Martin Puchner's "Culture: The Story of Us, From Cave Art to K-Pop"

Martin Puchner, the Byron and Anita Wien Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard University, is a prize-winning author, educator, public speaker, and institution-builder in the arts and humanities. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Puchner applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Culture: The Story of Us, From Cave Art to K-Pop, and reported the following:

From page 99:

though the new script was initially seen as less sophisticated, it ended up giving rise to works of the greatest originality and significance, in part because it created a space for women writers to innovate outside the strictures of male, Chinese-oriented literature, with its set canon and literary conventions. (It also gave rise to the first court-sanctioned Japanese poetry anthology, the Kokinshu.) The mostly female diaries written in the kana script were so fresh and successful that male writers started to imitate them.

Despite this newfound independence, Chinese culture continued to be a hugely important reference point in Japan. Murasaki's Tale of Genji, for example, includes almost eight hundred Chinese-style poems and makes frequent reference to Chinese literature. Murasaki is also one of the few contemporaries to have written about Sei Shonagon, whom she regarded as a rival: "Sei Shonagon has the most extraordinary air of self-satisfaction. Yet, if we stop to examine those Chinese characters of hers that she so presumptuously scatters about the place, we find that they are full of imperfections." Even centuries after the end of imperial missions to China and the flowering of the kana script, the best way to put down a rival was to criticize her faulty Chinese writing.

THE CLEAREST EXPRESSION OF THE NEW SPIRIT OF INDEPENDENCE is another account of an imperial mission, one produced with considerable hindsight around the same time as The Pillow Book and comparable to its story of the Chinese emperor's testing of the Japanese. It is a scroll combining text and image to recount the travels of one Kibi no Makibi, a legendary minister who went on an imperial mission to China.

According to other sources, the historical Kibi had mastered thirteen areas of Chinese learning, which included the five Confucian classics, history, yin-yang, calendars, astronomy, and divination, as well as the game of Go. This impressive knowledge of Chinese culture served

The page captures the main thrust of the book surprisingly well in that it speaks about cultural borrowing. Over a period of several hundred years, Japanese emperors sent diplomatic missions across the sea to China to learn about new forms of architecture, literature, and worship. Buddhism played an important role in these deliberate acts of cultural import. The chapter focuses on a Buddhist monk, Ennin (794 AD - 864 AD), who kept a journal of his travels in China, where he collected manuscripts and studied new ways of representing the Buddha through sculpture. He also experienced the sudden persecution of Buddhists in China, which made it even more important for him to bring the latest Buddhist thought and art to Japan.

I think of this kind of cultural transfer as an act of grafting, of one culture deciding to graft elements of another culture onto its own traditions. (Something similar happened when Rome decided to graft elements of Greek culture onto its own traditions.)

Page 99 focuses on the aftermath of this entirely voluntary act of cultural transfer (no one was forcing Japan to send cultural missions to China), especially on two women writers, Sei Shonagon and Murasaki Shikibu, who were writing around the year 1000 AD, after the official cultural missions had come to an end. Their work shows that cultural grafting doesn't imply inferiority or lack of originality. Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book is a great work of social and aesthetic commentary, and Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji, the first great novel in world literature. (The chapter--and page 99--concludes with a visual account of these earlier cultural missions, the Kibi scroll, which anticipates Manga comics today.)

The view of culture that emerges from the book is that cultures thrive on borrowing, from the earliest surviving art works to K-pop. With the book, I hope to bring a deep historical perspective to our current debates about culture, from so-called culture wars and debates about the return of looted art to cultural appropriation. Above all, the book celebrates humans as a culture-producing species.

Visit Martin Puchner's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christina Dunbar-Hester's "Oil Beach"

Christina Dunbar-Hester is a science and technology studies scholar and associate professor in the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication. She is the author of Low Power to the People: Pirates, Protest, and Politics in FM Radio Activism, winner of the McGannon Award for Social and Ethical Relevance in Communications Technology Research, and Hacking Diversity: The Politics of Inclusion in Open Technology Cultures, winner of the Information Science Book of the Year Award from the Association for Information Science and Technology.

