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The controversy surrounding Alice Goffman’s On the Run is nothing new—the book’s appearance was met with both laudatory curiosity and defensive criticism, from within and outside academic sociology. On the Run offers an ethnographic account based on Goffman’s work in the field—and the field happens to be a mixed-income, West Philadelphia neighborhood, whose largely African American residents lived their lives under the persistence presence of the cops, whose pervasive policing left Goffman’s subjects, the members of her community, caught in a web of presumed criminality. The elephant(s) in the room: how does a privileged white woman engage in this kind of (often passé) participant-observer research without constantly self-checking her positionality? How can this type of book—and its more sensational elements—be true to the word? Who has permission to write about whom? And what happens when these questions leave the back-and-forth behind the closed doors of the academy and bring up very real suggestions about legal culpability, fabrication, and the politics of representation?

In a long-form piece for the New York Times Magazine, Gideon Lewis-Kraus assesses Goffman’s predicament and how her personal experiences shaped several of the more controversial aspects of the book’s account. All the while, he traces the book’s emergence during a crucial (and heated) moment for the history of sociology, when data-driven analysis has bumped the hybrid reportage/qualitative ethnography favored by Goffman into the margins of social science, and considers how the events following its publication played out in the media—and what all of this might mean for Goffman’s own future (and those of her subjects, neighbors, peers) and that of her discipline.

Following this excerpt, you can read the piece in full here.

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But what her critics can’t imagine is that perhaps both of the accounts she has given are true at the same time — that this represents exactly the bridging of the social gap that so many observers find unbridgeable. From the immediate view of a participant, this was a manhunt; from the detached view of an observer, this was a ritual. The account in the book was that of Goffman the participant, who had become so enmeshed in this community that she felt the need for vengeance ‘‘in my bones.’’ The account Goffman provided in response to the felony accusation (which read as if dictated by a lawyer, which it might well have been) was written by Goffman the observer, the stranger to the community who can see that the reason these actors give for their behavior — revenge — is given by the powerless as an attempt to save face; that though this talk was important, it was talk all the same.

The problem of either-­or is one that is made perhaps inevitable by the metaphor of ‘‘immersion.’’ The anthropologist Caitlin Zaloom, who studies economic relationships, explained to me that it’s a metaphor her own field has long given up on. The metaphor asks us to imagine a researcher underwater — that is, imperiled, unreachable from above — who then returns to the sun and air, newly qualified to report on the darkness below because the experience has put a chill in her bones. This narrative of transformation is what strikes critics like Rios as so patronizing and self-­congratulatory. But Goffman herself never understood her work to be ‘‘immersive’’ in that way. The almost impossible challenge Goffman thus set before herself is the representation of both these views — of drive as manhunt and drive as ritual — in all their simultaneity.

Goffman could have covered herself by adding another paragraph of analysis, one that would have contextualized but also undercut the scene as the participants experienced it. Almost all of her early readers thought she should do that. It would have made her life easier. But she didn’t. This was a book about men whose entire lives — whose whole network of relationships — had been criminalized, and she did not hesitate to criminalize her own. She threw in her lot.

To read more about On the Run, click here.

In addition to making an appearance in the “Briefly Noted” books section of the New Yorker, the Cheers equivalent of finding an empty chair between Norm and Cliff at the bar, this week Jessa Crispin, author of The Dead Ladies Project, published an opinion piece at the New York Times on singlehood and St. Teresa, riffing on her pilgrimage to Ávila, the saint’s town. Here’s a nugget of what’s waiting over at the NYT:

Five hundred years after St. Teresa, and there are still very few models for women of how to live outside of coupledom, whether that is the result of a choice or just bad luck. I can’t remember the last time I saw a television show or a film about a single woman, unless her single status was a problem to be solved or an illustration of how deeply damaged she was. This continues even as more and more women are staying single longer and longer.

I’ve been single for the most part going on 11 years now, and so I have heard every derogatory, patronizing, demeaning thing said about single women. “There has to be someone for you,” a married woman friend once said exasperatedly after I recounted another bad date. Implying, unconsciously, that there must be one man somewhere on the planet who could stand to be around me for more than a few days at a time.

And so it’s hard to get people to understand why a woman would ever choose to live a life alone. We no longer have to choose between being a brain and a body, but I can’t help but think that we lose something when we couple up, and maybe that thing is worth preserving. I pointed out to a different friend that it was the nuns who were the most socially engaged, working with the world’s most vulnerable. My friend, married, asked “as devil’s advocate” whether they were simply compensating for the lack of romantic love and children with their social concern. Yes, I said, maybe. “But we all have needs that aren’t met, and we’re all looking for substitutes.”

To read more about The Dead Ladies Project, click here.

Our free e-book for January:
David Welky’s The Thousand-Year Flood: The Ohio–Mississippi Disaster of 1937

From an expansive profile of lion expert and University of Chicago Press author Craig Packer at the New York Times:

Like many scientists, Dr. Packer, a professor of ecology, evolution and behavior at the University of Minnesota, has fought his share of battles in the pages of professional journals.

But he has also tangled with far more formidable adversaries than dissenting colleagues. He has sparred with angry trophy hunters, taken on corrupt politicians, fended off death threats and, in one case, thwarted a mugging. Like the lioness, his opponents discovered that he is unlikely to give ground.

“My reflex is to confront the danger and go right at it,” he said.

Dr. Packer’s boldness — he concedes some might call it naïveté — eventually led to the upheaval of his life in Tanzania, where for 35 years he ran the Serengeti Lion Project, dividing his time between Minnesota and Africa. Assisted by a bevy of graduate students, he conducted studies of lion behavior that have shaped much of what scientists understand about the big cats.

But in 2014, Tanzanian wildlife officials withdrew his research permit, accusing him of “tarnishing the image of the Government of Tanzania” by making derogatory statements about the trophy hunting industry in emails, according to a letter they sent him. And in April, while visiting the Serengeti to film a BBC documentary, a chief park warden informed him that he had been barred from the country. (Apparently, he had made it through customs by mistake.)

Dr. Packer described the events leading to his banishment in his recently published book, Lions in the Balance: Man-Eaters, Manes, and Men with Guns. It mixes episodes of spy novel intrigue with detailed descriptions of scientific studies and PowerPoint presentations.

To read more about Packer’s work published by the University of Chicago Press, click here.

To read more about Lions in the Balance, his latest book, click here.

Eduardo Lalo, as a review in Necessary Fiction notes, is a name familiar to very few English readers. “At the time of this review, a Google search of ‘Eduardo Lalo’ turns up very little in English—only a basic Wikipedia page. One hoping to read more about the author must brush up on one’s dusty Spanish skills.” The Cuban-born Lalo, however, began to gain more cosmopolitan acclaim with the publication of his book Simone, which won the Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize, an award that aims to “perpetuate and honor the work of the [titular] eminent novelist and also to stimulate the creative activity of Spanish language writers.” (The award is somewhat comparable, though much larger in scope, to the Man Booker Prize.) ” On the heels of the award, the the book’s first English language translation, by David Frye, has recently been published by the University of Chicago Press. The plot arc of the novel is complex, and the book’s narrative fealty vacillates between the subject positions of a self-educated Chinese immigrant, a jaded novelist, and the eponymous Simone.

From Necessary Fiction, which manages to condense the core of what is at stake for Lalo:

Just when we have uncomfortably settled into the doomed love story, the book takes a significant turn. Toward the end of the novel, the narrator and a novelist friend of his interrogate a visiting Spanish writer about the literature of the peninsula, and the lower quality work—in their opinion—that many Spanish publishers publish. (There may be some continental agreement to that, as Javier Márias has stated that he had no desire “to be was what they call a ‘real Spanish writer.’”) It is, at first, a strange shift. While the plot is held in abeyance, the book tries to make a larger point about the treatment of literature. In part, the point is that Puerto Rican writers have been unfairly ignored, while more maudlin and unoriginal writings from “real Spanish writers” have received outsized attention.

