Yuri Pines's "China’s Aristocratic Age"

Yuri Pines is the Michael W. Lipson Chair in Chinese Studies at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of The Everlasting Empire: The Political Culture of Ancient China and Its Imperial Legacy, The Book of Lord Shang: Apologetics of State Power in Early China, Zhou History Unearthed: The Bamboo Manuscript Xinian and Early Chinese Historiography, and other books.

Pines applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, China's Aristocratic Age: Politics and Power in the Springs-and-Autumns Period, with the following results:

Page 99 of my China’s Aristocratic Age: Politics and Power in the Springs-and-Autumns Period focuses on ebbs and flows of foreign policy of Chu—a dominant power in the southern part of the Zhou (Chinese) realm—during the final decades of the Springs-and-Autumns period (770–453 BCE). Having overthrown his brother, the ruthlessly expansionist King Ling (r. 540–529 BCE), the new ruler, King Ping (r. 528–516 BCE), opted for retrenchment and eased the pressure on Chu’s dependencies. This mildness backfired, however; several dependencies and allies interpreted it as a sign of weakness and opted to shift allegiance to Chu’s major southeastern rival, the state of Wu. In 506 BCE, Wu delivered a crushing defeat on Chu, even briefly occupying its capital. Once it recovered, Chu abandoned its erstwhile caution and began systematically annexing its former dependencies and allies, marking a new stage in its territorial expansion.

These policy fluctuations reflect a certain feature of Springs-and-Autumns politics: it was an era of constant political experimentation. Is it better to annex weaker neighbors or to maintain a smaller, more manageable polity? How should outlying territories be governed—by delegating power to indigenous elites, to autonomous appointees from the center, or implementing tighter centralized control? How can a rules-based interstate order be preserved amid routine infractions by major powers? How can effective governance be maintained in an age when many rulers ascend the throne as inexperienced youngsters—or even toddlers? How can domestic stability be preserved amid perennial competition among powerful ministerial lineages? What matters more the battlefield: securing victory or preserving one’s honor? Under what circumstances should the ruler consult the capital-dwellers? These questions—none of which had simple answers—continually preoccupied contemporary statesmen. Some offered solutions that were viable for years or even decades, but ultimately, no enduring remedies to these interstate and intrastate problems emerged.

China’s Aristocratic Age analyzes why—despite several temporary successes—the aristocrats of the Springs-and-Autumns period failed to design a viable polycentric political system. This failure doomed the aristocratic polycentric order. Statesmen of subsequent centuries sought stability instead in a unified, centralized, and bureaucratized empire. As I argue in the book’s conclusion, “After three centuries of the Springs-and-Autumns, China became immunized against polycentric rule. This may be the most surprising contribution of the aristocratic age to China’s eventual endorsement of the unified empire as the normative civilizational orientation.”

Visit Yuri Pines's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Everlasting Empire.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elliott Logan's "Over and Over"

Elliott Logan is a lecturer in film and screen studies at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of Breaking Bad and Dignity.

Logan applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Over and Over: Performance, Time, and Resonance in Serial Television Drama, and shared the following:

On the one hand, page 99 of Over and Over is (I hope) not characteristic of what one would find and perhaps be most rewarded by across the book's length. Early in writing the book, I set myself a rule: no claims or lines of argument, no questions that propelled my inquiry forward, could be set out unless they emerged from a specific moment of television drama. So it's perhaps unusual that page 99 features nothing in the way of close reading to which so much of the book is devoted! Instead, fully two-thirds of the page is a rather abstract discursus on the affinity between the conditions of human friendship and the seriality of television drama. This is, happily, a core theme of the book's focus on television performance, and it is characteristic of the book that in this passage I am devoted to turning over the darker, less frequently considered face of this relationship between long-form television drama and long-term human relationships. Building on the work of the philosopher Alexander Nehamas, I note that while two good friends may each help the other to become who they are, "There is a dark side [...] to this promise of creation," one that also echoes the conditions of seriality. "[O]nce we feel there is nothing more in ourselves and in our friend to discover, 'once our interaction promises nothing new, freezes what has already happened ... our friendship is effectively over'. How do two people sustain their bonds and keep their promises if one or the other (or both) can no longer be seen as the person they were, or as able to be the person they wish to become?"

This is the core problem of interpersonal life that I identify at the heart of the moments I discuss in the book, one that serial drama is exquisitely poised to express and explore through its tensions between accrual and transience, the building of history between people and its gradual erosion or fading or deformation and development (for better or for worse) over time. If there is anything to which the book brings new attention, it is the positive valence of the provisional and transient as qualities that might limit the extent to which our lives and relationships become exhausted, trapped in sediment, "[frozen by] what has already happened".

Learn more about Over and Over at the Rutgers University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sunneva Gilmore's "Redressing Rape in War"

Sunneva Gilmore is a medical doctor specialising in sexual and reproductive healthcare in Northern Ireland. A member of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists since 2018, she has forensic medicine experience and completed a PhD in law at Queen's University Belfast on reparations for conflict-related sexual violence. She has extensive expertise in reparations policy at national and international levels and serves as a Medical Member of the Victims' Payments Board for Northern Ireland. In 2020, she was appointed an expert on reparations at the International Criminal Court, focusing on rape, sexual slavery, and attacks on healthcare.

Gilmore applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Redressing Rape in War: A Medico-Legal Approach to Sexual Violence, and reported the following:

Page 99 immerses readers in one of the less recognised consequences of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV): the long-term harms that challenge conventional understandings of injury and, in turn, what meaningful redress should look like. At the heart of the book are the lived experiences of victims and survivors, alongside the perspectives of practitioners working in the field. Fittingly, this page draws on powerful firsthand accounts that may be uncomfortable to read, but are essential to understanding the cascading and interconnected consequences of CRSV.

As the book adopts a medico-legal approach, page 99 captures a central tension that runs throughout the text: the gap between existing legal conceptions of redress and the complex realities of lived harm. It highlights overlooked physical, psychosexual and stigmatising consequences of CRSV, the uneven development of care and treatment, and the ways in which gendered investment in health shapes available forms of redress. The discussion also considers reproductive implications, male victims and survivors of sexual violence, and the compounding effects of disability, illustrating how biological, psychological, social and legal factors intersect. Although the term itself does not appear on this page, it exemplifies the book's argument for a biopsychosocial-legal approach to understanding and responding to CRSV.

While page 99 offers a strong introduction to many of the book's central themes, it cannot fully represent its scope. A browser would gain a good sense of how victims and survivors navigate recovery for themselves and their families, and how sexual violence can profoundly disrupt identity, relationships, social roles and life goals. However, the book applies its medico-legal framework across the entire continuum of redress. It examines the evolution of reparations, critiques current approaches, and proposes a broader framework that brings together formal reparations, healthcare, self-repair and informal forms of redress. Ultimately, it argues that transformative redress requires an interdisciplinary understanding of both vulnerability and resilience, greater emphasis on rehabilitation and new ways of measuring what successful redress truly means.

