Erin Beeghly's "What's Wrong with Stereotyping?"

Erin Beeghly is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of Graduate Studies for the Philosophy Department at the University of Utah. Her primary research interests lie at the intersection of ethics, social epistemology, feminist philosophy, and moral psychology.

Beeghly applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, What's Wrong with Stereotyping?, and reported the following:

Page 99 drops you into the book’s fourth chapter. That chapter opens with a photo of Barbara Gittings, an early gay rights activist in the United States. She’s holding a sign at a pre-Stonewall rally, sporting short haircut, stylish sunglasses, and a smart mid-1960s dress straight out of Mad Men. Her sign says: homosexuals should be judged as individuals. She’s there to protest homophobic policies, rampant and shameless in that era: policies that required the federal government to fire gay employees because they were alleged security threats; that allowed businesses to refuse service to gender non- conforming and queer patrons; and justified police raids on gay bars. In these raids, queer, trans, and gender non-conforming patrons were manhandled, assaulted, and thrown in jail. All of this – and more – was perfectly legal.

The chapter wrestles with the idea on Gittings sign. What does it mean to treat someone as an individual? Is it plausible that all stereotyping – and, for that matter, all discrimination – is wrong because it involves generalizing on people, ignoring their individuality? Is there a moral right to be treated as an individual?

I’m at a point in the chapter where I’m grappling with the slipperiness of the ideal on Gittings’ sign. The most natural ways to interpret the sign’s message don’t work. They suggest, implausibly, that clocking anyone based on looks – as a certain gender, as queer, as belonging to a certain racial or ethnic group, as Republican or Democrat – is inherently wrong.

“For some theorists,” I write on page 99, “the upshot is this. We must stop explaining what’s wrong with stereotyping—as well as what’s wrong with discrimination—by saying that it fails to treat persons as individuals. The claim is philosophically corrupt. However, other theorists take the analysis so far as a challenge. The challenge is to articulate a new interpretation of failing to treat persons as individuals that does not generate the problem of absurdity.”

I am on the cusp of diving into nerdy attempts to vindicate the imperative on Gittings pre-Stonewall sign. If we take Gittings and other early gay rights activists seriously, we should be able to make sense out of that sign’s message, interpret it in a way that is not absurd, find the truth in its meaning.

It’s Pride month right now. Almost sixty years after this photo was taken, it’s still important to make sense of that sign. LGBTQIA+ stereotyping and discrimination continue to plague us, alarmingly so. Page 99 holds out hope that we can push back against anti-queer policies, and the dehumanizing stereotypes that underlie them, with the idea on Gittings sign. On the other hand, the book goes on to argue that individualistic wrongs are only ever part of the story of what’s wrong with stereotyping.

Using queer history as a touchstone, the book as a whole offers a nuanced picture of what’s wrong with stereotyping. It argues that stereotyping individuals – judging persons by group membership – is not always wrong. Nor is characterizing groups in generic ways: queers are fabulous after all. However, when stereotyping is unethical, you can tell because it is characterized by clusters of wrongs, travelling together for systematic reasons, targeting groups for violence and marginalization. All in all, my book provides a rich understanding of wrongful stereotyping that readers can use to identify wrongful stereotyping in their everyday lives. Page 99 exemplifies this, taking readers on a lively philosophical journey.

Visit Erin Beeghly's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joseph Kellner's "The Spirit of Socialism"

Joseph Kellner is a historian of Russia and the Soviet Union at the University of Georgia.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Spirit of Socialism: Culture and Belief at the Soviet Collapse, with the following results:

Page 99 of The Spirit of Socialism: Culture and Belief at the Soviet Collapse finds one Sergei Chevalkov, formerly a colonel in the Soviet Union’s land-based nuclear defense forces, late in the process of converting to a millenarian sect. In keeping with one major theme of the book, he is explaining to me (in interview) why neither his former work (in both its technical and philosophical aspects) nor the Soviet worldview contradict the teachings of Vissarion, the sect leader who, in 1991, proclaimed himself the Second Coming of Christ. Chevalkov, who considers Vissarion to have reconciled all of the world’s spiritual and intellectual currents, was an early and zealous convert, who quickly became the high priest of the sect upon relocating to their survivalist commune in southern Siberia, where my interviews were conducted.