While the narrator obviously has significant pride in his Puerto Rico, it inevitably comes with a concomitant sense of resentment—part of the dark shadow that follows this novel sentence-by-sentence. Upon seeing the name “Colony Economy” on a carton of milk in a coffee shop, the narrator muses about how Puerto Rico’s history “overwhelms and defines” him. It is an apt lens through which to view Simone—characters who cannot quite escape the world they were born into, or the childhoods they were subjected to, a country shackled by the past and every extension of happiness undercut by sorrow. “What is left of the men and women of this country?” the narrator muses. “What remains but the coffee and the centuries, ground down and percolated, flowing through steel tubes, pouring from plastic spigots?”

To read the review in full, click here.

To read more about Simone, click here.

From Sam Tanenhaus’s review of Nut Country: Right-Wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy for the New York Times Book Review:

Whenever we’re in danger of forgetting that the modern Republican Party is captive to a movement, one new excitement or another will jolt us back to reality — whether it is a trio of high-flying presidential candidates who’ve collectively served not a single day in elective office or an uprising by congressional Jacobins giddily dethroning their own leader. Each new insurrection feels spontaneous even as it revives antique crusades to abolish the Internal Revenue Service, “get rid” of the Supreme Court or — most persistent of all — rejuvenate the Old South. Half a century before Rick Perry indicated secession might be an option for Texas, John Tower, the state’s first Republican senator since Reconstruction, accepted the warm greeting of his new colleague, Senator Richard Russell, the Georgia segregationist, who reportedly said, “I want to welcome Texas back into the Confederacy.”

Tower is one of the more statesmanlike figures in “Nut Country,” Edward H. Miller’s well-researched and briskly written account of Dallas’s transformation from Democratic stronghold to “perfect test kitchen” of a new politics of Republican protest that combined the libertarian cry for “freedom” with the states’ rights ­model of constitutional order.

A go-getting paradise with an economy enriched by government contracts (aerospace and defense), Dallas might seem a curious place for anti-Beltway insurgency. But dependency bred anxiety, and “wealth and fear” took form together, as the journalist Theodore H. White observed in 1954. The tide of newcomers, many from the Midwest, inhaled the fumes of “Texanism,” according to White “a synthetic faith that lets them oppose all the controls and exactions of the federal government in Washington as an invasion of sacred and immemorial rights, while at the same time providing, with its frontier and vigilante memories, a complete answer to the newer problems of minorities, labor and the complexities of city living.”

One of the new Dallas Republicans was Bruce Alger, a Princeton graduate and disciple of Ayn Rand, elected to the House of Representatives in 1954. Initially an Eisenhower supporter, he declined to sign the notorious “Southern manifesto,” with its defiant sneer at civil rights, but soon became an “artful champion of Jim Crow.” In November 1960, four days before the presidential election, he led a group of 300 protesters who converged on a downtown Dallas hotel and accosted Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson when they entered the lobby. Television cameras captured the moment — along with Alger holding aloft a placard that read “L.B.J. Sold Out to Yankee Socialists” — helping to plant the image of Dallas as a “city of hate.”

To read more about Nut Country, click here.

Congrats to Swan Isle Press and Anthony Geist for their translation of The School of Solitude: Collected Poems by Luis Hernández, which was just announced as one of the longlist candidates for the 2016 PEN Literary Award for Poetry in Translation. The book collects the prolific work of the legendary (and legendarily troubled) Peruvian poet Luis Hernández, who published three collections of poetry by the age of twenty-four, not to publish again until his untimely death in 1977 at thirty-six years-old Drawing upon the numerous notebooks he kept in the interim, The School of Solitude is the first book of Hernández’s writing to appear in English.

To read more about The School of Solitude, click here.

The recently published May 2015 issue of PMLA included a special feature in its “Theories and Methodologies” section devoted to a number of wide-ranging commentaries by contemporary scholars on Andrew Cole’s The Birth of Theory. Cole’s book—readily endorsed by Frederic Jameson and Mladen Dolar, among others—situates Hegel’s dialectic as the ur-theory and method of social analysis from which most of the major thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would further constitute “theory” as distinct from systematic philosophy. In collaboration with PMLA, we’re pleased to excerpt the opening of Cole’s own piece for the journal, “The Function of Theory at the Present Time,” which follows below. You can read more about the issue in full here, or visit Cole’s page at Princeton University, here.

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From “The Function of Theory at the Present Time”

by Andrew Cole

Let me start by defining “theory,” because the definition itself illustrates why we can name Hegel as its inventor, rather than Marx or Nietzsche, both of whom pick up where Hegel left off. As I suggest in The Birth of Theory, Hegel founds theory in his break from Kant, which I regard as the signal moment when philosophy transforms into theory as we now know it. What makes Hegel different from Kant, in other words, is what makes his habits of thought—his dialectic, above all—lasting and familiar and such a part of what goes into critical theorizing today, even within schools of thought that celebrate their anti-Hegelianism or are indifferent to Hegel. In Hegel we find the following three features that I am content to call “theory.”

First, theory is distinct from philosophy, because it challenges the grounds on which you can presume to describe the world, as the first section of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit makes clear in its portrayal of a subject (or “consciousness”) who is in tatters after failing to account coherently for objects in the world. Hegel is bold here. He starts the Phenomenology of Spirit by undoing philosophy as practiced in his day. He gives you no transcendental ego, no handy schematic for possible experience, no subject who cognizes the world effortlessly but has awkward moral problems, no geometrical proofs, and no dislike of contradiction. And with no transcendental ego on the scene, Hegel leaves room for something far more compelling: the Other, in all of its epistemological and ethical significance. (The Other is also Hegel’s invention.)

It’s for these reasons that I think theory is best defined, in the first instance, as philosophy against itself. Theory, like philosophy, requires rigor of thought, but it tries not to confuse consistency for systematicity. It’s not for everyone, as Hegel’s long reception history has made clear. But what’s challenging about Hegel is what’s difficult about getting a grip on thinking itself (even today, philosophers of mind find it nearly impossible to define “consciousness”). In this respect you could say that the shift from Kant to Hegel is the shift from experience to thought—thinking no longer being spontaneous experience but active reflection, a perspective on experience. In Kant, in other words, we do the work of reading a difficult philosophy about what constitutes experience. But in Hegel we read experience itself and face the difficulties of thinking with the kind of confidence you might expect from philosophy. Granted, Kant makes room for an alternative: not cognition but “thinking,” which involves not constitutive concepts—those sorting mechanisms hidden deep within our noumenal selves that render the manifold legible to our understanding—but rather regulative concepts, which we consciously contrive to help us divine ideas about what we can’t experience directly, the supersensibilia (see Critique of Judgement). Hegel, however, collapses this distinction between constitutive and regulative concepts and dispenses with the supersensibilia or noumena that necessitates such conceptual distinctions in the first place. And without constitutive concepts, there’s no Kant: the whole core of his “Copernican” first Critique drops out. The result is radical. It not only nullifies critical philosophy but also leads to another important aspect of theory as it emerges in Hegel’s work.

The second feature of theory holds that we are linguistic beings and that experience is so structured like a language that it qualifies as a language. Kant would never say this. At most, he speaks of the empty but temporal unfolding of the “inner sense” (Critique of Pure Reason 255 [b291]) or the succession of perception following on the order of events. But Hegel says that “it is in language that we are conceptually productive” (qtd. in Birth of Theory ii), which means that we not only think in language but also conceptualize in language. For Hegel, concepts are not just logical operators but figures—figures that then double back and do conceptual work (ibid. 156–61). In other words, in Kant, concepts huddle together while supping at the table of categories, always minding their manners and doing what they’re tasked to do: process the manifold. But in Hegel concepts leave the table and in so doing depart from fixity, from order, from transcendence. It’s as if all concepts in Hegel are regulative concepts, which for Kant (in his third Critique) are indeed the stuff of language, poetry, art, imagination, allusion, analogy, and other forms of thought by which we labor to make sense of what’s initially other to us. In this sense, theory is concerned with the materiality of thought, the materialization of thinking—which brings us to yet another feature of theory.

