Columbia University Press

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.

D. T. Suzuki’s 1950s lectures at Columbia University were foundational for the postwar Zen boom. Speaking softly in a bookcase-lined room, Suzuki, then in his eighties, introduced East Asian Buddhism to a rapt audience of the general public, scholars, and students. He offered a distinctive interpretation of Zen, weaving together his understanding of classical Buddhist texts, especially the Flower Garland Sutra, with Christian mysticism, psychology, and twentieth-century European and American philosophy. The freewheeling lectures captivated listeners drawn from the New York intelligentsia and art world—including Carolyn Brown, John Cage, Arthur Danto, Sari Dienes, Erich Fromm, Phillip Guston, Ibram Lassaw, and Dorothy Norman—and catalyzed public interest in Buddhism.

Spreading Indra’s Net presents Suzuki’s 1952–1953 lectures in full, giving a vivid look at how one of the most important global Buddhist figures of the twentieth century interpreted Zen for an American audience. Drawing on archival research in Japan and the United States, editor Richard M. Jaffe provides an extensive introduction that traces Suzuki’s path to Columbia, analyzes the content of the lectures, and surveys their reception. Among the most accessible works of a major figure and a record of a crucial moment in New York history, this book displays Suzuki’s gifts as a teacher, scholar, writer, and thinker.

One of China’s first works of science fiction, New Story of the Stone is a belated twentieth-century sequel to the beloved eighteenth-century masterpiece Story of the Stone (more famously known as Dream of the Red Chamber). The story follows protagonist Jia Baoyu, borrowed from the original Story, as he is dramatically hurled forward over a hundred years from his own time into a bewildering future: first the decadent semicolonized late Qing China of the author’s own time and later an astonishing high-tech Confucian utopia called the Realm of Civilization.

Baoyu is equally disoriented in both places: in China proper, he is distressed by the growth of foreign influence and weakening of the traditional moral code in favor of capitalist consumerism and selfish gain; in the Realm of Civilization, he is amazed by everything he encounters—from flying cars and ingenious medical technologies to the perfectly moral populace. Seen through Baoyu’s eyes, the Realm is everything that late Qing China has failed to be and offers a hopeful vision of what it might yet become.

This quick-paced romp deftly highlights some of the major preoccupations of the tumultuous final decade of China’s last dynasty while raising important existential questions about China’s future. Enlivened by author Wu Jianren’s vivid imagination and wry sense of humor, this playful, satirical adventure is essential reading for lovers of science fiction and Chinese literature in translation.

A number of European authors who survived concentration camps, ghettos, and besieged cities in the middle of the twentieth century chose not to write straightforward memoirs or testimonials but instead to fictionalize their experiences. By manipulating narrative time and point of view and altering biographical facts, these writers produced literary texts that challenge common notions of what constitutes an appropriate representation of collective trauma. How might such works provide a deeper understanding of historical truth than the facts alone? What does the literature of the camps reveal about present-day spaces of confinement?

Worlds Apart explores the ethics of representation by reading the works of writers who use the techniques of literary fiction to depict survival in these precarious spaces. Benjamin Paloff traces the complex relationship between fact and truth in these texts, disentangling writers’ individual experiences from fictional elements that universalize that experience and, in so doing, show the camp to be an institution of the present. Touring the unusual genre conventions of these works, he weighs crucial questions about what constitutes “truth” in historical representation, literature, and the popular imagination. Reading across Czech, French, German, Polish, Russian, and Yiddish, including lesser-known and untranslated works, Paloff considers portrayals of the Shoah, the Gulag, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and the blockade of Leningrad. Bold, nuanced, and rich in comparative insight, Worlds Apart argues forcefully for the moral urgency of recognizing that the camp is not simply a historical artifact but a basic institution of contemporary society.

In the early twentieth century, as the multiethnic Qing empire transformed into the Republican Chinese nation-state, Chinese Muslims faced new challenges, confronting competing visions of nation-building, religion, secularism, democracy, and modernity. In this book, Hale Eroğlu explores how a group of key figures navigated this complex landscape, offering a transnational intellectual history of Chinese Muslim thought.

Muslim Transnationalism in Modern China provides a portrait of underrecognized reformists who aimed to turn Muslim subjects into active Chinese citizens and revive “true” Islam in order to aid China’s development and promote peace. Eroğlu examines reformists’ engagement with local and transnational Muslim currents, spanning “orthodox,” “heterodox,” reformist, secular, and socialist movements from Egypt, Britain, India, Turkey, and the Soviet Union. She reveals their varied strategies and highlights how they adapted global ideas to address local challenges such as the policies of the Nationalist and Communist parties, the antireligion discourse of the New Culture Movement, and the anti-Islam rhetoric of Christian missionaries. Drawing from Republican and early Communist-era journals, Chinese translations of Islamic sources, and memoirs and travelogues, this book offers a nuanced understanding of Chinese-speaking Muslim intellectuals’ efforts to balance local and global influences in shaping their community’s future.

The political turmoil in Libya—which has claimed more than 20,000 lives and frustrated international partners since 2011—is an immensely complex struggle for power with a dizzying array of participants. How did Libya’s “Arab Spring” devolve into civil war after the removal of longtime leader Muammar Gaddafi?

Ruining Revolution examines Libya’s descent into chaos, pinpointing the roles of Islamist and Salafi forces. Focusing on two key but underestimated movements, the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood and Libyan Salafi-Madkhalis, Inga K. Trauthig argues that ideological groups have been of greater importance than previously assumed. She maps out crucial junctions in Libya’s recent history, tying in these movements’ pasts, to show how Islamist and Salafi forces have stoked instability. Although the 2011 Libyan revolution was not religious, these groups proved surprisingly well-equipped to capitalize on social and political fissures and to attract international support.

Featuring deep research and rigorous analysis, this book draws on a range of sources, including in-depth interviews and propaganda shared on social media. Ruining Revolution illuminates the dynamics that have shaped contemporary Libya—with significant policy implications for regional engagement—and offers broader insight into the underlying workings of a range of radical groups.

Why are people inclined to believe misinformation? This wide-ranging and comprehensive book shines a light on how false beliefs take root and spread, exploring the cognitive, emotional, and social factors that make us all susceptible to misinformation.

Challenging approaches that focus solely on education and media literacy, Matthew Facciani emphasizes the important role identities and social ties have in the complex interplay of forces that lead people to believe things that are not true. Susceptibility to misinformation is largely shaped by social dynamics. The pressure to affirm one’s personal and group identities can leave individuals vulnerable to false beliefs. Facciani examines both offline and online connections, highlighting how social media, news media, and personal networks can promote and amplify false claims. To bring social-scientific findings to life, he shares the stories of people who fell for misinformation, with contemporary examples including the COVID-19 pandemic and antivaccine movement.

Facciani examines the effectiveness of various approaches to combating misinformation, underscoring the importance of understanding the psychological and sociological mechanisms behind its spread. He provides actionable recommendations for reducing the influence of misinformation at all levels, from having productive conversations with friends and family to rebuilding trust in institutions. Distilling the latest research accessibly and featuring compelling case studies, Misguided equips readers with practical strategies to counteract false beliefs.

In scarcely a century, Salafism has transformed Sunni Islam. Claiming to be a revival of the purest form of Islam, this movement promotes ultraconservative social and religious norms and rejects all non-Sunni religious groups. In Egypt, its influence has grown to the point of reshaping mainstream conceptions of the faith. How did such a deep religious transformation sweep through Egypt so rapidly? What is the significance of Salafism for the country’s political scene, both before and after Hosni Mubarak fell from power in 2011?

Twilight of the Saints examines the history of Salafism in Egypt from its 1920s emergence in Cairo’s scholarly circles through the present day, shedding new light on the movement’s shifting relationship to politics. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and interviews, Stéphane Lacroix illustrates how Salafism redefined what it means to be Muslim for Egyptians. He emphasizes the factors that distinguish the Salafis from the Muslim Brotherhood, despite their parallel trajectories. The Salafis, who initially shunned oppositional politics, were looked upon more favorably by the authorities, who perceived a greater threat from their Islamist counterparts. Lacroix explores how Salafism influenced the dynamics of the 2011 revolution and the democratic transition that ended with the army’s takeover of the country, as well as how it has fared since. Twilight of the Saints offers an in-depth, authoritative understanding of the relationship of Salafism, politics, and authoritarianism in Egypt, with significant implications for the wider Muslim world.

As we live our lives, hearing seems to be something that we simply have, not something that we do. Yet in a wide variety of occupations and activities, people must develop their hearing skills to achieve proficiency. How do people learn to hear?

This innovative book investigates strategies and techniques for honing hearing in medicine, music, outdoor adventuring, and Morse code operation. Sarah Maslen uncovers tricks of the trade and forms of communal assistance for crafting these largely unconscious practices. She shows that hearing is far more complex than is often assumed and that it depends on competencies that extend beyond the ear. In so doing, Maslen explodes myths of genius and natural talent and the idea that certain skills are the province of particular kinds of people. Overcoming the distance between insiders and outsiders requires access to the collective support that cultivates seemingly natural sense abilities.

Learning to Hear examines vivid and varied cases, such as how doctors listen for a heart murmur, how musicians build the skills to play along with others, how adventurers sense dangers like melting ice or falling rocks while climbing, and how telegraph operators develop a feel for Morse code. A deeply original exploration of the cultivation of hearing, this book offers a new approach to embodied experience.

In the last third of the twentieth century, the Arab intellectual and political scene polarized between totalizing doctrines—nationalist, Marxist, and religious—and radical critique. Arab thinkers were reacting to the disenchanting experience of postindependence and a widespread sense of malaise, as well as to authoritarianism, intolerance, injustice, failed development, and successive defeats by Israel. The foundational account of these responses, Contemporary Arab Thought illuminates the relationship between cultural and political critique in the work of major Arab thinkers. Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab also connects Arab debates to the postcolonial issues of Latin America and Africa, revealing the shared struggles of different regions.

Since its first publication in 2009, this book has stood as the foremost account of contemporary Arab debates on culture, philosophy, modernity, tradition, identity, and liberation. It is widely used in Middle Eastern studies courses, and it has become a classic in the field of Arab intellectual history. Contemporary Arab Thought now features an extensive new introduction that reconsiders post-1967 Arab intellectual history in light of the 2011 uprisings and the upheavals that have occurred over the intervening years. Kassab critically reflects on the book’s arguments and the responses it has provoked, and she surveys the new preoccupations that have emerged in Arab debates since 2011. As crises again overtake the Middle East, this landmark work continues to offer indispensable insight into the richness of contemporary Arab thought.

From In Borneo, the Land of the Head-Hunters to The Epic of Everest to Camping Among the Indians, the early twentieth century was the heyday of expedition filmmaking. As new technologies transformed global transportation and opened new avenues for documentation, and as imperialism and capitalism expanded their reach, Western filmmakers embarked on journeys to places they saw as exotic, seeking to capture both the monumental and the mundane. Their films portrayed far-flung locales, the hardships of travel, and the day-to-day lives of Indigenous people through a deeply colonial lens.

Nomadic Cinema is a groundbreaking history of these films, analyzing them as visual records of colonialism that also offer new possibilities for recognizing Indigenous histories. Alison Griffiths examines expedition films made in Borneo, Central Asia, Tibet, Polynesia, and the American Southwest, reinterpreting them from decolonial perspectives to provide alternative accounts of exploration. She considers the individuals and institutions—including the American Museum of Natural History—responsible for creating the films, the spectators who sought them out, and the Indigenous intermediaries whose roles white explorers minimized. Ambitious and interdisciplinary, Nomadic Cinema ranges widely, from the roots of expedition films in medieval cartography and travel writing to still-emerging technologies of virtual and augmented reality. Highlighting the material conditions of filmmaking and the environmental footprint left by exploration, this book recovers Indigenous memory and sovereignty from within long-buried sources.

Slow motion has become perhaps the least special effect in film and media, a stylistic technique for showing violence, dream sequences, and flashbacks or other experiences outside ordinary time. We see so much slow motion on our screens today that we can look past its history and forget how rare it was before the 1960s, when films such as The Wild Bunch, Bonnie and Clyde, and 2001: A Space Odyssey helped it explode in popularity at a moment of cultural change and social upheaval. This ambitious book tells the story of slow motion, tracing a broader fascination with the uneven speeds of modern life and our ability to comprehend them.

Downtime explores the history and aesthetics of slow motion, from its origins in early film to its prominence today. Mark Goble argues that the effect’s sudden visibility after 1968 registers experience of modernity as a period of perpetual acceleration that somehow makes even the smallest intervals of time feel endless. Ranging across literature, art, and cinema—including novels by William Faulkner, Don DeLillo, and W. G. Sebald as well as Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust—he describes how writers and filmmakers depict the velocities and durations of contemporary life. Goble reveals the twentieth century and its aftermath as figured in slow motion: rushing past and deliriously delayed, everything going fast and slow at once. Downtime is about time and its technologies in an accelerated world that can advance only in slow motion.

The worldwide spread of the internet has revolutionized communication at a harrowing cost: the relentless commodification of attention. Algorithm-driven capitalism extracts profit from not only physical bodies but also the emotional and creative labor of internet users. This economic system alienates us from our inmost selves and gives us only a gnawing longing that cannot be satiated—a spiraling collective mental health crisis. The exchange is deeply unequal: we pay attention and receive alienation.

Aarushi Bhandari offers a new way to understand the political economy of attention, combining quantitative analysis and personal narrative to critique the role of information and communications technologies in global society. Ranging across levels, from international development policy to online social movements through individual internet users, she examines how these technologies have fostered a host of unequal exchanges. Pervasive inequalities—between richer and poorer countries, between progressive social movements and the reactions against them, and between technological elites and the online population—now reinforce one another, with far-reaching consequences. Along the way, Bhandari shares her own journey as a chronically online millennial woman growing up among the Kathmandu elite in a dominant-caste Hindu family during the Nepali Civil War. A bold and incisive critical analysis, Attention and Alienation also considers how to reclaim the potential of the internet and design new systems that prioritize collective well-being.