The Page 99 Test, in this case, has succeeded admirably. The book’s analysis shifts regularly between the experience of individual converts, believers and radicals of the early 1990s, and a broad cultural and intellectual portrait of late-Soviet and post-collapse Russian society. Here on page 99, the reader finds the former, in appropriately colorful form. It is a book of eccentrics, oddballs and heretics in some ways, but one that finds such people to be far closer to the center of Soviet society and culture than one would assume—with Chevalkov an excellent example. His story addresses a central question of the text, namely, how and why so many people, possessed of Soviet values and Soviet resources, came to adopt novel and radical worldviews that most would consider un-Soviet, all in the few years surrounding the country’s collapse. With these questions answered—read to see how!—the book then draws a new and I hope compelling picture of Soviet life and its legacies in the new Russian Federation. But its largest conclusions don’t concern the Soviet Union alone. The reader ought to come away thinking about the relationship between science and faith; reckoning with the conditional and fragile nature of their own worldview; and considering how different Russia’s crisis in the 1990s really is from our own crisis today. Page 99 won’t get you there entirely, but it’s not a very long book on the whole.

Learn more about The Spirit of Socialism at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eve Darian-Smith's "Policing Higher Education"

Eve Darian-Smith is a distinguished professor and the chair of the Department of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Irvine.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Policing Higher Education: The Antidemocratic Attack on Scholars and Why It Matters, and shared the following:

Page 99 talks about how attacks on universities and scholars are related to a wider set of attacks on journalists, librarians, writers, political activists and public intellectuals – in fact anyone who challenges repressive political power. This wider set of attacks by antidemocratic regimes, including the MAGA Republican regime, may take various forms. In places such as Brazil, Hungary or India, they can range from censoring what gets published, to closing news outlets, to arrests, detentions, and in some cases even torture, rape and death.

The Page 99 Test is pretty effective in conveying the overarching point of my book, which is that attacks on academic freedom are one strategy exercised by antidemocratic politicians to expel any criticism challenging their authority to govern. We see attacks on academic freedom increasingly under Trump’s second administration as students and scholars are policed and criminalized for public protest, as well as shuttled into cars and relocated to distant detention centers. And we see it in the widespread defunding of science and research that seeks to make universities and colleges bend to the far-right’s ideological agenda. These efforts have a chilling effect on learning. In a very material sense, people are being disciplined to self-censor and not speak up, afraid of real and imminent threats. This is what the far-right wants – to create an environment in which people are scared to think in ways that may question those in power.

Unfortunately, this isn’t just a US problem. My book looks at two interconnected global trends – rising antidemocracy and declining academic freedom. I argue that what is happening in the US needs to be understood as part of a global drift toward authoritarianism that includes aggressive control over knowledge production.

With this book, I hope to open conversations about the value of academic freedom and higher education in general. Despite US education being very expensive and historically exclusive, going to college is vital for training people to question their assumptions and think critically about their place in the world. And importantly, academic freedom is central to revisioning more inclusive democratic societies that respect diverse worldviews and encourage innovative ideas that drive new jobs and solutions.

Being able to think, study, discuss and share knowledge without fear of censorship is essential for everyone, irrespective of age, gender, sex, religion, class, race or ethnicity. This is an urgent and timely message as we face a new era of unparalleled political repression.

Learn more about Policing Higher Education at the Johns Hopkins University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Global Burning.

--Marshal Zeringue

David C. Hoffman's "American Freethought"

David C. Hoffman is an associate professor in the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs at the City University of New York.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, American Freethought: The History of a Social Movement, 1794–1948, and reported the following:

Page 99 of American Freethought takes readers right to the heart of the book’s subject matter. It begins a section devoted to a freethinking feminist named Frances Wright who lived from 1795 to 1852. The section is titled, “Frances Wright: Utopian Abolitionist and Apostle of Science.” It opens,

Frances Wright was one of the most luminous of the British activists who immigrated to the United States in the early nineteenth century. She is honored today as a pioneering feminist and abolitionist who was the first woman to go on a public speaking tour in America, but she also should be remembered for carrying forward [Thomas] Paine’s vision for science by promoting secular scientific education for both women and men.