The third aspect that can be said to define theory is that theory historicizes thought, studying its materialization across disparate forms of human expression—music, literature, art, architecture, religion, philosophy—either in a diachronic or synchronic analysis—or, aspirationally, both at once. It’s enough for a scholar to focus on one of these disciplines or only one mode of historical analysis, but Hegel’s ambition was to think these all at once or pursue a project of writing that would take him from form to form, time to time, place to place. This is the hardest kind of critical writing to do, and Hegel didn’t always succeed, at times offering what we can all agree are culturally blinkered positions. But the method is there, as is the hope for it, once more scotching Kant’s conceptual scheme. Here, again, Hegel works over Kant’s constitutive concepts. To be sure, if Hegel was going to deal in fixed concepts, he would, in true dialectical fashion, put them in the wrong place—not in the self but in history, whereby the concept of a period or some other totalizing conception of a historical moment (like an episteme) is always in tension with the individual examples emerging from within its frame, examples that have a share in conceptualizing a period precisely because they conceptualize by other means: through figuration. Examples—be they poems, paintings, sculptures—are never adequate to their moment. Rather, they are behind or ahead. They contradict their age and one another. Or to turn this formulation around: every present moment is a tangle of emergent and residual forms.

Those are the three main points in what I argue is Hegel’s invention of theory in opposition to Kant’s philosophy, and I support my case by offering multiple histories of dialectical thinking from Plato, Plotinus, and Aristotle to Hegel (more on this below); from Hegel to Marx (whose theory of commodity fetishism restages Hegelian eucharistic fetishism); from Hegel to Nietzsche (whose dialectical tendencies for once deserve acknowledgment); from Hegel to the nineteenth-century English and American critics experimenting with Hegelianism contra Victorian formalism (T. H. Green, Bernard Bosanquet, William Courthope, Leslie Stephen, Vida Dutton Scudder); from Hegel to Bakhtin (whose Hegelianism is always a question); from Hegel to Jameson (always honest about his Hegelianism); and from Hegel to Deleuze, in whose work you’d expect to find Hegel as an epithet, but who instead supplies perhaps the best example of a patently Hegelian “conceptual figuration,” whereby figures do the work of concepts and vice versa. When the gap between Hegel and Deleuze closes, a space for utopian thinking opens up, in which dialectics is energized by phenomenologies past and present.

It’s fine, of course, even de rigueur, to call yourself a theorist but not a Hegelian. But if any of the three points listed above seem important for the task of theorizing, even if you use different emphases and terms, then you have Hegel to thank. That is fundamentally my argument about theory, no more and no less. If none of your theoretical program is included here, it doesn’t mean it’s not important. My aim, at any rate, in The Birth of Theory is to explain why dialectics merits the name “theory” in its most general and particular sense—theory as a certain relation to philosophy, theory as a point of view on concepts and on the process of theorizing, and theory as reflection on history. All of this begins quite clearly in Hegel, and I am unapologetic for saying so in the light of lingering worries about “origins” (Birth of Theory 22–23).

But if dialectics is theory, then where did Hegel get his dialectics? Here we enter into a history of thinking from Plato to the present that strangely hasn’t been undertaken in the disciplines of theory. The reason for this lacuna is not the range of that history but rather the prevailing assumptions about the nonvalidity of premodern, or specifically medieval, thought today. Theorists can’t underestimate the Middle Ages any longer. As I argue in chapters 1 and 2, Hegel didn’t invent his dialectic. Rather, he took it from the Middle Ages. In (again) seeking to depart from Kant’s critical philosophy, Hegel deliberately adopts the distinctly medieval dialectic of identity/difference as the signal instance of dialectical thinking itself. But what makes identity/difference a medieval dialectic? The answer comes in the realization that while these two logical categories, identity and difference, are familiar to theorists today (thanks to Hegel), so familiar as to seem to have no history, they weren’t properly dialectical in the philosophy of Plato or Aristotle. They had their dialectical beginning, rather, in postclassical philosophy, in Plotinus in particular, who radically modified the ancient discipline of dialectic by prioritizing the thinking of differences in identity and identities in difference. By setting the categories of identity and difference at the center of dialectic, Plotinus fashioned a powerful dialectical mode of contemplation that was influential throughout the Middle Ages, with Nicholas of Cusa representing perhaps the last and best known example. Hegel, I show, drew from this medieval tradition of dialectical thinking by following the form, placing identity and difference at the center of his own dialectic. In so doing, he rejected the classical, or antique, legacy of dialectic, as well as the early modern aspersions against medieval dialectic.

Yet if we are to understand what makes Hegelian dialectical theory critical on its own terms, then we need to unthink Marx’s (and Engels’s) famous statement “It has not occurred to any one of these philosophers to inquire into the connection of German philosophy with German reality, the relation of their criticism to their own material surroundings.” At least, we need to rethink its target. For if any philosopher “inquired into the connection of German philosophy with German reality, the relation of their criticism to their own material surroundings,” it was Hegel. And his “master-slave” or, more accurately, “lord-bondsman” dialectic is the example right under our noses. As I show in chapter 3 of The Birth of Theory, this most famous dialectical scenario in the Phenomenology of Spirit represents Hegel’s explicit critique of precapitalist modes of production evidenced in the German states while Hegel was alive—the forms of Grundherrschaft historians consistently characterize as feudalism. In his critique, Hegel reveals himself to be presciently proto-Marxist and exposes, prospectively, how patently absurd it is to blame Hegel for condoning capitalism or to declaim that “Hegel’s stand-point is that of modern political economy,” as Marx says (qtd. in Birth of Theory 118). There was no capitalism around for Hegel to critique. The truth of the matter is born from an analogy: what feudalism is to Hegel capitalism is to Marx.

The analogy itself aims to do two things: to show that Hegel is presciently Marxist in his critique of his “own material surroundings,” thereby explaining why Marx would find Hegel’s dialectic to be theoretically necessary to begin with; and to restore modes of production to the analysis not only of history or literature but of theory and philosophy, grounding these latter in the contexts of their emergence.

Andrew Cole is professor English at Princeton University and director of the Gauss Seminars in Criticism.

(Excerpted and adapted from “The Function of Theory at the Present Time,” PMLA 130.3 [2015]: 809–18.
Posted by permission of the Modern Language Association of America. © 2015 Andrew Cole.)

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To read more about The Birth of Theory, click here.

Excerpt:
Masters of Uncertainty: Weather Forecasters and the Quest for Ground Truth 

by Phaedra Daipha

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PRODUCING THE WEATHER FORECAST

Protecting America’s life and property against the calamities of the weather is a daunting task to manage, above and beyond the formidable meteorological challenges involved. There is a tremendous range of “weather” for the NWS to keep an eye on: land weather, airport weather, marine weather, fire weather, hydrologic weather. To properly protect America’s life and property against the calamities of the weather, therefore, NWS forecast offices are operational around the clock.“The weather never sleeps and neither do we” is the usual stock phrase Neborough forecasters use to enlighten outsiders about their schedule and, by extension, their importance.