Learn more about Redressing Rape in War at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Margaret K. Nelson's "Peddlers, Merchants, and Junk Dealers"

Margaret K. Nelson is A. Barton Hepburn Professor of Sociology Emerita, Middlebury College. Her books include, among others, Sociology Meets Memoir (2024), Farm and Wilderness Summer Camps: Progressive Ideals in the 20th Century, with Emily K. Abel (2023), Keeping Family Secrets: Shame and Silence in Memoirs from the 1950s (2022), and Parenting Out of Control: Anxious Parents in Uncertain Times (2012).

Nelson applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Peddlers, Merchants, and Junk Dealers: Jewish Life in Small-Town Vermont, with the following results:

The very top of page 99 ties up an account of why Abraham Cohen remained in Vergennes, Vermont when his wife moved to the nearby city of Burlington. The middle section, about Minne and Aaron Cohen is more complete:

Minnie Shuchman Cohen and seven children … arrived in New York City in 1913 and traveled directly to Burlington, where Aaron had bought them a house at 265 North Winooski Avenue (a five-minute walk from the house Abraham subsequently bought for his family). … Aaron settled his family in Burlington while he continued to live and work in Vergennes for four more years.

The bottom paragraph begins to tell the story of yet another couple, Rose and Alec Jacob Abramoff who remained married but lived separately.

Is page 99 representative of this book? Well, yes and no. On the “yes” side, the page offers detailed information including the names of both men and women, the years in which these people immigrated to the United States, the places they lived, the occupations of the men, and the domestic arrangements within their families. The level of thoroughness – drawn from newspapers, public records, and interviews with descendants – is characteristic of the book as a whole. But on the “no” side, the page gives no indication that the people were Jewish and that the place Aaron lived was a very small town. Indeed, this page focuses on the women who left their husbands (and the reasons for their leaving) while even as they continued to be married, rather than revealing anything about the generations of Jewish people who stayed and built their lives in the small towns of New England.

By the time the name of Abraham Cohen appears on page 99, the reader will know him well as a Jewish immigrant who was a junk dealer for over forty years. The reader will also know Abraham Cohen’s brother-in-law, Max Fishman, another Jewish immigrant who, by way of contrast, spent his life first as an itinerant peddler and then as the owner of a successful dry goods store that remained in business for almost 100 years. Both men lived, and worked in the same small town of Vergennes, Vermont. In subsequent chapters their relatives – including their wives, children, and grandchildren – will also come alive through my discussion of how Jewish people were integrated into places in which they constituted but a tiny minority. The conclusion compares the trajectories of Jews who settled in small-town Vermont at the dawn on the twentieth century with those who arrived three-quarters of a century later.

Learn more about Peddlers, Merchants, and Junk Dealers at the NYU Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Parenting Out of Control.

The Page 99 Test: Like Family.

The Page 99 Test: Keeping Family Secrets.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew B. Kennedy's "Rebellious Follower"

Andrew B. Kennedy is Associate Professor at the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University, an M.A. in Law and Diplomacy from Tufts University, and B.S. in Psychology from Duke University. Prior to his academic career, he worked as a consultant, journalist, and teacher in Beijing, Hong Kong, and Washington, D.C.

Kennedy applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Rebellious Follower: China's Search for Science, Technology, and Innovation, and shared the following:

Page 99 may be found in the middle of Chapter 5, “The Balancing Act.” The chapter explores how China’s reformist leaders started experimenting with a more balanced approach to science and technology in the 1980s, chipping away at state planning and allowing more room societal initiative. Page 99 notes how challenging and problematic these changes were. “While the creation of a foundation system created new opportunities for scientists,” it notes, “the liberalization of prices and salary disparities made careers in basic science unappealing.” While small startup firms emerged, “the private sector was still nascent and remained vulnerable to discrimination.” The program to create China’s own technology clusters along the lines of Silicon Valley “suffered from considerable ‘mission drift’ over time.” The passage concludes by putting these challenges in perspective: “expanding society-led S&T in a Leninist political system accustomed to central planning was bound to be fraught.” More encouragingly, it adds that it was “striking how much change China’s leaders introduced in a relatively short period of time.”

Overall, the Page 99 Test works rather well for Rebellious Follower. Readers opening the book to this page would quickly understand that the book is a deep dive into how China’s policies toward science, technology, and innovation have evolved over time. In fact, page 99 highlights a number of key changes at an important moment. Readers would also perceive that the book is concerned both with China’s changing approach and with the challenges and contradictions these changes have wrought.

One page can only say so much, of course, and readers would need to start with Chapter 1 to appreciate the full scope of the book and its argument. The story really starts in the 19th century, when imperialist incursions brought the concept of science to China in the first place. Debates over how to respond have animated Chinese policymaking ever since. In the 1950s, China embraced state-led science planning, inspired by the Soviet Union, but Chairman Mao Zedong soon tired of this approach. In the 1960s, therefore, Mao’s Cultural Revolution touted “mass science” as the path to salvation – a remarkable challenge to more traditional elitist conceptions of what science was. Following Mao’s death, a more elitist approach returned, but departures from state-led planning soon followed. In the 1990s, China began to embrace not only science and technology, but also innovation, and the country’s “innovation system” became a new focal point for policymaking. In the 21st century, China’s leaders have developed an “innovation system with Chinese characteristics,” one in which a resurgent party-state plays a critical guiding role.

Throughout this winding history, Chinese leaders have shown a deep and abiding interest in foreign ideas about how science, technology, and innovation work. Yet they have also repeatedly challenged these ideas, either resisting them or adapting them as they have sought to reconcile imported belief systems with local ideologies. Simply put, China’s leaders have followed foreign ideas closely, but they have been remarkably rebellious followers.

Learn more about Rebellious Follower at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Terra Ziporyn and Amy R. Wolfson's "Educating the Exhausted"

Terra Ziporyn is the Executive Director and cofounder of Start School Later and author of numerous books on health and medicine, including The Harvard Guide to Women’s Health. Amy R. Wolfson is a professor of psychology at Loyola University Maryland and a leading scholar of adolescent sleep health.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Educating the Exhausted: Adolescent Sleep and the Struggle for a Later School Start, and reported the following:

Page 99 of our book, Educating the Exhausted: Adolescent Sleep and the Struggle for a Later Start, gives a compelling example of the challenges sleep researchers, like one of the authors, Amy R. Wolfson, ran into when they tried to convince school districts (translate adolescent sleep research into policy to benefit teens), in this case Worcester, MA (where the author was from at the time), and Seekonk, MA to set developmentally appropriate middle and high school start times. We note on page 99,

From the 1990s through 2019 they worked tirelessly to delay Worcester’s school start times. The school committee was still actively discussing potential plans as recently as 2021. Neighboring Shrewsbury at last voted to delay school start times for the 2023-24 school year…as have several other school districts…. Nonetheless, Worcester’s high schools still start at 7:20am.