Dunbar-Hester applied the "Page 99 Test" to her latest book, Oil Beach: How Toxic Infrastructure Threatens Life in the Ports of Los Angeles and Beyond, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Oil Beach is in the chapter on sea otters in Southern California, which surveys the last few decades in these otters’ longer arc from pelt-bearing commodities to charismatic objects of conservation. (The book’s four chapters each concern a different life form that lives in or passes through San Pedro Bay, focusing on birds, bananas, otters, and cetaceans.)

Page 99 actually contains one of my favorite quotes in the whole book, from a 1999 Los Angeles Times story about the local aquarium’s inauguration of its otter exhibit. Its author wrote:

A little girl named Summer arrived in Long Beach last month with what sounds like a Hollywood crisis: a lousy fur coat, a weight problem and a dependency issue. Summer, an 11-month-old sea otter at the Long Beach Aquarium of the Pacific, also would be distressed to know she’s missing her spot in the limelight. This Saturday the aquarium will launch Sea Otter Summer, but the budding diva will be in rehab.

When I say “favorite” here, I don’t mean that I necessarily like this quote. It’s rather unsettling how the reporter equates an orphaned otter who probably suffered pollution or environmental injury to a Hollywood celebrity in rehab. (As I explain on page 99, aquarium handlers knew the young otter’s so-called “addiction” to suckling towels “was an unfortunate effect of her separation from her mother when she was only one week old...”) Nonetheless it’s evocative and placeful, as it attempts to “translate” the struggling otter by way of a Los Angeles trope, and anthropomorphizes her to enroll the reader into caring about her (while also, true to Hollywood, making a spectacle of her).

In making an otter’s life history interchangeable with a Hollywood stereotype, the quote inadvertently gets at some of what I’m trying to do in the book: to provide an “unnatural history” of arguably one of the most incredibly manipulated, managed places on earth, the Los Angeles coastline in San Pedro Bay. The aquarium is a striking setting: it showcases marine ecologies of the Pacific Ocean, and it tries to offer a “good life” to a struggling wild animal who’s a member of a heavily managed, endangered population; but it’s built on infilled “land” literally created by pouring concrete in the estuarial LA River mouth, using revenue generated by the Los Angeles- Long Beach container ports and oil drilling.

So the mise-en-scène of Oil Beach, in all its messy contradictions, is at least hinted in this page. At the same time, I’m not sure the page-99 description of the otter’s life at the aquarium gives the reader much preview of the analysis of the book. But it does foreshadow major themes of multispecies life and death, and the entanglement of industrial infrastructure and spaces for living; and evokes place in a meaningful way.

Visit Christina Dunbar-Hester's website.

The Page 99 Test: Hacking Diversity.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kyrill Kunakhovich's "Communism's Public Sphere"

Kyrill Kunakhovich Kyrill Kunakhovich is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He is coeditor of The Long 1989.

Kunakhovich applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Communism's Public Sphere: Culture as Politics in Cold War Poland and East Germany, and reported the following:

From page 99:

…Under these constraints, a national communism was at least better than its previous version, and most Poles welcomed Gomułka’s reforms. New challenges and disappointments would come soon enough. But in the fall of 1956 embracing National Communism was a winning strategy for Polish leaders, supported by the party and the public alike.

This strategy was far more problematic for the SED, even though East German officials were some of the first to use it. After June 17, 1953, the GDR’s leadership adopted an early version of National Communism, vowing to become more responsive to the public’s needs—including the need for greater contact with West Germany. But draping the SED in German colors was a dangerous game. Amid national uprisings in Hungary and Poland, even loyal party members pushed its policies to their logical endpoint, calling for German reunification and the erasure of the GDR. In Poland, championing the nation bolstered the PZPR’s authority because it brought the party closer to the people. In East Germany, however, it only exposed the gulf between them. So long as East Germans saw themselves as Germans first, reforms like Gomułka’s—decentralization, democratization, de-Sovietization—would inevitably fuel the drive for German unity and therefore undermine the GDR. The tactics that had stabilized communism in Poland were unavailable to the SED, unless it could instill a very different kind of national identity.