The primary responsibility of an NWS forecast office, of course, is to advise and alert about the potential for hazardous weather. Only when hazardous weather warning requirements have been met do forecasters turn their attention to routine products and services. Indeed, during a hazardous weather event, the NWS becomes transformed into what Fine (2007, 40) calls an“activated organization . . . verging on being overwhelmed and understaffed, until routine can again be established.” In this, NWS forecasters readily resemble firefighters, paramedics, and other first responders— primed for hazardous weather, they seem perpetually caught in a lull before the storm. But pushing the analogy any further may be misleading. In contrast to firefighters (cf. Desmond 2007, 81ff.) and other emergency professionals, NWS forecasters experience little or no workload downtime.11 In 2008, five years after the implementation of the IFPS, with the work schedule radically revamped to accommodate for the realities of the new forecasting process and the new forecasting process already an old routine, Neborough forecasters were still struggling to keep up with the weather. To be sure, their workload has been exacerbated by an expanding list of IFPS-driven forecast responsibilities, which, coupled with a series of staff cutbacks due to a shrinking budget, force offices to “do more with less,” to use another favorite NWS catch phrase. What drives this heavy workload in the first place, however, is the fact that we have come to recognize “the weather” not as a finite phenomenon, like a wildfire or a robbery, but as ever present and relevant. As competition among the various weather forecast providers emboldens our appetite for more, faster, better weather information, what counts as the weather further expands in detail and significance. And so, too, does the charge of NWS forecasters. NWS forecast offices more closely resemble a newsroom in this respect—busy during routine operations, verging on understaffed during emergency conditions.

It is this trait of the weather that, in the context of NWS operations, makes weather forecasting an auspicious case study for probing the process of decision making in multiple decision- making regimes. But first, the basics. By way of an introduction to the process of meteorological decision making, the remainder of this chapter goes over the main components of a typical shift at the Neborough office: data analysis; deliberation; and finally, the actual doing of the forecast. In practice, of course, these components are thoroughly intertwined. There is no actual moment when diagnosis ends and prognosis begins. Rather than constituting the means and ends, respectively, of forecasting action, diagnosis and prognosis are in fact“two names for the same reality” (Dewey 1922, 36). Ne-borough forecasters never switch from a diagnostic to a prognostic frame of mind—they just continue making increasingly more consequential decisions as the forecast submission deadline draws nearer. If anything, meteorological prognosis analytically precedes diagnosis, as will become evident in the following pages. This empirical reality of NWS forecasting, while unintelligible from a rational choice perspective, is entirely consistent with pragmatist accounts of the decision-making process. “We do not use the present to control the future,” writes Dewey (1922, 322); “We use the foresight of the future to refine and expand present activity.” The formal distillation and ordering of the NWS forecasting routine into a diagnostic, a deliberative, and a prognostic component denotes therefore the temporal, or processual, unfolding of forecasting action rather than its analytic structure.

TAKING OVER THE HOT SEAT

No shift can start without a briefing by the outgoing forecaster to get the incoming forecaster up to speed with the big weather picture and developing concerns. As in any other work setting whose rhythm is dictated by a shift schedule, weather briefings form an essential, organic part of the forecasting routine as they allow for efficient resource management, minimize duplication of effort, and promote forecast-to-forecast continuity. Weather briefings almost always occur right at the workstation of the outgoing forecaster. Indeed, if the incoming forecaster does not find the outgoing forecaster at his desk as she walks in, she will seek him out in his cubicle and, together, they will walk back to the operations deck to begin the briefing. This is not a mere formality but a testament to the role of screenwork—that is, the processing of information via computer screens— as the organizing principle of meteorological expertise (Daipha 2013). As already noted, if they cannot see it, forecasters cannot think, never mind talk, weather. The departing forecaster relies on the computer screens to make a case for his forecasting decisions, reasoning through the assortment of weather displays he flags as pertinent. For her part, the incoming forecaster relies on the computer screens to keep up with the action, to bring into focus what portends to be the weather forecasting problem of the day. As will become apparent time and time again, screenwork forms the backbone of every aspect of the meteorological decision-making task.

A briefing is in reality two briefings in one, a briefing about forecast concerns and a briefing about technology malfunctions, and forecasters at Neborough will invariably cue “weather wise” and “equipmentwise” to signal the end of the initial pleasantries and the start of the briefing or to segue into the next section. Depending on the weather situation du jour and the familiarity of the incoming forecaster with the current weather system—in other words, depending on whether she has worked that desk the previous day—briefings may last from several seconds to over ten minutes, not infrequently turning into protracted meteorological discussions on model performance and biases or similar past weather events. Throughout, the two forecasters will be poring over the computer screens, the outgoing forecaster guiding the action with the computer mouse. Anything and everything deemed relevant information can be included in the weather briefing: model(s) of choice and reasoning behind it, forecast dilemmas and ultimate decisions, remarkable personal weather observations and puzzling spotter reports, verification concerns, deliberations with neighboring offices, weather features to watch out for, upcoming hazards and how they have been addressed so far, interoffice coordination issues. The conversation is relaxed and collegial, a good-natured back and forth. Yet, even between forecasters who know each other well and have a high regard for each other’s forecasting skill, the exchange is clearly underwritten by a handing off the baton dynamic: the outgoing forecaster is eager to make his forecast stick, especially if he is coming back in a few hours, while the incoming forecaster is intent on not missing a beat but not necessarily committed to the particulars of the existing forecast.

Margaret (short-term desk, day shift): So you guys still thinking some action today?

Dick (short-term desk, midnight shift): Yes. Yes. Todd [at the neighboring office to the southwest] and I were talking it over, and there’s just enough cold air advection aloft, and it’s a sharp enough upper trough, that I was not going to go against tit . . . But, as you can see here, there’s a fair amount of action upstream right now in [adjacent states to the southwest], and the potential is there for all that to work in and just stabilize the air mass out of all severe possibility. So, it’s not something I’m entirely confident in, but with the other factors in place I just showed you . . .

Margaret: So, it must be all instability aloft, because it feels pretty comfortable out there.

Dick: Yeah . . . I mean, see here, we are eventually looking at a minus twelve [degrees Celsius] at 500 [millibar atmospheric pressure level]. But it’s going to be this evening before it gets down into our part of the Northeast . . . so, that’s part of the problem, too, that . . . if anything busts the forecast is that the cold pool . . .

Margaret: Takes forever?

Dick: . . . takes forever to get in. so that’s something to keep an eye on. . . . Anyway, I did what I could; it’s in your hands now.

“Equipmentwise” the briefing can take up an equal amount of time—hardly surprising given the big science character of NWS forecasting operations. Technology fails forecasters in big and small ways, from the radar going down during a severe storm to the server being slower than usual, and it fails them in multiple ways at once. The log of any given shift during my stay at Neborough contained at least two equipment malfunction entries, with that number doubling during hazardous weather conditions. The weather spares no one, certainly not the people tasked with anticipating its every move.

Finally, a“changing of the guard” of sorts takes place. Throughout the briefing, the outgoing forecaster has remained seated at the desk chair with the incoming forecaster standing or leaning against the desk next to him. The briefing completed, the outgoing forecaster will now stand up and, sometimes with some kind of verbal or nonverbal flourish, he will offer the seat to his relief of the day.

The incoming forecaster is now in charge of the workstation. But not until she has adjusted the computer screens according to the settings stored under her user profile will she have truly taken control of the desk and of the weather. The customized, unique combination of weather display formats, color graphics, and sound alarms effectively transforms the workstation into on’s personal workspace, and Neborough forecasters are quick to switch over to their profile the moment they claim the seat. That is especially so because, stored under a forecaster’s name but accessible by all, is a set of personal “best practices” for looking at weather information: the so- called Procedures, accumulated over one’s career and updated as necessary. To study the wind along the atmospheric column, for example, one forecaster might prefer the 850, the 500, the 250, and the surface millibar height charts, color coded just so, while another might routinely find the 700, the 500, the 200, and the surface charts more insightful. Where the Procedures become truly useful, however, is in their ability to recall elaborate composites of data graphics in a matter of seconds. As a result, the variation among forecaster profiles can appear quite staggering. Yet, despite their seemingly idiosyncratic nature, forecasters’ profiles reflect eminently social decisions, the result of apprenticing at particular meteorology programs and forecast offices, under particular mentors, with particular technologies, and so on (see Daipha 2010). For example, unlike other Neborough forecasters, Biff and Phil have primarily organized their Procedures according to weather scenarios, something they learned to do at X- University, which they attended several years apart. And Margaret and Phil are in the habit of looking at weather data in really busy four-panel displays, something they picked up, as it turns out, while interning in the same forecast office in the Midwest.