As you will come to appreciate in our book, as captured on page 99, we learned early on that this was going to be an uphill battle – translating clear science on adolescent sleep and circadian health into meaningful school start times for youth. While the school district stories discussed in chapter 5, “Early Efforts to Delay School Start Times,” took place towards the 1990s and the early years of the 21st C, our book will draw you into understanding why research evidence on its own does not ensure that all school districts set school start times that allow for sufficient and regular sleep needed for optimal health and mental health. Our book both reviews the science of adolescent sleep health, historic disconnect between school start times and sleep research, early and ongoing efforts to set guardrails for age-appropriate school start times, perceived and actual hurdles, significance of the founding of the non-profit, Start School Later, and ultimately what it will take to sunset the start school later movement? Hence, Educating the Exhausted, not only captures the consequences of exhaustion for our teens and our society, but also how we have contributed to that exhaustion in decisions we’ve made about our schools and how we can address that exhaustion and its consequences by ensuring that strong science informs healthy public policy. Readers will come to understand exactly why our colleagues, friends, students, and communities have been tirelessly working to “educate the exhausted” for over three decades.

Visit Terra Ziporyn's website and Amy R. Wolfson's faculty webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tad Tuleja's "Skirmishes with Patriotism"

Tad Tuleja is a folklorist, songwriter, and former college writing instructor. The author of thirty books and numerous scholarly papers on American folk and popular traditions, he is also the editor of Different Drummers: Military Culture and Its Discontents and, with Eric A. Eliason, of Warrior Ways: Explorations in Modern Military Folklore.

Tuleja applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Skirmishes with Patriotism: Looking for America in the Long Shadow of Vietnam, with the following results:

Sixty years ago, at 24, I declined my government’s invitation to fight in Vietnam. I did so for what I believed were moral reasons, yet saying “the right No” to the war was a decision that had me asking myself for decades not only “Did I do the right thing?” but also “What if I had gone there?” Skirmishes with Patriotism began as an attempt to answer those questions. But the tale grew in the telling, and the book became a meditation that tries to work out more generally how manhood and nationalism come together around the noble infatuation we call patriotism. Ultimately it grapples with the question “What does it mean to say you love your country?”

The story begins in the Eisenhower 1950s, when I was a Boy Scout and the son of a U.S. naval officer. The book’s first half tracks my journey from that trusting childhood to the late 1960s when, having escaped the war, I spent some time in Paris and London. When I came home in 1971, I wrote an essay for Chicago Review entitled “Notes on a Homecoming.” On page 99 of Skirmishes, I reflect on that essay. It’s an appropriate glance at the book, for it shows an old man critiquing the certainties of his youth—the same critique that drives the book overall. Here’s the text of page 99:

On the facing page of my [Homecoming] essay, a French news photo shows an old Vietnamese woman aiming a rifle while a young woman corrects her technique. Are these the freedom-loving peasants we are there to protect, or a pair of VC irregulars with GIs in their sights? There is no way to tell from the picture, and that tells us something dreadful about the war: It erased the line between our friends and our enemies.

Yet this fact seems barely visible to the young radical-in-exile. He is talking of the war as a political evil, not as a place where people point rifles at each other. He is aware, fleetingly, that there are people involved. Not the Vietnamese: They are never mentioned in this diatribe on the war. But there are Americans there, in those “rows of dead soldiers.” In the first pages of the piece, as he sits in the sun playing Hemingway, he is aware of these men. “Comfortable in my cafes, wined, dined, and anodyned,” he imagines the faces of “young men like me who, unlike me, will not return.” It’s a small but telling moment of awareness. Even while riding the winds of smug outrage, he is able to recall, for a second, the break he’s been given.

I am speaking of this young man now as if he is alive, and as if, even stranger, he is not me. That is a way of creating a salutary distance, of owning and yet not owning these decades- old words. Yet it was some version of “I” who set them down. And they spoke some truth to the reality I saw then, to the power and the abuse of power that embroiled my world. I wish I could say I was more concerned with our soldiers than is suggested by the hint of “young men like me.” But that was a mission failed which has taken me most of my life to come back around to. It is part of why my “right No” is still a weight to be borne.

Saigon fell on the last day of April 1975. Within hours, American TV screens aired film of the victors’ tanks rumbling through the streets of the capital—soon to be renamed Ho Chi Minh City—and of civilians scrambling for space on the Air America helicopters that were spiriting people away from an anticipated bloodbath. The war that had torn us apart was over. We watched its final twitches in sick satisfaction.

In the second half of Skirmishes, I track my engagement with Vietnam and with patriotism from that grim April day to the present. In trying to understand what the war I hated felt like to the young Americans who fought it, I drew on the memoirs of fine writers like Philip Caputo, Tobias Wolff, Tim O’Brien, and Karl Marlantes. And I came to see that it was not impossible to reconcile a hatred of war with respect for soldiers. Respect especially for the sacrifices that they make “for God and country.”

The final chapters of Skirmishes move beyond the battlefield to the home front, where as I said in a song written decades after the war, “Elders write the contracts while children close the deal.” Writing this memoir eased the burden I’d carried for decades while convincing me that George Orwell had it right when he said the worst of war propaganda, “all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.” Something to remember the next time somebody with a flag pin and no uniform tells you our latest “patriotic” adventure is worth service members’ lives.

Visit Tad Tuleja's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ankita Pandey's "Becoming Allies"

Ankita Pandey is Associate Professor, Jindal School of International Affairs, O.P. Jindal Global University, India, and Research Associate at St Antony's College, the University of Oxford.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Becoming Allies: Civil Liberties Activism in India, and shared the following:

Page 99 of Becoming Allies opens onto one of the book's central concerns: the quiet, painstaking work of fact-finding by civil liberties activists. The practice is about independent investigations into police violence and abuse of power by state officials. But more broadly this practice is part of the larger ongoing contestation over who gets to tell the story of injustice? This page is in a chapter that explores activist fact-finding as a political act.

The page notes that the work of civil liberties teams was to uncover facts, and to unsettle official truths. Their reports showed how ordinary legal procedures could become instruments of injustice. Words such as "and others", in a police complaint could leave several unnamed people vulnerable to future arrest. Fact finding revealed that official records failed to match eyewitness accounts. Procedures were ignored, rewritten, or invented after the event. The fact-finding reports by civil liberties activists asked: why were people arrested who had never been at the scene? Why was live ammunition used before less violent measures were exhausted? The struggle, the page suggests, was over who possessed the authority to say what had happened.

Would a reader who stumbled upon page 99 grasp the essence of the book?

In many ways, yes. They would encounter one of its recurring themes: democracy depends on those who patiently investigate, document, and amplify the voices of others. Fact-finding is one of the principal ways the allies in this book practised politics. Yet page 99 might make a casual reader assume the book is about human rights investigations alone. It is not. It is about the practices of people who undertake such work, and the distinctive political role they play. Becoming Allies asks: why do some people raise awareness around injustices that they do not have a direct stake in? It follows the practices of lawyers, judges, journalists, academics and other concerned citizens who defended political prisoners, documented communal violence, supported labourers, and stood beside marginalised communities.

Seeing these people as allies shifts our attention from a bi-polar conflict between movements and the state to the relationships that connect them. The book develops the ideas of ally activism and the politics of amplification to show how local struggles become public causes, and how voices travel beyond the places where they first emerged.