What is beauty, and what is its political function? In what ways might it help undermine white supremacy and cultivate a more democratic political culture? Democracy and Beauty shines a light on W. E. B. Du Bois’s attempts to answer these questions during the decade surrounding the First World War and, in so doing, offers a groundbreaking account of the philosopher’s aesthetics.

Robert Gooding-Williams reconstructs Du Bois’s defense of the political potential of beauty to challenge oppressive systems and foster an inclusive democracy. White supremacy is a powerful force that defies rational revision, Du Bois argued, because it is rooted in the entrenched routines of its adherents. Beauty, however, has a distinctive role to play in the struggle against white supremacy. It can strengthen resolve and ward off despair by showing the oppressed that they can alter their social world, and it can unsettle and even transform the pernicious habits that perpetuate white supremacy. Gooding-Williams also explores Du Bois’s account of the interplay among white supremacy, Christianity, capitalism, and imperialism as well as key tensions in his work. A rich engagement with Du Bois’s philosophy of beauty, this book demonstrates the relevance of his social thought and aesthetics to present-day arguments about Black pessimism, Black optimism, and the aesthetic turn in Black studies.

Consider the lucky few. They studied hard and aced high-stakes tests, survived demanding schooling and extracurriculars, graduated from top colleges and immediately landed high-pay, high-status corporate positions in tall buildings. What happens after this middle-class dream of fast-track careers comes true?

White-Collar Blues follows the Turkish members of the global elite workforce as they are selected into, survive within, and opt out of coveted employment at transnational corporations. State-employed doctors, lawyers, and engineers were long seen as role models until Turkey followed the global tide of neoliberalism and began to embrace freer circulation of capital. As world-renowned corporations transformed Istanbul into a global city, Turkey’s best and brightest have increasingly sought employment at brand-name firms. Despite achieving upward mobility within and beyond Turkey, however, many Turkish professionals end up feeling disappointed, burned out, and trapped in their corporate careers.

Drawing from more than one hundred interviews in Istanbul and New York City, Mustafa Yavaş develops a theory of middle-class alienation, explaining how so-called “good jobs” fail elite workers. Yavaş shows how educational investments in an increasingly competitive landscape lead to high hopes, which then clash with poor work-life balance, low intrinsic satisfaction, and a felt lack of meaning from labor in corporate workplaces. Highlighting the trade-off between freedom and financial security, White-Collar Blues reveals the hidden costs of conflating the quest for socioeconomic status with the pursuit of happiness.

Built on the grounds of a former cotton plantation, the Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington, offered agricultural and industrial education as a strategy for Black self-determination. There—and in many other communities in the U.S. South, the Caribbean, and Central America—Black people repurposed and regenerated what had been a place of enslavement into a site for imagining alternative futures.

Jarvis C. McInnis charts a new account of Black modernity by centering Tuskegee’s vision of agrarian worldmaking. He traces the diasporic ties and networks of exchange that linked Black communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although Washington is often regarded as an accommodationist, McInnis shows how artists, intellectuals, and political leaders—including George Washington Carver, Jean Price-Mars, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Marcus Garvey—adapted Tuskegee’s methods into dynamic strategies for liberation in places like Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti, and Jamaica. Even as the legacy of the plantation continued to circumscribe Black life, these thinkers found resources in its ruins to forge new theories and practices of progress, aesthetic innovation, and freedom that contributed to the New Negro Movement of the 1920s and 1930s.

In contrast to traditional understandings of Black modernity as urban and premised on northward migration, McInnis foregrounds rural settings and practices of place making, rootedness, and liberatory agriculture. Shedding new light on the transnational influence of a historically Black institution in the U.S. South, Afterlives of the Plantation remaps Black cultural, intellectual, and political histories down to the very soil.

This book is a nuanced and comprehensive account of the intricate politics surrounding public sector pensions, an issue that has become increasingly contentious in recent years. Drawing from an array of case studies and theoretical perspectives, it delves into how public sector pensions are negotiated, structured, and sustained, revealing the consequences for governance, labor relations, and public policy.

Carolyn Abott examines the historical development of public sector pensions, emphasizing the sociopolitical factors that have shaped their evolution and the ongoing debates about their sustainability. She uncovers the political and economic considerations that influence pension policy, highlighting the tensions among public employees, governments, and taxpayers. Abott also addresses the broader implications for economic inequality and intergenerational equity, offering a distinctive perspective on the intersection of public finance and political power.

The Politics of Public Pensions concludes with recommendations for reform that balance the needs of retirees with the fiscal realities faced by governments, providing a roadmap for a sustainable and equitable future. Combining qualitative and quantitative methods, this rigorous book delivers essential insights for policy makers, scholars, and anyone interested in public finance.

What do Americans truly want in a novel? What would it look like if their preferences and aversions materialized in book form? In People’s Choice Literature, Tom Comitta has taken up this challenge, writing two groundbreaking novels based on a nationwide poll about literary taste—one featuring the story elements Americans most desire and another containing everything Americans despise.

The Most Wanted Novel is a fast-paced thriller evoking page-turners by Dan Brown, David Baldacci, and Janet Evanovich. It follows a California woman pulled into a tech tycoon’s apocalyptic ambitions after her brother’s kidnapping, teaming up with a hunky FBI agent with a tragic past. The Most Unwanted Novel is a genre-bending doorstopper: an epistolary Christmas novel set on a near-future Mars, where elderly aristocratic tennis players scour the globe for lost love, venturing from the coldest of arctic wastelands to the darkest caverns of the macabre. Variously recalling Kathy Acker, César Aira, and Philip K. Dick, it features sentient robots, talking animals, and a hundred-page collection of horror stories.

People’s Choice Literature is inspired by the artists Komar and Melamid, who created two now-infamous paintings based on opinion polling. A similar experiment by Dave Soldier produced “The Most Wanted Song” and “The Most Unwanted Song.” Comitta has adapted these methods to fiction, drawing on readers’ preferences about everything from genre to verb tense to characters’ identity, and incorporating machine learning data and passages written in collaboration with a large language model. Audacious and shockingly entertaining, People’s Choice Literature also asks big questions about taste, authorship, and the notion of “good writing.”

In the early 1950s, the young Michel Foucault took a keen interest in the method of existential analysis—Daseinsanalyse—developed by the Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger. He gave a lecture course on this topic at the University of Lille in the spring of 1953 and wrote a detailed introduction to the 1954 French translation of Binswanger’s Dream and Existence (1930), in which he promised a forthcoming book that would “situate existential analysis within the development of contemporary reflection on man.” This book presents Foucault’s unpublished manuscript on Binswanger and existential analysis for the first time in English, offering crucial insight into his intellectual development.

Foucault carries out a systematic examination of Daseinsanalyse, contrasting it with psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology and championing its ambition to understand mental illness. In his critique of existential analysis, Foucault began his turn toward emphasizing the primacy of experience, which would lead to the radically new perspective and genealogical methods of The History of Madness and The History of Sexuality. Revealing a little-known influence on Foucault’s historicist approach, Binswanger and Existential Analysis reminds us of his unparalleled ability to destabilize our conceptions of self.

The films of Pedro Almodóvar teem with characters who at once are and are not alter egos of the director. In film after film, the Spanish auteur mines his past for alternative selves, telling and retelling formative stories from his own life, plumbing the depths of his memory while exploring other lives he might have led. What can Almodóvar’s work tell us about the quest for self-knowledge—for understanding who we are and who we might yet become?

James Miller considers seven of Almodóvar’s most personal films, arguing that together they offer a revealing self-portrait of the director and his search for meaning. Beginning with Volver, Miller traces Almodóvar’s signature obsessions backward and forward through the director’s filmography. Deeply shaped by the counterculture of the 1960s—which arrived belatedly in Franco’s Spain—Almodóvar has long been fascinated by the exhilarating power and devastating limitations of artistic and sexual transgression. In rich readings, Miller shows how Almodóvar tests the blurry line between fiction and reality, the bounds of individual freedom, and the durability of a sense of self. In so doing, the director turns cinema into a form of philosophical investigation and self-exploration. A keenly observed, masterfully written portrait of one of world cinema’s greatest creative forces, The Passion of Pedro Almodóvar finds in film new ways to tell the story of a life.

This book challenges dominant understandings of both economic inequality and the future of work. Leading scholars in law, social sciences, and the humanities consider the production and reproduction of global hierarchies by revisiting and deploying three critical approaches that emerged in the late twentieth century: racial capitalism, world-systems theory, and critical legal distributional analysis. They demonstrate that these methods—especially when brought together—offer new insights into the forces that entrench the asymmetries of power and wealth that are too often shorthanded as inequality. They also uncover elisions and erasures of the past and present in prevailing technological-determinist narratives about the future of work.

Hierarchies at Work features powerful, grounded studies of the dynamics of work and livelihood in sites ranging from garment factories in Jordan and palm oil fields in Colombia to dairy farms in the United States. These studies underscore the necessity of thinking about the future of work and livelihoods through their racialized past and present and recognizing the systemic role of law in unequal distribution. Highlighting alternative imaginaries that contest systems of domination and subordination, this timely book offers resources to spur more just futures across local and global levels.

Since World War II, the U.S. military has taken a keen interest in shaping press coverage and, through it, public perception and democratic oversight of the armed forces. After misjudging the domestic political landscape during the Vietnam War, Army leaders embraced media management, recognizing that control over information had become central to how wars are fought. Even as the Army presented itself as a scrupulously apolitical organization, its leaders strove to reshape their political environment through public relations.

This book tells the story of the U.S. Army’s deepening involvement in media management over six decades and offers new ways to understand the military as a political actor. Thomas Crosbie examines how the Army gradually transformed its relationship with the civilian government and the public by engaging with the press. He traces Army media management from its origins as an ad hoc task to its professionalization and formalization, alongside the Army’s rise as a political force, its precipitous fall in the Vietnam War era, and its renewed ascent after learning key lessons from the experience of Vietnam. The Political Army draws on the records of Army leaders, archives of major public affairs figures and organizations, and extensive interviews with war correspondents, public affairs officers, and senior Army staff. Demonstrating how the U.S. Army gained, at great expense, potent political sway, this book provides a theoretically rich account of military politics and what it means for democracy.

Cities are typically thought of as permanent. Structures, streets, infrastructure, and other features of the built environment, even if they are periodically replaced, are intended to endure. But temporary, flexible spaces and uses are essential to how cities function and the ways urban dwellers inhabit them. Such adaptability, moreover, is fundamental if cities are to meet the challenges of the future.

This book examines temporary urbanisms across varied global contexts, considering their significance for cities and everyday life as well as for policy and practice. It brings together many distinct forms and facets of temporariness and adaptability—from sites of consumption by privileged residents to the survival strategies of marginalized groups—drawing on examples spanning five continents. Lauren Andres explores the driving forces of adaptability as well as the power dynamics and tensions between temporariness and permanence. She highlights how adaptability enhances livability, sustainability, and resilience, showing its importance for addressing crises such as climate change, socioeconomic inequalities, and pandemics. Authoritative and wide-ranging, Adaptable Cities and Temporary Urbanisms reveals why experimentation and creativity are crucial to the present and future of cities.

What does it mean to love? Does love complete us, giving us purpose and meaning? Or does it tie us down and even harm us? Is erotic desire complicit in oppression, or could it deliver liberation? Are our desires extricable from the wrongs of our societies? And in today’s world, is love still worth the trouble?

This book develops a critical theory of sexual love and friendship, offering profound new ways to understand the troublesome nature of eros. Federica Gregoratto explores the ambivalence of erotic love, which is at once intimately interwoven with heterosexism, racism, and neoliberal capitalism yet entices us with the tantalizing possibility of transformation. Drawing on a rich array of sources—from Frankfurt School critical theory to feminist thought and contemporary philosophies of emotions and affects, as well as poetry, novels, films, and music—she argues that love provides unexpected resources for political agency, resistance, and emancipation. Gregoratto makes a passionate defense of erotic freedom as an adventurous process through which we understand, together with others, who we are and who we want to become, both in our individual existences and in our social lives. Wide-ranging and daring, Love Troubles invites us to reflect on our fraught amorous experiences, showing why we should cherish and learn from them.

Under the Eastern Han dynasty (25–220 CE), a self-described recluse wrote a series of essays denouncing the evils of his time. Assailing corruption, misrule, and neglect of the common people, Wang Fu’s Essays of a Recluse (Qianfulun) offers a rare outsider view of culture, society, and government during this period. This book presents the first full English translation of the Qianfulun, one of the most significant works to survive from the Eastern Han period.

Wang’s essays range across moral philosophy, cosmology, education, military affairs, and conflict in the borderlands. The essays decry governmental corruption and rampant litigiousness, as well as the callous neglect of the poor and the exploitation of women. To remedy these failures, Wang Fu calls for heeding the wisdom of the classics and implementing procedures for recruiting worthy officials. His focused interest in the common people and sensitivity to their travails make Essays of a Recluse a rich source of information about daily life during the Eastern Han period, providing insights into folk religion, divination, marriage practices, and the legal system. Widely admired in his lifetime, Wang’s essays were later singled out by Han Yu (768–824 CE) as one of the three great works of the period. Anne Behnke Kinney and John S. Major’s expert translation makes an important but notoriously complex and difficult work accessible to a range of English-language readers.

