Columbia University Press

It is widely believed that Congress has broken down. Media accounts present the storied legislature as thoroughly gridlocked, paralyzed by partisan rancor. Political scientists find that Congress is passing fewer laws and spending less time on legislative work. Which parts of a supposedly dysfunctional legislature continue to function?

Maya L. Kornberg examines the legislative process beyond voting patterns, emphasizing the crucial role of congressional committee hearings. In committees, lawmakers hear from expert witnesses, legislators revise and discuss bills before bringing them to a vote, and the public has an opportunity to engage with Congress. Kornberg scrutinizes the inner workings of committees—the different types of witnesses who testify, the varied hearings Congress holds, and the distinct effects that committee work has on congresspeople. She deploys original mixed-methods datasets that span from insider interviews to sentiment analysis examining the language used in hearings. Kornberg evaluates how committees operate and the conditions affecting their performance, finding that committee work can be more deliberative and productive than the politics of the Congress floor.

Through a comprehensive exploration of who committees hear from and how they listen, this book demonstrates that Congress is not as dysfunctional as is often claimed. Inside Congressional Committees also suggests timely reforms based on these findings that can strengthen Congress.

In recent years, attitudes in the United States toward the Palestinian cause have shifted dramatically. Although Palestinians have long been demonized in U.S. media and politics, their struggle portrayed as illegitimate, emergent progressive voices increasingly challenge the status quo on Israel and Palestine and express solidarity with Palestinian resistance. What accounts for this change and its evolution?

This book provides a new lens on activism around Palestinian issues, demonstrating how the global Palestinian diaspora has driven transnational political movements. Karam Dana explores the ways that exile has shaped Palestinian identity and allowed for new forms of global activism. He examines the social, political, economic, and technological forces that have created space for Palestinian voices to be heard by wider audiences worldwide. Drawing on interviews with scholars and advocates—including members of the Palestinian diaspora and Jewish American activists—as well as public opinion data and media analysis, Dana traces how global Palestinian communities have influenced American views. He addresses the backlash against pro-Palestinian advocacy but argues that solidarity with Palestinians—both in the United States and globally—will continue to strengthen. Timely and insightful, To Stand with Palestine offers an inside look at how Palestinians have shared their story with the world and why sympathy for their plight is growing, with significant implications for the global political landscape.

Immigrants are less likely to commit crimes. They are eager to learn local languages. Immigration is not a burden on social services. Border walls do not work. There is no unmanageable refugee crisis. Yet many such misinformed assumptions and harmful misconceptions pervade conversations about immigration.

This timely book is a practical, evidence-based primer on immigrants and immigration. Each chapter debunks a frequently encountered claim and answers common questions. Presenting the latest findings and decades of interdisciplinary research in an accessible way, Ernesto Castañeda and Carina Cione emphasize the expert consensus that immigration is vital to the United States and many other countries around the world. Featuring original insights from research conducted in El Paso, Texas, Immigration Realities considers a wide range of places, ethnic groups, and historical eras. It provides the key data and context to understand how immigration affects economies, crime rates, and social welfare systems, and it sheds light on contentious issues such as the safety of the U.S.-Mexico border and the consequences of Brexit. This book is an indispensable guide for all readers who want to counter false claims about immigration and are interested in what the research shows.

European intellectuals of the 1950s dismissed American culture as nothing more than cowboy movies and the A-bomb. In response, American cultural diplomats tried to show that the United States had something to offer beyond military might and commercial exploitation. Through literary magazines, traveling art exhibits, touring musical shows, radio programs, book translations, and conferences, they deployed the revolutionary aesthetics of modernism to prove—particularly to the leftists whose Cold War loyalties they hoped to secure—that American art and literature were aesthetically rich and culturally significant.

Yet by repurposing modernism, American diplomats and cultural authorities turned the avant-garde into the establishment. They remade the once revolutionary movement into a content-free collection of artistic techniques and styles suitable for middlebrow consumption. Cold War Modernists documents how the CIA, the State Department, and private cultural diplomats transformed modernist art and literature into pro-Western propaganda during the first decade of the Cold War. Drawing on interviews, previously unknown archival materials, and the stories of such figures and institutions as William Faulkner, Stephen Spender, Irving Kristol, James Laughlin, and Voice of America, Barnhisel reveals how the U.S. government reconfigured modernism as a trans-Atlantic movement, a joint endeavor between American and European artists, with profound implications for the art that followed and for the character of American identity.

Today, most Uyghurs are Muslims. For centuries, however, Uyghurs were Buddhists. By around 1000 CE, they, like many of their neighbors, had decisively turned toward the Dharma, and a golden age of Uyghur Buddhism flourished under the Mongol empire. Dwelling along the Silk Road in what is now northwestern China, they stood at the center of Buddhist Eurasia, linking far-flung regions and traditions. But as Muslim power grew, Uyghur Buddhists converted to Islam, rewriting their past and erasing their Buddhist history.