If page 99 offers a glimpse of one practice, the book asks readers to notice the invisible labour of those who gather the testimonies, preserve the evidence, carry stories across institutions and refuse to let injustice disappear into silence.

Learn more about Becoming Allies at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Barbara Ganson's "Lady Daredevils"

Barbara Ganson is a professor of history at Florida Atlantic University. She is a guest curator at the Glenn L. Martin Maryland Aviation Museum and a private pilot. Her books include Texas Takes Wing: A Century of Flight in the Lone Star State.

Ganson applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Lady Daredevils: American Women and Early Aviation, and reported the following:

On the half page numbered 99, there is an illustration of altitude record setter Ruth Blaney Alexander in San Diego, in 1929. She is smiling while sitting in the cockpit of her airplane with a stuffed animal dog mascot and a bouquet of beautiful flowers. Below the image, I quote her endearing letter she wrote to her third husband, which sheds light on her emotional state before her departure to return home to Kansas. She left behind her wedding ring and might have been considering leaving him. Another letter she left for her parents to be opened only in case of death, asking them "not to wish her back," because she has gone on to a happier life and will wait for them there. She then mentions that the "way of life is hilly" and right then she was at the bottom of one of the hills and the next one looked tough to her. Ruth Blaney Alexander mentions "she had the promise of a ship, gas, and an engine but no money to back her flights," but somehow, “she would manage.”

The letters she left behind for her loved ones allow the reader to understand how aviators dealt with the realty of flying at a time when things could and often went terribly wrong during the early years of flight.

Overall, page 99 well represents the book which aims to describe and analyze the experiences of lesser-known (and well known) women aviators. It illustrates well the depth of my research, as these are rare letters.

Learn more about Lady Daredevils at the University of Illinois Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ann Blair's "In the Scholar’s Workshop"

Ann Blair is the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor in the Department of History at Harvard University. Her books include Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age and (with Paul Duguid, Anja-Silvia Goeing, and Anthony Grafton) Information: A Short History.

Blair applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, In the Scholar’s Workshop: Hidden Histories of Collaboration and Authorship, with the following results:

Page 99 plunges us into chapter 2 (“Invisible and visible”) and a central theme of the book: the general invisibility but occasional visibility of the “little people” on whose help authors and scholars often relied in composing texts and preparing them for publication. I focus here on examples from Renaissance Europe 1500-1650, but I expect that these patterns apply to other contexts too.

In the Renaissance the conventions of authorship in print and in iconography emphasized the author as a single name on a title page and a solitary figure working with his papers and books. Learned books often included a number of paratexts (e.g. preface, dedicatory epistle, table of contents, index) but there was no equivalent to the acknowledgments section that we expect today. In fact authors and scholars typically relied on the help of young men they hired or on live-in students or even family members to help them by taking dictation, reading, finding references, making copies of texts, among other tasks. But these amanuenses (singular: amanuensis, for “hand-servant”) remain hidden from view in the final printed product that they helped to create. The main exception to this pattern of invisibility occurred when authors sought to pin the blame on their helpers for errors or shortcomings that the reader might encounter. The author did not name the helpers, but acknowledged their existence by asking the reader to “please excuse the errors of my amanuenses.” A more elaborate version invoked a thieving servant who would seek to publish the stolen text, thus forcing the author to rush into print with his text in order to forestall a dishonest and inaccurate edition by the servant. I argue that these two tropes were an innovation of the age of print, which I call the “servant function.” Why did they originate in Renaissance Europe?

As I explain on page 99, printing was a source of anxiety for the author:

The attraction of getting one’s work into print was precisely to spread one’s reputation far across space and time, but the risk of an unfavorable reception was also heightened by the prospect of broad distribution beyond the author’s control. The context of confessional conflict in the sixteenth century further raised the stakes of a negative reception, since there were constant tensions and shifting distributions of power not only among the main rival confessions but also within each of them as factions within the Catholic and the several Protestant churches vied for power. Authors who miscalculated the impact of their book could face devastating consequences, hence the virtues of the servant function to relieve the author of some of this anxiety and responsibility.

This early modern move is the opposite of today’s acknowledgments in which authors thank those who helped by name and take responsibility for any errors as their own.

The book investigates the relationships between amanuensis and principal in other historical contexts (ch. 1) along other thematics axes too—mechanical vs intellectual work (ch. 3), attribution of authorship (ch. 4), and the management of posthumous papers (ch. 5).

Learn more about In the Scholar’s Workshop at the Princeton University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Too Much to Know.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sergey Gavrilets's "Social Influence and the Logic of Collective Action"

Sergey Gavrilets is Distinguished Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Mathematics at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. He is the author of Fitness Landscapes and the Origin of Species.

Gavrilets applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Social Influence and the Logic of Collective Action, and shared the following:

Page 99 falls in the chapter “Dynamics of Social Influence.” It begins with a figure showing adoption curves in the classic Bass model of innovation diffusion, which combines influence from external authorities with influence from peers. The page emphasizes that “even a relatively weak effect of external influence ... can significantly speed up the spread of the innovation.” It then notes how the model can incorporate individual differences and network interactions before turning to the classic Daley-Kendall model of rumor spread, which adapts ideas from epidemic models.

The Page 99 Test works reasonably well for my book, although it works better as a sample of the book’s approach than as a summary of its full argument. The page captures one of its central concerns: how individual behavior spreads through a population under the combined influence of authorities and peers. It also illustrates the book’s typical strategy: begin with a simple formal model, explain its intuition, visualize its consequences, and then connect it to related models and possible extensions.

At the same time, a browser reading only this page might conclude that the book is mainly about the diffusion of innovations and rumors. Its larger subject is collective action: why groups sometimes solve shared problems and sometimes fail, even when cooperation would benefit everyone. The book asks who contributes and who free-rides, why people punish violators or follow leaders, how norms emerge and change, and when small behavioral shifts can produce large social transformations.

My central argument is that no single mechanism can adequately explain collective action. Material incentives matter, but so do personal attitudes and moral values, beliefs about what others will do, social norms, peer influence, cultural authorities, cognition, learning, and individual differences. The book brings insights from game theory, behavioral economics, evolutionary theory, psychology, and cultural evolution into a common framework. This framework shows how actions, attitudes, and beliefs can coevolve and reinforce one another, sustaining cooperation but also trapping groups in persistent collective failure. It also helps identify tipping points, explain why apparently ineffective institutions endure, and clarify when interventions by leaders, authorities, or committed minorities can redirect a group’s trajectory.

Page 99 therefore reveals an important engine of the book - social influence operating through nonlinear population dynamics - but not the full machine. It gives a good taste of how the book thinks, but only a partial map of what it explains.

Visit Sergey Gavrilets's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Greg Garrett's "White Lies"

Greg Garrett is the Carole McDaniel Hanks Professor of Literature and Culture at Baylor University and Canon Theologian for the American Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Paris, France. He has published over thirty books, including The Gospel According to James Baldwin: What America's Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity (2023) and A Long, Long Way: Hollywood's Unfinished Journey from Racism to Reconciliation (2020).

