The book is full of stories connected with each of these segments of my life. I hope different browsers will first look at the table of contents, then open to...

These adventurous turn-of-the-century women announced their independence by buying their own islands in Ontario's Georgian Bay.

Beautiful Monsters explores how “classical music,” and the idea of “the classic” itself, found a home in the American popular imagination. Concerns about the apparent cultural demise of classical music...

As a graduate student at Harvard University, I worked with B. F. Skinner, the preeminent behaviorist of the 20th century. Although my dissertation was about discrimination learning by pigeons, Skinner's...

While chapter four, dealing with the debates surrounding the use of the death penalty for counterfeiting crimes, offers some revealing examples of how contemporaries understood money politically, I would steer...

Why would one kind of congregation turn to the bankruptcy system three times as often as any other? After ruling out geography, denomination, and leadership, one factor remains — and it points straight at the lending market. A look at subprime church loans, banks that said no, and the legal process that finally forced lenders to the table.

Why would one kind of congregation turn to the bankruptcy system three times as often as any other? After ruling out geography, denomination, and leadership, one factor remains — and it points straight at the lending market. A look at subprime church loans, banks that said no, and the legal process that finally forced lenders to the table.

Chapter 1 of Life After Privacy is an ideal first look for the average reader. This chapter examines our curious, conflicted relationship to privacy. We may say that privacy is...

The book addresses a few different fields of inquiry. These include film genre, and writing on genre by people like Rick Altman. They also include ideas about urbanism. I focus...

Betty Friedan called it a rip-off of the women's movement, and that verdict has shaped fifty years of argument about the film — as has a screenwriter's famously catty complaint about the director casting his own wife. Newly opened archives in Beverly Hills, London and New York tell a different story about who actually made the thing. Authorship here is messier, and far more female, than the myth allows.

Cutting-edge of scholarship. The art we love.