To be sure, our forecaster does not, as a rule, have to change the previous weather display settings. Rarely did I witness a Neborough forecaster request that the display settings be changed or explained when hunched over someone else’s workstation— following the weather was straightforward enough. In fact, there is an argument to be made that no profile presets are truly necessary, and that the default settings would more than suffice for the task ahead. Certainly, most forecasters like to claim that relying on their Procedures is only an issue of expediency. In practice, however, temporal constraints and the threat of information overload lead to a near absolute dependency on such preset templates for studying the weather.

2:45 p.m. Phil was working an administrative shift in his cubicle today but has been called on forecast duty because of the potential for severe weather later this afternoon. He logs into one of the vacant workstations, turns to the left graphics screen, goes to File/Procedures/select User ID, selects his user name, clicks on severe Weather Tools from the drop-down menu, and selects to load all six of the included information sources from the new drop-down menu. Repeats the same process for the middle graphics screen, this time clicking on Meso [analysis] stuff and selecting five information sources (mostly guidance products from the storm Prediction Center) out of approximately twenty-five. While waiting for the data to load, he next turns to the right graphics screen but now selects Biff’s user name and clicks on severe_Neborough Radar_Right. He tells me he has been meaning to copy this procedure into his own user profile. He likes how “nice and clean” Biff has set up his radar info for right-moving storms. . . . Within fifteen minutes, in consultation with Tom (short- term desk), Phil is ready to press “send” for the first severe thunderstorm watch of the day. He rubs his hands together in excitement: “And we’re rolling!”

***

To read more about Masters of Uncertainty, click here.

From Molly McArdle’s interview with Jessa Crispin about The Dead Ladies Project at Travel + Leisure: 

“Though they are not all ladies, her subjects took part in what could be called the creative life, whether they made, published, or fed great works of art. Crispin’s book mixes criticism, memoir, and travel writing into a collection of essays that is brutal and empathetic, languorous and impatient, smart and, well, smart.”

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What are the responsibilities of a travel writer? How do they differ from the responsibilities of a traveler? Do travelers have any responsibilities at all?

“Of course travelers have responsibilities! You have the responsibility not to be an asshole! Not to see this country as being laid out on a platter for your taking. You are a guest—you have to respect that this place has nothing to do with you. Too often you see travelers looking at a landscape and asking, “What can I take from this?” Even the obnoxious dudes who make a big deal about the difference between the “traveler” and the “tourist.” Travel writers have an even greater responsibility, because then they are telling stories about this place that has nothing to do with them, and there is a very long history of travel writers doing and saying terrible things. Acting like colonialists, lying about what happened, trying to make themselves look like the conquering hero, bringing their home land’s assumptions and value systems to a place where they don’t belong. Just for example, Paul Theroux scanned all of Asia and only found sexually available, complacent, totally submissive women (shocker) in an essay he wrote called “China Dolls.” Or, that guy who claimed he discovered Machu Picchu even though people were living right by there! So as a contemporary travel writer, it is your job to know the sins of your fathers and carry them and not repeat them.”

To read more about The Dead Ladies Project, click here.

Carl De Keyzer’s The First World War reproduces newly restored glass-plate images (scratches and flaws meticulously removed, which involved De Keyzer’s pursuit of the original glass plates from international archives, private collections, and museums), depicting the experience of WWI from vantages and perspectives previously lost to history. A recent post at Slate‘s history blog, The Vault, featured several images from the book taken by the photographer Arthur Brusselle, who was commissioned by the Belgian government to travel to those sites that had seen the most devastation and document his encounters (these particular plates are held in the archive of the City of Bruges).

From Rebecca Onion’s post at Slate, with a couple of accompanying images below:

Two of the towns in the photographs below—Diksmuide and Nieuwpoort—were the sites of the Belgian Army’s final stand against the invading German Army, in October 1914. Pushed to the coast, the Belgians, accompanied by British and French troops, created a 22-mile defensive line from Nieuwpoort to a village named Zuidschote. The nearly monthlong Battle of the Yser, during which the Belgians purposefully flooded part of this landscape in order to deter German advances, ended in defeat for the Germans and allowed Belgium to keep a small percentage of its land under its own control.

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Arthur Brusselle, Diksmuide (1918–19). Photo copyright: City of Bruges.

Arthur Brusselle, Diksmuide (1918–19). Photo copyright: City of Bruges.

To read more about The First World War, click here.

To see more sample images from the book, click here.

As we near the end of the 2015 University Press Week blog tour, here’s a shorthand of what our fellow esteemed presses have in the works today under the umbrella, “Conversations with Authors,” in addition to all of the great posts other presses have contributed so far:

• Gary Kramer, publicist at Temple University Press, interviews Eric Tang, author of Unsettled, about his scholarly publishing experiences
• Columbia University Press editor Christine Dunbar discusses the new Columbia UP Russian Library series of literature in translation in conversation with translators and scholars from the series board
• the University of Virginia Press profiles one of their authors via an intimate Q & A
• at the Beacon Press blog, executive editor Gayatri Patnaik speaks with author Jeanne Theoharis about The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks and the Rosa Parks papers
• Acquisitions editor Dawn Durante interviews Carol Stabile, editor of the Feminist Media Studies series, for the University of Illinois Press
• the University of Southern Illinois Press blog features questions and answers with Guy R. Hasegawa, author of Villainous Compounds: Chemical Weapons and the Civil War
• the University of Kansas Press hosts a discussion with Friended at the Front author Lisa Silvestri
• Marketing manager Marty Brown, of Oregon State University Press, talks with author Lawrence Landis about his writing process for A School for the People: A Photographic History of Oregon State University
• A Q & A between Liverpool University Press’s editorial director and the editor of one of their forthcoming open access e-textbooks, Using Primary Sources is in the works for LUP
• And finally, the University of Toronto Press sits down with one of their journal editors.

To read more about 2015 University Press Week—and see what you might have missed—click here.

An old University of Chicago Press printer’s block (date unknown), with the original 1891 logo. Photo by: Isa Leshko.

How did we get from here to there? How do we go from here to there? How was it that we went from here to there? Where are we going? How? These kinds of questions are excellent pontifications on/interrogations of the nature of time and space, those blaring abstractions, as we perform them through acts of mechanical reproduction and ongoing technological developments. Maybe a better question is, then, What carries us where? When the University of Chicago Press was founded in 1890, it wasn’t printing knowledge. It was a press in the literal sense of the term, a printer:

The University of Chicago Press was one of three original divisions of the University when it was founded in 1890. Although for a year or two it functioned only as a printer, in 1892 the Press began publishing scholarly books and journals, making it one of the oldest continuously operating university presses in the United States.

This isn’t a critical history of the University of Chicago Press, but one wonders about the relationships between scholarship, technology, and the academic institution that engendered that turn from printing materials to printing ideas.