By way of background, the revolutionary pamphleteer Thomas Paine, whose Common Sense set America on the path to independence, argued that science rather than traditional religion should be the common pursuit that unites a free republic. Wright promoted this idea in her public lectures, urging her followers to establish “Halls of Science,” where a free scientific education would be available to all regardless of gender or social standing.

I am glad to have the opportunity to introduce the readers of the Page 99 Test to Frances Wright, who was a major figure in the freethought, abolitionist, and feminist movements of the early nineteenth century that is all but forgotten today. In the 1820s she invented and pursued a workable scheme for ending slavery in the United States that might have changed the course of history if it had not been brought down by lack of funding and an outbreak of malaria. Wright’s collected works should have a place on the shelf of Penguin Classics next to her mentor Jeremy Bentham, but there is no modern edition of them in any series.

Wright is just one of the many freethinking women and men that readers will encounter on the pages of American Freethought. Among the others are Ernestine Rose, the atheistic daughter of a Polish rabbi who led efforts to establish married women’s property right in New York State; Frances Ellingwood Abbott, a radical Unitarian whose “Nine Demands of Liberalism” ignited the revival of American freethought after the civil war; Ida Craddock, a fervent spiritualist who was persecuted for writing a sex manual; and Queen Silver, a precocious child whose first public lecture in defense of atheism was given at the age of ten in the 1920s. These are some of the many characters in American history who have contributed to the freethought movement’s defense of every American’s right to believe or disbelieve by the light of their own conscience without state interference.

Learn more about American Freethought at the Johns Hopkins University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert N. Spengler III's "Nature's Greatest Success"

Robert N. Spengler III directs the Fruits of Eurasia: Domestication and Dispersal research project and leads the Domestication and Anthropogenic Evolution Research Group at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany. He is author of the book Fruit from the Sands and has published dozens of scholarly articles while running research projects across Central Asia.

Spengler applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Nature's Greatest Success: How Plants Evolved to Exploit Humanity, with the following results:

The ninety ninth page of Nature’s Greatest Success is bisected by two different and equally captivating topics; the page opens with the conclusion of a discussion of strawberry domestication. The popular narrative of strawberry domestication involves a farmer in the 1700s – a bit of a strawberry fanatic – who planted different species of strawberries in his garden, only to notice one day that something rather different was growing in his strawberry patch. I ask whether the process of stumbling across hybrid forms of a crop can be thought of as a proxy for some aspects of domestication in prehistory. If an ancient farmer suddenly discovered a unique form of a crop growing in their field, would they have tried to reproduce it, and, if so, which of the forms of plants in your produce market are a result of this process? The latter part of the page dives into the odd case of quinoa domestication, and I rationalize the ways that the process could not have involved human intentionality. In short, genetic features of the plant prevent active seed selection from fostering the process of domestication.

I believe that a reader picking the book up and thumbing to the page in question would gather enough of an understanding of the overall book that, if the topic catches their attention, they will return to page one and begin reading. The book spans a wide range of topics, using many case studies, with the goal of providing the reader with an idea of what domestication looked like in antiquity and how the foods they eat came into being.

Domestication remains one of the most captivating topics of scholarship across the sciences, as it is a key part of the story of what permitted humanity to become culturally modern. Without domesticated crops, you would not have any of the material goods that you take for granted, human populations would be low, cities could not exist, and the arts and sciences would not have developed. Geneticists, archaeologists, and ecologists have started to realize that humans in prehistory did not intentionally domesticate crops. This means that the evolutionary process that permitted human cultural development was a happy accident, as opposed to a great achievement of humanity. In Nature’s Greatest Success, I explore these new ideas about how domestication traits first evolved. In this book, I encourage the reader to think in different ways about ancient agriculture and the ongoing domestication processes all around you today. In short, the most important questions about humanity have remained unanswered because of long-standing misunderstandings about how ancient domestication occurred, and the true story of domestication is far more interesting than the long-standing narrative.

Visit Robert N. Spengler III's website.

The Page 99 Test: Fruit from the Sands.

--Marshal Zeringue

Steve L. Monroe's "Mirages of Reform"

Steve L. Monroe is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the National University of Singapore. He is a scholar of development, with a primary focus on the Arab world. His scholarship examines two of the region's most pressing developmental challenges: limited economic integration, and gender inequality.

