Rebekah Farrugia & Kellie D. Hay's "Women Rapping Revolution"

Rebekah Farrugia is Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Communication, Journalism, and Public Relations at Oakland University. She is the author of Beyond the Dance Floor: Female DJs, Technology, and Electronic Dance Music Culture.

Kellie D. Hay is Professor of Cultural Studies in the Department of Communication, Journalism, and Public Relations at Oakland University. She has authored many articles about music, politics, and cultural identity, and specializes in critical qualitative methodologies.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Women Rapping Revolution: Hip Hop and Community Building in Detroit, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Women Rapping Revolution features emcee Mahogany Jones’s track “Skin Deep” from her album Pure. Ronald “iRonic” Lee Jr. produced the track that features fellow Detroit emcee Insite the Riot and vocalist Ozara Ode.' In our analysis, we contend that “Skin Deep’s” music and lyrics invite listeners to reflect on the history of whiteness and colonization in the United States. Specifically, the track zeroes in on the privileging of light skin and emphasizes the need for Black girls and women to love themselves in a country where they continue to be exoticized and treated as less than white women.

Upon receiving the call to participate in the Page 99 Test we eagerly flipped through our book to see whether or not this one page would give readers an accurate sense of the project as a whole. To our amazement, page 99 is an uncannily accurate snapshot of the subject matter we engage in Women Rapping Revolution. Specifically, it is a page from the chapter where we expand upon the concept of the “Vulnerable Maverick,” a construct we introduce and use as a framework for analyzing Black women’s subjectivity in their roles as artists and cultural citizens. The pairing of vulnerability with a maverick’s attitude and power rescues vulnerability from weakness. It is a response and contrast to the controlling image known as the Strong Black Woman, which forecloses the possibility of vulnerability.

In reference to “Skin Deep,” Insite the Riot explains on page 99 that the song expresses her belief that “vulnerability is a strength, self-confidence is a necessity, and recognizing our own beauty is vital.” iRonic Lee adds that “these issues are frequently experienced and seldom dealt with or even expressed artistically.” We argue that together these artists create fresh texture, where colorism and institutionalized racism brush up against perseverance and the joy of self-love in melodic rhythms, a jazzy hook, and soft and steady voices.

Women Rapping Revolution is an ethnographic study about a women-centered collective called The Foundation (2009-2016) that had a dynamic presence in Detroit’s hip hop underground at a time when the city was undergoing immense transition as it fell into and emerged from bankruptcy. Throughout, we employ an interdisciplinary framework to showcase how women and some men in the city embody hip hop’s roots as a community-building enterprise to create spaces and places for themselves in an increasingly neoliberal environment. While in many ways diverse, a common set of ethics, aesthetics, and an overarching commitment to social justice binds these artists together.

Learn more about Women Rapping Revolution at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew C. Klein & Michael Pettis's "Trade Wars Are Class Wars"

Matthew C. Klein is the economics commentator at Barron’s. Michael Pettis is professor of finance at Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Klein applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace, and reported the following:

Page 99 is at the very end of chapter 3, near the center of the entire book. The first three chapters are all about giving the reader a multi-century perspective on the history of trade, cross-border financial flows, economic development, and imbalances between production and consumption. The second half of the book, by contrast, is focused on detailed case studies of China, Germany, and the United States over the past few decades.

Taken out of context, I suspect that page 99 would be confusing to the general reader. It represents the culmination of an argument about the implications of the U.S. trade balance with Mexico and why many people misunderstand the economic relationship between Mexico and the U.S. People who hadn't read the preceding pages would probably have trouble following the concepts and the discussion. But many of the points we make are core to our overall understanding about what matters when it comes to thinking about international trade. So while I don't think it's the best page for a browser to pick to get a sense of whether they would like our book, it is fairly representative of the ideas in our book -- especially the idea that misconceptions about trade can lead to needless conflicts between countries with common interests.

Our basic thesis is that trade disputes between countries aren't caused by geopolitics or incompatible national interests, but by class conflicts within them. Unfortunately, many people don't understand this, such as those we criticize on page 99 who believe Mexico's prosperity comes at the expense of the U.S. Income inequality is the underlying problem in the global economy. It deprives consumers of the money they need to buy what they should be able to afford, which means they either will spend less than they should, or borrow to make up the difference. Under-spending depresses the economy, while borrowing breeds instability and crises. To end the trade wars, we must end the class wars.

