Columbia University Press

From the books and heretics burnt on the pyres of the Inquisition to self-immolations at protest rallies, from the massive burning of oil on the global scale to inflammatory speech, from the imagery of revolutionary sparks ready to ignite the spirits of the oppressed to car bombings in the Middle East—fire proves to be an indispensable element of the political. To account for this elemental source of heat and light, Pyropolitics delineates a semantico-discursive field, replete with the literal and metaphorical mentions and uses of fires, flames, sparks, immolations, incinerations, and burning in political theory and practices.

Relying on classical political theory, literature, theology, contemporary philosophy, and an analysis of current events, Michael Marder argues that geopolitics, or the politics of the Earth, has always had an unstable, at once shadowy and blinding, underside—pyropolitics, or the politics of fire. If this obscure double of geopolitics is, increasingly, dictating the rules of the game today, then it is crucial to learn to speak its language, to discern its manifestations, and to project where our world ablaze is heading.

Previously published by Rowman and Littlefield, this edition has a new foreword from Slavoj Žižek and three new chapters.

This book discusses the state of cryobiology, which is currently developing into an important and innovative field of medicine.
It is already routine to preserve and revive cells and small tissue samples through cooling. The current development of organ cryopreservation with the aim of preserving human transplant organs and making them available to remedy the shortage of transplants will be discussed. Preservation of the entire human body is also a long-term goal which may come a little more into reach by such development.
The processes involved in the cooling of tissues, using vitrification and cryoprotection, are discussed in detail.
The many experiments on cells, tissues and organs at non-cryogenic and cryogenic temperatures below 0°C are compiled and evaluated.
Obstacles to the methods and the development of means to overcome them are another topic.
The astonishing survival of cells following oxygen deprivation is presented with regard to the still inadequate methods of post-mortem tissue cryopreservation.
The possibilities of repairing and reactivating tissues form another chapter.
The book ends with an outlook on the development of amazing new methods and procedures for cryoprotection, the prevention of ice crystals and stress fractures, and the restoration of tissues.

The work addresses a general audience as well as academics and, in particular, scientists who want to find out about the state of research in the field of cryobiology cryoprotection in general and organ and body preservation in particular.

This book came into being almost by accident: After the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion to Ukraine, several students of a Kyiv screenwriting school began to describe their impressions, telling what they saw and felt. They created their texts to distract themselves, to re-live difficult moments in their lives, and simply to talk about what was happening to them. Later, it became clear that these texts form a fascinating book, narrating a frank story about the war, a story of private people experiencing the Russian invasion. Volodymyr Hromov, a teacher at that screenwriting school, added several more eyewitness accounts to the students’ texts, excerpts from correspondence with friends and acquaintances.
The book contains testimonies from those who left and those who stayed, those who sat under siege and who crossed the front line. It forms a chronicle of the beginning of a full-scale war, but also of the narrators’ reflections on the events they took part in, their search for a way out, and their hopes for the future. The volume’s contributors are Oleksandr Sivak, Oleksiy Dranhinis, Olha Apenko, Bohdan Bilyaev, Maryna Kuzmicheva, Anastasiya Tymoshenko, Tetyana Stepanova, Olha Horobets, Svitlana Yatsynich, Sima Vasilyeva, Yevhen Khvorostyanko and Natalya Bezmen.

In today’s dynamic business world, the intersection of traditional strategy and human behavior is more relevant than ever. Brought to you by the collaborative minds of graduate students, alumni, and faculty from ESB Business School as well as contributors from INSEAD, this volume explores the subtleties of this integration. Journey through foundational theories, learn about the evolving tools, and delve into the nuanced interplay between emotions and strategic decisions. Ideal for business students, scholars, practitioners, and those curious about the fusion of strategy and human insight, “Aspects of Behavioral Strategy” provides a thoughtful glimpse into the evolving landscape of strategic management.
Where the pulse of strategy beats with the rhythm of the human heart.

This unique collection of essays offers a glimpse into life in and around Kharkiv during the first two years of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. A Kharkiv native, Vikoriia Grivina reflects on living in a city where days are full of poetry readings and gallery openings, while nights are saturated with air raids and explosions.

The chronicle of everyday life is layered with inquiries into the urban history and mythology of the 20th-century Kharkiv, a look at the city’s decolonial processes, new activist communities, and also the re-discovery of the 1920s literary movement known as the Ukrainian Executed Renaissance. The collection also comprises a fictional story that explores some of the darker, irrational fears and imaginations of urban dwellers during war.