Monroe applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Mirages of Reform: The Politics of Elite Protectionism in the Arab World, and shared the following:

Page 99 defends how this chapter in Mirages of Reform measures the strength of Jordanian industries’ social connections to the state. This measure relies on data from publicly traded firms. It gauges industries’ social-connections strength as the share of chairmen and board members (CBMs) of publicly traded firms in an industry who belong to Jordan’s historically favored ancestral group – Jordanians of East Bank descent.

The first half of page 99 presents the pros and cons of this measure. On the plus side, data from publicly traded firms is publicly available. This helps me identify socially connected CBMs based on whether they have an “East Bank” last name, and cull information on their firms’ size and profits. On the downside, this measure assumes that industries without publicly traded firms have weak social connections to the state.

The second half of page 99 tries to validate this assumption. Compared to industries with publicly traded firms, Jordanian industries without publicly traded firms have on average smaller firms, lower tariffs and are devoid of State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) – all signs of weak social connections. I then argue that if industries without publicly traded firms did in fact have strong social connections to the state, this measure would be a “hard” test of the argument as it would overestimate the social connections strength of weakly connected industries; differences in tariff cuts and profits between industries with strong and weak social connections would be even greater if I had a more accurate measure of industries’ social connections. Page 99’s last paragraph presents qualitative evidence from different industries that substantiates the chapter’s measure of social-connections strength.

The Page 99 Test on Mirages of Reform passes in spirit but not in substance. Page 99 gives the browser a whiff of the book’s essence – its challenges, assumptions, methodological orientations. Defining and measuring social connections was one of the hardest parts of this book project. Page 99 exhibits one of the book’s tactics in measuring social connections. I like how the page begins by acknowledging this measure’s limitations, then segues into an empirical and theoretical defense of the measure, before validating the measure with secondary sources and case expertise. I hope that a browser reading page 99 would infer that I understand the empirical challenges of studying state – society relations, and have made a good faith effort to overcome these challenges.

Nevertheless, page 99 does not reveal the book’s argument: industries with stronger social connections undergo more extensive but deceptive levels of trade policy reform when their state has greater support from the US and the EU. The Page 99 Test also excises the previous chapters’ lengthy explanation and definition of social-connections strength. I conceptualize the strength of industrialists’ social connections to the state as a function of the quality and frequency of their interactions with state officials. By this logic, the economic elite who belong to politically favored social groups have the strongest social connections to their regime – hence page 99’s focus on CBMs of East Bank descent. This information is key to assessing the social connections measure’s validity.

Lastly, in shrinking Mirages of Reform’s measure of social connections to CBMs from politically favored groups, the Page 99 Test excludes the multiple approaches this book uses to assess social connections across time and place. Instead, the page 99 reader might mistakenly conclude that this book restricts its measures of social connections to what is static and quantifiable. For a more complete yet condensed understanding of Mirages of Reform, I encourage the casual browser to skim the introduction.

Visit Steve L. Monroe's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Marcus Alexander Gadson's "Sedition"

Marcus Alexander Gadson is Assistant Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina School of Law and the author of articles published in places such as the UCLA Law Review and the Georgetown Law Journal.

Gadson applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Sedition: How America's Constitutional Order Emerged from Violent Crisis, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Sedition says:

…virulent white supremacy political campaign in American history to shatter the movement for interracial political cooperation. Meanwhile, Democrats in Wilmington conspired to overthrow a government they associated with Black political power, which culminated in an armed mob demanding the mayor’s resignation at gunpoint after a day of bloodletting. If both these efforts succeeded, white supremacists could end Black political involvement in the state and eradicate the spirit of 1868 once and for all.

Someone reading this would get an inkling of what my book is about, but miss important context and not truly understand the argument I make. They would know that they will eventually read a chapter explaining that white supremacy motivated some North Carolinians to overthrow Wilmington’s government and that their insurrection was violent. However, they would not know, just from the excerpt, that the book makes a larger claim: that constitutional crises have been common in American history and have shaped American constitutional law and history in dramatic ways. The Wilmington Insurrection of 1898 is part of that larger story I tell.