Garrett applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, White Lies: Dismantling Ten Cultural Myths About Race, and reported the following:

Page 99 of White Lies is a virtual cornucopia of themes and ideas about the power of racial myths to create a caste system and to diminish those who are not white Christian males. On that page, I wrestle with the Supreme Court’s 2023 Students for Fair Admission decision striking down race-based admissions to institutions of higher ed, and with the hypocritical suggestion from Supreme Court justices including Clarence Thomas that racial discrimination is a thing of the past.

In the process, I dig into the truth that since we are a multi-cultural multi-racial nation we will have to reckon with these differences. I use James Baldwin’s seminal essay “The Stranger in the Village” as a way to address how America must confront race and difference, since the Black American is “not a visitor to the West, but a citizen there, an American; as American as the Americans who despise him.”

The page—which is also the concluding page in a chapter about the myth of white Americans celebrating that at least they aren’t Black—ends with how white americans have created myths to keep Black people in their place, to enforce white supremacy, including the simple idea that race can differentiate between two people in identical economic situations by race. “Systems that were created to make people miserable make people miserable,” I write, “and thus has the racial caste system functioned in America.”

Page 99 of my White Lies is a remarkable confirmation of the book’s larger thesis that racial myths shape the way we think, live, and believe. This page 99 offers an incredibly dense summation of the creation of a racial caste system in America and cites Isabel Wilkerson, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, James Baldwin, and theologian Maria Power, and presents a call to action on the myth that we can and should use race to set up who in America matters and who does not.

The largest section of page 99 is a discussion of James Baldwin’s seminal essay “The Stranger in the Village,” which appeared in his first book, Notes of a Native Son. I have argued in a previous book on Baldwin (The Gospel according to James Baldwin) that his experience visiting a Swiss alpine village that had never seen a Black man helped him formulate many of his most important understandings about race. The villagers saw him as exotic. The children wanted to touch his nappy hair. But as he notes, white men in the West (Baldwin divided his time between France and the United States) do not have the luxury of looking upon him as a stranger.

Baldwin—and the villagers of Leukerbad—knew that eventually he would go back down the mountain, and they did not have to deal with him. But for those in the Western democracies, for those in his native United States, the question of the Black person could not be ignored. Either white people would have to acknowledge the shared humanity of the Black person, or everything might fall apart.

I’m particularly happy with my closing paragraph, which is not only the last paragraph on page 99, but the last paragraph of my chapter “At Least We’re Not Black.” It notes how our history has leaned into this harmful myth (often at the detriment of poor whites, who might have more in common with Black Americans than with wealthy whites), and makes an explicit connection to white Christian nationalism, which I write about at length in the book, which has taken and is daily leaning into the idea of a racist caste system that enthrones them to the detriment of everyone else.

Well done, Page 99 Challenge. With White Lies, you absolutely nailed it!

Follow Greg Garrett on Facebook and Substack.

The Page 99 Test: Entertaining Judgment.

Writers Read: Greg Garrett (June 2017).

The Page 99 Test: Living with the Living Dead.

--Marshal Zeringue

Marina Cano's "Theatrical Afterlives"

Marina Cano is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Valencia. She has taught at universities in Scotland, Ireland and Norway. She is the author of Jane Austen and Performance (2017), and the co-editor of Jane Austen and William Shakespeare: A Love Affair in Literature, Film and Performance (2019). More recently, she has co-edited the collection Women, "Failure" and Academia: Activism, Creativity and Critique in the Contemporary University (2026).

Cano applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Theatrical Afterlives: Nineteenth-Century Women's Novels on the Stage, with the following results:

I open my book, Theatrical Afterlives, in search of that potentially defining page, page 99. I am thrilled to discover that it falls on one of my favourite chapters: Chapter 3, “Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford in Suffrage Times.” How exciting!

This chapter explores dramatic productions of Gaskell’s best-known, best-loved novel by groups of suffragettes, and argues that such dramatic offspring sheds light on the novel itself, by making readers aware of its potentially pro-suffrage verve. This links back to the argument of the book as a whole: that the theatrical afterlives of nineteenth- century women’s novels are a prism through which we can look back at the novels, and that, when we do so, we discover different shapes and colours—like with a kaleidoscope.

But, first of all, what exactly is going on here? Page 99 contains part of my discussion of how Miss Pole, one of the formidable spinsters that inhabit the town of Cranford, can be read as a suffragette foremother. The section starts on page 98, so by page 99 we are still at the beginning of the discussion. On page 98, I have been laying out how suffrage actresses, members of the suffrage group Actresses’ Franchise League (AFL), played the character of Miss Pole with heightened aggressivity at the International Suffrage Fair of 1912. By page 99, I turn from the stage to the page to seek what basis there is for such rendition in Gaskell’s novel.

I explore, for example, one of Miss Pole’s speeches in Chapter 10 of the novel, where she claims to know the male sex really well. She knows that men wish “to be considered Samson and Solomon rolled into one.” After all, “My father was a man, and I know the sex pretty well.” On this, I claim that “Gaskell’s Miss Pole appears here as an activist and feminist protester, criticising that sacrosanct system of Victorian authority: patriarchy, and especially parental rule.” Her speech, in fact, is motivated by an encounter with the local doctor, Mr Hoggins, who, Miss Pole claims, has been mugged by a group of robbers, an incident he repeatedly denies (rightly, as it turns out).

So, to go back to the Page 99 Test, is this page representative of the book as a whole? v To my surprise, the answer is yes. The page starts with the sentence “The use of the qualifying adverb ‘even’ points to the connections between Cranford the novel, Cranford the dramatizations and the suffrage movement.” Here I am close reading a review of the AFL’s performance of Cranford. I then turn to the novel to unpick some of these connections between the stage and the page (through the Mr Hoggins discussion and Miss Pole’s aggressivity).

Interestingly, the end of the page takes us back to the stage, to the Cranford productions by the AFL and the WFL (Women’s Freedom League). Page 99 concludes by further exploring the connections between Miss Pole, Gaskell’s character, and the WFL, one of the radical groups of suffrage fighters. To reinforce the connection, I quote the WFL’s call to arms, and make the point that it retrospectively resonates with Miss Pole’s own aggressive harangue in the novel: “To arms, Freedom Leaguers! The thought of our tortured prisoners of war should…” This is where page 99 ends, in the midst of the WFL’s rallying cry.

Now this dance—from the stage to the page and back to the stage and its historical context—is representative of the book as a whole and of the key strands that the book weaves together. It is also representative of its key ideas: these theatrical productions tell us something about the reception history of nineteenth-century novels by British women writers (in this case, that Gaskell and her novel had an eventful afterlife among suffrage fighters and players).

But the plays also uncover something about the novels that has largely gone unnoticed, some socially progressive undercurrent: the pro suffrage sympathies of Cranford in this case, a novel that Gaskell wrote in the 1840s, when the movement for the female vote was budding in England. (Gaskell herself corresponded with some suffragettes and supported their journalistic endeavours). After all, in Gaskell’s Cranford, women are enfranchised already: they are the sole homeowners in town and make all local decisions. They are the “Amazons” that the narrator, half-jokingly, describes them as, at the start of the novel.