The involvement of the so-called “auxiliary police” and the “self-government” (i.e. local residents who were entrusted with the management of the affairs of the municipality) in the murder of the Jewish population and the looting of Jewish property during the German occupation of the USSR is still poorly understood.
This groundbreaking book concentrates on the Ukrainian-Russian-Belarusian borderland and analyzes the diverse motivations of local collaborators.

The reflections and deliberations in this book represent different aspects of the publishing, scholarly and media activity of the former Soviet political prisoner and Jewish-Ukrainian public intellectual, as well as co-initiator of Ukraine’s First of December Group, Joseph Zissels, over the past years. The book starts with outlines of Zissels’s self-understanding and comprehension of his involvement in the dissident movement. Based on his own research, the author offers his model of seeing modern Ukraine through the prism of the coordinates basic to the European system of values. The main themes of the book’s articles, lectures and interviews are civil society, identity formation, social tolerance, and Jewishness.

The book’s title has been chosen, by the author, from Psalm 5, Verse 2 of the Complete Jewish Bible: “Give ear to my words, Adonai, consider my inmost thoughts.”

Nationalism and Indigenousness in Select Commonwealth Writings and Films: A Postcolonial Rereading—the first publication the new book-series Studies in Commonwealth Writings—collects 24 essays written by scholars, critics, and writers from all over the world, which, in the postcolonial perspective, analyze select literary writings and films from the so-called ‘Commonwealth countries’ (especially those belonging to Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Caribbeans) to explore how the concerned writers and filmmakers have depicted issues of nationalism and indigeneity.
Though there are controversies regarding the acceptability and relevance of the term ‘Commonwealth’, the present literary and cultural world is – identifiably – being dominated by publications and works of these ‘Commonwealth’ litterateurs and filmmakers. Ranging from analyses of Canadian writings to Indian films and novels, and from Australian writings to African publications and cinema, this anthology of critical writings—to be used by academicians and researchers alike from the disciplines of literature and film studies—seeks to fill in the (perceptible) lacuna that still exists in the field of critical approaches to Commonwealth literature, films, and culture.

The volume’s contributors are:

• Bhaduri, Irona
• Bhagira, Tanmoy
• Chakraborty, Rituparna
• Dutta, Rishav, and Neha Arora
• Farahmandfar, Masoud
• Ghosh, Debottama
• Guttman, Anna
• Jahan, Israt
• Karmakar, Tushar Kanti
• Kavitha, T.S., and Mahesh Sharma
• Khan, Bodhisattwa
• Khan, Khatija B.B.
• Mark, Tekena Gasper, and Taiwo Afolabi
• Modak, Poulomi
• Mukherjee, Ananya
• Mukherjee, Ananya
• Raj, Sony Jalarajan, and Adith K., Suresh
• Ray, Sumit
• Roy, Kaushik
• Roy, Satyajit
• Saikia, Meghali
• Swarnakar Neha
• Wayal, Amar, And Anupama A.P.
• Yadav, Ram Bhawan

Leonid Finberg is a prominent Jewish-Ukrainian public intellectual. His main research interests include the history and culture of the Jews of Ukraine, Ukrainian society of the twentieth century, post-totalitarian world, and socio-political issues of the present. He has published over 100 articles in Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, Hungarian, French, German, and American academic and non-fiction journals.
This volume contains, in the form of an interview, Finberg’s account of his own editorial, writing, and publishing activities, his articles on and assessments of current events in Ukrainian and Jewish history. The collection of texts is a testament to different stages in the development of Finberg’s self-awareness and reflections on culture, history, and the present.

Religious elements play an important role in Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. Russia has used, among others, religion to justify parts of the war that has been going on since 2014, the invasion of 24 February 2022, and its own war propaganda. Meanwhile, in Ukraine, a church dispute continues that has concrete political and human rights implications, Islam plays an often overlooked role on both sides of the front. The Russian war also represents a paradigm shift for the security of Jewish life.
This volume assembles contributions by authors from the fields of political science, ecumenics, theology, history, sociology, and ethics. All contributions are united by the basic assumption that although the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine is not a religious war, it cannot be understood without considering and analyzing religious elements and contexts of justification.