Fast forward a century. In 1991, building off a wave of enthusiasm for the fax machine, John Warnock initiated the Camelot Project. It attempted the development of an Interchange PostScript, a new language of “operations and conventions” with regard to digital data. It wanted to live the dream (the 1991 dream):

Imagine if the IPS viewer is also equipped with text searching capabilities. In this case the user could find all documents that contain a certain word or phrase, and then view that word or phrase in context within the document. Entire libraries could be archived in electronic form, and since IPS files are self-contained, would be printable at any location.

animated GIF of Adobe Acrobat (TM) PDF download-in-progress, sourced via Google

The Camelot Project launched what turned into the PDF. This technology remained proprietary to Adobe until it was released as an open standard in 2008 (Fascinatingly enough, citing the article that footnotes this development requires use of the Internet Archive, a non-profit institution dedicated to “preserving the internet.”). Could we have anticipated how much that new programming language would change the way we store and retrieve information, and in turn, how we circulate scholarship online? Probably not. But the seed of the PDF was already there. It was present in the gesture that led the University of Chicago Press to publish its first scholarly work, Robert F. Harper’s Assyrian and Babylonian Letters Belonging to the Kouyunjik Collections of the British Museum in 1891. The contingency—or better, the interrelations between the production of new knowledge and the production of new technology—isn’t accidental. It’s how we get from here to there. That one sphere may occasionally take the lead and develop with greater speed isn’t the heart of the matter—it’s that they are co-evolutionary, and the getting from here to there is a movement. How we organize ourselves institutionally contributes to and affects how we change our perceptions, which in turn contributes to and affects how we mobilize technology. We might not have been dreaming of JSTOR when we invented the PDF, but JSTOR might have been dreaming of us.

Today, 24 years later, in 2015, our publicity director flew to Rome to accept an award on behalf of one of our authors. The prize? A 3D-printed trophy fashioned after a piece of sculpture. As described in the press release:

Italian sculptor and architect Davide Prete specializes in urban-scale works using stainless steel, forged steel, and small-scale sculptures combining traditional metalsmithing techniques and 3D printing and laser scanning.

In the smithy’s work, we have the theory of the laser printer. The stories it could tell.

The inaugural Bridge Award (Non-Fiction), a collaborative project between several non-profit institutions in the US and Italy, was awarded to Robert Pogue Harrison’s Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age. The award itself is a 3D-printed sculpture.

***

Next up in the UP Week blog tour is the University of Manitoba Press Blog, with images of some of the books (and book launch photos!) they’ve published over the course of the past 48 years.

To read more about University Press Week, click here.

Lost German Zeppelin, slightly hovering above a field of French peasants, October 1917. Photo by: Albert Moreau. Credit: ECPAD/France/Albert Moreau.

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The first Armistice Day, which celebrated the one-year anniversary of the end of hostilities on the Western Front, and ultimately, the conflict-based dissolvement of World War I, took place on November 11, 1919, and marked that moment a year earlier, the “eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” of 1918. Fast forward nearly a century. Desensitized via the ubiquity of war photography and new forms of media circulation to the strangeness, the horrors, the portrayal of foreign terrain, and the shocks of bearing witness to conflict, we can point to any number of examples of now classic photojournalism that portray the terror of warfare in the twentieth and twenty-first century, including work by Robert Capa, Joe Rosenthal, Nick Ut, Gary Knight, Benjamin Lowy, and Ashley Gilbertson.

The First World War: Unseen Glass Plate Photographs of the Western Front is different. Carl De Keyzer’s meticulous reconstruction of photographs—including many authentic color images, the result of early autochrome technology—makes available glimpses of the First World War, as never seen before. We’re accustomed to grainy, scratched, blurred images in monochrome of the devastation of trench warfare, but these images, taken by some of the war’s most gifted photographers producing glass plate images in lieu of film from crude cameras, offer more distinct moments: from Belgian soldiers in training to African colonial troops on the Western Front, from the everyday minutiae of civilians’ lives to women making 75mm shells on the assembly line in the factory in Saint-Chamond, all accompanied by an Introduction from Geoff Dyer and an essay by historian David Van Reybrouck.

More of De Keyzer’s process is explained in an interview between Getty curator Nancy Perloff and De Keyzer at Places:

My team and I searched all over Europe — all over the world, in fact. We discovered that original negatives are available for fewer than five percent of the existing images. Most were destroyed during or after the war; some were recuperated for the silver used in the old collodion process, and many were simply badly treated or lost.

We made a list of about fifty different museums and collections worldwide, which over the course of several years we visited or contacted. These included the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Hoover Institution, in the United States; the War Office/National Archives, in the United Kingdom; the Musée Albert-Kahn, in Paris; the Bundesarchiv, in Berlin; and many places in Belgium. I spent weeks hunting through wooden boxes with dust-covered glass plates and containers packed with old prints, and poring through old albums. Most museums have not even begun to archive and digitize these collections.

We posed two key questions to the archival institutions. Could we scan the originals? And then would they allow me to restore the originals according to my own professional standards and personal perspectives? Only a few museums responded affirmatively to both questions.

And from a recent profile of the book in the Telegraph, which teases some of the book’s content:

These images were taken between 1914 and 1921, in places of which we have likely never heard, by photographers – Tournassoud, Aubert, Moreau, Antony, Gimpel, Castelnau – whose names are unfamiliar. Here, male and female factory workers weld fins to mortar grenades, or stack thousands of mess tins. Red-trousered regiments bathe almost leisurely in a pond, in a scene that recalls the pastoral idylls of Giorgione or Manet; a bugle hangs on a nearby tree. Elsewhere, children look on as soldiers parade in country fields, or play at airmen and prisoners on the streets of Paris.

To read more about The First World War, click here.

To see sample pages from the book, click here.

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Also, today we continue the 2015 University Press Week blog tour. Read up on previous contributions from member presses here, and in the meantime, look for some great posts on the history of university press design from Northwestern University Press, Princeton University Press, MIT Press, the University of Kansas Press, Georgetown University Press, Syracuse University Press, Stanford University Press, Harvard University Press, Athabasca University Press, and finally, Yale University Press.

To read more about 2015 University Press Week, click here.

From the headquarters of the American Association of University Presses (AAUP), here comes everyone’s favorite week in November, besides that one about colonialism—just kidding, this week is, of course, de facto, the pride of November because it celebrates the prescience, diversity, and commitment to knowledge exemplified by the university press in the twenty-first century. Here’s a fine sampling of the breadth and depth offered by these presses, presented as a series of infographics, which play with the collective numbers produced by member presses from 12 nations, 41 of the United States, and 7 Canadian provinces.

From Monday, November 9th, through Friday, November 13th, in particular, you’ll be able to virtually participate in a blog tour, featuring posts from over 40 AAUP member presses. We’re up on Thursday, but in the meantime, here’s what in the horizon for the next few days:

Today, Monday, 11/9, you’ll find posts from: the University of Florida Press (on how scholarly cookbooks have changed the Sunshine State), the University Press of New England (on the serendipitous timing of their book Winning Marriage, released within days of the Supreme Court’s recent verdict), the University Press of Missouri  (on their statewide partnership and collaboration to create the “Mississippi Books” page at the Clarion Ledger), the University Press of Kentucky (coming thru with some surprising facts on AAUP presses), the University of Nebraska Press (showcasing some staff profiles), the University of California Press (on new publishing platforms), the University of Wisconsin Press (on mystery fiction and scholarly publishing), and posts by both the University of Kansas and University of Michigan Presses.

Tomorrow, Tuesday, 11/10, look for posts courtesy of: Indiana University Press (from IUP director Gary Dunham), Oxford University Press (from editorial director Sophie Goldsworthy), George Mason University Press (by Mason Publishing on the future of digital tools), University Press of Colorado (on their 50th anniversary—and what’s up ahead), a second blog from the University Press of Kansas (by director Chuck Myers), University of North Carolina Press (from director John Sherer, on the necessity of financial support), West Virginia University Press (on the value of acquisitions work in the digital age), and John Hopkins University Press (with commentary from editorial director Greg Britton).

And, for general information about this week, here follows a synopsis from the AAUP website:

#ReadUP
The AAUP community uses the #ReadUP hashtag to highlight on social media the best of what UPs are publishing all year long. It beautifully captures what we celebrate when celebrate University Press Week: the scholarship, writing, and deep knowledge that is shared with the world through our books and publications.