Shortly after June 17, 1953, the playwright Bertolt Brecht mocked the SED’s response in an unpublished poem titled “The Solution.” Officials insisted that “the people / had forfeited the confidence of the government,” he wrote. “Would it not be easier / in that case for the government / to dissolve the people / and elect another?” The question was meant to be absurd, inverting as it did the standard relationship between people and government. But in effect, electing a new people is precisely what the SED did. Protest in 1953 and criticism in 1956 made clear that most East Germans waited for reunification instead of committing themselves to the GDR. To get through to such people and win their support, the SED had to rewire their sense of belonging. It had to uproot their lives, expose them to the party’s teachings, force them to get engaged in civic life, and distance them from West Germany. The government thus set out to elect its people through a Socialist Cultural Revolution that forced even the most reticent to participate. It sought to make East Germans out of Germans—and in the process to make the SED a truly national party.

This is a real success case for the Page 99 test! My book compares the workings of the public sphere in two Eastern Bloc countries, Poland and East Germany. Naturally, most pages focus on one country or the other, but here the two are side by side, as they are in the book as a whole. One of my central arguments is that the Bloc was deeply intertwined. For all their differences, Poland and East Germany evolved in tandem, partly because they watched each other closely.

Page 99 falls at the end of a chapter on nationalism, which shows that between 1953 and 1956 both states faced the same challenge: how to adjust communist rule to public opinion? Each country’s leaders set out to create a National Communism that would be more reflective of the people’s will. But they had to do it in strikingly different ways, as page 99 explains. Because of Germany’s division, East German leaders could not champion national traditions the way that Polish leaders could. Instead, they had to build a new East German nation in their image.

Page 99 captures some of the big-picture arguments of Communism’s Public Sphere. What it misses, though, are my sources and methods. The book’s starting point is that political discussions in the Eastern Bloc unfolded in cultural spaces – theaters, galleries, cinemas, youth clubs. Since communist regimes suppressed free speech, such spaces were rare outlets for dissenting voices. Taking advantage of their platform, artists presented visions that challenged the party line. Audiences, too, spoke for themselves by booing, clapping, or refusing to show up. Instead of a transmission belt for state officials, cultural institutions functioned as a public sphere: a space where many actors could weigh in on public affairs. I show how this worked in two cities, Kraków and Leipzig, between the Red Army’s invasion of Poland in 1944 and German reunification in 1990. Looking beyond page 99, a reader will find rock and roll, a workers’ opera, underground art shows, smuggled recordings, and a great deal more.

Learn more about Communism's Public Sphere at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jason Danely's "Fragile Resonance"

Jason Danely is Reader in Anthropology and Chair of the Healthy Ageing and Care Research Innovation and Knowledge Exchange Network at Oxford Brookes University. He is the author or coeditor of Aging and Loss, Vulnerability and the Politics of Care, and Transitions and Transformations.

Danely applied the "Page 99 Test" to his latest book, Fragile Resonance: Caring for Older Family Members in Japan and England, and reported the following:

What's on page 99: The end of a section titled 'Dancing with Danger' and the start of another titled 'Eating Intimacy'. These are two of my favourite sections, both looking at Japanese carers' descriptions of embodied and responsive care.

The test: Page 99 introduces some of the main themes of the book, but it doesn't capture the cross-cultural comparative approach, so the test was about 1/2 successful.

As page 99 suggests, the book is about the stories of carers' ordinary experiences and how these developed over time into new ways of attending to and responding to the world. Care entails a kind of attunement, like a dance, but cultivating this sensitivity can be exhausting, isolating, and little appreciated. Page 99 extends this with the Japanese notion of compassion. One of my favourite lines on this page is "Carers dance creatively, carefully, often on the edge of a cliff of dangerous compassion."