Learn more about Trade Wars Are Class Wars at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Anya P. Foxen's "Inhaling Spirit"

Anya Foxen is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2015.

Foxen applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Inhaling Spirit: Harmonialism, Orientalism, and the Western Roots of Modern Yoga, and reported the following:

I have to admit, I was kind of excited to see what the “Page 99” test would reveal. I mean, I know I wrote the book, but when I finally got to hold a paper copy in my hands, I had little idea of even the chapter that this seemingly random page would land me in. Upon actually flipping the thing open, I was first confused, then annoyed, then perplexed, and then finally fascinated.

Page 99 contains the only passage in the book dedicated to a fairly major 19th-century historical figure—specifically one whom I had originally excluded, but was forced to reexamine by one of my readers during peer review. This figure is Andrew Jackson Davis (1826–1910), the “Poughkeepsie seer” who synthesized much of the ad-hoc theology for American Spiritualism out of an eclectic mix of Mesmerism and Swedenborgianism and authored an entire six-volume encyclopedic work called The Great Harmonia (1850–1861).

Now, given that my book is about “Harmonialism,” it seems like Davis should have been a shoo-in, which of course is precisely what my reader pointed out. I had originally chosen to ignore Davis because I found him a little overrated. Davis, who was so prolific a writer that one finds it difficult to believe he ever had a thought he didn’t see fit to publish, authored over thirty books over his lifetime. These books, all on more or less related themes, were simultaneously masterful syntheses of contemporary metaphysical thought, but for this same reason not particularly novel or unique. The book I spend quite a bit of this page describing was titled The Harbinger of Health (1861). It’s lengthy and consists largely of home remedies—some magnetic, though the majority herbal—for nearly every condition known to man, from hemorrhoids to being struck by lightning. One aspect of it, however, was particularly relevant for my purposes. As part of his discussion of magnetic healing, Davis describes something that he refers to as the “Pneumogastric Treatment,” through which one may receive “spiritual strength” from the air by means of deep and steady breathing performed in a supine position while directing the will to the various parts of one’s body. This, of course, is precisely what is meant by my book’s title—“Inhaling Spirit.”

Ultimately, I begrudgingly incorporated Davis because, harmonial jack-of-all-trades that he was, he represented the most perfect little microcosm for the diffuse yet consistent idea I was working to establish under the label of “harmonialism.” Down to the fact that he grounds his personal origin story in an astral double-team visitation by Galen and Swedenborg. So, in the end (and as evidenced by my whirlwind of emotions as I once more processed Davis’s relevance), I think the “Page 99” test worked.

Visit Anya P. Foxen's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Paul Matzko's "The Radio Right"

Paul Matzko is a historian who specializes in the intersection of politics, religion, and mass media in modern America. He currently works at the Cato Institute as the Assistant Editor for Tech and Innovation for Libertarianism.org and is the host of the weekly podcast Building Tomorrow.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Radio Right: How a Band of Broadcasters Took on the Federal Government and Built the Modern Conservative Movement, and reported the following:

To summarize, page 99 [inset below left; click to enlarge] drops the reader into the middle of President John F. Kennedy’s preparations to censor those conservative radio broadcasters who criticized his administration. This particular page discusses his working relationship with his brother, US Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy--who kept track of the day to day operations of the censorship campaign--and their plan to target the offending broadcasters with audits by the Internal Revenue Service.

Page 99 is not the best place to start reading because understanding what’s going on requires significant information from the previous chapter, namely, this thing called the “Reuther Memorandum” referenced in the chapter title. It’s also not the worst place to start because it doesn’t take a professional historian to be able to tell from reading just this page that some kind of political skullduggery is involved.

If the idea that President Kennedy targeted his political opponents with IRS audits surprises you, then buckle in for the rest of the book! The Kennedy administration also leaned on the Federal Communications Commission to selectively enforce its regulations (known as the “Fairness Doctrine”) against radio stations airing conservative programming; the threat was that either stations stop doing so or they would face problems when it came time to renew their station licenses. To aid in that effort, the administration and its allies at the Democratic National Committee also secretly created two front organizations to launder money and administration talking points and to lodge Fairness Doctrine complaints against recalcitrant stations. The pressure campaign outlived Kennedy and continued into the late-1960s, by which time hundreds of station owners had dropped conservative broadcasting. It was the most successful episode of government censorship of the past half century, and, until now, the most successfully concealed.