Other chapters in Theatrical Afterlives engage in a similar choreography, this time through prison theatricals (in connection to Jane Austen), the Irish stage and colonial histories (in connection to the Brontës), late twentieth-century British experimental theatre (George Eliot), and the woman question and the New Woman of the mid to late nineteenth century (Ellen Wood, Mary Elizabeth Braddon). So, there is much more to discover!

Learn more about Theatrical Afterlives at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sophie Gee's "The Barbarous Feast"

Sophie Gee is professor of English at Princeton University and the Vice Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Sydney. She is the author of Making Waste: Leftovers and the Literary Imagination and The Scandal of the Season, a historical novel recreating Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock. She cohosts the popular literary podcast The Secret Life of Books.

Gee applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Barbarous Feast: Eating and Writing in the Eighteenth-Century World, and shared the following:

Page 99 of The Barbarous Feast gives a pretty good glimpse of what the book is about. I’m saying that in his 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe (usually regarded as the first novel in English), Daniel Defoe uses the image of the cannibal feast Crusoe encounters on his “deserted” island as a surrogate for the ravenous colonial appetites of Britain and Spain, which have turned the entire Caribbean into a contested zone of greed, rapaciousness and bitter conflicts.

I write:

Defoe’s writing in Crusoe and elsewhere figures the region as a site of omnipresent and mutually ravenous hunger among colonial occupiers and “savages” alike. Defoe’s cannibal realist mode in Crusoe, his insistence on cannibal hunger as a defining feature of the area, places the emerging form of the novel firmly within a preexisting tradition of European writing that figures the Caribbean as both devouring and needing to be devoured.

As the chapter continues, I argue that cannibalism has another significance in Defoe’s novel. Real cannibalism, as opposed to the kind burlesqued in European writings from the period, belonged to complex predation rituals for constructing subjectivity in the Arawak diaspora. Such predation rituals (which might once have been practices on the Leeward Islands where Crusoe is set) used ritual eating to construct kinship relationships between enemies and convert strangers into tamed friends. Crusoe, and by extension Defoe, fear cannibals because they fear their non-European models of interiority and selfhood, which defy being folded into European ways of imagining human inwardness and relationship.

The title of my book comes from the cannibalism scenes in Robinson Crusoe. I use the idea of a “barbarous feast” to refer to any eating ritual or practice that sees subjectivity and inwardness in terms that resist, defy or do not comply with mainstream, authoritarian conceptions of how selfhood and inwardness should be.

What won’t be obvious from page 99 is that I am offering a new history of the novel, in which eating rituals and imaginative fictions become entangled and interdependent during the eighteenth century, because of intensified British imperialism. It also won’t be apparent that The Barbarous Feast is unusual because it includes a series of creative non-fiction essays interspersed with chapters of scholarly writing. I wrote these when I was finishing the book, on a sabbatical in Sydney, Australia. On returning to the place in which I had grown up but left in my early 20s, I saw it afresh as a colonial landscape that had been remade by British settler colonizers, informed by the same ideas of interiority and subjectivity that I was describing in my scholarship.

Learn more about The Barbarous Feast at the Princeton University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Sophie Gee's The Scandal of the Season.

Writers Read: Sophie Gee (June 2009).

--Marshal Zeringue

Thomas Leonard-Roy's "Writerly Hate in Eighteenth-Century Britain"

Thomas Leonard-Roy studied literature at the University of Toronto (BA, MA) and Harvard University (PhD). He is Assistant Professor of English Literature at John Cabot University in Rome, Italy.

Leonard-Roy applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Writerly Hate in Eighteenth-Century Britain, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Writerly Hate begins with a full sentence that neatly sums up what follows: “Boswell’s expressions of self-hate were especially potent and direct after encounters with prostitutes, often while drunk.” The browser then finds several examples of those encounters – in an alcove on Westminster Bridge, in Amsterdam, in Edinburgh near the house of David Hume, in a Charing Cross brothel – and those self-hating expressions, the standard form being “I despised myself.” Further examples show how Boswell’s self-hate about such encounters was regularly expressed in the language of the Bible.

It so happens that page 99 comes in the middle of what I consider the odd chapter of the book – odd because it is the only chapter about self-hate in a book that is otherwise about more social forms of hating. The hate I discuss here is tormented, muttered, whereas the styles of hate I showcase in the rest of the book tend to be more lively and good-humoured. This is also the only chapter of the book about the religious contexts of hate. Page 99 might therefore leave the browser with a poor idea of the whole work.

But I wouldn’t say the page has completely failed the test, for a couple reasons. First, Writerly Hate is about the stylistic diversity of hate, a feeling that we now tend to think of in very rigid ways. If a piece of writing is deemed hateful, you would probably assume it was inflammatory, even seeking to incite violence against a group of people. One would probably not assume it was quiet-spoken, laconic, and confessional, as Boswell’s self-hate is. So – am I cheating the test? – the page is representative of the whole book in the way that it closely describes a distinct style of hate that challenges some of our modern assumptions about this feeling. The other reason is that page 99 is generous with quotations (exactly one third of the total words on the page). This is something I’ve tried to do across the book: let eighteenth-century men and women speak for themselves, as much as possible, without drowning out my own voice as scholar and critic.

Visit Thomas Leonard-Roy's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Bond's "Animate"

Michael Bond, the author of the acclaimed Wayfinding: The Art and Science of How We Find and Lose Our Way, is a writer specializing in human behaviour and a former editor and reporter at New Scientist. He won the 2015 British Psychological Society Prize for The Power of Others. Until recently, he taught writing as a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Oxford Brookes University.

Bond applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Animate: How Animals Shape the Human Mind, with the following results:

If a reader parachuted onto page 99 of Animate they'd find themselves in a discussion of the fantastical animals in C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia – the centaurs, satyrs, fauns, marsh-wiggles, unicorns and dragons that have captivated children for generations – beneath an illustration of strange humanesque figures. Since the book is not specifically about children, fictionalised animals or C. S. Lewis, this is not the ideal place to land. It would take a leap of deduction to figure out that Animate is an exploration of human-animal relationships and how they have changed over 40,000 years. Nonetheless, page 99 is part of a chapter that describes an important part of this thesis: the idea that the creative arts is one of the few areas where people have tested human-animal relationships without fear, where mythological beasts are free to roam and the many attributes that we share with animals are examined and celebrated. So we can say that the parachutist lands close but perhaps not close enough. Or we could take a slightly different approach, noting that Ford Madox Ford talked of page 99 revealing "the quality of the whole”, rather than the sense of it. If you landed among the water-spirits and shape-shifting witches of page 99, would you want to read on? I hope so.

Visit Michael Bond's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ahsan I. Butt's "The Lies That Bind Us"

Ahsan I. Butt's is Associate Professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. He is the author of Secession and Security.

