the gaps between textual and historical analysis and the complexities of embodied practice, Borkataky-Varma and Foxen reflect on the narration and transmission of experiences, including their own. Lively, accessible, and nuanced, The Serpent’s Tale offers rich insights for scholars, practitioners, and all readers drawn to Kuṇḍalinī.

It is commonly believed that Stalinism ended a vibrant period in Soviet avant-garde art and literature. The triumph of socialist realism, in this view, curtailed experimentation with aesthetic form and replaced it with a call for clarity, accessibility, and ideological conformity. But Stalin’s formula “national in form, socialist in content” gave artists an opening for officially sanctioned formal innovation—as long as it drew on the national cultures of the Soviet Union.

Nariman Skakov offers a new way to understand Soviet modernism, showing how writers and artists looked to the East to renew avant-garde experimentalism under Stalin. He traces how figures such as Victor Shklovsky, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, Dziga Vertov, and Sergei Eisenstein responded to the Soviet state’s ideological demands by engaging with the traditions of the new socialist republics in Central Asia. The concept of national form gave these artists a sanctuary for aesthetic innovation, yet this experimentation relied on exoticization of the “strangeness” of the Soviet East and a fascination with ethnic others.

Recasting Soviet aesthetics from the vantage point of Central Asia, Skakov rethinks orientalism and its relationship to socialism. Challenging conventional narratives of the fate of the Soviet avant-garde, Reorientalism provides a deeply original decentering of modernism.

The feminist movement has long been guided by the promise of progress for women: politically, economically, and in personal life. But we live in a time when history appears to be moving backward into a more reactionary past. How might feminist thought make sense of this plight without returning to the liberal, Western framework of progressive reason?

Yanbing Er argues that the key to this predicament lies in the capacity of the literary imagination to invigorate feminist critical practice. She reveals how a literary mode of enchantment fundamentally transforms feminist theory and praxis, imagining new and surprising possibilities that had once been foreclosed by dominant paradigms of progress. Enchantment illuminates forms of existence that have been lost, erased, or obscured, allowing us to encounter both feminism and the world anew. Er finds incantatory power in the works of writers such as Rivers Solomon, Akwaeke Emezi, Ruth Ozeki, and Alexis Wright, who disrupt hegemonic ways of thinking by summoning otherwise unimaginable ways of being. Their works collectively present an immersive and expansive feminist imaginary that makes space for marginalized histories, narratives, and lifeworlds.

Elegantly written and boldly argued, Feminism Enchanted shows how poetic language conjures alternative futures for feminist thought.

In the 1930s, the pioneering Danish scientist Inge Lehmann (1888–1993) made a groundbreaking discovery about the nature of Earth. Analyzing data from earthquakes, she determined that the heart of the planet is a solid inner core. Her discovery overturned the widely accepted theory of the core being fluid, but she trusted her calculations: “If I am right, and I know I am,” she wrote in a letter. A fiercely independent thinker, Lehmann forever changed our understanding of our planet.

If I Am Right, and I Know I Am provides a powerful portrait of an extraordinary woman while guiding readers through the fascinating history of earth science. Hanne Strager tells the story of Lehmann’s life and accomplishments, recounting how she battled inner demons and a mental breakdown and how she overcame pervasive prejudice to forge her own path in a male-dominated scientific world. In Lehmann’s era, women were expected to conform to rigid roles and were discouraged from pursuing serious academic careers. Even as Lehmann became a leading geophysicist, she had to navigate not only gender bias but also the isolation of being a lone woman in an overwhelmingly male field. Strager also follows the traces of an elusive love letter linking Lehmann romantically to another woman. The first biography of Lehmann, this book seamlessly weaves together her personal life and scientific achievements, highlighting her resilience and brilliance.

For nearly a thousand years, the city of Tharros in western Sardinia was central to trade routes and cultural exchange, a hub connecting North Africa, the Balearic Islands, and the Eastern Mediterranean. Its earliest ruins, dating from the seventh century BCE, were likely constructed by Punic settlers from North Africa. The Carthaginians built temples and tombs; the Romans, who arrived in the third century BCE, erected their own infrastructure, such as public baths and aqueducts. Tharros was eventually abandoned around 1000 CE. The site was plundered over the centuries, and treasures from its tombs were widely trafficked.

This is the first English-language book to explore the rich and fascinating archaeological site of Tharros. Distinguished scholars of Sardinian and Mediterranean archaeology examine the history of excavations and the many significant discoveries that have been made on the site. Essays consider the religious beliefs, burial practices, material culture, and daily life of the inhabitants of ancient Tharros. Dozens of color photographs depict the city’s architecture and artifacts—buildings and roads from the Bronze Age, the Punic era, ancient Roman times, and the Christian centuries, along with treasured and everyday objects now held in major global museums. Showcasing the achievements of Sardinia’s ancient society, this book shines a light on Tharros’s distinctive history and culture.

Textual Life is a groundbreaking book that recasts the role of knowledge in the making of a colonial and postcolonial nation. It makes a case for a new literary and intellectual-historical approach to Islam in Africa.

The Senegalese Muslim scholar Shaykh Musa Kamara (1864–1945) wrote History of the Blacks, a monumental history of West Africa, in a time when colonial discourses asserted that Africans lacked both writing and history. He sought to publish a bilingual Arabic and French edition of the book by working with humanists in colonial institutions, but the project was ultimately undermined by the disregard of the French state.

Textual Life considers Kamara’s story as a parable about the fate of the humanities amid epistemic and technological change. Wendell H. Marsh argues that Kamara’s scholarship reflected what he calls the textual attitude, an orientation to the world mediated by reading. Colonial humanists shared this attitude even while upholding racial and religious hierarchies, and they took an interest in African texts and traditions. The bureaucrats and technocrats who succeeded them, however, disdained such dialogue—for reasons that bear a striking resemblance to the algorithmic antihumanism that is ascendant today.

Drawing on Kamara’s body of work, colonial archival documents, and postcolonial knowledge production within Senegal, Textual Life offers a decolonial vision of the humanities. By engaging with African and Muslim intellectual resources, Marsh shows how thinkers like Kamara who were subjected to colonialism can help us find a future after empire.

We are constantly being warned, but we seldom heed warnings. Cautioned about authoritarian leaders, climate change, technological dystopias, or other catastrophes, we fail to take action or even take them seriously. Too often warnings are dismissed—much like the artists, scientists, environmentalists, and intellectuals who deliver them. Why don’t we listen?

Santiago Zabala asks us to think of philosophy as a warning, a call to heed ominous “signs from the future.” He argues that warnings—as distinct from predictions—invite us to see the possibility of a radical break from the present. Predictions tell us to submit to the inevitable, but warnings ask us to take part in shaping a different future. A philosophy of warnings offers an alternative horizon of understanding beyond “the real” and “the normal,” and a politics of warnings helps us confront hidden emergencies through collective interpretation, listening, and action.

Signs from the Future places thinkers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, de Beauvoir, and Arendt into conversation with present-day politics, art, and culture, drawing our attention to unheeded warnings. This timely and engaging book shows why unresolved crises from the past must be interpreted anew today if we are to imagine an equitable future—or a future at all.

This textbook offers a fresh approach to learning Sanskrit, the ancient language at the heart of South Asia’s vast religious, philosophical, and literary heritage. Designed for independent learners and classrooms alike, it provides a uniquely in-depth and immersive introduction to the language, exploring a rich selection of Sanskrit texts from the Buddhist tradition.

Unlike most textbooks, Reading Sanskrit devotes as much attention to the formation of individual words (morphology) as to the various, frequently unfamiliar ways those words combine to form sentences (syntax). This approach equips students with invaluable linguistic insights into Sanskrit usage and style, enabling them to engage more confidently with original Sanskrit texts.

Challenging topics are broken down into manageable sections and spread across multiple lessons. Each lesson includes plainly worded explanations, abundant annotated examples, and vocabulary notes providing the relevant cultural context needed to understand the ideas and narratives introduced in the exercises and readings. Audio recordings and other supplementary online resources help students improve their pronunciation and enhance accessibility further.

Reading Sanskrit draws from the Buddhist tradition’s vast Sanskrit corpus to present a thematically coherent collection of texts covering a wide range of literary genres, including narrative, philosophical, and poetic writings. This unique choice of source material provides an engaging approach to language learning, immersing the student in one of the major strands of South Asian spirituality and culture while highlighting Buddhism’s connection to other religious and literary traditions.

Today, the opioid crisis often feels intractable. This book offers a wider perspective on its underlying causes, examining the biological, psychological, and social aspects of addiction and the interactions among them.

Jay Schulkin, a behavioral neuroscientist, and Bryce Huebner, a philosopher, explore the complexities of opioid addiction through a distinctive combination of neuroscientific knowledge and pragmatist thought. They detail the biological and neurological processes that shape and sustain addiction, showing why opiates’ power to ease pain makes us vulnerable to abusing them. The book discusses the relationship between addiction and depression, the dilemmas of pain management, and the meaning of recovery. Schulkin and Huebner underscore the stigma that marginalizes people who struggle with addiction and the social factors that shape access to treatment and care, calling for a focus on harm reduction. They consider questions of individual and social accountability, reflecting on choice, autonomy, and freedom.

Interdisciplinary and wide-ranging, this book brings deep learning, empathy, and insight to understanding the experience of addiction.

Major demographic transitions are underway in Asia and the Pacific. The populations of China, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Russia are aging and shrinking, while India, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Australia, among others, continue to grow. How will these striking changes affect regional security dynamics and the United States–led alliance structure in the Indo-Pacific?

Andrew L. Oros offers an expert analysis of how rapid aging and population shifts are transforming the military strategies and capabilities of regional powers in Asia. Examining sixteen states, he provides a comparative view of the developing landscape and explores ways to address the consequences. Oros demonstrates that, contrary to what many have claimed, states with shrinking populations will continue to be formidable military powers. He develops a novel theoretical and empirical argument for why rapid aging does not necessarily dampen security competition. Nonetheless, demographic shifts in the coming decades will fundamentally alter the security challenges facing the United States and its allies. Oros considers how technological change and health care advances are mitigating the drawbacks of aging populations as well as how factors such as autonomous defense systems and artificial intelligence present new challenges. Rigorous and timely, Asia’s Aging Security makes a forceful case that adjustment to demographic change is a necessity for twenty-first-century foreign policy.

Romanticism is often reduced to nostalgic pastoralism and solitary contemplation of the sublime. But a radical strand of Romantic writers and thinkers offered sweeping political, ecological, and religious critiques of capitalism, racism, settler colonialism, and environmental destruction. Interweaving canonical nineteenth-century authors with Black and Indigenous thinkers who transformed their work, this book is a bold new account of Romanticism for today’s deeply entrenched crises.

Mark S. Cladis examines the progressive democratic, religious, and environmental beliefs and practices that informed European Romantic literature and its sustained legacies in North America. His interpretation interweaves diverse voices such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, and Leslie Marmon Silko while also revealing the progressive visions of Romantic authors such as Rousseau, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge, Mary Shelley, Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller. Forging connections among literary and philosophical traditions while closely reading a wide range of texts, Radical Romanticism shows how storytelling is central to the pursuit of justice and flourishing for the human and the more-than-human worlds. Bringing together environmental humanities, literary theory, political theory, and religious studies, this book makes the case for a renewed radical Romanticism, offering urgent resources for a world beset by catastrophe, uncertainty, and despair.

In Han China (202 BCE–220 CE), few luxury objects were as widely coveted as bronze mirrors. Typically circular and ranging from seven to thirty centimeters in diameter, these mirrors were crafted from high-tin bronze, with highly reflective surfaces on the front and intricate designs and auspicious inscriptions on the reverse.

The Allure of the Mirror explores how and why these objects, historically known as haowu (“fine things”), became so beloved throughout early imperial China. Tracing their production and consumption—from manufacture in imperial, princely, and private workshops to their roles in life and death—Yanlong Guo uncovers the varied ways these seemingly trivial objects took on social and cultural significance. Across social classes, mirrors had a wide range of uses as status symbols, personal tools, romantic tokens, family heirlooms, auspicious amulets, treasured gifts, and funeral offerings. Guo demonstrates how these “fine things,” once exclusive to elites, gradually became accessible to a wider segment of society. Mirrors, he argues, connected people across the empire, fostering a shared cultural community of aesthetic tastes and social values from royal courts to rural households.

Interdisciplinary and comprehensive, The Allure of the Mirror offers fresh insights into the relationship among art, society, and ideology in the Han Empire, revealing how decorative objects could bridge social divides and shape cultural identity.

Prior to European colonization, the world was thickly populated with hundreds of independent states and vibrant regional state systems. Yet these states are typically excluded from traditional international relations scholarship, which has mostly focused on the European experience.

This book provides a groundbreaking comparative analysis of non-Western states and state systems in the nineteenth century. Using an original data set on independent states during this period, Charles R. Butcher and Ryan D. Griffiths answer fundamental questions such as how many states there were, when they arose, and when they died, documenting the large number of states that were extinguished as a consequence of European colonialism. They explore the structure of nineteenth-century state systems in East Asia, South Asia, maritime Southeast Asia, and West Africa, examining the effects of war, trade, and interaction capacity. Through these case studies, Butcher and Griffiths provide novel perspectives on longstanding debates over state centralization and the choice between indirect and direct forms of rule.

Shedding new light on the dynamics of non-Western interstate relations during the nineteenth century, Before Colonization reveals striking similarities between state systems across diverse historical settings.

Does being in motion change how we think? Tracing the connections between thinking and transit—including walking, being transported by a vehicle, and many other modes—this innovative book shows how embodiment and movement deepen, expand, and transform creative thought.

Megan Craig and Edward S. Casey provide a collaborative phenomenological exploration of thought in motion, interspersing lively first-person accounts with broader philosophical inquiry. Their investigation, structured around the four ancient elements—water, air, earth, and fire—ranges across swimming, boats, balloons, planes, cars, trains, and other modes of transport. Craig and Casey invite readers to recall their own experiences of travel and how thinking changes in tandem with shifting environments and whatever conveys a person from place to place. They also consider how changing climates and evolving technologies, with new rhythms and materialities, have shaped human thinking in its many varieties.

Thinking in Transit celebrates forms of movement and motion that carry the body and mind out of their habituated routines. This book urges a change in how philosophers have traditionally framed the setting for serious thought: from the austere, solitary space of a study to populated places of interaction and passage.

The labor of literature is often thought of as a specialized craft, distinct from everyday work. In Stitch, Unstitch, Kristin Grogan traces an alternative vision of writing and the writer, arguing that modernist poetry was deeply shaped by ordinary labor and the people who performed it. This relationship provoked powerful political and aesthetic experiments—and allowed modernist poets to imagine ways of life beyond the demand to earn a living.

Poetic form, Grogan shows, offers ways to reflect on the meaning and worth of labor, particularly types of gendered labor that are typically unseen and undervalued. Her fine-grained readings locate modernist poetry within sites of social reproduction, factory work, craft labor, and other forms of manual labor, placing literary texts alongside objects such as constructivist posters and set design, household notes, and homemade books. Grogan considers Ezra Pound’s ideology of craft and artisanal labor; Lola Ridge’s immersion in the New York garment industry; Langston Hughes’s encounter with Soviet workers’ theater; Gertrude Stein’s gendered and queer domestic labors; and Lorine Niedecker’s employment as a hospital cleaner. Blending Marxist and feminist theory with attentive close readings, Stitch, Unstitch is a revelatory materialist account of the values of poetry.

States and institutions in both conventionally authoritarian and formally democratic societies overtly circumscribe freedom in any number of ways. Yet there are also subtler forms by which authorities and cultural forces compromise the choices of individuals in ways that do not seem, at first glance, to be coercive. This book brings together a distinguished set of scholars to examine covert constraints on academic, political, and economic freedom from a variety of angles, developing surprising and timely new insights.

Ranging across philosophy, economics, law, health, science, art, and the media, luminaries from different fields expose threats to freedom within avowedly liberal and democratic institutions and cultures. Their incisive essays, both analytical and historical, emphasize how economic inequality, academic orthodoxy, media control, racism, and gender roles undermine the potential for human flourishing. By considering such multifarious noncoercive threats, they illuminate the vexed notion of freedom. Lively and learned, this book offers a provocative and urgent understanding of the often-unacknowledged forces that restrict our choices.

Contributors include David Bromwich, Eric Foner, Robert Gooding-Williams, Michael Ignatieff, Laura Kipnis, Anya Schiffrin, Joseph E. Stiglitz, and Geoffrey R. Stone. In an essay and an interview with the volume editors, Noam Chomsky addresses the neoliberal assault on academic freedom.

In early 1867, a book of poems stunned the French literary world. Titled The Book of Jade, it featured Chinese calligraphy and named ancient Chinese poets as sources, leaving readers uncertain whether the collection was a translation or a French author’s invention. Though the book was published under a pseudonym, the author was quickly recognized as Judith Gautier, the young daughter of a prominent writer. Resembling neither contemporary French verse nor any conventional translation of the day, The Book of Jade opened the eyes of readers throughout Europe to classical Chinese poetry.

Chinese Songs in a French Key tells the extraordinary story of the birth, rebirth, and rich afterlife of The Book of Jade. Pauline Yu traces the research and creative process behind the book, including Gautier’s collaboration with a Chinese refugee known as Tin-Tun-Ling. She shows, through juxtapositions with original Chinese texts, how Gautier’s imaginative strategies conveyed core elements of Chinese poetry to a European audience. Yu explores how the work’s influence reverberated across French letters, Anglo-American modernist poetry, and the international history of translation. The story also unfolds within Gautier’s network of luminaries—such as Victor Hugo, Richard Wagner, and John Singer Sargent—and against the backdrop of France’s “discovery” of China through scholarship and plunder. Drawing attention to Gautier’s audacity and accomplishments, this deeply researched and elegantly written book provides new perspectives on the surprising routes cultural transmission can take.

Over the centuries, we have learned to peer into what was once invisible. Imaging devices like cameras, telescopes, microscopes, and MRI machines map the world around, beyond, and within us in ways the naked eye could never see. In so doing, these technologies have transformed our understanding of our place in the universe and our conception of our own bodies—and we may be on the cusp of an even greater revolution.

Daniel K. Sodickson—a physicist and biomedical imaging innovator—explores the rich history and surprising future of vision, from the evolution of eyes to emerging high-tech devices. Beginning in the early oceans, when organisms first developed sight, The Future of Seeing tells the stories of the many remarkable tools people have invented to extend our natural vision. Ranging from the tales of brilliant inventors to profiles of everyday people, this book shows how imaging has transformed the practice of medicine, reshaped the global economy, and complicated the notion of privacy. In the era of artificial intelligence, Sodickson argues, it will be reinvented even further, emulating not only our senses but also our brains. Inviting and eye-opening, The Future of Seeing is a revelatory look at what imaging teaches us about the way we see the world, each other, and ourselves.

A number of Black writers have drawn inspiration from the biblical tale of the expulsion from paradise. In this deeply interdisciplinary and poetically written book, Jamall A. Calloway explores the presence of Eden and the aftermath of the Fall in works by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Richard Wright, and Alice Walker. In reflecting on Eden, he contends, these writers rethought what paradise could mean in the face of the catastrophes of the Black experience.

By placing key novels in conversation with major religious thinkers, Calloway shows how Black writers adopted Edenic motifs to rebut orthodox interpretations of Genesis, with striking theological implications. He argues that Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room counters St. Paul’s proclamations on the mortification of the flesh, reads Morrison’s Paradise against St. Augustine’s City of God as a challenge to the exclusions of the Garden of Eden, investigates Wright’s use of Søren Kierkegaard’s interpretation of Adam in The Outsider, and demonstrates how Walker’s The Color Purple and Catholic theologian Ivone Gebara offer a radical reconceptualization of the serpent in Genesis. The book concludes with a reflection on Lucille Clifton’s poetry. Revealing the richness of Black writers’ engagement with theology, Imagining Eden is a profoundly original consideration of literature and liberation, God and humanity.

The concept of privacy is central to public life in the United States. It is the fulcrum of countless conflicts over reproductive rights and consumer protection, the power of tech companies and the reach of state surveillance. How did privacy come to take on such import, and what have the consequences been for American institutions and society?

Martin Eiermann traces the transformation of privacy from a set of informal cultural norms into a potent political issue. Around the turn of the twentieth century, in a nation that was searching for order amid rapid change and frequent moral panics about the ills of modern life, privacy spoke to emerging social problems and new technological realities. During this tumultuous period, political mobilization and judicial contestation shaped a legal, institutional, and administrative privacy architecture that has partly endured into the twenty-first century. Eiermann rebuts the claim that technological change renders privacy obsolete, demonstrating that the concept became increasingly capacious when it was applied to the social problems and political disputes of the information age. And he shows that it is often the selectivity—not the ubiquity—of governmental and corporate data collection that should elicit our concerns.

Drawing on rich archival materials and computational research methods, The Limiting Principle provides a deeply original sociological account of the history, social significance, and limitations of privacy in the modern United States.

During the brutal Italian occupation of Ethiopia (1936–1941), the country descended into endless counterinsurgency and mass violence, which specifically targeted local intellectuals with the sanction of Italy’s leading experts. Yet these atrocities followed decades of dialogue between Ethiopian and Italian researchers, and in the postcolonial era, their successors continued to debate Ethiopia’s past and future as survivors and perpetrators. This historical reckoning unfolded against the backdrop of Third World liberation, disputed colonial guilt, and the search for postcolonial justice.

Feasting on History is a wide-ranging intellectual history of the Italian-Ethiopian relationship, told through the intertwined lives of Heruy Wäldä Sellasé, an Ethiopian writer and civil servant, and Enrico Cerulli, an Italian Orientalist and colonial official. It takes place on the battlefields and detention sites of fascist empire, within the evolving institutions of the international system, and throughout the interlinked intellectual worlds of Europe, Africa, and the African diaspora. James De Lorenzi documents the violence perpetrated by experts across these spaces as well as the pioneering Ethiopian effort to address the crimes of empire through international law. He also explores a distinctive European tradition of Africa-focused Orientalism and its critical reception by Ethiopian, African, and Black American scholars, reconstructing a bold multilingual commentary on colonial knowledge, self-determination, and the global color line.

Challenging conventional narratives of African and European intellectual history, Feasting on History vividly illuminates the links among weaponized research, colonial trauma, and the modern international order.

French colonization dismantled Algerian names. Under the occupation that began in 1830, not only were Algerian towns and streets renamed in honor of French figures, but personal names were forced to follow French conventions and norms. Colonial authorities simplified and transformed Algerian names to suit their administrative and legal purposes, crudely transcribing and transliterating Arabic and Berber. They imposed a two-part name and surname model that stripped away the extended family ties and social context inherent to precolonial naming practices.

This groundbreaking history of personal names in nineteenth-century Algeria sheds new light on the symbolic violence of renaming and the relationship between language and colonialism. Benjamin Claude Brower traces the changes Algerians’ personal names suffered during the colonial era and the consequences for individuals and society. France’s imposition of new names, he argues, destabilized Algerians’ sense of self and place in the community, distorted local identities, and compromised institutions such as the family. Drawing on previously unstudied records, Brower examines different northwestern African naming traditions and how colonialism changed them. With the aid of literary and critical theory, he develops new insights into the name and its relationship to power and subjectivity. A rigorous theoretical and historical account of symbolic violence, The Colonization of Names unveils many unseen forms of harm under colonial rule.

Another pandemic is coming. It’s only a matter of time. It could be a novel flu virus, a biological weapon, even a prehistoric virus from melting glaciers—and we are not prepared. No one wants to endure the lockdowns and social isolation, the confusion and mixed messaging, or the fear and distrust that we experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic ever again. Yet that’s exactly the path we’re headed down if we erase the last pandemic from our memories.

In Before the Next Crisis, the public health expert Tista S. Ghosh implores us to remember. She shares the pandemic stories of everyday Americans from all walks of life—red and blue states, urban and rural areas. This gripping and relatable book recounts the real-life struggles that Americans faced: a Colorado grocery store manager dealing with harassment over mask policies, an Indiana police officer encountering a growing mental health crisis, a rural Wisconsin physician fighting rising public distrust, a California company leader struggling to keep frontline workers safe, and an Ohio health official grappling with the decision to cancel the city’s largest tourist event. These and other powerful narratives not only preserve the history of the pandemic but also highlight the lessons we must learn before the next health crisis—not just politicians or scientists, but all of us.

Glassblowing by hand might seem like a dying art, yet it is thriving: Studios and universities offer popular classes, and glass art is widely exhibited and sold. Amateur and professional glassblowers alike are captivated by the choreography of fire, smoke, and molten material. Why are people drawn to this ancient craft? What is distinctive about the social, physical, and intellectual experience of glassblowing? How does the body learn an art?

In Fire Craft, Erin E. O’Connor interweaves an immersive firsthand account of her experiences learning to blow glass with a sensuous ethnography of embodiment and community among glassblowers. Through compelling stories, such as her struggle to produce an elegant goblet, she shows how a novice becomes hooked by and committed to a craft. Reflecting on embodied knowledge, O’Connor considers how we negotiate mistakes and failures, how we strive to develop proficiency in the face of shortcomings, and how through making objects we make meaning. She also explores the history of glassblowing and how various social, environmental, and knowledge frameworks shape the valorization of craft. From the furnaces of empire to the hot bodies of collaboration and love, O’Connor reveals the interconnectedness of the body with the elemental world. A gripping tale of the social world and experience of glassblowing, Fire Craft passionately defends practical labor as intellectual work that changes self and society.

Sweet potatoes were among the American crops Christopher Columbus brought back to Europe—where they were thought to be an aphrodisiac. In China, this versatile root became a staple that fueled rapid population growth. Introduced to Japan to stave off famine, sweet potatoes later sustained the country’s imperial expansion. Because this hardy plant can thrive in almost any soil, it has long been cultivated as a subsistence crop in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Oceania. In recent years, Western health experts have begun touting the humble sweet potato as a “superfood” with numerous nutritional benefits.

Considering these events and many others, Staple to Superfood explores the sweet potato’s rich history and remarkable global influence. Q. Edward Wang demonstrates how this resilient root has not only nourished communities but also defined their identities. Tracing its journeys through the intricate networks of global trade and cultural exchange, he shows how the sweet potato transformed agricultural practices, culinary traditions, and social structures worldwide. From the Americas to Europe to Asia and the Pacific, the spread of this crop illuminates the varied paths that global development has taken. Wang also contrasts the sweet potato with its botanically unrelated namesake, the white potato. Blending agricultural, cultural, and historical perspectives, Staple to Superfood offers a fresh look at the power of food to transform societies. It is a compelling exploration of how the sweet potato shaped the modern world and continues to influence global food systems today.

Urban theater took shape in postindependence India as a large and complex field produced in more than sixteen major languages, including Bengali, Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati, and Kannada. The cosmopolitan engagement of leading playwrights with modernist and postcolonial literary movements around the world created distinctly new aesthetic and political approaches to Indian myth, history, and sociocultural experience, which had become the most prominent subjects in modern Indian drama. Yet even as critics and scholars of global modernism have increasingly turned their attention beyond North America and Europe, they continue to focus on dominant world languages at the expense of multilingual cultures such as India’s. Despite their originality and significance, modernist works written in Indian languages other than English remain neglected.

In Cosmo-Modernism and Theater in India, Aparna Bhargava Dharwadker develops a new framework for understanding non-Anglophone Indian modernisms by recovering crucial theoretical concepts and using them to analyze the writing, staging, and reception of major plays in multiple languages. She argues that the output of prominent mid- to late-twentieth-century playwrights such as Dharamvir Bharati, Mohan Rakesh, Badal Sircar, Vijay Tendulkar, Girish Karnad, and Habib Tanvir registers a decisive rupture from nineteenth-century forms of colonial modernity. In representing the ancient Indian past, the postcolonial urban present, and the rich repertoire of precolonial performance traditions, these authors’ works became highly inventive expressions of modernist classicism, realism, and traditionalism. Dharwadker shows how a decommercialized performance economy and the incessant activity of translation further enhanced modernist production, and she connects Indian modernisms to regional, national, and transnational networks. Offering bold new insights into the theory and practice of modernist drama, this book delivers a radical remapping of global modernisms.

Race, it is widely understood, is a social category that has no genetic basis, yet biological notions of race keep reemerging. Attempts to redress disparities in biomedical research emphasize recruiting racially representative trial participants. Forensic use of DNA evidence purports to pinpoint the race of a potential suspect. Genetic ancestry tracing companies explain test results to customers using racial categories. The makers of genomic databases seek to ensure racial inclusivity.

Jonathan Kahn argues that this predicament arises from a surprising source: the concept of diversity. Ranging across law, politics, science, and medicine, he examines the blurring of the distinction between social understandings of race and biological understandings of genetic variation. Because diversity has become such a central concept across domains, Kahn contends, it enables slippage between these contradictory ideas, entangling biological and social views of race. Tracing the parallel histories of the Human Genome Project, workforce diversification efforts, U. S. Supreme Court cases over affirmative action, the rise of precision medicine, and the COVID-19 vaccine trials, among others, he shows why diversity is often deployed in ways that threaten to biologize race or undermine efforts to address racial injustice. Combining incisive critique and interdisciplinary insight, The Uses of Diversity offers bracing new perspective on one of today’s most vexed concepts.

Dealing with the risks of climate change and disaster is a political process. It produces winners and losers, mobility and permanence, radical change and continuity, relief and suffering. For some, it ultimately leads to life or death. Yet consultants, academics, humanitarian agents, and politicians often simply propose well-intentioned ideas—resilience, sustainability, community participation, emergency shelter, green development—while failing to perceive the blind spots and unintended consequences of such approaches.

Debating Disaster Risk brings together leading global experts to explore the controversies that emerge—and the tough decisions that must be made—when cities, people, and the environment are at risk. Scholars and practitioners discuss the challenges of reducing vulnerability and rebuilding after destruction in an accessible and lively debate format, with commentary by researchers, students, and development workers from across the world. They emphasize the ethical consequences of decisions about how cities and communities should prepare for and react to disasters, considering issues such as housing, environmental protection, urban development, and infrastructure recovery.

A valuable resource for scholars, students, and practitioners in a variety of fields, this book provides an in-depth analysis of the difficult choices we face in dealing with disasters. As climate change accelerates, Debating Disaster Risk invites readers to grapple with the most pressing controversies.

This interdisciplinary book provides timely fresh perspective on Palestine-Israel by rethinking the nature of settler-colonial sovereignty and the relationship between land and people. Muhannad Ayyash argues that this relationship comes in two distinct forms: a settler-colonial type, practiced by the Israeli state, that consists of “lordship” over land and people, and a decolonial type, seen in Palestinian popular organizing, that he calls “land as life,” a reciprocal bond. The former is characterized by private ownership, possession, and violent expulsion of others; the latter by communal ownership, belonging to the land, and opposition to the violence of expulsion.

Ranging widely across theory and history, Ayyash contends that the opposition between these two types is at the core of the Palestinian-Israeli struggle. The choice before us today, he concludes, is between the continuation of the Israeli settler-colonial project in particular and the project of colonial modernity in general, or the commencement of a decolonial age in Palestine-Israel and beyond. Offering both novel theorizations and politically engaged analysis, Lordship and Liberation in Palestine-Israel illuminates how decolonial sovereignties represent an alternative to settler-colonial violence.

In the years following the Arab Spring, a number of Islamist insurgent groups conquered swaths of territory across the Middle East and North Africa and began governing civilian populations. These groups have been faced with the complexities of administering justice, collecting taxes, and providing public services such as health care and education. How do Salafi-Jihadist armed groups, which typically claim to be committed to ideological purity, approach administration, and what does this reveal about rule by insurgent forces?

This book is a groundbreaking comparative exploration of Salafi-Jihadist governance, drawing on in-depth case studies of the Islamic State in western Iraq and eastern Syria, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in northwestern Syria, and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in southern Yemen. Marta Furlan examines rebels’ experiments in ruling, considering issues such as the treatment of non-Muslims, the extent of civilian participation, the use of coercive measures, and the scope of social and political change. She assesses whether there is a single model of Salafi-Jihadist governance, the degree to which ideology and doctrine inform the behavior of rebel rulers, and the similarities and differences between Salafi-Jihadists and other nonstate armed groups. Offering a window into the inner workings of government and civilian life under Islamist power, Inside Salafi-Jihadist Governance sheds new light on rule by nonstate groups more broadly.

Chinese Encounters with America tells the stories of twelve women and men whose American experiences transformed their lives and influenced China’s trajectory, with a particular focus on the period after Beijing and Washington established full diplomatic relations in 1979. Each chapter recounts how these Chinese citizens interpreted America and adapted their understanding to bolster China’s quest for modernization.

Their professions range from diplomacy, business, and science to sports, education, and the arts, but their distinctive stories are united by shared questions: Why did they go the United States, and why did they return to China? What difference did their encounters with America make in their lives and careers? What do their experiences tell us about the complexities of Sino-American interactions?

At a time when US-China relations are contentious, this book challenges the idea that American and Chinese interests and values are incompatible. It shows that personal encounters have been instrumental in finding common ground, even when there are differences and disagreements. Through vivid and engaging profiles, Chinese Encounters with America offers a fresh, nuanced understanding of the world’s most pivotal relationship.

In both the United States and France, each side of the legal battle over same-sex marriage and parenthood relied heavily on experts. Despite the similarity of issues, however, lawmakers in each country turned to different sets of authorities: from economists and psychoanalysts to priests and ordinary people. They even prized different types of expertise—empirical research in the United States versus abstract theory in France.

Exploring the legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States and France, this book sheds new light on the power of experts to influence high-stakes democratic debates. Drawing on extensive interviews and ethnographic observation, Michael Stambolis-Ruhstorfer traces the divergences between the two countries, showing why some experts are ubiquitous in one but absent in the other. He argues that lawmakers, judges, lawyers, journalists, and activists covet something only experts can provide: the credibility and aura of authority, or “expert capital,” which they deploy to advance their agendas. Expert capital is not derived from scientific or technical merit alone but is produced through cultural norms, material resources, and social relationships, which vary greatly across national contexts.

Through the story of the fight over gay rights, By the Power Vested in Me reveals how and why certain experts—but not others—obtain the authority to shape public opinion and policy. At a time of soaring public distrust in experts, this book offers new ways to understand the contested political role of expertise and its consequences.

The introduction of gender quotas has significantly increased women’s representation in national legislatures—not only in democracies but also in many autocracies. To what extent has the growing number of women in authoritarian legislatures granted them more power and influence? What conditions help or hinder women’s political participation under autocratic regimes? And what does the role of women tell us about the politics of authoritarianism today?

Drawing on a decade of fieldwork and a vast data set collected across the Middle East and North Africa, Marwa Shalaby develops a new theory of women’s political representation in authoritarian regimes. She examines the dynamics of women’s political inclusion in three Arab monarchies, Morocco, Jordan, and Kuwait, with varying levels of quota implementation and where the strength and capacity of political parties differ widely. Shalaby demonstrates that the degree to which individual parties have been institutionalized plays a significant role in women’s legislative behavior and political power. Parties play integral roles in recruiting, cultivating, supporting, and elevating female candidates in contexts where women have been excluded from existing networks of power, in nondemocratic systems as well as democracies. Although the introduction of quota systems has expanded women’s numerical presence, the absence of institutionalized parties has limited their ability to gain influence. Nuanced and incisive, Varieties of Power offers grounded, comparative insights into the study of gender and politics, political representation, and authoritarianism in the Middle East and North Africa.

Ward’s Island in the East River sits just a short distance from Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx, yet it has been cordoned off from the rest of New York City. For nearly two centuries, it has been treated as a dumping ground for society’s most marginalized—the unhoused, recent immigrants, and people diagnosed with mental illnesses. Even today, its two psychiatric hospitals, homeless shelters, and residential substance-use treatment program house more than one thousand people, but these institutions are fenced off from the athletic fields and green space of the adjoining Randall’s Island Park.

Exiles in New York City shares untold stories from Ward’s Island, offering a new lens on the city’s past and present from the perspective of the marginalized. Philip T. Yanos—a clinical psychologist who grew up on Ward’s Island—explores the history of the island alongside the history of urban mental health systems in the United States. Drawing on archival documents and interviews with current residents and staff while weaving in recollections of his own childhood, he traces how the island became a place of exile and brings to life the failings of the approach to mental illness that it represents. This incisive and timely book reveals a part of New York City that has long been hidden in plain sight, and it also considers how to transform Ward’s Island for a new era.

Documentary films are often celebrated with aural metaphors: they give “voice” to the “voiceless” and ask the public to “listen.” But when did listening become synonymous with social justice? How exactly do documentaries train audiences to listen when they ask them to right historic wrongs or hold power to account?

The Documentary Audit challenges the association of listening with accountability and charts oppositional modes of listening otherwise. Pooja Rangan develops a framework for understanding how documentary practices have, under the mantle of accountability, provided a moral cover for listening habits that are used to profile, exclude, and incarcerate.

From the British Crown’s promotional films to Zoom meeting recordings, from disability-informed filmmaking in Japan to forensic efforts to expose anti-Palestinian violence in Hebron, Rangan explores how historical and contemporary practitioners have challenged and refused the lures of normative documentary listening habits in order to listen with an accent, listen in crip time, and listen like an abolitionist. Through an interdisciplinary approach that bridges documentary and sound studies while considering raciolinguistics, disability access, and legal forensics, Rangan demonstrates how the question of listening is central to the study of documentary. Far from being a neutral ethic, The Documentary Audit shows, listening creates the reality it purports to verify—with transformative political possibilities.

Principles of Bitcoin presents a holistic, first-principles-based framework for understanding one of the most misunderstood inventions of our time. By stripping away the hype, jargon, and superficial analysis that often surrounds the crypto industry, this book uncovers the true ingenuity behind Satoshi Nakamoto’s creation—and its profound implications for the future of money, governance, and individual freedom.

Vijay Selvam analyzes the technology, economics, politics, and philosophy of Bitcoin, making the case that only through this holistic understanding can we gain an appreciation of its true meaning and significance. Readers are invited to consider Bitcoin as a tool for individual empowerment, a catalyst for economic autonomy, and a challenge to traditional monetary systems. Selvam demonstrates why Bitcoin stands alone in the digital asset space as a path-dependent once-in-history invention that cannot be replicated.

Principles of Bitcoin is an invaluable resource for professionals in the financial world seeking a rigorous and accessible understanding of Bitcoin. Students, curious thinkers, and all who find the technology daunting will also benefit from its clear, foundational approach. Equipping readers with the tools to grasp the many facets of Bitcoin, this book is an ideal guide to exploring its role in shaping a more decentralized, transparent, and equitable future.

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, existence is perpetual transformation. Humans and gods become plants and animals, stones and stars—or something in between. No rigid distinctions remain untroubled. In his own time and in ours, Ovid’s work challenges fundamental assumptions about the universe and humans’ place in it.

Metamorphoses Reimagined offers a twenty-first-century retelling of Ovid’s masterpiece that decenters the human. Michael Marder reinvents the text in new genres—letters, essays, confessions, prayers, poetic fragments, and dramatic dialogues, among others—some picking up where the original left off, others reconceiving the narrative in alternative forms. Marder’s metamorphoses invert protagonists’ relationships and reinterpret their transformations, playing with stylistic adaptations and foregrounding nonanthropocentric points of view. Above all, they explore the metamorphosis of language itself and ask in what, if any, sense the notion and the figure of the human are worth holding onto today.

Providing fresh perspective on Ovid’s classic in light of contemporary concerns, Metamorphoses Reimagined is a work of breathtaking philosophical, literary, and linguistic experimentation, proposing creative ways to write and think, to be and become.

An emphasis on practicing meditation in yearslong retreats—whether in a cave or a cloister, alone or with a small number of peers—has been a defining feature of Tibetan Buddhism throughout its entire history. Although the life stories and writings of the Himalaya’s most famous hermits are well known, the history of this tradition and the details of its practice have largely remained a mystery.

A groundbreaking exploration of individual long-term meditative retreat in Tibetan Buddhism, Mountain Dharma tracks developments in ascetic discourse and practice from the twelfth century to the twentieth. David M. DiValerio provides a comprehensive reading of texts that offer instruction on the eremitic endeavor, comparing how dozens of authors have treated six key orienting concerns: place, people, food, sources of danger, the spiritual lineage, and time. The book traces a genealogy of the Tibetan ascetic self, demonstrating an increasing tendency to adopt practices that contrast the meditator with earlier generations of enlightened masters, defining the latter-day retreatant as a being in time. By viewing instructions for how to live in retreat as technologies of self, this book sheds new light on how the history of this tradition has been driven by evolving notions of personhood.

Methodologically innovative and richly sourced, Mountain Dharma sets a new standard for the historical study of asceticism.

Since we imagine something intentional about a community both in its formation and its function as a new entity, there is something both baffling and attractive about the idea of a “plant community.” Do plants know what they’re doing? Some claim our attention: good to eat, good to smell, get stuck to your clothes. For a majority, plants or plant communities arouse a restricted admiration: lawn. A lawn can be a plant community, an atrocious one to be sure. But I’m thinking of plant communities in the eyes of God, where the plants foregather in ancient times and set out toward infinity. These deserve the word community, and the individuals who make them up are original in the extreme, as they must be: they live in a tough town.

It is our luck that the eternal aspects of these daredevils have fallen to the eye of artist Lindy Smith who has used the sun in ways known best to her to reveal the souls of plants as lives, as archetypes, as semaphore. Their shapes seem to belong to dreams while for all their unexpectedness they are no more accidental than dreams. What we see emerges from the lives they’ve lived in deep time; their importance hangs over them as an aura. 

We long to say their names: milkweed, mullein, bulrush, fescue, rush, yarrow. Or, on the other hand, sumpweed, pigweed, spurge. They belong to the things we see for the first time while recognizing we’ve known them always, hence the longing to absorb their eternal forms. Creation—we have it by our fingertips, just. Smith’s images Smith has discovered the souls of so many plants I thought I knew and left their essential signatures on my mind that I will never see them in the same way again, or more to the point, forget them again. I wish I knew enough about the process to understand what help the sun has been in finding these plants out. But here they are, seen by an artist, and what help it is.—from the Preface by Tom McGuane

Cars are killing people and making the planet uninhabitable. Crashes take the lives of more than a million people around the world each year. Air pollution linked to motor vehicles contributes to even more untimely deaths. Highways and unsafe streets have devastated cities, yet traffic congestion still swallows up countless hours. And carbon emissions from transportation are a key driver of climate change, which now threatens to make the world unlivable. Why do we still worship at the altar of the car? How can we find alternatives that are healthier for the planet and ourselves?

This book exposes how “Big Car”—the complex of companies in the automobile, oil, insurance, media, and concrete industries that promote and entrench car dependence—has pursued profit at the expense of the common good. David Obst explores how Big Car gained almost immeasurable influence over our lives, weighing the benefits and the costs of reliance on private automobiles. He details how industry covered up the harms of lead additives, fought against seatbelts, and continues to fund climate-change denialism. Obst considers the future of mobility, surveying how cities—from Taipei to Tempe, Copenhagen to Chicago—are experimenting with forms of transportation that offer alternatives to the dominance of cars. Provocative and comprehensive, Saving Ourselves from Big Car is a powerful wake-up call for us to change how we use cars before it’s too late.

Why is it so difficult to account for the role of identity in literary studies? Why do both writers and scholars of Indian English literature express resistance to India and Indianness? What does this reveal about how non-Western literatures are read, taught, and understood? Drawing on years of experiences in classrooms and on U.S. university campuses, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan explores how writers, critics, teachers, and students of Indian English literatures negotiate and resist the categories through which the field is defined: ethnic, postcolonial, and Anglophone.

Overdetermined considers major contemporary authors who disavow identity even as their works and public personas respond in varied ways to the imperatives of being “Indian.” Chapters examine Bharati Mukherjee’s rejection of “ethnic” Americanness; Chetan Bhagat’s “bad English”; Amit Chaudhuri’s autofictional literary project; and Jhumpa Lahiri’s decision to write in Italian, interspersed with meditations on the iconicity of the theorists Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and Edward Said. Through an innovative method of accented reading and sharing stories and syllabi from her teaching, Srinivasan relates the burdens of representation faced by ethnic and postcolonial writers to the institutional and disciplinary pressures that affect the scholars who study their works. Engaging and self-reflexive, Overdetermined offers new insight into the dynamics that shape contemporary Indian English literature, the politics of identity in literary studies, and the complexities of teaching minoritized literatures in the West.

From birth to death, we care and are cared for by others. Yet we rarely acknowledge care except when it fails. In Love, Money, Duty, Rachel Adams examines the stories we tell about care, those who do the work, and those who depend on it. These narratives, she argues, help us better understand our complicated feelings about care and the obligations that come with it.

Combining insightful and compassionate readings of writers and artists—among them Toni Morrison, Susan Sontag, Roz Chast, Sally Mann, and Jamaica Kincaid—with stories of her own experiences, Adams analyzes the work, feelings, and ethical dilemmas associated with care, including unwelcome emotions such as boredom, resentment, exhaustion, and disgust. From the universal dependence of infancy to elder care and from the intimacy of home and family to institutions like hospitals, nursing facilities, and asylums, Love, Money, Duty considers our ambivalence about vulnerability and need and how it is shaped by capitalism, race, and gender.

Drawing from moral philosophy, gender and queer theory, critical race and disability studies, and health humanities, Adams treats care as a form of work, a feeling, an ethic, and an art. Exploring the radical possibilities of care and the devastating consequences of its failure, this book invites readers to appreciate care that works, recognizing the creativity and resourcefulness of dependent people and their caregivers.