Visit Jason Danely's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kelsey Klotz's "Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness"

Kelsey Klotz is Lecturer in the Department of Music at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her research focuses on jazz, race, identity, and privilege. Her articles have appeared in Dædalus, the American Studies Journal, Jazz Perspectives, and the Journal of Jazz Studies. She holds a BA in Music (piano) from Truman State University and a PhD in musicology from Washington University in St. Louis.

Klotz applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness, and reported the following:

The first thing browsers would likely be drawn to on page 99 of Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness would almost certainly be the image at the bottom of the page. The image comes from the Dave Brubeck Collection, and was taken by photographer Lonnie Wilson during a “Dave Teaches Teachers” program in California in 1954. The image shows Brubeck playing at the piano, with about 30 viewers looking mostly intently at his playing. The viewers are predominantly white women. The text on page 99 shares the text of a review of one such piano class. One reviewer used a range of reactions explained within a feminine sphere of musical consumption when describing these women: “Some of the ‘girls’ squeaked and squealed like ecstatic teenagers while others dug it like supper club sophisticates and took notes for later study.”

I’m a bit mixed as to whether browsers would get a good or poor idea of the whole work. As to approach, page 99 reflects the importance of archival research and primary sources to my project as a whole. However, the text on the page simply recounts the review; analysis comes in subsequent pages. This section of the book connects whiteness with respectability through these women’s interest in a certain kind of jazz (jazz performed by Brubeck). In this time period, critics and other writers were positioning Brubeck’s jazz (and some other cool jazz musicians) as uniquely respectable. For example, one writer declared to the readership of Good Housekeeping magazine that, “Jazz used to be the boy with dirty hands whom you wouldn’t let come into your house…and now, with clean hands, it is to be found in the concert halls, the music conservatories…and in the nicest living rooms.” But while you wouldn’t necessarily get that important connection from the text of page 99, the image truly paints a picture of white middle-class women’s musical interest (there is only one Black woman in the image, positioned at the back of the room). In that way, page 99 has the potential to reveal quite a lot about whiteness as an intersectional performance visible both onstage and off.

On a more personal note, page 99 comes smack dab in the middle of one of my favorite moments in my book. There has long been a narrative in jazz that women simply do not like or understand jazz music as much or as well as men (you don’t have to look too far today to see similar narratives still thriving). However, the Brubeck Collection showed me how strong midcentury women’s interest in jazz was—fan letter after fan letter recount self-described housewives’ varied ways of engaging with the music, whether as listeners, players, or idea creators. So for me, page 99 presents a jumping off point for another potential project on jazz and gender.

Learn more about Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Garett Jones's "The Culture Transplant"

Garett Jones is Associate Professor of Economics at the Center for Study of Public Choice, George Mason University. He is the author of 10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less (2020) and Hive Mind: How Your Nation's IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own (2015).

Jones applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To a Lot Like the Ones They Left, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Cultural conflict is risky enough, but when different cultural worldviews match up roughly with different ethnicities, the risk is even greater. We’ve already seen that cultural differences tend to persist for generations across different ethnic groups in the United States, Canada, and Europe, so the risk of cultural conflict is certainly there.

And as in the Dr. Seuss story of the Sneetches—where some birds have stars on their bellies and discriminate against those without—small ethnic differences can easily be both self-reinforcing and a focal point for the cultural outrage of others. So, both real and imagined cultural differences can make ethnic conflict more dangerous, more costly, more deadly than other cultural conflicts. It’s a multiplier effect, with risks of downsides all around. The more we dive into the scholarly research on ethnic diversity, the harder it becomes to say that ethnic diversity is usually a strength.

But at least publicly, elites in Western Europe and North America have gone all-in on the theory that our ethnic diversity is our strength—even though the research suggests it’s a double-edged sword in the workplace, a nudge toward lower trust in the local neighborhood, and a multiplier of social conflict for the nation.