Visit Paul Matzko's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jeffrey Alan Erbig Jr.'s "Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met"

Jeffrey Erbig Jr. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Latin American and Latino Studies (LALS) at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Erbig applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met: Border Making in Eighteenth-Century South America, and reported the following:

There are few words on page 99 of Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met, as a 1758 map by Italian cosmographer Miguel Antonio Ciera covers approximately eighty percent of the page. The map depicts the Río de la Plata estuary (near Buenos Aires, Argentina) and adjacent lands, and the only text is a brief caption in which I explain a significant contradiction in Ciera’s and others’ works. Ciera includes two ethnic labels on this map – Charrúas and Pampas – yet in textual accounts, he and his colleagues deny that such people actually lived in those lands. This page is part of a sixteen-page section in which I analyze the use of ethnic labels in regional maps alongside the writings of the mapmakers who drew them.

The page 99 test would give browsers an accurate, yet incomplete idea of what this book is about. That the page would include a historic map is unsurprising, as the book includes twenty-two in total, alongside another thirteen that I made using geographic information systems (GIS). Moreover, a critical reading of ethnographic content in colonial cartography is a centerpiece of this work. Yet, if a reader were to only consult this page, they would miss the book’s most important aspect: its focus on the spatial practices of Indigenous Americans. Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met is not simply a book about colonial representations of Native peoples, but one about the on-the-ground socio-spatial relations.

Ciera was one of dozens of mapmakers commissioned by the Portuguese crown in the first of two collaborative efforts with Spain to partition South America during the late eighteenth century. These boundary commissions were the largest ever sent to the Americas, and they collectively traveled the entire length of the border and cosigned maps that remain the earliest legal precedents to present-day international boundaries. These were the same commissions that formed the backdrop to the 1986 film The Mission, yet historical records reveal that rather than bit players in colonial conflicts, Indigenous peoples engaged mapmakers with their own visions and aims. Much has been written, albeit little in English, about the handful of officials who led the boundary commissions, yet few studies address the thousands of local laborers who made them possible and hardly any consider the border’s meaning to Indigenous peoples whose lands it bisected. That final consideration is the crux of the book.

Visit Jeffrey Erbig Jr.'s website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tanya Kant's "Making It Personal"

Tanya Kant is Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies (Digital Media) at the University of Sussex, UK. She is Co-Managing Editor of the open access, multimedia publishing platform REFRAME.

Kant applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Making it Personal: Algorithmic Personalization, Identity, and Everyday Life, and reported the following:

From page 99:

The odd thing is that I work in [data analytics] so I’m fairly well aware of what’s out there, but I don’t have the feeling I’m on top of it, and I find that very, that bothers me and a tool like [Ghostery] probably gives you a false sense of security that you are on top of it.

--Robkifi (machine learn­ing researcher, UK).

This quote from Making It Personal is taken from a research interview with data specialist Robkifi [the interview participant’s chosen pseudonym] on his use of online privacy tool and data tracker blocker, Ghostery. The page explores Robikfi’s statement that online privacy tools give him ‘a false sense of security’ when it comes to being monitored by commercial data trackers such as Google, Facebook and third party profilers. Despite being an analytics expert – comfortably fitting the computer sciences definition of a ‘power user’ – Robikifi feels that when it comes to controlling his own online data trail (his browsing history, social media ‘likes’, click-throughs, location data, and other traceable digital movements), it is not possible to wholly prevent commercial platforms from surveilling his online movements. Taking into account similar interview responses from other ‘power users’, I argue on this page that – somewhat counter-intuitively – the more web users know about data tracking, the less powerful they feel in understanding and controlling their own data profiles. Power users feel anxious that they can never ‘be on top’ of commercial data tracking because there is no ‘top’: data trackers don’t just collect data about us in order to offer us ‘personalized’ advertising, they use data profiling to create new knowledge in order to monetize and shape our identities, individual preferences and our everyday digital movements.

I’m pleased that the Page 99 Test works well with Making It Personal. The fact that the page features an interview excerpt from a research participant really reflects the book’s central aim: to critically analyse how web users themselves understand and negotiate the algorithmic personalization practices (such as online data profiling) that intervene in their daily web trajectories. Page 99 highlights that algorithmic personalization does not only pose a threat to user privacy – it also creates anxieties around knowledge production and users’ own sense of self. That said, the page only reflects one of the book’s themes; arguments about online identity performance, algorithmic capital and trust in personalization systems aren’t featured. Still, I hope that Page 99 provokes reflections in readers that even so-called ‘power users’ of data tracking technologies can be considered powerless in the face of contemporary ubiquitous, sprawling and unknowable algorithmic personalization practices.

Visit Tanya Kant's website and Twitter perch.

--Marshal Zeringue

Amy Klein's "The Trying Game"

Amy Klein wrote the “Fertility Diary” column for The New York Times’s Motherlode blog for three years. She writes frequently about health and fertility for publications such as Newsweek, Slate, The Washington Post, and others.

Klein applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Trying Game Get Through Fertility Treatment and Get Pregnant without Losing Your Mind, and reported the following:

On page 99 there is one paragraph that really summarizes my thoughts about infertility, if not about the whole book itself.

Page 99 comes at the end of a chapter on how to find a doctor. There is one paragraph that really summarizes my thoughts about infertility, if not about the whole book itself.

In the end, I don’t think there’s one doctor or clinic for everyone. (Thank God, because that doc would be even busier than she is today!) For my friend at the end of her rope who has been to four clinics and tried every protocol, I’ll recommend the most experimental clinic. And for the woman who’s been trying for a year but never had a basic workup done, I’ll suggest a small practice run by a cautious RE who I know won’t force her into invasive treatment too soon.

So that summarizes my thinking about a lot of the field and also how I make recommendations but isn't the whole book.

My book is really compartmentalized - each chapter can almost be its own book. So page 99 is a wonderful window into the technical parts of my book --what is IVF, how do you find a doctor, how do you pay for it, etc.

But since section III of my book is about the emotional journey, I think that's a more apt window of what the book is about or what's special about this book over other infertility books.

So this is a book I wish I had when I was going through infertility. I made so many mistakes along the way – starting with the wrong doctor, staying too long – and I had so many questions not answered in medical literature or online at the time, like how to deal with my boss, or feeling like I hated everyone who was pregnant or how to deal with insurance and when to give up. I wanted this to be a book you can skip to the chapter you’re up to or just skip the chapters you’re not interested in.

Visit Amy Klein's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Siobhan Keenan's "The Progresses, Processions, and Royal Entries of King Charles I, 1625-1642"

Siobhan Keenan is Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at De Montfort University, Leicester, where she is also Associate Dean Research and Innovation for the Faculty of Arts, Design and Humanities. Her research focuses on early modern theatre history, regional performance culture, and royal progress entertainments. She is the author of several books, including Travelling Players in Shakespeare's England (2002) and Acting Companies and Their Plays in Shakespeare's London (2014), as well as the editor of two politically topical seventeenth-century manuscript plays, The Emperor's Favourite (2011) and The Twice Chang'd Friar (2017).

Keenan applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Progresses, Processions, and Royal Entries of King Charles I, 1625-1642, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Progresses, Processions, and Royal Entries of King Charles I, 1625-1642 introduces a case study of a royal progress visit Charles I and his queen, Henrietta Maria, paid to Welbeck Abbey, the home of William Cavendish, Earl of Newcastle during the 1634 royal summer progress into the North Midlands of England.

Dipping into the book at page 99 gives you a taste of the political and cultural significance of the royal progress visits that Charles paid to members of his nobility during his annual summer travels, including how the unique access these visits offered to the monarch, gave hosts the chance not only to impress and flatter the king, but an opportunity to petition and counsel Charles. William Cavendish, for example, was thought to be keen to secure a court appointment in 1634, but was also known to believe in the role of the nobility as advisers to the monarch. His keenness to impress Charles and to win royal favour is reflected in the fact that he reportedly spent between fourteen and fifteen thousand pounds on the visit – more than any other Caroline host spent on such a visit – the hospitality including a lavish feast to which Cavendish invited the local nobles and gentry, and a specially commissioned show by renowned playwright and poet, Ben Jonson, Love’s Welcome at Bolsover. In sparing no expense, Cavendish was clearly hoping to impress the king. But he also appears to have used the visit to offer coded advice to Charles, modelling the kind of reciprocal generosity and local engagement that he believed the king should practice more visibly.

What page 99 does not fully reveal is the scale and variety of the Caroline royal progresses explored in the book, which ranged from small-scale ‘hunting’ progresses to wider-ranging public progresses, such as Charles’s 1633 ‘great’ journey to Scotland for his belated coronation as king which involved stops at multiple towns, cities, and country houses. Similarly, page 99 only gestures towards one of the key questions explored in Progresses which is the extent to which Charles was accessible to his subjects and receptive to their petitions and counsel. It has often been claimed that Charles was a remote and inaccessible monarch and that this this contributed to the eventual outbreak of the English Civil Wars (1642) and Charles’s overthrow and execution. Although not stated explicitly on page 99, Progresses tests these assertions about Charles’s rule by offering the first extended study of his interactions with his subjects outside London during his summer travels.

Hopefully, the glimpse page 99 offers into one of these encounters between monarch and subject would have encouraged Ford to read on and to learn more about Charles’s travels and his relationship with his people!

Learn more about The Progresses, Processions, and Royal Entries of King Charles I, 1625-1642 at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Howard Steven Friedman's "Ultimate Price"

Howard Steven Friedman, a leading statistician and health economist, is an expert in data science and applications of cost-benefit analysis. He teaches at Columbia University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Ultimate Price: The Value We Place on Life, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Ultimate Price focuses on different ways that we can value our own lives. It explains the survivor needs method and compares it to the replacement income needs calculation. The page concludes by referring back to the Value of a Statistical Life and describing the differences in both the amounts (Value of a Statistics Life is much larger than the typical life insurance policy) and the difference in purpose.

This test works reasonably well for my book so I would say it gets a solid passing grade though not an A. As we would expect, there are many other pages in the book that would give a better understanding of the book itself since, on page 99, I am right in the middle of a detailed discussion. Readers will get some understanding that I am looking at how life is valued from different points of view by the discussion of the life insurance methods and the comparison with the Value of a Statistical Life. The reader will likely fail to understand the breadth that my book covers and potentially get the false impression that it is narrow in scope. Readers will also immediately recognize that the text is clearly written for a lay audience but provides a substantial amount of scientific rigor to allow readers to understand the details underneath the calculation.

Ultimate Price examines the different ways that human life is valued from civil courts to criminal courts to for-profit companies to health insurance and life insurance and even discussing victims compensation funds. The key principles in the book are that price tags are put on human life all the time, usually using calculations that we can all understand. These price tags are often unfair resulting in some lives being less valued and consequently less protected. We need to ensure that life is priced fairly, so that human rights and human lives are always protected.

Visit Howard Steven Friedman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Liam Vaughan's "Flash Crash"

Liam Vaughan is an investigative journalist for Bloomberg and Bloomberg Businessweek. He has been awarded the Gerald Loeb prize for excellence in business journalism and the Harold Wincott prize for financial journalism. He is coauthor of The Fix: How Bankers Lied, Cheated, and Colluded to Rig the World’s Most Important Number. He lives in London.

Vaughan applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Flash Crash: A Trading Savant, a Global Manhunt, and the Most Mysterious Market Crash in History, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Dressed in bespoke suits and statement watches, they pitched their prospects in the lobbies of five-star hotels. After hours they networked at charity events and clubs like the Worshipful Company of International Bankers. MacKinnon’s style was high energy and relentless. Dupont was a social chameleon.

Page 99 of Flash Crash introduces readers to a pair of financiers who enriched themselves by introducing the book’s protagonist, a naïve but brilliant financial trader named Navinder Sarao, to a string of disastrous investments.

A browser who opened Flash Crash on page 99 would get a good sense of the journalistic narrative style and the somewhat unseemly milieu in which the action occurs. They wouldn’t, however, get any indication of the book’s central story, or its themes. Overall, I’d say the test is moderately successful, since readers get enough of a taste for the tenor of the book to make an informed decision as to whether they might enjoy it.

Flash Crash tells the remarkable true story of Navinder Singh Sarao, a working class savant from the outskirts of London who taught himself to trade, made $70 million which he didn't tell anyone about, and was ultimately blamed by the American government with causing a $1 trillion market crash from his bedroom. One of the book’s strengths, I hope, is that it takes readers into a world beyond the big investment banks and hedge funds: a world of strivers, like Nav, and chancers, like the pair introduced on page 99, who helped relieve him of his money. For many readers, Flash Crash will be an eye-opening journey into the underbelly of global finance: the tax dodgers, the markets cheats, the offshore bankers and the fraudsters. Page 99 provides a glimpse of that.

Visit Liam Vaughan's website.

--Marshal Zeringue