This book presents the first comprehensive history of Buddhism among the Uyghurs from the ninth to the seventeenth century. Johan Elverskog traces how the Uyghurs forged their distinctive tradition, considering a variety of social, political, cultural, and religious contexts. He argues that the religious history of the Uyghurs challenges conventional narratives of the meeting of Buddhism and Islam, showing that conversion took place gradually and was driven by factors such as geopolitics, climate change, and technological innovation. Elverskog also provides a nuanced understanding of lived Buddhism, focusing on ritual practices and materiality as well as the religion’s entanglements with economics, politics, and violence. A groundbreaking history of Uyghur Buddhism, this book makes a compelling case for the importance of the Uyghurs in shaping the course of both Buddhist and Asian history.

Winner 2024 Sociology of Disability in Society Outstanding Publication Award, Disability in Society Section, American Sociological Association

Movements that take issue with conventional understandings of autism spectrum disorder, a developmental disability, have become increasingly visible. Drawing on more than three years of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with participants, Catherine Tan investigates two autism-focused movements, shedding new light on how members contest expert authority. Examining their separate struggles to gain legitimacy and represent autistic people, she develops a new account of the importance of social movements as spaces for constructing knowledge that aims to challenge dominant frameworks.

Spaces on the Spectrum examines the autistic rights and alternative biomedical movements, which reimagine autism in different and conflicting ways: as a difference to be accepted or as a sickness to treat. Both, however, provide a window into how ideas that conflict with dominant beliefs develop, take hold, and persist. The autistic rights movement is composed primarily of autistic adults who contend that autism is a natural human variation, not a disorder, and advocate for social and cultural inclusion and policy changes. The alternative biomedical movement, in contrast, is dominated by parents and practitioners who believe in the disproven idea that vaccines trigger autism and seek to reverse it with scientifically unsupported treatments. Both movements position themselves in opposition to researchers, professionals, and parents outside their communities. Spaces on the Spectrum offers timely insights into the roles of shared identity and communal networks in movements that question scientific and medical authority.

During the Republican period (1912–1949) and after, many Chinese Buddhists sought inspiration from non-Chinese Buddhist traditions, showing a particular interest in esoteric teachings. What made these Buddhists dissatisfied with Chinese Buddhism, and what did they think other Buddhist traditions could offer? Which elements did they choose to follow, and which ones did they disregard? And how do their experiences recast the wider story of twentieth-century pan-Asian Buddhist reform movements?

Based on a wide range of previously unexplored Chinese sources, this book explores how esoteric Buddhist traditions have shaped the Chinese religious landscape. Wei Wu examines cross-cultural religious transmission of ideas from Japanese and Tibetan traditions, considering the various esoteric currents within Chinese Buddhist communities and how Chinese individuals and groups engaged with newly translated ideas and practices. She argues that Chinese Buddhists’ assimilation of doctrinal, ritual, and institutional elements of Tibetan and Japanese esoteric Buddhism was not a simple replication but an active process of creating new meanings. Their visions of Buddhism in the modern world, as well as early twentieth-century discourses of nation building and religious reform, shaped the reception of esoteric traditions. By analyzing the Chinese interpretation and strategic adaptations of esoteric Buddhism, this book sheds new light on the intellectual development, ritual performances, and institutional formations of Chinese Buddhism in the twentieth century.

The Tarikh-i Ḥamidi is an epic and tragic history from the region of Xinjiang in northwest China, the homeland of the Muslim-majority Uyghur people. Written in the early twentieth century, it chronicles a mass rebellion by the Muslims of Xinjiang against the China-based Qing empire from its beginnings in 1864 to the Qing reconquest of 1877 and its aftermath. Its author, Musa Sayrami, was an eyewitness to and participant in the rebellion, and he later became a servant to the state that arose from it: an emirate led by the Central Asian military commander Yaʿqub Beg.

Sayrami documents the optimism of the rebellion’s early days, when local Muslims rose up to demand justice, as well as the tragedies that resulted from its leaders’ hubris. Yaʿqub Beg’s state offered hope for Islamic rule, but he turned out to be a flawed ruler, and the Qing reconquered the region. The narrative alternates dramatic scenes of battles and intrigue with colorful legends and reflections on the nature of politics.

Sayrami wrote not only to record events being lost from memory three decades after the uprising but also to account for why the Islamic rebellion had failed. He draws on traditional Islamic scholarship to analyze the relationship between Qing and Islamic power, developing an incisive argument about politics and empire. Presenting a distinctly Uyghur perspective on China, Eurasia, and the world, the Tarikh-i Ḥamidi is at once an invaluable lens on a period of flux and a cornerstone of Uyghur writing.

Honorable Mention, 2024 Ángel David Nieves Book Award, American Studies Association, Digital Humanities Caucus

Today, algorithms exercise outsize influence on cultural decision-making, shaping and even reshaping the concept of culture. How were automated, computational processes empowered to perform this work? What forces prompted the emergence of algorithmic culture?

Algorithmic Culture Before the Internet is a history of how culture and computation came to be entangled. From Cambridge, England, to Cambridge, Massachusetts, by way of medieval Baghdad, this book pinpoints the critical junctures at which algorithmic culture began to coalesce in language long before it materialized in the technological wizardry of Silicon Valley. Revising and extending the methodology of “keywords,” Ted Striphas examines changing concepts and definitions of culture, including the development of the field of cultural studies, and stresses the importance of language in the history of technology.

Offering historical and interdisciplinary perspective on the relationship of culture and computation, this book provides urgently needed context for the algorithmic injustices that beset the world today.

Winner, 2024 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

Muslim people are found all over the world. Most live outside the Middle East, from Asia to the Americas. The vast majority of contemporary Muslims are not fluent in Arabic, and speakers of languages such as Persian, Urdu, and Turkish have made essential contributions to Islamic history and culture. However, typical courses on Islam tend to downplay areas beyond the Middle East, focusing on Arabic texts and elite theological and doctrinal arguments.

This book offers an inclusive view of the diversity and complexity of the many worlds of Islam, investigating ethics and aesthetics as much as scriptures and theology. By paying attention to Muslims who are socially, culturally, doctrinally, or politically marginalized, it provides a comprehensive and all-embracing vision of the religion and its many interrelated communities. Contributors from a range of personal and intellectual backgrounds explore the capaciousness of Muslim identities, helping readers achieve a broader understanding of the past, present, and future of the Muslim world. This book includes communities such as the Nation of Islam and Alevi Muslims, and it goes beyond rituals like prayer and fasting to consider a wider array of practices, such as tattooing.

Across the Worlds of Islam is at once student-friendly and cutting-edge, written with both introductory courses and general readers in mind. Examining Muslim identity and practice from the perspective of the margins, it offers nuanced portraits of Muslim life across geographic and sectarian divisions.

Chimpanzees fascinate people for many reasons. We are struck by the apes’ resemblance to humanity, as seen in their use of tools and their complex social lives, and we are moved by the threats that human activity poses to them. Our awareness of our closest living relatives testifies to the efforts of the remarkable people who study these creatures and work to protect them. What motivates someone to dedicate their lives to chimpanzees? How does that reflect on our own species?

This book brings together a range of chimpanzee experts who tell powerful personal stories about their lives and careers. It features some of the world’s preeminent primatologists—including Jane Goodall and Frans de Waal—as well as representatives of a new generation from varied backgrounds. In addition to field scientists, the book features anthropologists, biologists, psychologists, veterinarians, conservationists, and the director of a chimpanzee sanctuary. Some grew up in the English countryside, others in villages in Congo; some first encountered chimpanzees in a zoo, others in the forests surrounding their homes. All are united by a common purpose: to study and understand chimpanzees in order to protect them in the wild and care for them in zoos and sanctuaries. Contributors share what inspired them, what shaped their career choices, and what motivates them to strive for solutions to the many challenges that chimpanzees face today.

Today, the People’s Republic of China is North Korea’s only ally on the world stage, a tightly knit relationship that goes back decades. Both countries portray their partnership as one of “brotherly affection” based on shared political ideals—an alliance “as tight as lips to teeth”—even though relations have deteriorated in recent years due to China’s ascendance and North Korea’s intransigence.

In A Misunderstood Friendship, leading diplomatic historians Zhihua Shen and Yafeng Xia draw on previously untapped primary source materials revealing tensions and rivalries to offer a unique account of the China–North Korea relationship. They unravel the twists and turns in high-level diplomacy between China and North Korea from the late 1940s to the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. Based on unprecedented access to Chinese government documents, Soviet and Eastern European archives, and in-depth interviews with former Chinese diplomats and North Korean defectors, Shen and Xia reveal that the tensions that currently plague the alliance between the two countries have been present from the very beginning of the relationship. They significantly revise existing narratives of the Korean War, China’s postwar aid to North Korea, Kim Il-sung’s ideological and strategic thinking, North Korea’s relations with the Soviet Union, and the importance of the Sino-U.S. rapprochement, among other issues. A Misunderstood Friendship adds new depth to our understanding of one of the most secretive and significant relationships of the Cold War, with increasing relevance to international affairs today.

With the advent of the steamship, repeated outbreaks of cholera marked oceanic pilgrimages to Mecca as a dangerous form of travel and a vehicle for the globalization of epidemic diseases. European, especially British Indian, officials also feared that lengthy sojourns in Arabia might expose their Muslim subjects to radicalizing influences from anticolonial dissidents and pan-Islamic activists. European colonial empires’ newfound ability to set the terms of hajj travel not only affected the lives of millions of pilgrims but also dramatically challenged the Ottoman Empire, the world’s only remaining Muslim imperial power.

Michael Christopher Low analyzes the late Ottoman hajj and Hijaz region as transimperial spaces, reshaped by the competing forces of Istanbul’s project of frontier modernization and the extraterritorial reach of British India’s steamship empire in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea. Imperial Mecca recasts Ottoman Arabia as a distant, unstable semiautonomous frontier that Istanbul struggled to modernize and defend against the onslaught of colonial steamship mobility. As it turned out, steamships carried not just pilgrims, passports, and microbes, but the specter of legal imperialism and colonial intervention. Over the course of roughly a half century from the 1850s through World War I, British India’s fear of the hajj as a vector of anticolonial subversion gradually gave way to an increasingly sophisticated administrative, legal, and medical protectorate over the steamship hajj, threatening to eclipse the Ottoman state and Caliphate’s prized legitimizing claim as protector of Islam’s most holy places. Drawing on a wide range of Ottoman and British archival sources, this book sheds new light on the transimperial and global histories traversed along the pilgrimage to Mecca.

Completed just weeks before his death, the lectures in this volume mark a critical juncture in the career of Roland Barthes, in which he declared the intention, deeply felt, to write a novel. Unfolding over the course of two years, Barthes engaged in a unique pedagogical experiment: he combined teaching and writing to "simulate" the trial of novel-writing, exploring every step of the creative process along the way.

Barthes's lectures move from the desire to write to the actual decision making, planning, and material act of producing a novel. He meets the difficulty of transitioning from short, concise notations (exemplified by his favorite literary form, haiku) to longer, uninterrupted flows of narrative, and he encounters a number of setbacks. Barthes takes solace in a diverse group of writers, including Dante, whose La Vita Nuova was similarly inspired by the death of a loved one, and he turns to classical philosophy, Taoism, and the works of François-René Chateaubriand, Gustave Flaubert, Franz Kafka, and Marcel Proust.

This book uniquely includes eight elliptical plans for Barthes's unwritten novel, which he titled Vita Nova, and lecture notes that sketch the critic's views on photography. Following on The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France (1977-1978) and a third forthcoming collection of Barthes lectures, this volume provides an intensely personal account of the labor and love of writing.

Nothing fills us with a sense of wonder like fossils. What looks at first like a simple rock is in fact a clue that reveals the staggering diversity of ancient environments, the winding pathways of evolution, and the majesty of a vanished earth. But as much as one might daydream of digging a hole in the backyard and finding a Tyrannosaurus, only a few places contain these buried treasures, and when a scientist comes across a remnant of prehistoric life, great care must be taken. What do budding paleontologists need to know before starting their search?

In Fantastic Fossils, Donald R. Prothero offers an accessible, entertaining, and richly illustrated guide to the paleontologist’s journey. He details the best places to look for fossils, the art of how to find them, and how to classify the major types. Prothero provides expert wisdom about typical fossils that an average person can hope to collect and how to hunt fossils responsibly and ethically. He also explores the lessons that both common and rarer discoveries offer about paleontology and its history, as well as what fossils can tell us about past climates and present climate change. Captivating illustrations by the paleoartist Mary Persis Williams bring to life hundreds of important specimens. Offering valuable lessons for armchair enthusiasts and paleontology students alike, Fantastic Fossils is an essential companion for all readers who have ever dreamed of going in search of traces of a lost world.

New Russian Drama took shape at the turn of the new millennium—a time of turbulent social change in Russia and the former Soviet republics. Emerging from small playwriting festivals, provincial theaters, and converted basements, it evolved into a major artistic movement that startled audiences with hypernaturalistic portrayals of sex and violence, daring use of non-normative language, and thrilling experiments with genre and form. The movement’s commitment to investigating contemporary reality helped revitalize Russian theater. It also provoked confrontations with traditionalists in society and places of power, making theater once again Russia’s most politicized art form.

This anthology offers an introduction to New Russian Drama through plays that illustrate the versatility and global relevance of this exciting movement. Many of them address pressing social issues, such as ethnic tensions and political disillusionment; others engage with Russia’s rich cultural legacy by reimagining traditional genres and canons. Among them are a family drama about Anton Chekhov, a modern production play in which factory workers compose haiku, and a satirical verse play about the treatment of migrant workers, as well a documentary play about a terrorist school siege and a postdramatic “text” that is only two sentences long. Both politically and aesthetically uncompromising, they chart new paths for performance in the twenty-first century. Acquainting English-language readers with these vital works, New Russian Drama challenges us to reflect on the status and mission of the theater.

During the last two decades, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has become a dominant force in cultural activity ranging from taste in music and art to choices in food and lifestyles.

The Field of Cultural Production brings together Bourdieu's major essays on art and literature and provides the first introduction to Bourdieu's writings and theory of a cultural field that situates artistic works within the social conditions of their production, circulation, and consumption.

Bourdieu develops a highly original approach to the study of literary and artistic works, addressing many of the key issues that have preoccupied literary art and cultural criticism in the last twentieth century: aesthetic value and canonicity, intertextuality, the institutional frameworks of cultural practice, the social role of intellectuals and artists, and structures of literary and artistic authority.

Bourdieu elaborates a theory of the cultural field which situates artistic works within the social conditions of their production, circulation, and consumption. He examines the individuals and institutions involved in making cultural products what they are: not only the writers and artists, but also the publishers, critics, dealers, galleries, and academies. He analyzes the structure of the cultural field itself as well as its position within the broader social structures of power.

The essays in his volume examine such diverse topics as Flaubert's point of view, Manet's aesthetic revolution, the historical creation of the pure gaze, and the relationship between art and power.

The Field of Cultural Porduction will be of interest to students and scholars from a wide range of disciplines: sociology and social theory, literature, art, and cultural studies.

In 1993, an astonishing discovery was made at a tomb in Guodian in Hubei province (east central China). Written on strips of bamboo that have miraculously survived intact since 300 B.C., the "Guodian Laozi," is by far the earliest version of the Tao Te Ching ever unearthed. Students of ancient Chinese civilization proclaimed the text a decisive breakthrough in the understanding of this famous text: it provides the most conclusive evidence to date that the text was the work of multiple authors and editors over hundreds of years, rather than the achievement of a single individual writing during the time of Confucius.

Robert Henricks now presents the first English translation of the "bamboo slip Laozi." Differing substantially from other versions we have of the text, the Guodian Laozi provides us with clues on how and when the text came into being. As Henricks's translation shows, many chapters are missing in this form of the text, and some chapters remain incomplete. All of this seems to suggest that the Tao Te Ching was not yet "complete" when these slips were copied.

In his translation, Henricks focuses attention on lines in each of the chapters that vary from readings in other editions. In addition, he shows how the sequence of chapters in this form of the text is totally unrelated to the sequence readers commonly see in the "standard" form of the text, i.e., in other translations.

Here are just a few of the noteworthy features of this new Tao Te Ching:

• A lucid introduction to the Guodian Laozi, offering background on the archaeological interpretation of the discovery

• Line-by-line comparisons of the Guodian Laozi against the Mawangdui and Wang Bi editions

• Extensive notes on each chapter describing the unique elements of the Guodian Laozi in comparison with other versions

• Transcriptions for each chapter, noting both the ancient and modern form of the characters in the chapter

• An appendix featuring the official biography of Laozi written by Sima Qian, the Grand Historian of China, as well as Henricks's commentary and notes on this biography

This groundbreaking work will lead to a reassessment of the history and significance of this well-known and critical work as well as a reevaluation of the role it played in the development of Taoism in early China.

What is the sentimental? How can we understand it by way of the visual and narrative modes of signification specific to cinema and through the manners of social interaction and collective imagining specific to a particular culture in transition? What can the sentimental tell us about the precarious foundations of human coexistence in this age of globalization?

Rey Chow explores these questions through nine contemporary Chinese directors (Chen Kaige, Wong Kar-wai, Zhang Yimou, Ann Hui, Peter Chan, Wayne Wang, Ang Lee, Li Yang, and Tsai Ming-liang) whose accomplishments have become historic events in world cinema. Approaching their works from multiple perspectives, including the question of origins, nostalgia, the everyday, feminine "psychic interiority," commodification, biopolitics, migration, education, homosexuality, kinship, and incest, and concluding with an account of the Chinese films' epistemic affinity with the Hollywood blockbuster Brokeback Mountain, Chow proposes that the sentimental is a discursive constellation traversing affect, time, identity, and social mores, a constellation whose contours tends to morph under different historical circumstances and in different genres and media. In contemporary Chinese films, she argues, the sentimental consistently takes the form not of revolution but of compromise, not of radical departure but of moderation, endurance, and accommodation. By naming these films sentimental fabulations—screen artifacts of cultural becoming with irreducible aesthetic, conceptual, and speculative logics of their own—Chow presents Chinese cinema first and foremost as an invitation to the pleasures and challenges of critical thinking.

Loren Ghiglione recounts the fascinating life and tragic suicide of Don Hollenbeck, the controversial newscaster who became a primary target of McCarthyism's smear tactics. Drawing on unsealed FBI records, private family correspondence, and interviews with Walter Cronkite, Mike Wallace, Charles Collingwood, Douglas Edwards, and more than one hundred other journalists, Ghiglione writes a balanced biography that cuts close to the bone of this complicated newsman and chronicles the stark consequences of the anti-Communist frenzy that seized America in the late 1940s and 1950s.

Hollenbeck began his career at the Lincoln, Nebraska Journal (marrying the boss's daughter) before becoming an editor at William Randolph Hearst's rip-roaring Omaha Bee-News. He participated in the emerging field of photojournalism at the Associated Press; assisted in creating the innovative, ad-free PM newspaper in New York City; reported from the European theater for NBC radio during World War II; and anchored television newscasts at CBS during the era of Edward R. Murrow.

Hollenbeck's pioneering, prize-winning radio program, CBS Views the Press (1947-1950), was a declaration of independence from a print medium that had dominated American newsmaking for close to 250 years. The program candidly criticized the prestigious New York Times, the Daily News (then the paper with the largest circulation in America), and Hearst's flagship Journal-American and popular morning tabloid Daily Mirror. For this honest work, Hollenbeck was attacked by conservative anti-Communists, especially Hearst columnist Jack O'Brian, and in 1954, plagued by depression, alcoholism, three failed marriages, and two network firings (and worried about a third), Hollenbeck took his own life. In his investigation of this amazing American character, Ghiglione reveals the workings of an industry that continues to fall victim to censorship and political manipulation. Separating myth from fact, CBS's Don Hollenbeck is the definitive portrait of a polarizing figure who became a symbol of America's tortured conscience.

"Unlike Freud, I do not claim that religion is just an illusion and a source of neurosis. The time has come to recognize, without being afraid of 'frightening' either the faithful or the agnostics, that the history of Christianity prepared the world for humanism."

So writes Julia Kristeva in this provocative work, which skillfully upends our entrenched ideas about religion, belief, and the thought and work of a renowned psychoanalyst and critic. With dialogue and essay, Kristeva analyzes our "incredible need to believe"--the inexorable push toward faith that, for Kristeva, lies at the heart of the psyche and the history of society. Examining the lives, theories, and convictions of Saint Teresa of Avila, Sigmund Freud, Donald Winnicott, Hannah Arendt, and other individuals, she investigates the intersection between the desire for God and the shadowy zone in which belief resides.

Kristeva suggests that human beings are formed by their need to believe, beginning with our first attempts at speech and following through to our adolescent search for identity and meaning. Kristeva then applies her insight to contemporary religious clashes and the plight of immigrant populations, especially those of Islamic origin. Even if we no longer have faith in God, Kristeva argues, we must believe in human destiny and creative possibility. Reclaiming Christianity's openness to self-questioning and the search for knowledge, Kristeva urges a "new kind of politics," one that restores the integrity of the human community.

In The Preparation of the Novel, a collection of lectures delivered at a defining moment in Roland Barthes's career (and completed just weeks before his death), the critic spoke of his struggle to discover a different way of writing and a new approach to life. The Neutral preceded this work, containing Barthes's challenge to the classic oppositions of Western thought and his effort to establish new pathways of meaning. How to Live Together predates both of these achievements, a series of lectures exploring solitude and the degree of contact necessary for individuals to exist and create at their own pace. A distinct project that sets the tone for his subsequent lectures, How to Live Together is a key introduction to Barthes's pedagogical methods and critical worldview.

In this work, Barthes focuses on the concept of "idiorrhythmy," a productive form of living together in which one recognizes and respects the individual rhythms of the other. He explores this phenomenon through five texts that represent different living spaces and their associated ways of life: Émile Zola's Pot-Bouille, set in a Parisian apartment building; Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, which takes place in a sanatorium; André Gide's La Séquestrée de Poitiers, based on the true story of a woman confined to her bedroom; Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, about a castaway on a remote island; and Pallidius's Lausiac History, detailing the ascetic lives of the desert fathers.

As with his previous lecture books, How to Live Together exemplifies Barthes's singular approach to teaching, in which he invites his audience to investigate with him—or for him—and wholly incorporates his listeners into his discoveries. Rich with playful observations and suggestive prose, How to Live Together orients English-speaking readers to the full power of Barthes's intellectual adventures.

Judith Butler follows Edward Said's late suggestion that through a consideration of Palestinian dispossession in relation to Jewish diasporic traditions a new ethos can be forged for a one-state solution. Butler engages Jewish philosophical positions to articulate a critique of political Zionism and its practices of illegitimate state violence, nationalism, and state-sponsored racism. At the same time, she moves beyond communitarian frameworks, including Jewish ones, that fail to arrive at a radical democratic notion of political cohabitation. Butler engages thinkers such as Edward Said, Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi, Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin, and Mahmoud Darwish as she articulates a new political ethic. In her view, it is as important to dispute Israel's claim to represent the Jewish people as it is to show that a narrowly Jewish framework cannot suffice as a basis for an ultimate critique of Zionism. She promotes an ethical position in which the obligations of cohabitation do not derive from cultural sameness but from the unchosen character of social plurality. Recovering the arguments of Jewish thinkers who offered criticisms of Zionism or whose work could be used for such a purpose, Butler disputes the specific charge of anti-Semitic self-hatred often leveled against Jewish critiques of Israel. Her political ethic relies on a vision of cohabitation that thinks anew about binationalism and exposes the limits of a communitarian framework to overcome the colonial legacy of Zionism. Her own engagements with Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish form an important point of departure and conclusion for her engagement with some key forms of thought derived in part from Jewish resources, but always in relation to the non-Jew.

Butler considers the rights of the dispossessed, the necessity of plural cohabitation, and the dangers of arbitrary state violence, showing how they can be extended to a critique of Zionism, even when that is not their explicit aim. She revisits and affirms Edward Said's late proposals for a one-state solution within the ethos of binationalism. Butler's startling suggestion: Jewish ethics not only demand a critique of Zionism, but must transcend its exclusive Jewishness in order to realize the ethical and political ideals of living together in radical democracy.

Interspecies Ethics explores animals' vast capacity for agency, justice, solidarity, humor, and communication across species. The social bonds diverse animals form provide a remarkable model for communitarian justice and cosmopolitan peace, challenging the human exceptionalism that drives modern moral theory. Situating biosocial ethics firmly within coevolutionary processes, this volume has profound implications for work in social and political thought, contemporary pragmatism, Africana thought, and continental philosophy.

Interspecies Ethics develops a communitarian model for multispecies ethics, rebalancing the overemphasis on competition in the original Darwinian paradigm by drawing out and stressing the cooperationist aspects of evolutionary theory through mutual aid. The book's ethical vision offers an alternative to utilitarian, deontological, and virtue ethics, building its argument through rich anecdotes and clear explanations of recent scientific discoveries regarding animals and their agency. Geared toward a general as well as a philosophical audience, the text illuminates a variety of theories and contrasting approaches, tracing the contours of a postmoral ethics.

Wael B. Hallaq boldly argues that the "Islamic state," judged by any standard definition of what the modern state represents, is both impossible and inherently self-contradictory. Comparing the legal, political, moral, and constitutional histories of premodern Islam and Euro-America, he finds the adoption and practice of the modern state to be highly problematic for modern Muslims. He also critiques more expansively modernity's moral predicament, which renders impossible any project resting solely on ethical foundations.

The modern state not only suffers from serious legal, political, and constitutional issues, Hallaq argues, but also, by its very nature, fashions a subject inconsistent with what it means to be, or to live as, a Muslim. By Islamic standards, the state's technologies of the self are severely lacking in moral substance, and today's Islamic state, as Hallaq shows, has done little to advance an acceptable form of genuine Shari'a governance. The Islamists' constitutional battles in Egypt and Pakistan, the Islamic legal and political failures of the Iranian Revolution, and similar disappointments underscore this fact. Nevertheless, the state remains the favored template of the Islamists and the ulama (Muslim clergymen).

Providing Muslims with a path toward realizing the good life, Hallaq turns to the rich moral resources of Islamic history. Along the way, he proves political and other "crises of Islam" are not unique to the Islamic world nor to the Muslim religion. These crises are integral to the modern condition of both East and West, and by acknowledging these parallels, Muslims can engage more productively with their Western counterparts.

The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of the Cold War but also the rise of a melancholic vision of history as a series of losses. For the political left, the cause lost was communism, and this trauma determined how leftists wrote the next chapter in their political struggle and how they have thought about their past since. Throughout the twentieth century, argues Left-Wing Melancholia, from classical Marxism to psychoanalysis to the advent of critical theory, a culture of defeat and its emotional overlay of melancholy have characterized the leftist understanding of the political in history and in theoretical critique.

Drawing on a vast and diverse archive in theory, testimony, and image and on such thinkers as Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, and others, the intellectual historian Enzo Traverso explores the varying nature of left melancholy as it has manifested in a feeling of guilt for not sufficiently challenging authority, in a fear of surrendering in disarray and resignation, in mourning the human costs of the past, and in a sense of failure for not realizing utopian aspirations. Yet hidden within this melancholic tradition are the resources for a renewed challenge to prevailing regimes of historicity, a passion that has the power to reignite the dialectic of revolutionary thought.

Emotion takes place. Rather than an interior state of mind in response to the outside world, emotion per se is spatial, at turns embedding us from without, transporting us somewhere else, or putting us ahead of ourselves. In this book, Ling Hon Lam gives a deeply original account of the history of emotions in Chinese literature and culture centered on the idea of emotion as space, which the Chinese call “emotion-realm” (qingjing).

Lam traces how the emotion-realm underwent significant transformations from the dreamscape to theatricality in sixteenth- to eighteenth-century China. Whereas medieval dreamscapes delivered the subject into one illusory mood after another, early modern theatricality turned the dreamer into a spectator who is no longer falling through endless oneiric layers but pausing in front of the dream. Through the lens of this genealogy of emotion-realms, Lam remaps the Chinese histories of morals, theater, and knowledge production, which converge at the emergence of sympathy, redefined as the dissonance among the dimensions of the emotion-realm pertaining to theatricality.The book challenges the conventional reading of Chinese literature as premised on interior subjectivity, examines historical changes in the spatial logic of performance through media and theater archaeologies, and ultimately uncovers the different trajectories that brought China and the West to the convergence point of theatricality marked by self-deception and mutual misreading. A major rethinking of key terms in Chinese culture from a comparative perspective, The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China develops a new critical vocabulary to conceptualize history and existence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Data and analytics have the potential to provide sports organizations with a competitive advantage both on and off the field. Yet even as the use of analytics in sports has become commonplace, teams regularly find themselves making big investments without significant payoff.

This book is a practical, nontechnical guide to incorporating sports data into decision making, giving leaders the knowledge they need to maximize their organization’s investment in analytics. Benjamin C. Alamar—a leading expert who has built high-performing analytics groups—surveys the current state of the use of data in sports, including both specifics around the tools and how to deploy them most effectively. Sports Analytics offers a clear, easily digestible overview of data management, statistical models, and information systems and a detailed understanding of their vast possibilities. It walks readers through the essentials of understanding the value of different types of data and strategies for building and managing an analytics team. Throughout, Alamar illustrates the value of analytics with real-world examples and case studies from both the sports and business sides.

Sports Analytics has guided a range of sports professionals to success since its original publication in 2013. This second edition adds examples and strategies that focus on using data on the business side of a sports organization, provides concrete strategies for incorporating different types of data into decision making, and updates all discussions for the rapid technological developments of the last decade.

Over 4.5 billion years, Earth’s climate has transformed tremendously. Before our more temperate recent past, the planet swung from one extreme to another—from a greenhouse world of sweltering temperatures and high sea levels to a “snowball earth” in which glaciers reached the equator. During this history, we now know, living things and the climate have always influenced and even shaped each other. But the climate has never changed as rapidly or as drastically as it has since the Industrial Revolution.

In this lively and entertaining book, Donald R. Prothero explores the astonishing connections between climate and life through the ages, telling the remarkable stories of the scientists who made crucial discoveries. Journeying through the intertwined evolution of climate and life, he tackles questions such as: Why do we have phytoplankton to thank for the air we breathe? What kind of climate was necessary for the rise of the dinosaurs—or the mammals, their successors? When and how have climatic changes caused mass extinctions? Prothero concludes with the Ice Ages and the Holocene, the role of climate in human history, and the perils of anthropogenic climate change. Understanding why the climate has changed in the past, this timely book shows, is essential to grasping the gravity of how radically human activity is altering the climate today.

Winner, 2024 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

The world’s oceans are changing at a drastic pace. Beneath the waves and along the coasts, climate change and environmental degradation have spurred the most radical transformations in human history. In response, the people who know the ocean most intimately are taking action for the sake of our shared future. Community scientists track species in California tidepools. Researchers dive into the waters around Sydney to replant kelp forests. Scientists and First Nations communities collaborate to restore clam gardens in the Pacific Northwest.

In At Every Depth, the oceanographer Tessa Hill and the science journalist Eric Simons profile these and other efforts to understand and protect marine environments, taking readers to habitats from shallow tidepools to the deep sea. They delve into the many human connections to the ocean—how people live with and make their living from the waters—journeying to places as far-flung as coral reefs, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and the Arctic and Antarctic poles. At Every Depth shares the stories of people from all walks of life, including scientists, coastal community members, Indigenous people, shellfish farmers, and fisheries workers. It brings together varied viewpoints, showing how scientists’ research and local and Indigenous knowledge can complement each other to inform a more sustainable future. Poignantly written and grounded in science, this book offers a narrative perspective on the changing oceans, letting us see how our relationships to the oceans are changing too.

Kenneth Waltz (1924–2013) is perhaps the most enduringly influential figure in international relations theory of the second half of the twentieth century. He is considered the father of the structural-realist or neorealist school, and his views on core questions, such as the causes of war and the structure of the international system, are foundational to the field today and likely will remain so for decades to come. Waltz’s writings on both theoretical and policy-related topics, from the balance of power to the spread of nuclear weapons, continue to fuel debate.

This book is a groundbreaking intellectual biography of Kenneth Waltz, shedding new light on the development and significance of his key contributions. Paul R. Viotti draws on extensive, candid interviews with Waltz as well as Waltz’s personal files and archival research to provide a nuanced account of the great scholar’s life and thought. He traces the intellectual sources and personal experiences that shaped Waltz’s work, including an intense Lutheran upbringing; service in World War II and the Korean War; and the academic environments of Oberlin College, Columbia University, and the University of California, Berkeley. Viotti examines the key influences on Waltz’s major works, Man, the State, and War and Theory of International Politics, and analyzes their distinctive insights. Engaging with the views of Waltz’s critics and featuring reminiscences from his colleagues, this book is a compelling portrait of an intellectual titan.

We've known for decades that climate change is an existential crisis. For just as long, we've seen the complete failure of our institutions to rise to the challenge. Governments have struggled to meet even modest goals. Fossil fuel interests maintain a stranglehold on political and economic power. Even though we have seen growing concern from everyday people, civil society has succeeded only in pressuring decision makers to adopt watered-down policies. All the while, the climate crisis worsens. Is there any hope of achieving the systemic change we need?

Dana R. Fisher argues that there is a realistic path forward for climate action—but only through mass mobilization that responds to the growing severity and frequency of disastrous events. She assesses the current state of affairs and shows why public policy and private-sector efforts have been ineffective. Spurred by this lack of progress, climate activism has become increasingly confrontational. Fisher examines the radical flank of the climate movement: its emergence and growth, its use of direct action, and how it might evolve as the climate crisis worsens. She considers when and how activism is most successful, identifying the importance of creating community, capitalizing on shocking moments, and cultivating resilience. Clear-eyed yet optimistic, Saving Ourselves offers timely insights on how social movements can take power back from deeply entrenched interests and open windows of opportunity for transformative climate action.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.