#UPShelfie
During UP Week, post a #UPshelfie (a photo of your university press and AAUP member books) to Twitter with the tags #UPshelfie and #ReadUP for a chance to win one of five Surprise! University Press Week book bags! We’ve collected an exciting, but mysterious, group of surprising books and items from our members to share with 5 lucky UP-readers. (Don’t forget both tags—that’s how we’ll know you want to be included in the drawing!)

Two online panels featured during University Press Week:

Opening Access: The Reinvention of the Academic Press
A wide-ranging discussion of the future of the academic book, in tandem with Academic Book Week
November 10, 3PM Eastern

It’s Not Scary: The Art of Getting Published with a Scholarly Press
Get insight into the life of your future book, from proposal to publicity
Friday, November 13, 12PM Eastern

The UP Week Roundup      

A bulletin of events and news for University Press Week: subscribe now!

To read more about AAUP Week and the campaign behind #readUP, click here.

In a piece for FiveThirtyEight, “How Democrats Suppress the Vote,” Eitan Hersh connects the dots between low voter turnout, off-year elections, and the pursuit of (often municipal) policy goals. Arguing that off-cycle elections inherently yield a decreased number of voters disinterested in having to vote multiple times or engaging in local-level politics, Hersh turns to Sarah F. Anzia’s Timing and Turnout: How Off-Cycle Elections Favor Organized Groups to explain why:

Political scientist Sarah Anzia, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, gives a compelling explanation in an outstanding book published last year. The first point that Anzia makes is that the off-cycle election calendar is not a response to voter preferences; voters do not like taking multiple trips to the voting booth. Anzia asked a nationally representative sample of Americans if they prefer elections held at different times for different offices “because it allows voters to focus on a shorter list of candidates and issues during each election” or all at the same time “because combining the elections boosts voter turnout for local elections.” Voters of all political stripes prefer consolidated elections, and by wide margins. But that’s especially true for people who identify as Democrats, who prefer consolidated elections 73 percent to 27 percent.

Democrats, Hersh suggests, who have long championed full participation as central to the democratic process, are in fact enabling and endorsing these off-cycle elections because of what they are able to offer constituent groups mobilized around specific issues.

Hersh appropriates Anzia again on what’s at stake in utilizing that strategy:

Anzia shows that off-cycle elections lead to higher salaries and better health and retirement benefits for teachers and public employees. Anzia studies these effects in many different ways. The simplest way is by looking at eight states that allow local governments to set their own election dates. She compares school districts that hold school board elections on-cycle and off-cycle within the same state. Controlling for factors that might make districts different from one another — like their population size, income, racial composition, partisan leanings and how urban or rural they are — Anzia found that the maximum base teacher salary is over 4 percent higher in districts with off-cycle elections.

Despite these advantages, by resisting consolidated elections, which a vast majority of their constituents endorse, Democrats are de facto suppressing the vote and inadvertently contextualizing how off-cycle elections, like more traditional barriers to voting,  are “imposing a cost on political participation.” This, in turn, is one Anzia’s core arguments: how mundane matters of scheduling are ultimately tactics that distribute political power.

To read more about Timing and Turnout, click here.

Jessa Crispin, author of The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, Expats, and Ex-Countries and editor-in-chief at Bookslut and Spolia magazine(s), recently appeared on an episode of WTTW’s Chicago Tonight, her former stomping grounds as book reviewer.

Along with video of Crispin’s conversation (not Dorothy Gale, 2:12; running away to Romania, 6:00; “Don’t Do It, Harper Lee,” 7:58), there’s an excerpt from the book on William James and Berlin, and some quotes from the interview, if digital players leave you cold.

You can read more about The Dead Ladies Project, here.

Our free ebook for November:
Harvey G. Cohen’s Duke Ellington’s America

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Few American artists in any medium have enjoyed the international and lasting cultural impact of Duke Ellington. From jazz standards such as “Mood Indigo” and “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” to his longer, more orchestral suites, to his leadership of the stellar big band he toured and performed with for decades after most big bands folded, Ellington represented a singular, pathbreaking force in music over the course of a half-century. At the same time, as one of the most prominent black public figures in history, Ellington demonstrated leadership on questions of civil rights, equality, and America’s role in the world.

With Duke Ellington’s America, Harvey G. Cohen paints a vivid picture of Ellington’s life and times, taking him from his youth in the black middle class enclave of Washington, D.C., to the heights of worldwide acclaim. Mining extensive archives, many never before available, plus new interviews with Ellington’s friends, family, band members, and business associates, Cohen illuminates his constantly evolving approach to composition, performance, and the music business—as well as issues of race, equality and religion. Ellington’s own voice, meanwhile, animates the book throughout, giving Duke Ellington’s America an intimacy and immediacy unmatched by any previous account.

By far the most thorough and nuanced portrait yet of this towering figure, Duke Ellington’s America highlights Ellington’s importance as a figure in American history as well as in American music.

To read more about Duke Ellington’s America, click here.

On Tuesday, November 10, 2015, at 9PM EDT, Debt of Honor, a new documentary by acclaimed filmmaker Ric Burns will air on WHYY-TV. The film “takes an unflinching look at the reality of warfare and disability,” and features footage and interviews with prominent disabled veterans, including Representative Tammy Duckworth and former Georgia Senator Max Cleland. In addition, Debt of Honor also relies on the scholarship of some of our leading figures in disability studies, and to this end, includes an interview with Beth Linker, associate professor in the Department of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania and author of War’s Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America. 

Linker’s War’s Waste contextualizes decisions made by the US government before entering World War I to avoid paying pensions to injured soldiers, a fiscal burden it had endured since the Revolutionary War. Instead, the idea of “rehabilitation,” charged with the potential of recent developments in social welfare and medical science, which sought to “rebuild” disabled soldiers and return them to civilian life, was pushed forward. Though this culminated in the postwar establishment of the Veterans Administration, one of WWI’s most lasting legacies, the story of how and why we got there—from the professional development of orthopedic surgeons and other medical professionals to curative workshops, in which disabled soldiers learned how to repair automobiles as well as their own artificial limbs—remained buried in the background, until Linker’s intervention. As the Bulletin of the History of Medicine put it, “This book is not merely the latest contribution to the ever-growing body of scholarship on disabled soldiers and their rehabilitation. It is one of the most important and readable studies to appear in recent years. . . . War’s Waste plainly deserves to become core reading among scholars and to be read by a wider, nonacademic audience interested in learning about the social and cultural history of America during the Great War.”

To read more about War’s Waste, click here.

Ellen Berrey’s The Enigma of Diversity: The Language of Race and the Limits of Racial Justice problematizes “diversity” for the twenty-first century, employing years of fieldwork, case studies, and historical research to document just how ubiquitous and weakened the term has become, courtesy of its championing by a plethora of causes, each to often symbolic and distinctly competitive ends.

In a recent op-ed for Salon, you can read a teaser for the arguments Berry further substantiates in her book, as she addresses the word’s specific usage by discomfited white people confronted by/with the topic of race:

Here’s what I’ve learned: diversity is how we talk about race when we can’t talk about race. It has become a stand-in when open discussion of race is too controversial or — let’s be frank — when white people find the topic of race uncomfortable. Diversity seems polite, positive, hopeful. Who is willing to say they don’t value diversity? One national survey found that more than 90 percent of respondents said they valued diversity in their communities and friendships.

The term diversity has become so watered down that it can be anything from code for black people to a profit imperative. Consider the cringe-worthy experience I had sitting in on a corporate diversity training, where initiates learned that diversity could mean our preferences for working at daytime or at night, or our favorite animal. As a Deloitte study showed, many Millennials take it to simply mean one’s unique culture and perspective. (Apparently they are listening to their diversity trainers).

