Columbia University Press

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

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

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

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

This sequel to Julia Kristeva’s celebrated allegory The Old Man and the Wolves returns to the corrupt seaside resort of a mythical town, where the boundaries between East and West, civilization and barbarism, and good and evil are erased. Part mystery, part meditation, this engrossing tale features the return of Parisian amateur detective and newspaper reporter Stephanie Delacour (Kristeva’s alter ego), drawn into the mystery of a friend's murder.

The story opens with the gruesome discovery of the decapitated body of a gifted translator, Gloria Harrison. Delacour finds herself participating in the investigation in the company of Detective Superintendent Northrup Rilsky. As the mystery unfolds, Delacour veers away from Rilsky’s investigation, on to a trail that leads to the real killer. Kristeva uses the classic thriller genre to animate the themes that run through her work as a linguist and philosopher. While Stephanie Delacour probes a brilliant gallery of suspects, we read between the lines some of the sorrows and dilemmas that are the focus of Kristeva’s own life and work: motherhood and the complex relationship between mother and child; art and music; psychoanalysis; mourning and melancholia; language; the powers of horror; and the hostility aroused by a competent, gifted, and attractive woman who is at once devotedly maternal and capable of sexual passion.

Julia Kristeva’s dazzling fictional debut is an intellectual adventure, full of vitality, sensuousness, and sustained lyricism. Reminiscent of The Mandarins, Simone de Beauvoir’s 1954 masterpiece, The Samurai brilliantly reconstructs a pivotal era of postwar French history—Paris in the late 1960s—and at the same time records the political disillusionment and ferment of a generation. In a brisk narrative spanning three continents, the novel follows an array of passionate and promiscuous intellectual warriors—the “samurai” for whom “writing is the only lasting act of pleasure and war combined.”

Readers will recognize finely sketched and often searing portraits of figures such as Lacan, Derrida, Barthes, Althusser, and many others. With an authorial voice that modulates between the erotic and the meditative, the ironic and the rancorous, The Samurai moves from Paris to Mao’s China—where revolutionary idealism collides with cold pragmatism—to New York and back to Paris. Over a twenty-five year period, the characters experience countless battles involving love, depression, maternity, and disease, while the various themes of the text—language, prison, madness, emotional ruptures—are brought to fruition with astounding insight.

This is a novel whose enormous energy derives from the juxtaposition of vital ideas set on a broad historical canvas. Fluid and captivating, The Samurai brilliantly illuminates both the constantly shifting terrain of human relationships and the manifold psychological entanglements of Left Bank intellectuals.

Julia Kristeva presents a thoroughly original and compelling reading of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, first delivered at the 1992 T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures at Canterbury. Kristeva's first essay, “Proust and Time Embodied,” takes a broadly psychoanalytical, linguistically sensitive approach to Proust’s exploration of time and the operation of memory. Next, in “In Search of Madeline,” she delves into Proust’s concept of the little cake that flooded him with the taste of childhood regained, providing an explanation for Proust’s search for the deeper levels of childhood grounded in her psychoanalytic experience.

Throughout Proust and the Sense of Time, Kristeva draws on Proust’s notebooks and manuscripts, pointing out significant variations in the different versions of his work. She examines his early philosophical training and the philosophical trends in Paris at the turn of the century, seeking to explain how he arrived at his concept of the primacy of memory and sensation.

Underlying Julia Kristeva’s Nations Without Nationalism is the idea that otherness—whether it be ethnic, religious, social, or political—needs to be understood and accepted in order to guarantee social harmony. This book is an impassioned plea for tolerance and for commonality, aimed at a world brimming over with racism and xenophobia. Responding to the rise of neo-Nazi groups in Germany and Eastern Europe and the popularity of the National Front in France, Kristeva turns to the origins of the nation-state to illustrate the problematic nature of nationalism and its complex configurations in subsequent centuries. For Kristeva, the key to commonality can be found in Montesquieu’s esprit general—his notion of the social body as a guaranteed hierarchy of private rights.

Nations Without Nationalism also contains Kristeva’s thoughts on Harlem Desir, the founder of the antiracist organization SOS Racisme; the links between psychoanalysis and nationalism; the historical nature of French national identity; the relationship between esprit general and Volksgeist; Charles de Gaulle’s complex ideas involving the “nation” and his dream of a unified Europe. Nations Without Nationalism reflects a passionate commitment to enlightenment and social justice. As ethnic strife persists in Europe and the United States, Kristeva’s humanistic message carries with it a special resonance and urgency.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Winner, 2025 Airey Neave Memorial Book Prize, Airey Neave Trust

Shocking acts of terrorism have erupted from violent American far-right extremists in recent years, including the 2015 mass murder at a historic Black church in Charleston and the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. These incidents, however, are neither novel nor unprecedented. They are the latest flashpoints in a process that has been unfolding for decades, in which vast conspiracy theories and radical ideologies such as white supremacism, racism, antisemitism, xenophobia, and hostility to government converge into a deadly threat to democracy.