This collected volume is based on a selection of research projects in the field of Intercultural Management at the Europäische Fernhochschule Hamburg, Germany.
The contributions focus on the challenges and opportunities faced within a modern and globalized workplace. Each paper highlights a distinct management problem from industries such as business administration, education, healthcare, and other important sectors.
A testament to the need for cultural intelligence in every workplace, the studies demonstrate how understanding that culture is more than simple geographical boundaries is crucial for enhancing personal growth, developing leadership skills, and building trust. Furthermore, a strong cultural intelligence fosters awareness and flexibility, an understanding of ethical and sustainable decision-making, and ultimately leads to more effective global interactions.

Contributors: Asche, Antonia; Bernhardt, Anja; Bieck, Dana; Englert, Christiane; Fritsch-Hehle, Maria; Thal, Daniel; Uhlig, Anna Carolin

This book investigates the concept of the System of National Cooperation (Hungarian abbrev.: NER), which was introduced as a form of “New Social Contract” (Csanádi), and its framing in pro-governmental media and public discourse during the period from 2010 until 2018. This qualitative discourse and framing analysis is based on case studies of how the Hungarian Citizens Union Fidesz-MPSZ (mis)uses government-friendly media to popularize its policies and actions, especially those related to the NER.
So far, the NER and its discursive manifestation in the media remain neglected topics in international academia. This unique study elaborates on the complexity of the Hungarian System of National Cooperation and provides an interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of the framing of discourses and concepts, in pro-governmental media.

Between 1932 and 1933, millions of people in Ukraine died of forced starvation. The famine, now known as the Holodomor, became one of the most deplorable acts in the history of the Soviet Union and the wider twentieth century. The Holodomor occupies an important place in Ukrainian and Soviet history, but less is known about the famine’s role in world history. Much has been written about the intents behind the famine, its genocidal particulars, and the effects of the famine within the borders of Ukraine. Still, a significantly smaller amount of work has examined how the Holodomor affected and was affected by global economics, politics, and international relations during the 1930s. The famine was covered in hundreds of press reports worldwide and debated and discussed by governments and world leaders. It became a crisis that captured the attention of foreign observers on every continent.
This collected volume is the first to address the history of the Holodomor from a global perspective. The chapters present perspectives on famine from a multidisciplinary approach that enables us to reckon with the global implications of mass starvation in Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 and to understand them on a scale that transcends the borders of Ukraine and the Soviet Union. This book results from the germination of ideas that the contributors first presented to a conference at the University of Cambridge in 2022. They include, in alphabetical order, Roser Alvarez Klee, Olga Andriewsky, Ray Gamache, Ola Hnatiuk, Bohdan Klid, Andriy Kohut, Wiktoria Kudela-Swiatek, Sara Nesteruk, Matthew Pauly, Henry Prown, Yuri Shapoval, Iryna Skubii, Atanas Terleckas, Serhy Yekelchyk, and Larysa Zasiekina.

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 authors share lessons they learned about conflict, whether a small fight, a real battle, or even a period of war, to help couples reset into a different state of love by using a dynamic five-step model to rebuild and maintain a foundation of vulnerability, empathy, and intimacy.

Conflict and turmoil--the intimacy of everyday life--is the foundation great relationships are built on. Based on decades of helping couples address conflict and achieve long-lasting love, the authors created a simple five-step process for reconciling differences, taking couples in crisis from rupture to repair.

Their tool—the PACER model (Pause, Accountability, Collaboration, Experiment, and Review)—takes into account cultural differences, past hurts, and current crises. It is an opportunity for not just healing but for growth. Packed with interactive exercises that make real change possible, Love, Crash, Rebuild offers readers in any type of romantic partnership—straight, gay, nonbinary, interracial, etc.—a single toolbox that can help bring a new understanding of what a successful relationship should look like.

This groundbreaking new book includes dozens of client anecdotes and stories of the authors’ relationship as a mixed-race couple, who are also couples’ therapists, that highlight how a simple process can address and resolve all ruptures, large or small. Couples will learn how to take a deeper look at what is lying underneath their issues and find a healthier outlook on their relationship.

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.

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.

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.

Ukraine is the new West Berlin of Eastern Europe. The annexation of Crimea and the Russian invasion of the Donets Basin (Donbas) forced the Ukrainian nation to change. In 2013, it was still a post-Soviet country with a divided identity. Today, it is an outpost of Europe which has been holding back the onslaught of the Russian army for several years now. The Wild West of Eastern Europe by Pavlo Kazarin is a book about how such a transformation has become possible.
In 2022, the Ukrainian version of this volume was named “Book of the Year” by BBC Ukraine in the category of “Essay Writing”.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.