Sedition provides six examples of constitutional crisis in American history, most of which readers will never have heard of, such as the Buckshot War, Dorr Rebellion, and Brooks-Baxter War. And by “constitutional crisis,” I mean things like terrorist organizations overthrowing duly elected governments and militias loyal to rival candidates shooting each other dead in the street. I then explain how these crises have affected the drafting and interpretation of both state and federal constitutions. At a time when many commentators are arguing about whether we are in a constitutional crisis, I believe this book can give readers vital context as they assess the debates.

Learn more about Sedition at the NYU Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Adam S. Hayes's "Irrational Together"

Adam S. Hayes is professor of sociology at the University of Lucerne. Before entering academia, he worked as an options market maker and equity derivatives sales trader and was licensed as a financial advisor.

Hayes applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Irrational Together: The Social Forces That Invisibly Shape Our Economic Behavior, with the following results:

Page 99 is the hinge where the book moves from storytelling to method. It really distills the broader mission of the book: to show that economic choices are never purely about numbers or cognitive quirks—they’re also greatly influenced by social forces. The passage invites readers to see how experimental techniques can unpick the ways that price, convenience, and status jostle with trust, loyalty, and shared identity in everyday financial decisions. It’s not about dismissing “economic” explanations or romanticizing the social. Instead, the page makes a case for measuring these factors in tandem. Unraveling the way that our dollars interact with our culture, social contexts, socialization processes, and relationships is indeed a miniature of the book’s central framework.

Does the Page 99 Test work?

Absolutely. The entire argument of Irrational Together is that economic life is governed, in part, by social forces—and that we can measure these influences. Page 99 reveals how the book bridges disciplines, bringing sociology’s insights about things like norms, networks, and identity into conversations typically dominated by economic rationality or behavioral biases. It’s not a rejection of what's come before, but an insistence that to truly understand choice, we have to see how these perspectives mesh and rub up against each other. This page signals a book that’s more than just a critique of “rational economic man”; it’s a toolkit for better understanding how our choices get entangled with who we are, who we know, and what matters most to us.

If this page draws you in, the rest of Irrational Together offers an extended invitation to see economic life in high relief. From meme-stock booms to the hidden scripts of gendered money talk, from algorithmic investing to the moral boundaries of peer-to-peer transactions, the book uses familiar stories, original data, and lived experiences to explore how everything from culture and social identities to interpersonal ties and social networks shape even what we think of as our most private economic decisions. What emerges is a vision of economic life that is less about solitary individuals optimizing abstract curves or even hopelessly irrational beings with limited processing power & cognitive biases--and more about real people navigating the social landscape that is the economy. By the end, readers won’t just have a richer view of economic sociology; they’ll see how these insights can inform more reasonable efforts at navigating financial choices and the crafting of more effective policies. If page 99 made you curious about why you sometimes pay more to buy from a friend—or why an app can nudge you toward “rational” investing—you’ll find the rest of the book picks up that thread and runs with it.

Visit Adam S. Hayes's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Neil Gregor's "The Symphony Concert in Nazi Germany"

Neil Gregor is professor of modern European history and director of the Parkes Institute at the University of Southampton. He is the author of Daimler-Benz in the Third Reich, How to Read Hitler, and Haunted City: Nuremberg and the Nazi Past. Most recently he coedited Dreams of Germany: Musical Imaginaries from the Concert Hall to the Dance Floor.

Gregor applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Symphony Concert in Nazi Germany, and shared the following:

Page 99 of my book falls in a section entitled ‘Guidance, Direction, Censorship’, so takes us straight to the heart of what the book is about – namely the question of how the Nazi dictatorship impacted the work of German orchestras in the 1930s and 1940s. As one would only expect, the regime swiftly developed mechanisms to ensure that orchestras adjusted their repertoire to Nazi demands regarding the promotion of ‘healthy’ German music (whatever that was). Conversely, the regime’s antisemitism was such that the performance of ‘Jewish music’ was rigorously policed – composers such as Mahler or Mendelssohn disappeared from concert programmes very quickly. So in this sense the Page 99 Test works remarkably well!