Butt applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Lies That Bind Us: Nationalism and History Textbooks, and shared the following:

Page 99 is in a chapter that examines different interpretations of territorial disputes in Latin American history textbooks. This page brings one section of the chapter to a close and begins another, each related to narratives regarding Argentina’s external conflicts. First, the concluding section focuses on its claim to the Malvinas/Falkland Islands, formally British territory. Page 99 explains that although the claim to the Malvinas enjoys broad-based national support in Argentina, the disastrous 1982 war and its association with the military dictatorship makes the episode more complicated for progressive and left-wing nationalists. These groups may affirm Argentine sovereignty over the Malvinas while treating the war itself far more critically than right-wing nationalists do. The page then opens the chapter’s discussion of Argentina’s border issues with Chile, outlining the long history of Argentine-Chilean cooperation and rivalry over borders, Patagonia, and regional power.

Page 99 provides a surprisingly good, if necessarily partial, introduction to The Lies That Bind Us. This page foregrounds one of the book’s central concerns: how countries define their territorial boundaries, and how the stories told about those boundaries vary, depending on which type of nationalism – right-wing, civic, left-wing, or progressive – dominates at a given time.

The discussion of the Malvinas illustrates that territorial claims are not simply accepted or rejected wholesale. Nearly all citizens regard the islands as Argentine territory, but they differ in how strongly they emphasize the claim and how they interpret the 1982 war. Right-wing narratives can celebrate the effort to recover national territory, while progressive and left-wing accounts are more likely to highlight the dictatorship’s brutality and incompetence. The territory remains symbolically Argentina’s, but the meaning of the war changes with the narrator.

The page then turns to Argentina’s border disputes with Chile, especially Patagonia and the Beagle Channel. It introduces the trajectory of the relationship between the neighbors, from allies in the wars of independence to rival regional powers, whose competing territorial claims and broader geopolitical competition in the Atlantic and Pacific produced an arms race, before the 1902 Pactos de Mayo eased tensions. Page 99 therefore captures the chapter’s broader interest in how nationalists narrate a country’s external boundaries: which territories are treated as inherently national, which historical grievances are emphasized and which are forgotten, and how rival states and territorial compromises are portrayed.

Still, much is missing. To begin with, page 99 only addresses Argentina’s external but not domestic territoriality, such as the incorporation of Indigenous lands and peoples. Nor does it touch on the chapter’s second half, which examines Chilean narratives regarding conflicts with Peru and Bolivia, Indigenous peoples such as the Mapuche, and Argentina. Moreover, the page would leave the reader completely unaware of the book’s examination of race and immigration in textbooks from California and Texas or big dates and eras in Indian and Pakistani textbooks.

Finally, page 99 does not display the book’s full theoretical framework, which distinguishes among right-wing, civic, left-wing, and progressive nationalisms, and examines how each constructs the nation’s boundaries of membership, space, and time. The test works well in giving the flavor of one important case study, but only partially for its broader comparative and theoretical scope.

Visit Ahsan I. Butt's homepage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Carol Lin's "When News Breaks"

Carol Lin, best known for being the first national anchor to report the first 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, was a long-time anchor and correspondent for CNN and ABC News. During her career, she covered the war in the Middle East, the aftermath of the Kosovo War, the 2002 Winter Olympics and every imaginable natural disaster from hurricanes, tornadoes, historic wildfires, and floods. Lin received an Emmy, a Peabody, the Alfred I. Dupont Award, and the Greater Los Angeles Press Club Awards for Excellence in both Investigative Reporting and her coverage of the Los Angeles Riots. She currently lives in Hawaii.

Lin applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, When News Breaks: A Memoir of Love and War, and reported the following:

It surprised me to discover that if readers open my memoir, When News Breaks, to page 99, they will gain a remarkably clear understanding of what the book is truly about.

Page 99 captures the emotional aftermath of my journalist husband's marital betrayal. In many ways, it answers the central challenge I face as the author: readers may assume When News Breaks is primarily about my journalism career or the fact that I was the first national television journalist to report the first attack on 9/11. Instead, it is a story about my complicated love for an older newsman, and the journalism careers that tested our marriage.

My husband, Will, had left his position as a television news executive to become communications director for an America's Cup syndicate made up entirely of female sailors. Meanwhile, I was a rising Los Angeles anchor and investigative reporter on the verge of receiving an offer from ABC News. Then ABC's chief investigative correspondent discovered that my husband had engaged in a high-profile one-night stand and intended to feature it in a story about the glamorous lifestyles surrounding the world of competitive sailing.

Page 99 begins after the America's Cup competition ended. Will and I return to the weathered beach house we had just purchased—our forever home, or so we assumed. It was a home that had withstood nature's fury since 1948. Its wooden windows, blistered by the salt air, spoke of quiet resilience. When we bought the house, all we saw was its potential. I recount the sellers' hope that their beloved family home would find the right owners. They asked our realtor whether she was certain the sale would go through. She reassured them with a simple observation: "Carol loves the house, and Will loves Carol."

But the scene that follows asks whether love alone can survive profound betrayal, whether we can survive and thrive through our own breaking news. In my writing program, I learned that every book orbits a single, essential question. Page 99 reveals mine: When is the right time, if ever, to let go of the things we love most?

Visit Carol Lin's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Violaine Roussel's "Data-Driven Hollywood"

Violaine Roussel is professor of sociology at the University of Paris 8 and research fellow at the Paris Center for Sociological and Political Research (CRESPPA). She is the author of Representing Talent: Hollywood Agents and the Making of Movies, How to Do Politics with Art, and other books.

Roussel applied the "Page 99 Test" to her latest book, Data-Driven Hollywood: The New Data Professionals in the Age of Streaming, with the following results:

Page 99 of Data-Driven Hollywood is part of the book’s second chapter, which describes how data specialists came to occupy key positions within streaming platforms—first at the three pioneering organizations, Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime Video—and how they thereby gained increasing influence over the content produced or acquired by the streamers. This chapter is therefore devoted to the origins of data specialists’ “positional power” within Hollywood’s central production organizations. Page 99 focuses on how these professionals helped define their own roles and worked to expand the boundaries of their sphere of influence within the streaming platforms, enabling them to establish themselves as indispensable participants in creative decision-making processes. They achieved this through internal alliances, but also by challenging the power of traditional producers, who until then had largely monopolized the authority to decide what should be produced and to predict what would be successful.

Page 99 of Data-Driven Hollywood can therefore serve as an interesting entry point into the story the book tells: that of the emergence of a new professional category—data and algorithm specialists—who have not only managed to establish themselves in Hollywood but, more importantly, to influence what is symbolically most valuable in that world: the greenlighting process for creative projects. While the Page 99 Test is thus partially successful, the perspective presented on this page does not, however, fully capture all the dimensions the book explores to explain the upheaval caused by the rise of data specialists in Hollywood.

Indeed, simply reading page 99 might leave the reader with the impression that the establishment of data specialists on the content side of Hollywood was the result of a well-coordinated strategy by a professional group or a few figures from the tech sector who set out to conquer Hollywood. The book, on the contrary, rejects this idea: it sheds light on a process of transformation that, as major and profound as it is, was not controlled by any individual or group. It shows how a combination of diversly motivated activities ultimately contributed to the emergence of a powerful new occupational group in Hollywood: that of content data specialists.