However much it might feel good, though, diversity talk is not enough. At this paradoxical time, when we are at once commemorating fifty years of civil rights gains while questioning racism in policing and prisons, it allows us to sidestep persistent, alarming racial inequalities. Its appeal makes it downright pernicious. It lets white people off the hook from doing something about our own culpability in the problem — like our inclination to live near people like us (i.e. white) or to put in a good word with the boss about our friends (i.e. probably white).

To read more about The Enigma of Diversity, click here.

In their October 19, 2015 issue, the New Yorker published a piece by staff writer Kathryn Schulz on Henry David Thoreau’s legacy. “Who was this cold-eyed man who saw in loss of life only aesthetic gain, who identified not with the drowned or the bereaved but with the storm?,” one of its takeaway lines, evidences Schulz’s polemical intent: “Pond Scum,” as the piece is titled, resituates Thoreau as a narcissistic control freak churning out our earliest instances of “cabin porn” and doling out misanthropic moral judgments as if they were fodder for page-a-day self-help calendars. One point she does concede, though: Thoreau was “an excellent naturalist and an eloquent and prescient voice for the preservation of wild places.”

Richard B. Primack, author of Walden Warming: Climate Change Comes to Thoreau’s Woods, responded in an op-ed for the Boston Globe, “Sorry, New Yorker, Thoreau is more relevant than ever,” which addressed Thoreau’s contributions to our understanding of species extinctions, the value of education, the dangers of consumer culture, and even, climate change.

As Primack argues:

Everyone knows that Thoreau was an unusually perceptive observer of nature who wrote eloquently and passionately about the need to preserve wild spaces. He also kept a voluminous journal — 2 million words by the time he passed away. But few know about his detailed notes on the emergence of leaves and flowers on hundreds of plant species and the arrival of migratory birds and the departure of ice on Walden Pond. These notes were so overlooked that the editors who first published his journals cut them to save space; they were left as scraps on the editing room floor as it were.

Thoreau recognized their value. He pulled the observations from his journals and created neatly organized tables (well, sort of neat, except for his incredibly bad handwriting) listing the leaves, flowers, birds, and other natural events he saw on each day for eight years between 1851 and 1858. He was creating a nature calendar.

These tables have been invaluable tools for investigating the impact of climate change on New England’s flora and fauna. His observations have been the foundation for a line of work and insights that has involved numerous students and researchers from many universities and countries and is still growing and expanding today.

To read more about Walden Warming, click here.

Kevin D. Haggerty and Aaron Doyle’s 57 Ways to Screw Up in Grad School generated quite a buzz. The book, written by two former graduate directors, covers the rookie mistakes made by new graduate students and delivers a how-to guide that sets would-be PhDs on the right track and off the path to failure—which these days includes a only 50 percent completion rate. The authors’ have a bang-up website, the aptly named gradscrewups.com, and the book has recently been profiled by Inside Higher Ed, Science, and CBS News’s Money Watch. To whet your appetite, here’s an excerpt from a recent piece at the THE, after the jump.

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“Step #7,” from an adaptation on “10 Steps to PhD Failure,” at the Times Higher Ed:

7. Cover everything

Students eager to screw up should remember that their thesis is their defining personal and professional achievement. The thesis is everything. Therefore, it should contain everything. Approach your topic from every conceivable angle. Use a diverse set of methodologies. Explore the topic from every theoretical framework conceivable. Aim to produce an analysis that spans the full sweep of human history. This will ensure that in 30 years you will be asking whether you are eligible for pension benefits as a graduate student.

While working on my master’s degree, I bumped into one of my professors and summarized my thesis topic for him. I was doing research on the sex trade, so I detailed how I expected to conduct a feminist analysis of prostitution in Toronto. It would address economic issues and incorporate recent theoretical work on ethnicity and identity. My methodology involved an ambitious plan for a lengthy period of first-hand observation in the field, combined with dozens of interviews with female street prostitutes, police officers, politicians and local activists. When I stopped talking, he smiled wryly and said, “Well, you certainly have your work cut out for you.”

As we parted, I thought to myself: “He’s right. This is insane. I will never be able to do all of this.” The project was massive, unfocused, and had to be radically reduced in scope and ambition or I would never finish. I slept horribly that night, but my fear motivated me to transform my thesis into something more feasible. Master’s and PhD students tend to set overly ambitious parameters for their research, mistakenly thinking that their thesis has to be a monumental contribution to knowledge.

The jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie famously said that it took his whole life to learn what not to play. The same is true for designing and writing academic works. You need to identify what not to cover in your research, and you must remove tangents peripheral to your analysis or argument. You might have to cut major sections or even chapters. This will hurt. I cut many pages of material in the final stages of writing my master’s thesis, including a number of chunks that I loved but which did not quite fit with my final structure and arguments. A thesis, like any written work, is always stronger when you omit unnecessary sections. Simply place those parts in a separate file and work them up later for a submission to a journal.

To read more about 57 Ways to Screw Up in Grad School, click here.

Robert Pogue Harrison’s Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age was recently announced as the inaugural winner of The Bridge Book Award for Non-Fiction, facilitated by  the American Embassy in Rome, Casa delle Letterature of Rome, Nation-al Italian American Foundation (NIAF), American Initiative for Italian Culture (AIFIC), and Federazione Unitaria Italiana Scrittori (FUIS).

From the award description:

“The Bridge” is aimed to reinforce the mutual understanding between Italy and the USA by exposing the reading public to the best works of fiction and nonfiction recently released in the two countries. The Award is meant to be a “bridge” that connects two cultures.

On the heels of the win, University of Chicago Press promotions director Levi Stahl traveled to Rome to accept the prize on Harrison’s behalf; images from the ceremony follow after the jump.

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To read more about Juvenescence, click here.

Randy Olson was once a marine biologist, with one foot in academia, a screenwriting dream, and the uncanny ability to communicate complicated science via narratives that used the foundations of story to draw readers in and keep them engaged. Now one of our most revered interlocutors of how science is understood and appreciated, Olson recently published Houston, We Have a Narrative: Why Science Needs Story, which takes readers through his “And, But, Therefore” principle of writing. In addition to delivering a TED talk on the ABT method, Olson was recently the subject of a review/profile for the Union of Concerned Scientists, in a piece that details his book’s inspiration and operating themes.

From the Equation blog at the Union for Concerned Scientists:

Scientists who want to succeed with Olson’s methods will have to not only read and process what he has to say, but also commit to thinking about how to communicate their work more effectively over time. . . . This isn’t an add-on to doing good science, either, Olson argues. Scientists are born storytellers, trying to make sense of data. Olson writes that even the humble scientific abstract benefits from adhering to an ABT structure and he presents several convincing case studies to underscore this point.

He challenges readers to re-examine what a story really is in the context of science. For instance, he chronicles how Watson and Crick told a good story when they challenged the old model of what DNA looks like. He also tracks the history of IMRAD, the now-accepted standard for how one “tells a story” in the scientific literature: introduction, methods, results, and discussion. And he lays out how positive and negative results correlate to archetypal plot structures.

It’s heady stuff, for sure, but it’s also what scientists and science communicators need to hear: Effective communication and storytelling are not optional add-ons for research; they are inherent to the research process itself.

Video from Olson’s earlier appearance at TED:

To read more about Houston, We Have a Narrative, click here.

The 2015 Frankfurt Book Fair is, far and away, the world’s largest book fair. In fact, it’s the world’s largest _____ fair, period. Tallying in at just over “7,000 exhibitors from about 100 countries, more than 9,000 accredited journalists, and [including] 4,000 events, the 67th Frankfurt Book Fair is ‘the largest trading place for content worldwide.'”

With that scope in mind, here are a few candids snapped by the University of Chicago Press crew, distributed via social media, on the heels of today’s opening press conference:

To read more about the goings-on in Frankfurt, click here.