At the same time, the passage nods to the ways in which the work of monitoring orchestral programming was carried out not by ‘the Nazi regime’ in the sense of something suspended over the musicians’ own world, but by figures co-opted from that musical world into the apparatus of control. In other words, it carries something of one of the core arguments of the book, namely that the remaking of German musical life under the dictatorship was a process in which musicians participated actively themselves. Over the course of the last twenty years historians of Nazi Germany have come to understand that the regime was not so much something that sat on top of German society as something that was embedded in it. This encourages us to think of musicians – and others – not merely as passive objects of the regime’s policies, but as agents in the formulation and implementation of those policies, and to recognise that the participatory dimensions of Nazi rule were in operation in the musical sphere too.

Where the test works slightly less well is in capturing the side of the book that is about audiences. As well as exploring how orchestras changed as institutions, the book is concerned with the question of whether new forms of listening to music emerged among the public. I am interested to explore not only how the transformation of ‘Germans’ into ‘Nazis’ over the 1930s and 1940s can be mapped in the concert hall, but also to think about how the concert hall was a site in which that transformation was pursued. In that way, the book moves beyond thinking about the world of policy and regulation into offering a social and cultural history of the phenomenon of concert-going more generally.

Learn more about The Symphony Concert in Nazi Germany at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sarah Gabbott & Jan Zalasiewicz's "Discarded"

Sarah Gabbott is a Professor of Palaeobiology at the University of Leicester. She researches the fossil record of ancient life and is particularly interested in understanding how fossils form and what they reveal about evolution and ecology. She actively seeks new fossil specimens from across the globe, going on digs to China, South Africa and the Canadian Rockies. She also works in the laboratory analyzing fossils and undertaking grisly experiments to determine how decomposition affects fossilization. Recently, she has turned her attention to the potential fossil record created by human activity, especially thinking about how long our 'artefacts' will endure.

Jan Zalasiewicz is Emeritus Professor of Palaeobiology at the University of Leicester. He was formerly a field geologist and palaeontologist with the British Geological Survey, involved in the geological mapping of eastern England and central Wales. His interests include Early Palaeozoic fossils, notably the graptolites (a kind of extinct zooplankton), mud and mudrocks, the Quaternary Ice Ages, the nature of geological time, and the geology made by humans. In recent years he has helped develop the concept of an Anthropocene epoch. He has written many popular science articles and books.

Gabbott and Zalasiewicz applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Discarded: How Technofossils Will be Our Ultimate Legacy, and reported the following:

Page 99 of our book Discarded takes the reader, fair and square, into the kind of world – or rather worlds – that we as palaeontologists must navigate in our daily work. It casually spans three and a half billion years, as the story stretches out from the microbes that colonize our clothes today to the first microbes that began to grow on the seafloors of the early Earth. It crosses, too, from living world to the chemical one, as it considers which minerals might crystallize to turn this kind of interaction into tangible, durable fossils, whether of primordial microbial colonies or of our modern fashion items. And it’s also a page that takes us into the mechanisms that keep our planet habitable, in introducing the diatoms, oceanic microplankton that provide much of the oxygen that we breathe.

It's a fair sample, we think, of the story that we have to tell: of how our science of palaeontology can throw a new kind of light on many aspects both of our lives and of the workings of our planet, as we show how even our most fleeting of human fashions may become immortal, leaving fossil impressions in strata that can endure until the end of the Earth.

This single page, mind, gives only a tantalizing glimpse of the extraordinary novelty and diversity of technofossils: those objects that we create for our profit and pleasure, and that have durability built into them by human design as a very effective first step to future fossilization. You have to turn to other pages of our book to consider the palaeontological puzzles posed by objects that range from concrete- built megacities spanning thousands of square kilometres to the almost unbelievably minuscule patterns etched onto the microchip within your computer and mobile phone; and, to consider how this new kind of palaeontology is affected by such things as global warming, sea level rise, and the balance between war and peace.

It’s the whole narrative of the book that shows our motive for writing it: that the countless objects that we so casually discard won’t simply somehow go away, but will all too often persist as a challenging, polluting legacy for our and future human generations. As technofossils begin their long journey to geological posterity, looking at them through a palaeontologist’s eyes may help with the vexing problems that they pose today.

Learn more about Discarded at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Jan Zalasiewicz's The Earth After Us.

--Marshal Zeringue