Yes, there are plans and proposals and training programs and social media memes designed to reduce the costs of ethnic diversity, but at this point those treatments are the ivermectin of social science—possibly good, possibly bad, possibly pointless. And if things don’t go well, there’s no FDA-certified rescue treatment for the costs of ethnic diversity.

Page 99 of The Culture Transplant falls toward the end of the chapter, so it’s making references to studies discussed at length over the previous twenty or so pages. Page 99 does an excellent job capturing the way I use evidence throughout this book: I use simple, clear language to sum up scholarly research in a way that would make an expert in the field nod along in agreement. And that isn’t just my opinion, it’s the view of a leading expert in the field of cross-country income differences, Professor Areendam Chanda of LSU. In his generous blurb, he said The Culture Transplant was

A unique and authoritative treatment of the deep persistence of cultural attributes that permeates across generations, and through migration, shapes institutions and contemporary outcomes…. Jones's treatment of the literature is a master class in distilling rigorous research and presenting it in a breezy fashion that is hard to put down once you get started.

But far more than most pages, page 99 editorializes, pointing out the jarring conflict between what we find in academic research on ethnic diversity versus the confident pronouncements of politicians, CEOs, and pundits. Part of what I needed to do with The Culture Transplant was to let readers know about the yawning gap between scholarly findings and mainstream media discussions of the long-term effects of migration on national economies. Page 99 of The Culture Transplant turns a spotlight on one important example of that gap, the potential costs of ethnic diversity.

That potential cost of ethnic diversity stands in sharp contrast with a clear potential benefit of skill diversity, a finding that also shows up in the chapter’s review of business research: teams that bring together diverse skills to a new task have a good shot at creating a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Different forms of diversity bring different benefits, different challenges. That’s a reminder that bringing candor to discussions about different forms of diversity is the first step to building the best possible world for all.

Follow Garett Jones on Twitter.

The Page 99 Test: 10% Less Democracy.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ditte Marie Munch-Jurisic's "Perpetrator Disgust"

Ditte Marie Munch-Jurisic is a philosopher specialized in the field of emotions and negative affect with a particular focus on the implications for majority-minority relations. I am currently a research associate at the University of Virginia, working remotely in The Moral Injury Lab, and a teaching associate professor in Minority Studies, University of Copenhagen.

Munch-Jurisic applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Perpetrator Disgust: The Moral Limits of Gut Feelings, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Perpetrator Disgust contains a brisk summary of the book’s unfortunate thesis:

“By rejecting the nativist assumption that human beings are essentially good and possess an instinctual resistance to killing, we arrive at a much more convincing account of the phenomenology of perpetrator disgust.”

We may wish to believe that it is against human nature to kill, and that perpetrator disgust represents the revolt of this benevolent nature against violence, but evidence across continents, conflicts, and time periods shows this account is too simple to be true. Page 99 is typical of the book in casting doubt on comforting conclusions. By pointing to instances of soldiers who enjoy war and the careful, systematic manner in which military organizations manage the emotions of soldiers in order to facilitate killing, the page reinforces a central argument of the book: that gut feelings are not reflections of nature, and that a more complex account of the relationship between our emotions and morality is required.

Through the disturbing lens of perpetrator disgust, we observe that gut feelings can be molded in many different directions and to different purposes. Our emotions are biological templates onto which particular values are imprinted. Gut feelings speak to the social facts of our time and place. Emotions, as a result, must be interpreted through a contextual understanding of the concrete emotional episode, an agent’s broader environment, and the available frameworks for interpreting an emotional experience.