The proliferation of railroads around the world was integral to the emergence of a global market-based economy at the turn of the twentieth century. This deeply researched and comprehensive book examines the history of rail in Japan from a global perspective, offering new insight into the connections between the world economy and Japan’s industrialization. Naofumi Nakamura traces the international locomotive trade and the growth of the Japanese railway industry, considering its ties to Japan’s domestic economic development and later imperial expansion. He investigates locomotive manufacturing and distribution in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focusing on how this industry came to Japan and then became a major domestic sector.

Nakamura argues that rail, introduced as an essential tool for nation-state building, was transformed into a tool for empire after the late 1890s. Japan sought to develop its domestic economy in response to globalization, yet had to balance the desire to localize industry with its imperial ventures. This necessitated imports from Western manufacturers until just before the First World War, by which time a domestic rail industry formed through government-led technology transfer and development found new outlets in Japan’s colonies and sphere of influence. Drawing on an extensive array of archival materials, Trading Locomotives sheds new light on the transnational nature of the industrial revolution in Japan and the world.

A poet, scholar, philosopher, religious thinker, translator, and teacher, Viacheslav Ivanov (1866–1949) was one of the most extraordinary figures of Russia’s tumultuous twentieth century. As a young scholar, he worked with European luminaries, studying ancient history with Theodor Mommsen and Sanskrit with Ferdinand de Saussure. Upon returning to Russia in 1905, Ivanov emerged as a major poet and theorist of Russian Symbolism. The Wednesday gatherings in his apartment attracted Alexander Blok, Nikolai Berdiaev, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Osip Mandel’shtam, and Anna Akhmatova. After the Bolshevik Revolution, he worked in the People’s Commissariat for Education, devising utopian plans for Soviet theater. Even so, Lenin personally rejected his application for travel abroad in 1920. Four years later, Ivanov left the Soviet Union for Italy, where he became a Catholic and spent his last years working for Vatican institutions.

This definitive biography of Ivanov tells the full story of his life and work amid the cataclysmic events of his time. Michael Wachtel traces Ivanov’s writings across languages and countries, following his trail through Moscow, St. Petersburg, Baku, Berlin, Paris, London, Geneva, Athens, Pavia, and Rome. Though his life was marked by seemingly contradictory elements, including occult experimentation, belief in Russian Orthodoxy, defense of the authority of the Roman Catholic Church, and unconventional sexual mores—notably bisexuality and a marriage to his stepdaughter—Wachtel shows how Ivanov reconciled his shifting selves. Revealing Ivanov as a cultural catalyst of wide-ranging influence, this book opens a new window onto twentieth-century Russian and European intellectual life.

What is the relationship between the ethical transformation of the self and the political transformation of the world? This book explores the ways several twentieth-century thinkers can help us relate the “care of the self” to the “care of the other,” tracing their accounts of how and why practices intended to change an individual can help spur social and political change, just as collective political action can produce a transformation of the self.

Daniel Louis Wyche examines the political implications of what he calls practices of ethical self-change. These include Pierre Hadot’s notion of “spiritual exercises”; what the French sociologist of labor Georges Friedmann calls the “interior effort”; Michel Foucault’s ethics of the “care of the self”; what Martin Luther King Jr. refers to as the work of “self-purification” integral to direct action; and Audre Lorde’s claim that caring for herself constitutes a form of “political warfare.” Wyche argues that these concepts can collectively provide an understanding that effaces distinctions between the care of the self, the other, and the community in a way that avoids reducing the political to the ethical. Ambitious and nuanced, The Care of the Self and the Care of the Other offers a framework for unifying individual moral action and collective political life.

What is the role of professional scholars in civic life? How and why should academics seek to reach audiences beyond their disciplines and institutions? Must there be tension between advancing along an academic career path and taking part in public conversations, or can these goals reinforce each other?

This book is a practitioner’s guide to civic engagement today, showing current and aspiring social scientists how to build a career in the public sphere. Drawing from personal experience and in-depth research, Philip N. Cohen gives straightforward advice that acknowledges professional risks as well as rewards. He calls on readers to embrace the reciprocal relationship between professional scholarship and active citizenship, arguing that aligning personal and vocational identities can enhance both public and academic contributions. Citizen Scholar explores intellectual work on social media, communication on topical issues, the role of political activism, and how to build trust while developing a public intellectual identity. It features lively examples from Cohen’s own work, from data-visualization principles to his experience suing President Trump for blocking him on Twitter—and winning.

For social scientists seeking to reach a wider public, Citizen Scholar provides tools and strategies for intellectual engagement and imparts invaluable perspective on how to lead a fulfilling professional and civic life.

In Indian languages from Sanskrit to Marathi, yoga has an enormous range of meanings, though most often it refers to philosophy or methods to control the mind and body. This book argues for a wider understanding, demonstrating that yoga has long expressed political thought and practice. The political idea of yoga names the tools of kings, poets, warriors, and revolutionaries. It encodes stratagems for going into battle and for the demands of governance. This idea suggests routes to self-rule even when faced with implacable obstacles, and it defines righteous action amid the grime and grief of politics and war.

Sunila S. Kalé and Christian Lee Novetzke chart a new genealogy of yoga, beginning with uses of the term in the Ṛg Veda, the Mahābhārata, the Bhagavad Gītā, and the Arthaśāstra. In the world of these texts, yoga names everything from war and battle strategy to good governance, espionage, taxation, and welfare. Kalé and Novetzke follow this trail into the modern period, examining the writings and speeches of thinkers such as Gandhi, Tilak, Aurobindo, and Ambedkar as well as the extraordinary story of the Princely State of Aundh, whose ruler saw the Surya Namaskar (Sun Salutation) as a tool for sovereignty. Offering a novel interpretation of yoga that embraces its long-standing political conceptualization, this book sheds light on South Asian political thought and history from its earliest texts to the present day.

Alain Badiou’s 1985 seminar on Parmenides initiated his ongoing dialogue with the pre-Socratic philosopher and set out some of the foundational ideas of his own major philosophical works, including Being and Event. The seminar provides both a new understanding of the importance of Parmenides in establishing the fundamental terms of philosophy and a vital account of the intimate relationship between philosophy and mathematics.

For Badiou, Parmenides inaugurates the history of philosophy by linking being, thinking, and nonbeing in a “Borromean knot”—a linkage in which the relationship between any two terms requires the mediation of a third. Badiou traces the permutations of this connection among fundamental concepts as it was transmitted to later thinkers, including Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hegel, and Heidegger. He also argues that Parmenides’s account of philosophy establishes a new kind of formal reasoning that, like mathematics, breaks with the Greek mythic and poetic traditions and their assumption that truth derives from sensory experience. This seminar demonstrates Badiou’s unparalleled ability to recast the fundamental questions of philosophy.

The public university as we once knew it is gone and never coming back. After generations of fickle state support, public universities behave more and more like their private counterparts—charging what the market will bear, offering what consumers demand, competing relentlessly with peers, and managing their own priorities. But looking back on how we got here offers surprising reassurance. U.S. public universities emerged largely intact after a decade of disruption bookended by a financial crisis and a pandemic. Resisting widespread calls for corporate reinvention or “disruptive innovation,” they hewed to their core missions. If anything, exposure to the rigors of competition only enhanced their longstanding commitments to the public good.

The University Unfettered tells the story of a single public research university that was a generation ahead of its peers in repositioning itself for an independent future. It answers eight fundamental questions about how any contemporary university balances competing missions—questions about how money is spent, how education and knowledge are pursued, and how decisions get made. Each chapter blends deeply informed reconstruction of strategic decisions at one university with concise analyses of the entire sector. An unparalleled account of how a typical public university really works, this book makes a timely and distinctive case for the nonelite institutions that educate the vast majority of America’s college students. Rebutting critiques from both left and right, it offers a refreshingly optimistic outlook on higher education today.

Psychological experts are omnipresent across public and private spheres. Nonetheless, psychology has always been dogged by questions about its authority and validity. Psychological research has yielded relatively few unambiguous successes, and the widely publicized “replication crisis” has called much of the published literature into question. How closely akin to other experimental sciences is psychology, and should its findings be assessed by the same standards? What makes psychology distinct, and how do such differences affect understandings of the boundaries of science?

In The Unbuilt Bench, David Peterson argues that the scientific study of the mind and human behavior is a different sort of epistemic activity than the work of the natural sciences. Through fieldwork in ten experimental psychology laboratories and, as a comparison, a molecular biology lab, he explores the concrete practices of experimentation. Ongoing improvement of research practice and technology at the frontiers of data collection, a process Peterson calls “bench-building,” is essential to most sciences, since it opens new possibilities for experimentation. Psychology labs, however, largely lack an emphasis on bench-building. Instead, the discipline and its subfields gravitate toward different dimensions of scientific progress that focus on theory building and cultivation of outside audiences. An empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated exploration of experimental psychology and scientific practice, The Unbuilt Bench also offers new insight into the ethical questions that psychology’s aims raise.

The economic benefits of increased immigration are potentially massive, many experts say. The United States and other wealthy countries, however, have put up barriers against even the highest-skilled foreign workers. Such choices reflect public opinion, which typically favors stringent restrictions. Under what conditions do voters in affluent democracies back higher levels of immigration? How can advocates build support for pro-immigration policies?

In this data-driven, counterintuitive book, Alexander Kustov argues that showing people how immigration benefits them and their fellow citizens can lead to greater acceptance of more open policies. Looking beyond the stereotype of xenophobic voters, he identifies people’s genuine concern for their compatriots as a key driver of attitudes toward immigration. Using extensive cross-national surveys and experiments, this book demonstrates that people are willing to bear costs to benefit others—but they prioritize helping their fellow citizens. Voters tend to oppose freer immigration because they believe it threatens the well-being of their communities, but they can be persuaded to support it if they see the outcomes of immigration policies as in their interest. Through in-depth comparison of Canada and Sweden, Kustov shows why pragmatic approaches that focus on attracting skilled, needed workers are more effective than humanitarian appeals and policies. Offering a realistic path forward that meets voters where they are, In Our Interest provides a new, optimistic perspective on the political prospects of pro-immigration reforms.

What does it mean to write in a socialist revolution? What defines labor in a communist society? In revolutionary China, writers were regularly dispatched to the countryside or factories with the expectation that, through immersion in the life of workers and peasants, they would be remade as “culture workers” whose writing could serve the communist project. Their cultural labor would not merely reflect or represent the process of building socialism—it would actively participate in it by excavating the contradictions and challenges of the ongoing reorganization of social relations.

Benjamin Kindler examines how writing transformed the Chinese Revolution even as the revolution remade what it meant to write. He argues that the revolution sought in unparalleled ways to overcome the basic division between those who write and those who work. This book combines close readings of a wide range of texts—from the works of established figures to the writings of amateur workers drawn from the factory floor—with analysis of Chinese socialist political economy. Far from being drab instances of state propaganda, these texts and cultural experiments were lively and inventive attempts to determine what a different, more equal society might look like. Offering new ways to understand cultural production as a material, embodied process, this book reconsiders the role of art and literature in radical politics.

During World War I, the Ottoman Armenian population was subjected to genocidal violence. The survivors largely fled Anatolia, forming diasporic communities around the world. Some Armenians, however, remained in what became the Republic of Turkey, and descendants of survivors still live there today as citizens of the state that once sought their annihilation. Despite their continued presence, Armenians in Turkey face ongoing exclusion and erasure from public life and collective memory.

Enduring Erasures is a historical ethnography of survival in the aftermath of catastrophe, examining how the specter of genocide still looms over the lives of the survivors’ descendants and the social fabric of Turkey. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Istanbul and Paris, Hakem Amer Al-Rustom offers a nuanced account of the daily existence of Armenians in Turkey and the broader Armenian experience in the diaspora. He develops the concept of “denativization” to analyze how Armenians were rendered into foreigners in their ancestral lands before, during, and after the genocide, showing how the erasure of Armenian presence and identity continues to this day both in Turkey and among the diaspora in France. Interdisciplinary and meticulously researched, Enduring Erasures challenges deeply ingrained nationalist histories and provides a powerful testament to the indelible mark that dispossession has left on Armenian lives. Emphasizing the human stories and personal narratives that anchor its historical analysis, this book is an essential read for those interested in the intersections of memory, identity, and political violence.

Nationalism today depends on the perception of victimhood. The historical memory of past suffering endows nationalist movements with political legitimacy and a sense of moral superiority. Koreans recall Japanese colonial atrocities, while Japan commemorates the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Israel sanctifies the Holocaust and Poland trumpets the Nazi and Soviet occupations. Even Germany and Russia, perpetrators of historical crimes, today cast themselves as victims by pointing to national suffering.

In this theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich book, Jie-Hyun Lim offers a new way to understand nationalism and its political instrumentalization of suffering, developing the concept of “victimhood nationalism” and exploring it in a range of global settings. He examines relations among Poland, Germany, Israel, Korea, and Japan, focusing on how memories of colonialism, the Holocaust, and Stalinist terror have converged and intertwined in transnational spaces. With an emphasis on memory formation, Lim scrutinizes how perpetrators in Germany and Japan transformed themselves into victims, as well as how nationalists in Poland, Korea, and Israel portray themselves as hereditary victims in order to rebut external criticism. He considers the construction of nations as victims and perpetrators, tracing the interaction of history and memory. Ultimately, the book contends, challenging victimhood nationalism is necessary to overcome the endless competition over national suffering and instead promote reconciliation, mutual understanding, and transnational solidarity.

Chinese intellectuals have long chafed under the dominance of dualities—the sense that they are trapped between two diametrically opposed forces, with no choice but to pick one side or the other. Over the years, they have been driven into binary debates such as reform versus revolution, tradition versus modernity, the West versus the East, and left versus right. At the same time, a number of key thinkers have sought to transcend the extremes and find middle ground.