The book’s following chapter sheds light on a decisive aspect of this rise of data specialists: it occurred in relation to—and largely in opposition to—another group that occupies a central place in Hollywood, namely producers and creators. The book’s third chapter examines in detail the struggles for power and legitimacy that pitted producers against data specialists, as well as the transformation of occupational arrangements that led them to work together in an increasingly less confrontational manner, until producers recognized that they would henceforth have to work with algorithms and those who create them. The book’s last chapter precisely examines the work and tools of data specialists: it shows that the algorithmic models and instruments they use represent a completely new approach to creative projects and audiences, and reveals the implications that come with it.

Learn more about Data-Driven Hollywood at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joy Dixon's "Sexual Heresies"

Joy Dixon is Associate Professor of History at the University of British Columbia and the author of Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England (2001).

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, Sexual Heresies: Religion, Science, and Sexuality in Modern Britain, and shared the following:

Page 99 of Sexual Heresies is part of a chapter on “Gender, Sex, and the Body in Modern Esotericism,” looking at gender, sex, and sexuality in ritual and sexual magic in the modern occult revival. This section explores sex and gender in the Theosophical Society (founded in 1875) and the associated Order of Universal Co-Freemasonry, an esoteric Masonic Order that admitted men and women on equal terms. The passage makes two key points: that whether and how the sexed body mattered in the ritual work of the Order was in question from the very beginning of Co-Masonic work, and that the rituals worked within the Order tended, paradoxically, both to emphasize and collapse the distinctions between members inhabiting male and female bodies (theosophists’ belief in reincarnation meant that the “true self” used a particular sexed body only for this lifetime).

For Co-Masons, as for the TS as a whole, teaching on sexual difference was complicated, unstable, and often internally contradictory. Over and over again the rites that were worked simultaneously emphasized sexual difference and collapsed or denied those differences; both the movement across the sexual binary and the undoing of that binary were key to the work. Men and women were initially drawn to each other because of their differences—differences derived from the experience of a sexed and gendered body. But through association—inside or outside the Masonic Lodge—they became more alike.

The rest of the page provides examples from The Link, the journal of the Theosophical Society’s secret Esoteric Section, and from The Co-Mason, to illustrate those claims.

If you read page 99 and expected the rest of the book to be about esotericism and sexual magic, you would be wrong – the next chapter deals with the sexual politics of evangelicalism and Anglo-Catholic “social purity” movements. In that sense, the Page 99 Test fails. But in another sense it works really well, because it takes you to the core argument of the book, which is that the emergence of new scientific ideas about sexuality (especially the new emphasis on the closeness of the religious and sexual impulses) set the stage for rethinking not just sexuality but religion too.

Page 99 is the first part of a discussion that moves on to Dion Fortune’s “polarity magic” and the explicitly sexual magic of Aleister Crowley. The willingness of occult practitioners to make sex – both sexual difference and sexual desire – central to their spiritual practice was one of the things that marked these as “alternative” religions (even as they also worked to shore up conventional ideas about sex and gender).

The first chapter of the book sets up what many religious people saw as a problem – that anthropologists, sexologists, and psychoanalysts had apparently proved that sex and religion derived from the same source and were interchangeable. Chapter 2 explores one response: liberal theologians in both the Catholic and Anglican churches worked to rehabilitate religious experience in the light of these new scientific ideas. Chapter 4 looks at the ways that religious conservatives resisted and reworked the same ideas in terms of sin and purity. The final chapter explores how critics of religion used the close relationships between sex and religion to attack religion itself as a kind of perversion.

Over and over you see an emphasis on the idea that spiritual orthodoxy had to be sexually "normal" and that sexual "deviance" was also spiritually “deviant.” Sexual Heresies tells the story of how new ideas about sex transformed ideas about religion, and explores some of what was at stake in that process.

Learn more about Sexual Heresies at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Libby Adler's "Governing the Terrain Called Beauty"

Libby Adler is a Professor of Law and Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. She is the author of Gay Priori: A Queer Critical Legal Studies Approach to Law Reform (2018) as well as numerous articles on LGBTQ legal issues. She was appointed a commissioner on the Massachusetts Commission on LGBTQ Youth in 2026.

Adler applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Governing the Terrain Called Beauty: The Queerness of Political Economy in Cuba and the United States, and reported the following:

Page 99 is in the middle of chapter 4 at a break between sections. The section that is concluding argues that the advent of same-sex marriage in Cuba required a reconfiguration of gay identity. The section that is starting offers a partial theory of how that reconfiguration occurred.

The glimpse via page 99 fairly represents an important piece of the book but does not explain the overall argument.

Part I of the book explains the history of gay identity and regulation in Cuba and the US. In Cuba, the role of imperialism and the fall of Cuba’s prime benefactor, the Soviet Union, are crucial to understanding the evolution of sexual identity in political-economic terms. Part II of the book, in which page 99 appears, is about the advent of same-sex marriage and how that legal reform grows out of distinct historical and economic forces in the two countries (Cuba and the US). Part III introduces Cuban legal voices in the form of interviews and uses these voices to theorize the significance of legal consciousness to divergent forms of legal change.

Learn more about Governing the Terrain Called Beauty at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Patrick Sullivan's "Stay Tuned"

Patrick Sullivan is an assistant professor of performance and visual studies at Texas A&M University.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Stay Tuned: Listening to the Network Era, with the following results:

When you get to page 99, you will find a discussion of the sitcom’s laugh track and how it differs from other empathetic sound, i.e., non-diegetic music. Both music and the laugh track help us judge the emotional register of a scene—a sort of priming or cueing—but the laugh track goes beyond merely prompting us to an intended response. The laugh track grounds an assessment of the show—what the book takes as an aesthetic judgment—into its very soundtrack, so our response to the laugh track is not simply to emotional priming but also to aesthetic assessment, a sort of “do I or do I not find this moment of the sitcom funny.” And as the 99th page’s chapter title, “Laughter’s Labor,” suggests, what is interesting about the laugh track is not whether you agree with the laugh track or that it worked but rather that it raises the work of aesthetic assessment in the first place.

While page 99 would not give the browser the book’s investment in formally reading television sounds nor the production histories surrounding the sounds, it does give them a sense of the intellectual stakes: the commitment to treating aesthetic theory as important to television studies and vice versa. This page works towards understanding how laugh tracks trouble aesthetic judgments, the mental process of experiencing the world through our senses, reflecting on that experience, and assigning a value to it. Other chapters address different aspects of aesthetic experience through different sound—Hanna-Barbera cartoon sound effects and comprehension as well as noises and contemplation. This troubling is not to suggest that these sounds of television aesthetically fail nor that aesthetic theory fails to help us grasp them. Rather, the book uses the tension, which in popular discourse often gets expressed in terms of value, between them to stage a recalibration of aesthetic theory and a reevaluation of the work the sounds of network-era television perform. While the particularities of aesthetic judgment, contemplation, and comprehension are worked out in detail through the chapters, the broader frame of the tension between aesthetic theory, evaluation of television sounds, and formal analysis are covered in the introduction, “The Trouble with Television Sound.” Finally, while I am biased and love every page in its own right, I recommend the browser turn to page 71.

Learn more about Stay Tuned at the Rutgers University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue