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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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