This book examines how a diverse set of Chinese intellectuals carved out in-between spaces beyond the poles of competing ideologies for greater openness, multiplicity, and pluralism. Reappropriating and rehistoricizing the concept of Thirdspace—theorized by Homi Bhabha and Edward Soja—Jianmei Liu traces how writers and artists, in different times and places, have explored and developed alternatives to either/or dichotomies. Chinese Thirdspace brings together an unexpected group of cases, including Zhang Dongsun’s political philosophy, Yin Haiguang’s “colorless thought,” Jin Yong’s martial arts fiction, Liu Zaifu’s fragmentary writing, Gao Xingjian’s transmedia cine-poems, Xi Xi’s hybrid works, Chi Zijian’s eulogy of shamanism, Chu Tien-Hsin’s various heterotopias, and Chan Koonchung’s speculative political novel, concluding with the controversy over Fang Fang’s Wuhan Diary. Their works offer new ways to grapple with the modern Chinese experience, and as Liu shows, they contain alternative possibilities for a future beyond the binary oppositions of our current era. Wide-ranging and theoretically rich, this interdisciplinary book demonstrates the pivotal role of Thirdspace in the intellectual history, politics, philosophy, literature, aesthetics, art, and film of modern China.

What would it look like to approach data with the care and attentiveness that we bring to a poem? Andrew Davison proposes a new philosophy of data modeled on the affective and ethical qualities of the encounter between a reader and a literary text and demonstrates its significance for understanding urgent social and political issues.

In a cross-disciplinary engagement with philosophical, literary, and political-theoretical accounts of poetic experience, Close Encounters challenges the philosophical underpinnings of dominant approaches to data analysis. Instead, Davison argues, social scientists should treat their data with the same close attention and ethical responsibility that are accorded to literary texts. In this view, quantitative and qualitative data are not only collected, coded, or constructed—they are entrusted to the care of their recipient. Such attunement yields original insight into silenced, erased, and neglected subaltern dimensions of the data. Davison demonstrates how this methodology provides fresh perspective on pressing topics such as immigration, border politics, torture, war, Trumpism, violent political speech, medical care, criminal justice, algorithmic governance, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Bringing together a strikingly original theorization of data with a rich array of examples, Close Encounters shows why the skills and methods of literary inquiry are essential to ethically sensitive data analysis.

What does it mean to have a heart? How does it feel when a heart fails, and what does it take to recover? In a world beset by never-ending crises—personal and collective, local and global—is heartlessness the only option?

From the Heart weaves together a personal narrative of a life-threatening ailment with considerations of philosophy, art, and science to contemplate ultimate questions: matters of life and death. Jeffrey L. Kosky recounts his brush with death—the surgical repair of a congenital defect in his aortic valve—his gradual recovery of everyday life, and his struggle to find the heart to go on throughout it all. To make sense of the experience, he immerses himself in humanistic inquiry and medical science—the histories of medicine, cardiac surgery, and knowledge of the human heart as well as the works of artists, writers, philosophers, and theologians. Writing about the experience of being human from the precarious position of his own woundedness, Kosky shares hard-earned perspectives on what matters most.

Combining moving memoir, encounters with major authors and artists, and heartfelt reflections on the “big questions” of existence, this elegantly written book is at once erudite and powerful. It shows us why the heart—in physical, emotional, and metaphorical senses—helps us come to terms with sickness and health, dying and living.

Why did the “stagflation” of the 1970s—the improbable combination of high unemployment and runaway inflation—prove so painful and protracted? What explains the U.S. stock market’s remarkable forty-year run of 12 percent average annual returns since then? Why is Japan still mired in a decades-long recession—and the Chinese economy in a tailspin? And what accounts for the resilience of U.S. stock and labor markets in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and in the face of the Fed’s record interest rate hikes?

Donald H. Chew, Jr., argues that answers to these questions lie in the principles and methods of “modern corporate finance.” Ideas formulated and tested by finance scholars—notably, an efficient stock market in which prices reflect the long-run values of public companies and a “market for corporate control” that exerts continuous pressure on management—informed and spurred the investor-driven capitalism that has created the world’s most productive and valuable companies. Drawing on his career-long relationships with leading academics and practitioners, Chew profiles key figures in the development of modern corporate finance while emphasizing their counterintuitive lessons for shareholders, companies, and countries. Corporate efficiency and value creation, he contends, are the fundamental source of the social wealth essential to addressing challenges such as poverty and climate change. Lively and provocative, this book makes corporate finance approachable—and even admirable—for readers interested in how the success and failure of companies affect their lives.

Hackathons—participatory gatherings in which people with various backgrounds and experiences come together to address a challenge or create something new in a limited period of time—have become an important part of today’s technological, social, and business landscapes. They originated in IT and have since spread into other fields including medicine, law, biology, environment, education, and civic engagement. How and why can hackathons drive innovation? How can they challenge the status quo? What role can they play in an organization’s strategy? Under what conditions are hackathons most effective, and what are their limitations?

Maciej Ryś—a hackathon leader and scholar with extensive experience in the field—offers a step-by-step guide to organizing successful hackathons and understanding their dynamics. He examines the evolution of hackathons from niche programming marathons to versatile platforms fostering technological advancements, entrepreneurial ventures, and social change. Drawing on extensive research, including observations and interviews from dozens of events worldwide, this book provides data-driven insights into the hackathon ecosystem. Ryś shares practical lessons for organizers, participants, and mentors ranging from planning to inclusivity and sustaining momentum afterward, emphasizing both individual and group levels. Readers will learn how to build better hackathons that attract more participants, and they will gain a deeper understanding of the dynamics of innovation. For both hackathon veterans and those new to the field, Sparks for Innovation helps readers develop new skills, discover new possibilities, and achieve new breakthroughs.

How is it that reading and writing can at once isolate us and bring us closer to others? Blending personal narrative with literary criticism, Emily Hodgson Anderson considers what a life spent with books has taught her about loneliness and human connection. She delves into the unseen labor of women, authors, and mothers, and she argues that we can reimagine intimacy through books. Herself a book lover and writer, a teacher of literature, and a single mom, Anderson reflects on the loneliness—and the strength—that can come from living, writing, and parenting alone.

Shadow Work puts writers such as Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Laurence Sterne, and Shakespeare into unexpected conversations with authors of children’s literature and contemporary fiction, among them Roald Dahl, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Zadie Smith, and Lewis Carroll. Elegantly and poignantly written, this book examines what it means to revisit longtime literary companions and how literature can help us better understand what we show and hide about ourselves.

Excessive corporate debt can lead to financial distress, which prevents a business from realizing its full potential. When this occurs, a company transforms into a “zombie,” incapable of making essential investments for its future growth or attracting the resources required to execute its business strategy effectively.

In this book, the restructuring veteran Mike Harmon provides an indispensable go-to guide tailored for executives, business owners, boards of directors, creditors, advisors, and investors grappling with financial distress. He equips stakeholders with an invaluable tool kit for mending a company’s fractured balance sheet while demystifying complex techniques and explaining restructuring methods in an accessible fashion.

Readers will acquire the skills needed to detect early warning signs of distress and to formulate a financial restructuring plan that reduces the risk of future trouble. They will learn how an effective plan optimizes the objectives of a company’s various stakeholders, its ability to service future financial obligations, its legal and contractual constraints, and its future prospects and business strategy.

Written for both current and aspiring practitioners, The Financial Restructuring Tool Set is not just a survival guide—it is a blueprint for transformation, empowering stakeholders to achieve a brighter, more prosperous future.

Donald J. Trump took office threatening to run roughshod over democratic institutions, railing against the federal bureaucracy, and calling for dismantling the administrative state. How do civil servants respond to a presidential turn toward authoritarianism? In what ways—if any—can they restrain or counter leaders who defy the norms of liberal democratic governance?

The Loyalty Trap explores how civil servants navigated competing pressures and duties amid the chaos of the Trump administration, drawing on in-depth interviews with senior officials in the most contested agencies over the course of a tumultuous term. Jaime Lee Kucinskas argues that the professional culture and ethical obligations of the civil service stabilize the state in normal times but insufficiently prepare bureaucrats to cope with a president like Trump. Instead, federal employees became ensnared in intractable ethical traps, caught between their commitment to nonpartisan public service and the expectation of compliance with political directives. Kucinskas shares their quandaries, recounting attempts to preserve the integrity of government agencies, covert resistance, and a few bold acts of moral courage in the face of organizational decline and politicized leadership. A nuanced sociological account of the lessons of the Trump administration for democratic governance, The Loyalty Trap offers a timely and bracing portrait of the fragility of the American state.

Just Awakening uncovers a forgotten philosophy of social democracy inspired by Yogācāra, an ancient, nondualistic Buddhist philosophy that claims everything in the perceptible cosmos is mere consciousness and consists of multiple karmically connected yet bounded lifeworlds. This Yogācāra social philosophy emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries among Chinese intellectuals who struggled against the violent Social Darwinist logic of the survival of the fittest. Its proponents were convinced that the root cause of crisis in both China and the West was epistemic—an unexamined faith in one common, objective world and a subject-object divide. This dualistic paradigm, in their view, had dire consequences, including moral egoism, competition for material wealth, and racial war. Yogācāra insights about plurality, interdependence, and intersubjectivity, however, had the capacity to awaken the world from these deadly dreams.

Jessica X. Zu reconstructs this account of modern Yogācāra philosophy, arguing that it offers new vocabularies with which to reconceptualize equality and freedom. Yogācāra thinking, she shows, diffracts the illusions of individual identity, social categories, and material wealth into aggregated, recurring karmic processes. It then guides the reassembly of a complex society through nonhierarchical, noncoercive, and collaborative actions, sustained by new behavior patterns and modes of thought. Demonstrating why Chinese Buddhist social philosophy offers powerful resources for social justice and liberation today, Just Awakening invites readers to think with modern Yogācāra philosophers about other ways of building egalitarian futures.

During the tumultuous years of World War II and the Cold War, new global humanitarian ideas and practices coalesced around the cause of saving the children in China. How did China’s children become archetypal victims who ignited a new global humanitarian imagination? And who would prevail in the transnational contest to control the vast quantities of aid flowing into China on their behalf?

The Adoption Plan offers a new history of the rise of global humanitarianism that places the recipients, administrators, and critics of humanitarian aid in China at the center of the story. Analyzing how the “adoption plan” for international child sponsorship became one of the most popular fundraising strategies for humanitarian work in China and across the world, Jack Neubauer explores how the globalization of humanitarian aid was linked to new practices of global intimacy that enabled donors to build personal relationships with Chinese children across geographic and cultural divides. Drawing on hundreds of letters written by Chinese children to foreign sponsors and extensive research in Chinese archives, Neubauer shows how China’s Nationalist and Communist parties mobilized the emotional bonds between children and sponsors to secure international support for their competing political projects. By the 1950s, child sponsorship and international adoption had become the most hotly contested humanitarian programs in Cold War East Asia.

Upending the conventional view of humanitarianism as a tool of Western influence, The Adoption Plan demonstrates that it was often the Chinese recipients of aid who were best able to control its material and ideological uses.

As climate change accelerates, the Arctic has become a frontline of global competition. Melting ice, rising temperatures, and swelling seas have made remote regions at once newly accessible and rife with new dangers. Vladimir Putin’s Russia has embarked on a substantial military buildup in the Arctic, and China has also turned its attention northward. The United States, however, has only recently begun to reestablish its Arctic presence after many years of waning influence.

America in the Arctic offers a timely and compelling case for why the United States must deepen its commitment to a region threatened by climate change and geopolitical rivalry. Mary Thompson-Jones surveys past and present U.S. relations with the Arctic lands: Canada, Iceland, Greenland, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Russia. She traces the history of the U.S. presence in the far north from the purchase of Alaska through the Cold War, arguing that lessons from the past should inform America’s relationships with its Arctic neighbors today. At its best, U.S. Arctic policy balanced security interests with residents’ needs and international cooperation on environmental and regional issues. In recent years, many policymakers scrambling to reassert U.S. leadership have framed their goals solely in security terms. Thompson-Jones argues that climate change now poses the greatest challenge, calling for a new approach that is inclusive of all the Arctic’s inhabitants. Bringing together national security expertise and historical insight, this book charts a course for American Arctic policy in a warming world.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the city of Tianjin was the diplomatic capital of the Middle Kingdom, where foreign consuls met Chinese dignitaries, and a hub of commerce and culture. Yet in the eyes of foreigners, the city remained provincial. After the tumult of the Boxer Rebellion, however, Tianjin transformed, when a little-known international political project turned it for a time into one of the most cosmopolitan places in the world.

Pierre Singaravélou tells the story of Tianjin’s emergence as a transnational metropolis, arguing that the city’s experience challenges conventional narratives of the origins of globalization. He focuses on the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion, when a number of imperial powers established an international military government that sought to modernize the city and its environs. Under its reign, people from all over the West and Asia flocked to Tianjin, in a whirlwind of commercial and cultural exchange. This provisional government embarked on ambitious public works and public health projects, attempting to transform not only the city’s infrastructure but also its residents’ behavior—all while the imperial powers seized large foreign concessions. Singaravélou traces the many tensions of the global city: between accommodation and resistance for Tianjin’s residents, between colonization and internationalization within the provisional government, and between cooperation and competition among the imperial powers. Bringing together global and local perspectives, Tianjin Cosmopolis offers a new vantage point on the imperial globalization of the early twentieth century.

What forces influence a person’s decision to pursue a career in science? And what factors determine which among the many possible pathways a budding scientist chooses to follow?

John A. Wiens traces his journeys through several subfields of ecology—and, in so doing, gives readers an inside look at how science actually works. He shares stories from his development as an ornithologist, community ecologist, landscape ecologist, and conservation scientist that convey the excitement of doing ecology. Recounting the serendipities, discoveries, and joys of this branching career, Wiens explores how an individual’s background and interests, life’s contingencies, the influences of key people, and the culture of a discipline can all shape a scientist’s trajectory. Becoming an Ecologist illustrates why ecologists ask the questions they do, how they go about answering them, and what they do when the answers are not what they expected.

Bringing together personal narrative with practical guidance for aspiring ecologists, this book provides a window onto a dynamic scientific field—and inspiration for all readers interested in building a career by following their passion for the natural world.

Radley Metzger was one of the foremost directors of adult film in America, with credits including softcore titles like The Lickerish Quartet and the hardcore classic The Opening of Misty Beethoven. After getting his start making arthouse trailers for Janus Films, Metzger would go on to become among the most feted directors of the “porno chic” era of the 1970s, working under the pseudonym Henry Paris. In the process, he produced a body of work that exposed the porous boundaries separating art cinema from adult film, softcore from hardcore, and good taste from bad.

Rob King uses Metzger’s work to explore what taste means and how it works, tracing the evolution of the adult film industry and the changing frontiers of cultural acceptability. Man of Taste spans Metzger’s entire life: his early years in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood, his attempt to bring arthouse aesthetics to adult film in the 1960s, his turn to pseudonymously directed hardcore movies in the 1970s, and his final years, which included making videos on homeopathic medicine. Metzger’s career, King argues, sheds light on how the distinction between the erotic and the pornographic is drawn, and it offers an uncanny reflection of the ways American film culture transformed during these decades.

Lavishly illustrated with rare photos and publicity images, this book paints a vivid picture of a filmmaker who channeled his artistic aspirations into some of the most disreputable movie genres of his day.

“Be the best you can be!” Practically from the moment we are born, we are taught to optimize our lives—to devote ourselves to increasing our productivity and efficiency, which, we are told, will make us happier and more successful. The imperative of constant self-improvement, however, drains us dry even as it promises to build us up.

The Creative Self delves into the hegemony of neoliberal self-optimization and turns to psychoanalysis in search of an alternative. In paired chapters, Mari Ruti and Gail M. Newman examine the works of the psychoanalysts Marion Milner and Donald W. Winnicott. They provide deeply personal accounts of how these thinkers resonate with day-to-day life, exploring modes of selfhood that subtly but profoundly resist the lure and escape the trap of competitive individualism. Milner urges us to relinquish the ego in the face of loss and lack, and Winnicott asks us to accept the paradoxes of the self instead of demanding their resolution. Together, their insights help us flourish where neoliberal self-improvement would stifle us. Combining the intellectual, the personal, and the political from two perspectives that converge and diverge in striking ways, this book offers an antidote to transactional individualism and envisions forms of creative living beyond its confines.

Around the world, growing populations of older adults need social care. Aging is typically associated with steady physical and cognitive decline; the practice of narrative therapy, by contrast, focuses on the resilience of the older adults by encouraging the construction of meaningful life stories. Practitioners engage participants to revisit their personal journeys to uncover their life lessons, finding core beliefs and values to help cope with new challenges. Ultimately, narrative therapy helps older adults recover meaning in life by inviting them to recollect and commemorate their life experiences.

This book is an in-depth guide to narrative therapy for students and practitioners in health care, social work, gerontology, and counseling, showing readers how to develop a culturally sensitive practice framework with older adults. It presents a step-by-step manual on the therapeutic use of narrative, describing the theories, methods, skills, and techniques of transformative narrative practice with older people in individual, family, group, and collective settings. Drawing on extensive clinical practice with older adults in Hong Kong and New York City, the authors explore narrative methods in divergent cultural contexts to advance a globally minded approach. Bringing narrative therapy to gerontological practice in culturally sensitive ways, this book foregrounds alternative models of aging that celebrate a life worth living.

The world is on fire and time for avoiding impending disaster is rapidly running out. This catastrophe has deeply entrenched foundations: a belief in human exceptionalism and human mastery over the Earth. Accelerating technological changes ranging from genetic engineering, synthetic biology, and nanotechnology to biobots, neuroprosthetics, and artificial intelligence are creating new worlds in which human beings will either be radically transformed or become extinct.

After the Human is an ambitious and audacious grand synthesis that weaves together philosophy, theology, quantum mechanics, relativity theory, information theory, ecology, plant and animal cognition, and artificial intelligence to forge a new philosophical vision for the future. Mark C. Taylor calls for replacing human exceptionalism with a theory of radical relationalism, an account of the world in which everything is interrelated and codependent. People, in this telling, are not isolated individuals separated from each other and set apart from the complex world they are destined to dominate but integral parts of a vital web, where differences enrich each other and nourish the greater whole. Ranging from the grounded worlds of dirt and soil to the most abstract realms of quantum ecology, After the Human reveals the alternative intelligences and transformative possibilities that provide hope for life beyond our perilous moment.

From the petroleum used to make film stock to the carbon and tungsten needed for studio lights and theater projectors, every movie relies on extractive processes. The film industry of Hollywood, moreover, rose alongside the oil and aeronautics industries that transformed Southern California. In this book, Brian Jacobson traces the surprising and inextricable connections between extractive industries and cinema, developing new ways to read films in light of the typically unseen material practices out of which they are built.

The Cinema of Extractions explores the ties between the worlds of movies and the materials that make movies possible and between the industries that make movies and the industries that use movies to reshape the world. Jacobson retells the history of cinema through the lens of extraction, considering its roots as a material form and its use as a tool for corporate and industrial world making. He brings together the material and industrial history of cinema with close formal analyses of films that depict extractive processes, juxtaposing early films and classics such as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre with industrial films made by companies like Shell Oil. Linking film and media studies with the energy and environmental humanities, this book models innovative historical and materialist approaches to formal film analysis and proposes a new poetics of industrial cinema.

Ketchup seems iconically American, but the word comes from a Southeast Asian anchovy sauce, and today it is made largely from Chinese tomato paste. Japan’s beloved ramen arose from the meeting of Chinese noodles and American wheat flour before attaining worldwide popularity in both gourmet and convenience-food forms. The baguette is mythologized as a product of the French Revolution, but in fact it emerged during late-nineteenth-century urbanization. Colonialism brought baguettes to Vietnam, where street vendors devised a new dish: banh mi, which refugees took with them around the world.

Telling these tales and many others, What We Eat explores world history through the lens of the global journeys of nearly ninety food products. Leading historians trace the origins and popularization of items commonly found in supermarkets, showing how each food illuminates wider histories. They consider the tension between the role of cuisine in shaping particular cultural identities and the standardization associated with globalization, and they demonstrate how foods have transformed as different societies have borrowed them. Chapters reveal the surprising sagas of coffee, cornflakes, gin, guacamole, hot dogs, hummus, naan, pet food, pizza, sparkling water, sushi, and many more. At once an intimate and a global history, What We Eat shows readers the everyday items on grocery store shelves in a new light.

Reproducibility is fundamental to the scientific method. After reading a paper describing research findings, a scientist should be able to repeat the experiment and obtain the same results. Yet an alarming number—perhaps as high as 90 percent—of published biomedical research papers face challenges in independent replication. Such issues range from honest mistakes to outright fraud. The scope of this crisis, however, underscores deeper systemic issues within the scientific community: its culture, incentives, and institutions.

In Unreliable, the distinguished scientist Csaba Szabo examines the causes and consequences of the reproducibility crisis in biomedical research, showing why the factors that encourage misconduct stem from flaws in real-world science. There are many culprits, including commonplace research methods and dubious statistical techniques. Academic career incentives, hypercompetition for grant funding, and a bias toward publishing positive results have exacerbated the problem. Deliberate data manipulation and fabricated findings churned out by “paper mills” are disturbingly common. Academic institutions and publishers, for their part, have perpetuated a culture of impunity.

Szabo explores how these failures have hindered scientific progress and impeded the development of new treatments, and he introduces readers to the “science sleuths” who tirelessly uncover misconduct. He proposes comprehensive reforms, from scientific training to the grant system through the publication process, to address the root causes of the crisis. Written in clear language and leavened with a keen sense of irony, Unreliable is an essential account of the reproducibility crisis that gives readers an inside look at how science is actually done.

During the interwar years in France, modernist literature challenged norms around sex and sexuality through daring portrayals of homosexuality and queerness. The same moment, however, witnessed the crystallization of the Western gender binary and its stark lines of division between male and female. Bringing together trans theory with French literary studies, Mat Fournier offers a new understanding of how the gender binary emerged in the modernist era.

Dysphoric Modernism considers gender deviance in works by a broad range of French authors, both writers who are canonical for queer theory, such as Marcel Proust, André Gide, Jean Genet, and Colette, and lesser-known figures, including René Crevel, Raymond Radiguet, Maurice Sachs, and Maurice Rostand. Its trans readings track the dysphoria inherent to modern gender and the many ways these texts both disrupt and reinforce it. Examining the complex entanglements of gender and sexuality with the colonial project, Fournier argues that modernist writers’ representations of sexual dissidence came at the cost of their enforcement of racial and gendered discrimination. A groundbreaking transgender analysis of French modernist literature, this book also demonstrates the significance of the concept of dysphoria for a number of fields.

Doomsday prepping has gone mainstream. Survivalists star in reality TV shows; celebrities hawk emergency gear; and ordinary people stockpile essentials in the hope that they can outlast a slew of threats, real and imagined. The ideology behind prepping, however, is no passing fad but a persistent feature of American life. Be Prepared reveals the surprising ways prepping is woven into the fabric of American institutions—and shows its significance for understanding the fault lines of liberal democracy.

Robert E. Kirsch and Emily Ray trace the beliefs and practices that underlie survivalism, from the rise of the Boy Scouts of America to Cold War fears of nuclear devastation through present-day Silicon Valley dreams of space colonization. They argue that prepping is rooted in long-standing anxieties over industrialization, urbanization, and immigration and steeped in the histories of colonial expansion and militarization. To grasp its political implications, Kirsch and Ray develop the concept of “bunkerization”: not simply building physical bunkers but building a society symbolized by the bunker. In such a society, individual vigilance and survival become the organizing principles of everyday life. People opt out of collective projects and retreat into personal responsibility for preparedness, expressed through acts of consumption. Shedding new light on the persistence of antidemocratic politics, from white supremacy to neoliberalism, Be Prepared also considers how to escape the solitary fate of life in the bunker and instead meet collective problems together.

Conventional narratives of empires and globalization focus on oceans and coasts, supposing that global connections are seaborne and that historical change proceeds inward from port cities into continental expanses. This book offers a new perspective, examining key inland areas around the world to show how interior regions have shaped global history.

Inlands brings together an interdisciplinary group of experts to explore the modern histories of inland regions across North and South America, Africa, Eurasia, and Australasia, from the American heartland to the Yangzi valley, the Great Dismal Swamp to the Arabian Desert. Together, they argue that interior regions provide a fresh vantage point from which to rethink the history of global connection and disconnection. Each chapter reconsiders national, regional, or imperial histories from an inland perspective, demonstrating how such places have spurred global change.

Contributors reveal the critical role inlands and their Indigenous inhabitants have played in the development, projection, and contestation of state power, showing how some interiors became essential to empire even as others developed in resistance to it. By examining the struggle to integrate inland regions into wider networks of exchange, this book also sheds light on the unevenness and the limits of contemporary globalization. A new global history of interior spaces, Inlands presents a bold challenge to dominant understandings of the making of today’s connected world.

The medieval mystic Julian of Norwich (1342–after 1416) is the first known woman to author a book in the English language, recognized today for her strikingly optimistic claim that “all shall be well.” Her visionary text Revelations of Divine Love is the product of many years of contemplation, written and revised after a life-changing event of near-fatal illness and divine revelation.

Hannah Lucas explores the entanglement of illness and revelation in Julian’s writings, illuminating the unexpected commonalities between the medical and the mystical and their significance for philosophies of health. Framed by an original application of post-Heideggerian philosophy, Impossible Recovery offers a vivid new interpretation of the medieval mystic as crafting a proto-phenomenological theology of well-being. Lucas’s careful readings pay close attention to Julian’s mystical language and poetics, revealing the surprising resonances of her writings with modern and postmodern thought. Refracted through Julian’s Revelations, this book advances a powerful existential query about the possibilities of recovery—of well-being, and of medieval history.

For centuries in China, people beseeched deities to protect the draft animals on which they relied. Across social classes—from peasants plowing the fields to merchants transporting goods through soldiers riding into battle—animals were essential to daily life and so took on a central place in the religious imagination. Prayers and rituals for animal well-being were most frequently addressed to the Horse King, divine protector of horses, donkeys, and mules, or the Ox King, who watched over oxen and buffaloes.

Kings of Oxen and Horses is a history of these two gods: their myths, their rituals, and their worshipers. It examines the place of draft animals in Chinese and Buddhist religious traditions and, in so doing, sheds new light on human interaction with nonhuman animals more broadly. Meir Shahar traces the history of the Horse and Ox Kings from late imperial China back to ancient India, revealing the long-term Buddhist influence on Chinese rural religion. He explores the myth of the draft animal as incarnate god, showing how Buddhism transmitted a belief in the sanctity of cattle and a taboo on beef from India to China. Shahar considers the ties between humans and their animal companions through the prism of religious practice, and he draws illuminating comparisons to other world religions. Bridging the gap between animal studies and religious studies, this book is a major contribution to both.

Linked verse (renga) was the most popular form of poetry in Japan’s medieval era (c. 1200–1600 CE). Renga poets linked verses of seventeen and fourteen syllables into long sequences in accordance with complex rules and literary allusions; the first verse, which initially stood alone, was the ancestor of the modern haiku. Courtiers, warriors, and commoners alike practiced linked verse in an atmosphere of literary artistry, scholarship, social sensitivity, and charged competition. The masters were often invited at great expense to warrior domains to preside at linked-verse sessions and provide instruction in the art and in allied works of the classical canon, such as The Tale of Genji. Some of Japan's most famous poets, among them Sōgi and Bashō, not only composed renga sequences still revered today but also made important contributions to the study of renga history, theory, composition, and etiquette.

This book is the most comprehensive work in English on premodern Japanese linked verse. It includes a history of the genre in both its formal (ushin) and unorthodox (haikai) manifestations up through the time of Bashō, an introduction to linked-verse composition and commentaries, and an overview of the art’s performative aspects. These three parts are each linked to original English translations: an early treatise on renga history, theory, and rules; a particularly intricate hundred-verse sequence and its contemporary commentaries; and two guides to mental attitude and deportment at a renga session. Wide-ranging and erudite, Linked Verse in Medieval Japan is a masterful account of the history, theory, and practice of one of Japan’s great art forms.

Financial professionals are paid as if they were capable of “beating the market” on a regular basis. In fact, active fund managers routinely underperform low-cost index funds, and financial analysts frequently produce inaccurate stock recommendations—and many receive large fees even when their clients are losing money. Why do financial intermediaries still persist in the investing world despite this track record? Economic theory, obsessed with notions of market efficiency, has no good answer.

This book demonstrates how long-standing social relationships within the investing world contribute to a state of inertia, which prevents substantive change to the status quo. In financial markets—as in many other settings—social groups persist through habit, routine, and path dependency. Financial intermediaries, for their part, use their positions to maintain and reproduce a state of affairs from which they benefit. Although financial professionals portray their world as one of dynamism and continuous innovation, in reality a strategic and purposeful inertia often prevails. An incisive sociological analysis of the communities that constitute financial markets, Inertia offers new insight into the social structures and dynamics that shape economic action.

Winner, 2025 Hugh J. Silverman Book Prize, Association for Philosophy and Literature

Finalist, 2025 PEN Open Book Award, PEN America

An ambitious genre-crossing exploration of Black speculative imagination, The Dark Delight of Being Strange combines fiction, historical accounts, and philosophical prose to unveil the extraordinary and the surreal in everyday Black life.

In a series of stories and essays, James B. Haile, III, traces how Black speculative fiction responds to enslavement, racism, colonialism, and capitalism and how it reveals a life beyond social and political alienation. He reenvisions Black technologies of freedom through Henry Box Brown’s famed escape from slavery in a wooden crate, fashions an anticolonial “hollow earth theory” from the works of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, and considers the octopus and its ability to camouflage itself as a model for Black survival strategies, among others. Looking at Black life through the lens of speculative fiction, this book transports readers to alternative worlds and spaces while remaining squarely rooted in present-day struggles. In so doing, it rethinks historical and contemporary Black experiences as well as figures such as Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Henry Dumas, and Toni Morrison.

Offering new ways to grasp the meanings and implications of Black freedom, The Dark Delight of Being Strange invites us to reimagine history and memory, time and space, our identities and ourselves.

This book explores the memorial and funerary artistic traditions of Southwest China during the Eastern Han dynasty (25–220 CE). In early imperial times, the art of this region—present-day Sichuan province—differed in both style and content from tomb and memorial art produced in other parts of the Han empire, especially that of the Central Plains, considered the heartland of Chinese civilization. Although Southwest China was described in contemporaneous accounts as an uncultured backwater, it had a vibrant and sophisticated artistic tradition.

Hajni Elias examines the Southwest’s rich material culture, which includes pictorial brick tiles, mingqi or spirit vessels, pottery figurines, decorated stone sarcophagi, architectural gate towers, and commemorative and ancestral stelae. She sheds light on the distinct traits and practices that arose from the region’s complex geographical, cultural, and economic tapestry. Elias also places the Southwest in a broader Han cultural framework, offering a new perspective on early Chinese society and its mortuary and memorial practices. Showcasing the quality and breadth of the achievements of the Southwest’s artisans and craftsmen, Remembrance in Clay and Stone reveals the distinctive and sophisticated ways in which people of this era recorded and memorialized their lives.

This book is a comprehensive and accessible overview of sex trafficking in the United States, examining its underlying dynamics and sharing key research findings. Andrea J. Nichols examines the backgrounds and experiences of survivors, traffickers, and buyers, showing how social and structural dynamics affect trafficking in the United States. She details common risk factors for victimization, emphasizing weak social institutions and safety nets. This book’s intersectional approach foregrounds the ways social oppression and marginalization contribute to heightened vulnerability, accounting for the roles of race, ethnicity, citizenship status, sexuality, gender, age, and disability.

Nichols introduces readers to the theoretical and political perspectives that shape research and policy on sex trafficking, considering abolitionist, neoliberal, feminist, criminological, and sociological viewpoints. She assesses the outcomes of policies relating to commercial sex and analyzes a variety of responses to sex trafficking, including in social services, health care, and the criminal legal system, as well as activism. Nichols reflects on how service providers, activists, and everyday people can effectively advocate for and with survivors of sex trafficking and offers recommendations for practice and policy.

Sex Trafficking in the United States is essential for understanding the dynamics of sex trafficking and its underlying sources. This second edition is thoroughly revised and updated, integrating the most up-to-date research.

A remarkable novel by one of Tibet’s foremost authors, The Red Wind Howls is a courageous and gripping portrayal of Tibetan suffering under Mao’s regime. The story delves deep into forbidden history, spanning the famine of the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and, most taboo of all, the 1958 Amdo rebellion when Tibetans rose in armed revolt against the Chinese state. Tsering Döndrup self-published the book in 2006, because no publisher would risk accepting it. When the authorities caught wind, all copies were confiscated and the author faced severe reprisals. He lost his job as head of the local archives, his passport was confiscated, and he has been under close surveillance ever since.

This powerful novel is set in part in the punitive labor camps to which Tibetans were sent after the failed rebellion, where many perished from starvation or forced labor. Inside and outside the camps, it depicts with dark humor a world of informers, cruelty, and score settling, against the backdrop of immeasurable environmental devastation and the destruction of traditional Tibetan ways of life. The novel draws on extensive interviews conducted by the author, and the rhythms of oral storytelling are reflected in its fragmented narrative style, which jumps back and forth between periods and events. An unparalleled account of the Chinese Communist Party’s takeover of Tibet, The Red Wind Howls is both a richly imaginative work of fiction and a vital piece of historical testimony.

Honorable Mention, 2025 Outstanding Book Award, Peace, War, and Social Conflict Section of the American Sociological Association

Everyday items found at the sites of atrocities possess a striking emotional force. Victims’ garments, broken glasses, wallets, shoes, and other such personal property that are recovered from places of death including concentration camps, mass graves, and prisons have become staples of memorial museums, exhibited to the public as material testimony in order to evoke sympathy and promote human rights. How do these objects take on such power, and what are the benefits and pitfalls of deploying them for political purposes?

A Victim’s Shoe, a Broken Watch, and Marbles examines how artifacts of atrocities circulate and, in so doing, sheds new light on the institutions and social processes that shape collective memory of human rights abuses. Lea David traces the journeys of what she terms “desire objects”: their rediscovery at the locations of mass atrocities, their use in forensic and legal procedures, their return to the homes of grieving families, their appearance in public spaces such as museums and exhibitions, and their role in political protests. She critically investigates the logic that shapes why and how desire objects gain symbolic power and political significance, showing when and under what circumstances they are used to promote particular worldviews and narratives. Featuring both novel theoretical methods and keen empirical analysis, this book offers important insights into the shortcomings of common assumptions about human rights.

In the north Indian state of Uttarakhand, in the Central Himalayas, Hindu deities are ever present in the lives of devotees. Through ritual practices of placemaking, spirit mediums, oracles, priests, and other specialists bring these beings into embodied form, calling on them for healing and counsel. In exchange for alleviating human suffering, deities ask that a place be made for them—in homes, villages, and temples, and in bodies, lives, and communities.

Gods in the World is a richly descriptive and evocative ethnography of Hindu ritual practices that shows how deities and other supernatural agents come to matter to ordinary people. Aftab S. Jassal traces how acts of placemaking, including healing practices that repair and restore relations between people and deities, allow deities to participate and intervene in human affairs. Many of the professional healers, storytellers, musicians, spirit mediums, and lay devotees who are chronicled belong to marginalized Dalit communities. These communities are at the forefront of combined pressures of tourism, neoliberal development, and Hindutva nationalist politics and often find creative ways of responding to their changing worlds. Bringing together fresh insights on the dynamics of caste and gender with enduring questions about ritual, healing, and the nature of human-divine relations, Gods in the World offers a striking account of everyday Hinduism in a contested and rapidly changing region.

Marcel Proust once wrote, “There is no longer anybody, not even myself, since I cannot leave my bed, who will go along the Rue du Repos to visit the little Jewish cemetery where my grandfather, following a custom that he never understood, went for so many years to lay a stone on his parents’ grave.” Investigating the origin and significance of this statement, Antoine Compagnon offers new insight into the great author’s underappreciated Jewish side.

Compagnon traces Proust’s ties to the French Jewish community, examining his relations with his mother’s successful and assimilated family, the Weils. He explores how French Jews read and responded to Proust’s masterpiece In Search of Lost Time in the 1920s and 1930s. Challenging contemporary critics who perceive self-hatred or even antisemitism in Proust’s work, Compagnon shows that many Jewish intellectuals and young Zionists admired and vigorously debated the novel, some seeing it as a source for pride in their Jewish identity. He also considers Proust’s portrayal of homosexuality and how it relates to notions of Jewishness. A work of remarkable erudition and deep research, Proust, a Jewish Way brings to light the vanished world of Proust’s first Jewish readers and shows how it can illuminate our reading of the great novelist today.

In the late fifteenth century, a young Dominican friar sets out on a journey from Paris to Florence in search of manuscripts of pre-Christian philosophy. Along the way, he encounters an ascetic alchemist in a small village. As the young man falls under the spell of the alchemist’s quest for enlightenment, a series of disasters—culminating in a total solar eclipse—strikes the village, with profound consequences.

Keiichiro Hirano’s Eclipse was a meteoric literary sensation when it first appeared in 1998. Its author, still an undergraduate, was hailed as a prodigy; the book received Japan’s most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa Prize, and became a bestseller. Set on the eve of the Renaissance in Europe, Eclipse depicts a society that is on the surface vastly different from modern-day Japan. Yet its account of a challenge to dualistic binaries and ossified worldviews holds striking contemporary resonance and philosophical depth. Taking the form of a memoir, Eclipse brings together an evocative portrayal of its historical setting, including the lore of medieval alchemy, with a rich literary lexicon, lush imagery, and psychological intricacy. This vivid translation offers Anglophone readers a vital work by one of Japan’s most distinctive voices.

Sex shapes who we are as individuals and as a species. Where in the mists of time did something so important—and eye-catching—originate, and what does this history tell us about ourselves? Why do we have sex, and sexes, at all?

In The Other Big Bang, the evolutionary and developmental biologist Eric S. Haag explores the two-billion-year history of sex, from the first organisms on Earth to contemporary humans. He delves into the deep history of sexual reproduction, from its origins as a fix for a mutational crisis to an essential feature of all complex life. Haag traces sexual differentiation from its earliest forms in microbes to its elaboration in animals, showing why sex differences in cells and organisms help species adapt, persist, and evolve. Humanity’s clear sexual kinship with yeast and clams exists even as we evolved differences that distinguish us from other mammals, and even other apes.

Bringing the story up to the present, Haag argues that the evolutionary history of human sexuality helps us better understand contemporary society. Our ancient male-female sexual system remains an important fact of life, even as we see increasingly diverse sexual orientations, gender expressions, and parenthood choices. Witty and inviting, The Other Big Bang offers a clear view of the evolutionary roots of human sexuality and their significance today.

Few Americans have done more than Jerome A. Cohen to advance the rule of law in East Asia. The founder of the study of Chinese law in the United States and a tireless advocate for human rights, Cohen has been a scholar, teacher, lawyer, and activist for more than sixty years. Moving among the United States, China, and Taiwan, he has encouraged legal reforms, promoted economic cooperation, mentored law students—including a future president of Taiwan—and brokered international crises.

In this compelling, conversational memoir, Cohen recounts a dramatic life of striving for a better world from Washington, DC, to Beijing, offering vital first-hand insights from the study and practice of Sino-American relations. In the early 1960s, when Americans were not permitted to enter China, he met with émigrés in Hong Kong and interviewed them on Chinese criminal procedure. After economic reform under Deng Xiaoping, Cohen’s knowledge of Chinese law took on a new importance as foreign companies began to pursue business opportunities. Helping China develop and reconstruct its legal system, he made an influential case for the roles of Western law and lawyers. Cohen helped break political barriers in both China and Taiwan, and he was instrumental in securing the release of political prisoners in several countries. Sharing these experiences and many others, this book tells the full story of an unparalleled career bridging East and West.

In February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine in a bloody escalation of a conflict that had begun eight years earlier. What drove Vladimir Putin to launch Europe’s largest land war since World War II?

Lucian Kim—an on-the-ground reporter in the region for decades—offers a gripping, definitive account of Russia’s path to war, from Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution and the 2014 Maidan uprising right up to the full-scale invasion. He examines the Kremlin’s motives, tracing Putin’s transformation from a seemingly pragmatic leader into an embittered tyrant who saw it as his historical mission to reconquer Ukraine. Kim places the war in the broader context of the Soviet Union’s collapse, arguing that it represents a clash between those who reject the Soviet past—like Volodymyr Zelensky and Alexei Navalny—and those who still identify with it. He debunks the Kremlin narrative that the West instigated the conflict, and he instead identifies the root causes of the war in the legacy of Russian imperialism and Putin’s dictatorial rule. At the same time, Kim is critical of the West’s empty promises to Ukraine, which made the country vulnerable to a revanchist Russia.

Putin’s Revenge features insight from Kim’s first-hand reporting on key moments, such as Russia’s occupation of Crimea and the beginning of the Russian-backed insurgency in eastern Ukraine. This book tells the story of the lead-up to the invasion with revelatory detail and fresh analysis, shedding new light on a conflict that has roiled the post–Cold War order.

Ecological crises threaten all forms of life on earth. Democracy too is endangered, as popular discontent, elite malfeasance, and unresponsive institutions imperil its survival. Present political concepts have proven inadequate to meeting these challenges, and their inadequacies are themselves symptoms of the failures of prevailing political, cultural, and ecological stories and practices.

This book offers a new vision of ecological and participatory democratic life for a time of crisis. Identifying myth and ritual as key resources for contemporary politics, Earthborn Democracy excavates practices and narratives that illustrate the interdependence necessary to inspire ecological renewal. It tells stories of multispecies agency and egalitarian political organization across history, from ancient Mesopotamia and the precolonial Americas to contemporary social movements, emphasizing Indigenous traditions and resistance. Resonating across these practices and stories past and present is a belief that we are all—human as well as nonhuman—earthborn, and this can serve as the basis for reimagining democracy. Allying visionary political theory with environmental activism, Earthborn Democracy provides a foundation and a guide for collective action in pursuit of earthly flourishing.

A number of converts to Buddhism report paranormal experiences. Their accounts describe psychic abilities like clairvoyance and precognition, out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, and encounters with other beings such as ghosts and deities, and they often interpret these events through a specifically Buddhist lens. This book is a groundbreaking exploration of these phenomena and their implications for both humanistic and scientific study of the paranormal.

D. E. Osto examines accounts of paranormal phenomena experienced by convert Buddhists from around the world collected through an online survey and interviews, placing them in the context of Indian Buddhist sources and recent scientific research. They focus in detail on the life stories of two interviewees and the important role the paranormal has played in their lives. These contemporary first-person narratives demonstrate the continued importance of the psychic and paranormal within the Buddhist tradition, and they can be interpreted as a living Buddhist folklore. Osto considers the limitations of both traditional religious views and Western scientific studies of the paranormal and proposes instead a new Buddhist phenomenological approach. Ultimately, Paranormal States contends, these deeply mysterious and extraordinary experiences exceed current understandings—and they can help bridge the gap between religious and scientific worldviews.

Over the course of a decades-long armed conflict, the Colombian state took a variety of approaches toward its insurgent opponent, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Successive governments swung between pursuing negotiations and responding with military counterinsurgency measures. FARC, for its part, proclaimed its commitment to “the combination of all forms of struggle”: seeking legitimation through both political and military means.

Investigating the relationship between FARC and the Colombian state from the outbreak of conflict in 1964 to the signing of the final peace agreement in 2016, Alexandra Rachel Phelan offers new insight into the dynamics of insurgencies. In such conflicts, both states and insurgents seek to assert their legitimacy, which has crucial implications for any prospective resolution. Phelan examines how FARC adopted different means of legitimation as part of its overall political and military strategy and how these strategies influenced government responses. She argues that the case of Colombia demonstrates that insurgents are more likely to engage in negotiations when the state recognizes their political legitimacy than when it demands their defeat. During a protracted conflict, when it is unclear that the state can win by military strength alone, offering incentives for political settlements can minimize—and perhaps even end—fighting. Drawing on interviews with former and active FARC leaders and Colombian government officials, as well as access to key primary documents, this book sheds new light on the Colombian conflict and provides rich theoretical understanding of the role of legitimacy in counterinsurgency more broadly.

How should an investor challenge the market price and find value? This book provides a new lens, arguing that value investing is a matter of understanding the business through accounting. Stephen Penman and Peter F. Pope—leading authorities on accounting and its investment applications—demonstrate why attention to financial statements is the key to judicious valuation. More broadly, they show that accounting fundamentals, when analyzed in a systematic manner, teach us how to think about value in new ways.

This guide to investing through analysis of financial statements presents both underlying principles and practical examples. It examines how an accounting book is structured, the ways to read one in order to extract information about value, and why accounting techniques help investors avoid common traps. Through cases that depict finance, investing, and accounting principles in action, readers learn crucial lessons for challenging the market’s pricing.

Financial Statement Analysis for Value Investing is essential reading for anyone interested in the fundamentals of value investing, practitioners and students alike. Both professional and individual investors can benefit from its techniques and insights, and it is well suited for value investing and financial statement analysis courses in business schools.

How do individuals address serious challenges in a context where organized gatherings are subject to strict government control? This book brings together a diverse group of scholars to explore the many ways people in China self-organize and create varied forms of coordination to solve important problems.

Through compelling, detail-rich case studies, The Extraordinary in the Mundane shows that family structures and networks deeply shape these modes of association. Because the public-private dichotomy does not resonate with many people in China, they rely on informal social ties, not formal organizations or state agencies, to confront personal challenges. Chapters present vivid ethnographic portraits that consider both positive and negative aspects of community formation. A woman with an autistic child creates an organization to advocate for inclusion of neurodivergent children in public schools. A trainee in a psychological counseling course finds mutual support among other participants. A boy is taken by his father to an internet addiction treatment camp that aims to restructure family interactions. A woman in her seventies shows off the burial clothes she prepared for herself, to the admiration of a group of friends. Offering a glimpse into the unofficial realities that often remain off the record, this book provides a wide-ranging and timely examination of the varieties of civic action in contemporary China.

Throughout his twenty-one-year tenure as president of Columbia University, Lee C. Bollinger was an outspoken national leader on many of the major issues confronting higher education and society more broadly. One of the country’s preeminent First Amendment scholars, he published frequently on free speech and press while leading a wide range of transformational university initiatives. During a period marked by profound change, he spoke within and beyond the academy about the challenges facing journalism, global free speech, and academic freedom, as well as the critical value of increasing racial and cultural diversity in higher education through affirmative action.

In Search of an Open Mind is a curated selection of Bollinger’s speeches, articles, and opinion columns during these momentous decades, reflecting on many significant events and challenges. These pieces cover a broad array of topics, from civil rights and civil liberties to the nature of the university and living a good life. Bollinger spoke often about the essential role of affirmative action in college admissions in overcoming the long legacy of racial discrimination, having led the litigation in the landmark case of Grutter v. Bollinger, in which, for the first time, a majority of the Supreme Court upheld the practice as constitutional. With the engaging writing style of a seasoned speaker and gifted teacher, this book provides first-hand insights into central issues of our civic and political life that are as timely now as when they were originally delivered.

Paternal, patriarchal, and fraternal concepts, metaphors, and images have long dominated thinking about politics. But the political, Gil Anidjar argues, has always been maternal.

In a series of finely woven meditations on slavery, sovereignty, and the social contract, this book places mothers and mothering at the crux of political thought. Anidjar identifies a maternal sovereignty and a maternal contract, showing that without motherhood, there could be no constitution, preservation, or reproduction of collective existence in time. And maternal power is also power over life and death, as he reveals through a nuanced consideration of abortion.

Through the concept of the maternal, Anidjar offers new insights into abiding sources from the Bible and ancient Greece to classical and modern political philosophy—the story of Hagar and Sarah, Oedipus and his two mothers, Hegel’s dialectic of master and slave—reinterpreted in light of Black and feminist criticism, psychoanalytic theory, and autotheoretical reflection. Elegantly written and provocative, On the Sovereignty of Mothers offers the maternal as a new frame for understanding the political order.

Republicans who live closer to the U.S.-Mexico border are less likely to support constructing a wall than those who live farther away. After a mass shooting, gun sales and permit applications skyrocket in nearby communities. Experiencing an extreme weather event like a hurricane or flood can encourage someone to attribute climate change to human activity. Why do we react so differently to faraway events and ones that take place on our doorsteps, and what does this reveal about our political landscape?

Proximity Politics is a groundbreaking examination of the role of distance in shaping attitudes, behaviors, and understandings of the world. Analyzing geocoded survey data, Jeronimo Cortina documents the crucial ways space and place influence public opinion. He demonstrates that the closer someone is to an event, social group, or policy, the likelier they are to have first-hand, specific, grounded knowledge of the subject. Conversely, distance leads to detachment, making it more likely that decontextualized or unreliable information and individual or group biases will prevail. Considering a range of case studies, from virus outbreaks to protests, Cortina unravels how spatial, emotional, temporal, social, and cultural distances affect public opinion. Bringing together quantitative and qualitative data in an accessible style, Proximity Politics shows that even in today’s interconnected world, we are still profoundly influenced by what happens next door.

Could ancient giant sharks called megalodons still exist in the deep sea? What should you do if stung by a jellyfish? Can we predict lightning strikes and how is climate change affecting hurricanes?

With humor, easy-to-understand language, and fun illustrations, marine scientist Ellen Prager and meteorologist Dave Jones use frequently asked and zany questions about the ocean and atmosphere to combat misinformation and make science engaging and understandable for all. From dangerous marine life, coral reefs, and the deep sea to lightning, hurricanes, weather forecasting, the Sun, and climate change, they reveal what’s fact, what’s fiction, and how to find science-based answers. This book is perfect for anyone curious about the world around them, educators, science communicators, and even scientists who want to learn about and explain topics outside their expertise.

A woman seduces her landlord to extort the family farm. Gamblers recruit a wily prostitute to get a rich young man back in the game. Silver counterfeiters wreak havoc for traveling merchants. A wealthy widow is drugged and robbed by a lodger posing as a well-to-do student. Vengeful judges and corrupt clerks pervert the course of justice. Cunning soothsayers spur on a plot to overthrow the emperor. Yet good sometimes triumphs, as when amateur sleuths track down a crew of homicidal boatmen or a cold-case murder is exposed by a frog. These are just a few of the tales of crime and depravity appearing in More Swindles from the Late Ming, a book that offers a panorama of vice—and words of warning—from one seventeenth-century writer.

This companion volume to The Book of Swindles: Selections from a Late Ming Collection presents sensational stories of scams that range from the ingenious to the absurd to the lurid, many featuring sorcery, sex, and extreme violence. Together, the two volumes represent the first complete translation into any language of a landmark Chinese anthology, making an essential contribution to the global literature of trickery and fraud. An introduction explores the geography of grift, the role of sex and family relations, and the portrayal of Buddhist clergy and others claiming supernatural powers. Opening a window onto the colorful world of crime and deception in late imperial China, this book testifies to the enduring popularity of stories about scoundrels and their schemes.

The director of classic films such as Sylvia Scarlett, The Philadelphia Story, Gaslight, Adam’s Rib, A Star Is Born, and My Fair Lady, George Cukor is widely admired but often misunderstood. Reductively stereotyped in his time as a “woman’s director”—a thinly veiled, disparaging code for “gay”—he brilliantly directed a wide range of iconic actors and actresses, including Cary Grant, Greta Garbo, Spencer Tracy, Joan Crawford, Marilyn Monroe, and Maggie Smith. As Katharine Hepburn, the star of ten Cukor films, told the director, “All the people in your pictures are as goddamned good as they can possibly be, and that’s your stamp.”

In this groundbreaking, lavishly illustrated critical study, Joseph McBride provides insightful and revealing essayistic portraits of Cukor’s actors in their most memorable roles. The queer filmmaker gravitated to socially adventurous, subversively rule-breaking, audacious dreamers who are often sexually transgressive and gender fluid in ways that seem strikingly modern today. McBride shows that Cukor’s seemingly self-effacing body of work is characterized by a discreet way of channeling his feelings through his actors. He expertly cajoled actors, usually gently but sometimes with bracing harshness, to delve deeply into emotional areas they tended to keep safely hidden. Cukor’s wry wit, his keen sense of psychological and social observation, his charm and irony, and his toughness and resilience kept him active for more than five decades in Hollywood. George Cukor’s People gives him the in-depth, multifaceted examination his rich achievement deserves.

An artist and writer whose charming and inventive works are at once modest and ambitious, Joe Brainard was one of the most distinctive figures on New York City’s vibrant cultural scene in the 1960s and 1970s. Widely known for his influential experimental memoir, I Remember, Brainard worked in a variety of forms, from New York School–aligned poetry to Pop Art–adjacent artworks, including wild riffs on the comic strip character Nancy. His art drew on the everyday and popular culture, exuding a sense of amiability, wit, and generosity.

Love, Joe presents a selection of Brainard’s letters stretching from 1959 to 1993, offering an intimate view of his personal and artistic life. They allow readers to witness an extraordinarily fertile moment in New York’s history, when literary and visual arts intersected with happenings, proto-punk and psychedelic rock concerts, and experimental music and dance performances. Brainard’s letters to his partner, Kenward Elmslie, and others also open a window onto the transformations of queer life during this period. His correspondents include poet and artist friends such as John Ashbery, Anne Waldman, Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, Fairfield Porter, Ron Padgett, Bernadette Mayer, James Schuyler, Alex Katz, and Andy Warhol, as well as lovers, patrons, high school friends, and fans. At once an insider’s view of the art and literary worlds and a revelation of Brainard’s creative process, these letters invite readers to share in his radical but gentle candor, his open-mindedness, and a sophisticated naiveté that helped him erase the conventional barriers between art and life.

For more than thirty years, the acclaimed novelist Shirley Hazzard and the renowned scholar of Japanese literature Donald Keene maintained a remarkable epistolary friendship. Brought together by the death of a mutual friend in the late 1970s, they discovered a profound connection built on mutual affinities for literature and culture and common values of humanism and cosmopolitanism.

Expatriates of No Country presents Hazzard and Keene’s correspondence, offering readers a new and intimate perspective on the work and achievements of these towering figures. Both left behind their countries of birth, and they shared experiences of displacement, estrangement, and fashioning new lives and selves in adopted homelands. Hazzard, who departed from Australia as a teenager without completing her formal education, led an expatriate life in New York and Italy as she attained literary fame. Keene, a pacifist who served as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Navy during World War II, devoted himself to the literature and culture of Japan, where he became revered. Their erudite and elegantly written letters trace the larger story of their friendship, finding striking overlaps between their distinctive worlds. Recording a vanished way of literary and intellectual life, Expatriates of No Country casts a new light on two extraordinary people through their unlikely connection.

In August 2020, Donald Trump announced that his administration had brokered a groundbreaking treaty between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, the first normalization agreement between Israel and an Arab state in more than twenty years. Soon afterward, Bahrain joined the agreements, known as the Abraham Accords. How were these treaties achieved, and why did the parties involved see normalization as in their interest? In what ways have the accords altered the Middle East’s political landscape, and how have they affected the question of Palestine?

This book is a groundbreaking in-depth analysis of the Abraham Accords, shedding new light on their causes and consequences. Elham Fakhro demonstrates how shared security concerns, economic interests, and regional political shockwaves led to a surprising strategic convergence between the Gulf states and Israel, setting the stage for covert relations to come out into the open. She examines the role of the Trump administration in negotiating the agreements and shows how the UAE and Bahrain have instrumentalized the accords to burnish their reputations in Western capitals. Fakhro underscores how Washington’s Middle East policy shifted toward expanding the agreements at the expense of attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—with profound costs. Offering a critical lens on a much-hailed agreement, this book argues that the pursuit of normalization in isolation from a lasting solution to the conflict has entrenched the conditions that continually plunge the Middle East into crisis.

Longlist, 2025 Moving Image Book Award, Kraszna-Krausz Foundation

Typically, films are suspenseful when they keep us on the edge of our seats, when glimpses of a turning doorknob, a ticking clock, or a looming silhouette quicken our pulses. Exemplified by Alfred Hitchcock’s masterworks and the countless thrillers they influenced, such films captivate viewers with propulsive plots that spur emotional investment in the fates of protagonists. Suspense might therefore seem to be a curious concept to associate with art films featuring muted characters, serene landscapes, and unrushed rhythms, in which plot is secondary to mood and tone.

This ambitious and wide-ranging book offers a redefinition of suspense by considering its unlikely incarnations in the contemporary films that have been called “slow cinema.” Rick Warner shows how slowness builds suspense through atmospheric immersion, narrative sparseness, and the withholding of information, causing viewers to oscillate among boredom, curiosity, and dread. He focuses on works in which suspense arises where the boundaries between art cinema and popular genres—such as horror, thriller, science fiction, and gothic melodrama—become indefinite, including Chantal Akerman’s La captive, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria, Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, Kelly Reichardt’s Night Moves, Lucrecia Martel’s Zama, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Creepy, and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return. Warner investigates the pivotal role of sound in generating suspense and traces how the experience of suspense has changed in the era of digital streaming. The Rebirth of Suspense develops a fresh theory, history, typology, and analysis of suspense that casts new light on the workings of films across global cinema.

Bottom-up voluntary associations, it is commonly thought, are among the fundamental building blocks of democracy, preparing people for engaged citizenship. A great deal of interest in Chinese civil society is premised on the idea that such groups might foster the emergence of democracy. But in a society where virtually all major institutions—from schools to workplaces to government—bear the deep imprint of authoritarian rule, can voluntary associations still spur social and political change?

Everyday Democracy is a groundbreaking study of bottom-up organizations in China, arguing that even in an authoritarian state, they nurture the skills and habits of democracy. Anthony J. Spires offers an in-depth look at two youth-based, youth-led volunteer groups, showing how their values and practices point the way toward the emergence of new, more democratic forms of association. In mainstream Chinese organizational life, even in grassroots civil society groups, hierarchy and autocracy are pervasive. In these groups, however, ideals of equality, mutual respect, and dignity have motivated young people to invent new practices and norms that contrast greatly with typical top-down organizational culture. Drawing on more than a decade of field-based research with a diverse array of participants, Everyday Democracy pinpoints the seeds of a democratic culture inside an authoritarian regime.

Finalist, 2025 SIM Outstanding Book Award, Social Issues in Management Division, Academy of Management

Dengue fever, a mosquito-borne viral infection, is a scourge of tropical climates. An extraordinary project in Indonesia, however, brought together a vast diversity of partners to combat the spread of the disease through innovative methods. This book tells the remarkable story of the fight against dengue and explores the implications for all social enterprises and business families seeking to tackle the world’s biggest challenges.

R. Edward Freeman and Andrew Sell examine the contributions of the many stakeholders who worked together across national, regional, and local levels for more than a decade. A scientific breakthrough found that infecting mosquitoes with a bacterium could prevent them from transmitting dengue and other viruses. To reduce the toll of the disease, though, this discovery needed to go beyond the laboratory. In Indonesia, thousands of people across a broad swath of society—including a leading business family and its foundation, university and medical school faculty and staff, local volunteers, and the sultan of Yogyakarta—formed a multistakeholder partnership whose efforts ranged from funding and management to large-scale field studies through releasing mosquitoes in their own backyards. Freeman and Sell distill key takeaways about stakeholder engagement, multidisciplinary teamwork, and durable collaboration for readers seeking to implement transformative projects. Defeating Dengue is at once an insightful case study of the power of multistakeholder partnerships and a gripping story of scientific and social achievement.

In Song-period China (960–1279 CE), masters in the Chan (Japanese Zen) school of Buddhism were presented as sources of religious authority on par with the Buddha, an almost unthinkably lofty status before the rise of Chan. This claim carried great rhetorical power, facilitating Chan’s appeal to Buddhist monastics and powerful patrons alike. But it also raised a challenging question for Chan Buddhists, who insisted that buddhahood properly transcends all worldly marks: By what signs could one recognize a Chan master as a buddha?

Discerning Buddhas argues that Chan Buddhists wove together tropes of sovereignty, hospitality, and martial heroism drawn from both Buddhist tradition and China’s cultural heritage to develop a distinctive vision of what it meant for a Chan master to be a buddha in Song-period China. Kevin Buckelew analyzes the ways Chan Buddhists deployed such tropes in ritual, literature, and visual culture in order to stage the comparison of Chan mastery with buddhahood. He examines how they used the concept of buddhahood to work through questions about the ideal Chan master’s authority, agency, and masculinity, in the process rendering buddhahood in terms highly legible to elite Chinese society.

Chan Buddhists, Buckelew shows, developed their own “signature” of buddhahood, according to which enlightened Chan masters who truly deserved comparison to the Buddha were supposed to be distinguished from everyone else. By exploring the resulting Chan culture of discernment, which raised fundamental questions about Buddhist authority at a pivotal inflection point in Chinese history, this book offers fresh insight into the place of Buddhism in Chinese society.

Leon Trotsky was living in The Bronx with his common-law wife and two children when the Russian Revolution broke out. President Woodrow Wilson and his successor, Warren G. Harding, had little in common—except both came to New York City to indulge in extramarital affairs. Henry Fonda and Jimmy Stewart were roommates for two years in the 1930s, sharing a Manhattan apartment dubbed “Casa Gangrene.” Simone de Beauvoir smoked her first joint at the Plaza Hotel in 1947. While living in Brighton Beach, Woody Guthrie wrote a song about his bigoted landlord, “Old Man Trump”—Donald’s father. The thirteen-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald was a menace to his Bronx neighbors, once firing a BB gun at their windows. Greta Garbo had a fear of dentists’ offices and found a practitioner who would examine her at a bench on Central Park West. Barack Obama spent his first night in Manhattan “curled up in an alley-way” on West 109th Street.

Telling these tales and many others, Destination City presents the surprising stories of historical figures who are not usually associated with New York City but spent key parts of their lives there. Vignettes recount incidents in the lives of hundreds of notable people—writers, artists, actors, scientists, activists, politicians, revolutionaries, and more. Some were greeted with ticker-tape parades; others came to the city penniless. Some fell in love with the city; others despised it. But all were marked in some way by their time in New York. Robert Pigott’s writing captures the fabric of a bygone city, bringing to life the colorful world these figures inhabited. Charming and wry, this book is for all readers interested in an unconventional angle on New York City past and present.

Todd McGowan forges a new theory of capitalism as a system based on the production of more than what we need: pure excess. He argues that the promise of more—more wealth, more enjoyment, more opportunity, without requiring any sacrifice—is the essence of capitalism. Previous socioeconomic systems set up some form of the social good as their focus. Capitalism, however, represents a revolutionary turn away from the good and the useful toward excessive growth, which now threatens the habitability of the planet.

Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, McGowan shows how the production of commodities explains the role of excess in the workings of capitalism. Capitalism and the commodity ensnare us with the image of the constant fulfillment of our desires—the seductive but unattainable promise of satisfying a longing that has no end. To challenge this system, McGowan turns to art, arguing that it can expose the psychological mechanisms that perpetuate capitalist society and reveal the need for limits. Featuring lively writing and engaging examples from film, literature, and popular culture, Pure Excess uncovers the hidden logic of capitalism—and helps us envision a noncapitalist life in a noncapitalist society.

Social entrepreneurs are people who launch ventures aimed at promoting positive change in their community and the world. Their bottom line is not financial profit but the common good. Drawing on his extensive career, John Marks has written a practitioner’s guide to the underlying principles of social entrepreneurship.

From Vision to Action offers a master class in effective negotiation and conflict resolution. It builds on a core strategy of understanding differences and acting on commonalities. Marks uses his own experiences of creating real-life breakthroughs during his time leading Search for Common Ground, which he founded and built with his wife, Susan Collin Marks, into the world’s largest peacebuilding nonprofit. Beginning with an improbable effort to promote cooperation between the CIA and the KGB, this book features examples that range from helping prevent genocide in Burundi to using children’s television to lessen ethnic tensions in Macedonia to creating a culture of mediation in Morocco. Readers learn key lessons, such as adapting to unexpected outcomes, communicating persuasive stories, and being incrementally transformational—or transformationally incremental. Bringing together compelling narratives and useful tools, From Vision to Action delivers practical guidance on building bridges and creating meaningful change.

Winner, 2025 Columbia University Press Distinguished Book Award

Across American history, the question of whose lives are long and healthy and whose lives are short and sick has always been shaped by the social and economic order. From the dispossession of Indigenous people and the horrors of slavery to infectious diseases spreading in overcrowded tenements and the vast environmental contamination caused by industrialization, and through climate change and pandemics in the twenty-first century, those in power have left others behind.

Through the lens of death and disease, Building the Worlds That Kill Us provides a new way of understanding the history of the United States from the colonial era to the present. David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz demonstrate that the changing rates and kinds of illnesses reflect social, political, and economic structures and inequalities of race, class, and gender. These deep inequities determine the disparate health experiences of rich and poor, Black and white, men and women, immigrant and native-born, boss and worker, Indigenous and settler. This book underscores that powerful people and institutions have always seen some lives as more valuable than others, and it emphasizes how those who have been most affected by the disparities in rates of disease and death have challenged and changed these systems. Ultimately, this history shows that unequal outcomes are a choice—and we can instead collectively make decisions that foster life and health.

Winner, 2025 Merle Curti Social History Award, Organization of American Historians

Finalist, 2025 Hagley Prize in Business History, Business History Conference

The history of the modern United States is the history of coal—and of coal miners. Trish Kahle reveals miners as forgers of a coal-fired social contract that was contested throughout the twentieth century as Americans sought to define the meaning of citizenship in an energy-intensive democracy.

Energy Citizenship traces the uncertain relationship between coal and democracy from the Progressive Era to the election of Ronald Reagan, examining how miners’ democratic aspirations confronted the deadly record of the country’s coal mines. Miners and their communities bore the burdens of energy production while reaping far fewer of the benefits of energy consumption. But they insisted that death in the mines, far from being inevitable, was a political choice. Kahle demonstrates that coal miners’ struggles to democratize the workplace, secure civil and social rights, and obtain restitution for the human toll of progress reshaped U.S. laws, regulatory administrations, and political imaginaries. Energy policy in the twentieth century was about not only managing fuels but also negotiating the relationship between coal miners and the rest of the country, which depended on the electric power and steel produced with the coal they mined.

Placing coal miners at the center of a sweeping new history of the United States, this book unmasks the violence of energy systems and shows how energy governance cuts to the heart of persistent questions about democracy, justice, and equality.

Winner, 2025 Columbia University Press Distinguished Book Award

What has gold done to people? What has it made them do? The Witwatersrand in South Africa, once home to the world’s richest goldfields, is today scattered with abandoned mines into which informal miners known as zama zamas venture in an illicit—often deadly—search for ore. Based on field research conducted across more than twenty-five years around these mines, Unstable Ground reveals the worlds that gold made possible—and gold’s profound costs for those who have lived in its shadow and dreamt of its transformative power.

From the vantage point of the closure of South Africa’s gold mines, Rosalind C. Morris reconsiders their histories, beginning in the present and descending into the pasts that shaped them. Anchored in evocative descriptions of mining in the ruins, this book explores the social worlds built on gold and the lives that were remade and sometimes undone by the industry over a century and a half. Viewing this industry from its margins, against the backdrop of the cyanide revolution, the gold standard’s demise, and recurrent sinkholes, as well as the insurrectionary protests and violence that continue to this day, it recasts the history of South Africa and the incomplete effort to overcome apartheid amid the transformations of the global economy. In writing that is by turns immersive, incisive, and poetic, Morris unearths a history that was born of imperial aspiration and that persists as a speculative mirage. Interweaving ethnography, history, personal testimony, and political thought with striking readings of South African literary texts, Unstable Ground is a work of extraordinary ambition and depth.