God, Guns, and Sedition offers the definitive account of the rise of far-right terrorism in the United States—and how to counter it. Leading experts Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware trace the historical trajectory and assess the present-day dangers of this violent extremist movement, along with the harm it poses to U.S. national security. They combine authoritative, nuanced analysis with gripping storytelling and portraits of the leaders behind this violence and their followers. Hoffman and Ware highlight key terrorist tactics, such as the use of cutting-edge communications technology; the embrace of leaderless resistance or lone-wolf strategies; infiltration and recruitment in the military and law enforcement; and the movement’s intricate relationship with mainstream politics. An unparalleled examination of one of today’s great perils, God, Guns, and Sedition ends with an array of essential practical recommendations to halt the growth of violent far-right extremism and address this global terrorist threat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Silver Medal in the Social Change and Social Justice Category, 2024 Nautilus Book Awards

Winner, 2024 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

Women working in the sciences face obstacles at virtually every step along their career paths. From subtle slights to blatant biases, deep systemic problems block women from advancing or push them out of science and technology entirely.

Women in Science Now examines solutions to this persistent gender gap, offering new perspectives on how to make science more equitable and inclusive for all. This book shares stories and insights of women from a range of backgrounds working in various disciplines, illustrating the journeys that brought them to the sciences, the challenges they faced along the way, and the important contributions they have made to their fields. Lisa M. P. Munoz combines these narratives with a wealth of data to illuminate the size and scope of the challenges women scientists face, while highlighting research-based solutions to help overcome these obstacles. She presents groundbreaking studies in social psychology and organizational behavior that are informing novel approaches for combating historic and ongoing inequities.

Through a combined focus on personal experiences and social-science research, this timely book provides both a path toward greater gender equity and an inspiring vision of science and scientists.

When we view a work of art, we often experience an emotional response, but the causes of our reactions are complex. Our knowledge of why we respond to art as we do is rooted in science—in psychology and biology. Eric R. Kandel traces the origins of this understanding to early twentieth-century Vienna, which gave rise to the concept of the “beholder’s share,” the realization that art is incomplete without the perceptual and emotional involvement of the viewer—that is, without our responses to it.

But what causes our response? Our brain is a creativity machine that brings to bear on any image—including a painting—certain innate, universal processes related to sensory perception as well as higher-order processes related to our personal experiences, memories, and emotions. Understanding how these unconscious processes in the brain interact to create the beholder’s share is one of the great challenges currently confronting brain science.

The essays on art and science in this book vary widely in subject matter, including the angst-ridden portraits of Soutine, conflicting views of women’s sexuality, Cubism’s challenge to our innate visual processes, and why we react differently to abstract versus figurative art. But each essay focuses on the interaction of art and science. Woven throughout are the many notable scientists, art historians, artists, and others, both Jewish and non-Jewish, who contributed to our understanding of how we experience art.

Intense partisanship is a familiar part of the contemporary United States, but its consequences do not stop at the country’s borders. The damage now extends to U.S. relations with the rest of the world. Too often, political leaders place their own party’s interest in gaining and keeping power ahead of the national interest.

Paul R. Pillar examines how and why partisanship has undermined U.S. foreign policy, especially over the past three decades. Placing present-day discord in historical perspective going back to the beginning of the republic, Beyond the Water’s Edge shows that although the corrupting effects of partisan divisions are not new, past leaders were often able to overcome them. Recent social and political trends and developments including the end of the Cold War, however, have contributed to a surge of corrosive partisanship. Pillar demonstrates that its costs range from the prolongation of war and crisis to the intrusion of foreign influence and the undermining of democracy. He explores the ways other governments respond to inconsistency in U.S. foreign policy, the consequences of domestic division for U.S. global leadership, and how the corruption of American democracy also weakens democracy worldwide. Pillar considers possible remedies but draws the sobering conclusion that entrenched political sectarianism makes their adoption unlikely. Offering insightful analysis of the decline of U.S. foreign relations, Beyond the Water’s Edge is an important book for all readers concerned about the state of the American political system.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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