Follow Ditte Marie Munch-Jurisic on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tabitha Stanmore's "Love Spells and Lost Treasure"

Tabitha Stanmore is a research fellow at the University of Exeter.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Love Spells and Lost Treasure: Service Magic in England from the Later Middle Ages to the Early Modern Era, and reported the following:

I was sceptical when asked to take part in the Page 99 Test for Love Spells and Lost Treasure: how could one page, taken at random, reasonably encapsulate the point of a whole book? In the end, though, I admit that I was pleasantly surprised. The page opens with the heading ‘Sales and Marketing’ and, despite how uninspiring this probably sounds, does centre on a major theme throughout the book. One of the key findings of my research is that magicians in premodern England were treated as a form of trader, selling a coveted and skilled ware to ready customers. Page 99 lists a number of ways in which service magicians plied their trade, and particularly the importance of word of mouth for finding potential clients. To quote directly from the opening paragraph:

…how did magicians find their clients and advertise services? Many seemed to have relied on word of mouth and recommendations. Others, particularly itinerant cunning folk, actively sought out clients by knocking on doors or even creating their own business. Either way, an important part of service magicians’ repertoire was their ability to promote their successes and build strong reputations.

People dealing with everyday yet urgent problems – chronic diseases, love-sickness, poverty – had limited directions to turn in the pre-modern period, but magic was definitely one option. Magical practitioners claimed to be able to cure illnesses that left trained doctors stumped, and find hoards of treasure buried in fields. The temptation to control one’s fate made spells an attractive solution, so people often turned to someone with supernatural powers for help. As page 99 relates, though, knowing which magician to approach – or even how to find one – was not always a straightforward task. People had been warned by generations of stories and Church warnings that magicians were sinister people who, at best, might trick you out of your money, and at worst could send you on a path to Hell. In the hope of finding an honest, reliable practitioner therefore, many potential clients relied on an intermediary to introduce them to the right wizard for their needs.

The use of intermediaries to move between cunning folk and their customers emphasises the delicate relationship – and market – in which magicians were acting. To come recommended suggests a long-standing reputation for reliable services: in short, that the magician was trusted by at least some people in their community. But when one’s business relies almost entirely on the good will and positive impression of a small, local population, the situation is necessarily fragile. Failing to perform the magic commissioned could easily damage one’s reputation, and the consequences from there could be severe. At the milder end, a magician’s business could dry up; at the more extreme, it could mean being reported to the authorities.

There’s much more to the book than this, but the themes certainly come through in the Page 99 Test.

Follow Tabitha Stanmore on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elie Honig's "Untouchable: How Powerful People Get Away with It"

Elie Honig worked as a federal and state prosecutor for 14 years. He prosecuted and tried cases involving violent crime, human trafficking, public corruption, and organized crime, including successful prosecutions of over 100 members and associates of the mafia. Honig now is a CNN Legal Analyst, hosts podcasts and writes for Cafe, is a Rutgers University scholar, and is Special Counsel to the law firm Lowenstein Sandler.

Honig applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Untouchable: How Powerful People Get Away with It, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Seven years later, armed with Arillotta’s information, we sent an FBI excavation team to the Agawam murder site. We had gotten permission from a judge for the FBI to take Arillotta out of prison for a day, on a macabre field trip of sorts, so he could show them precisely where to dig. FBI agents quickly found a series of .22-caliber shells on the ground, right where Arillotta had indicated—powerful corroboration in its own right, but merely a warm-up act for what happened next. The FBI team then used a front loader to skim thin layers of dirt, an inch or two at a time, from the spot where Arillotta claimed that Westerman’s body would be found. The FBI sifted carefully through each bucketload of dirt, first by hand and then by using a straining device that looked like a massive colander. After the first few scoops yielded nothing, the FBI’s front loader hit something hard—the soles of a pair of Nikes. It was Westerman’s body, head down, feet up, just as Arillotta had told us. The team spent the next several days, aided by an archaeologist, carefully excavating the site. They ultimately recovered Westerman’s decomposed remains—still with a ski mask over his head and a Taser in his jacket pocket, just as Arillotta had described. And inside the grave the team found the .38-caliber shell from that final close-range gunshot that Fred Geas put in Westerman’s head.

There has never been better corroboration than this. Here’s what I said to the jury during my closing argument at trial: “There’s an expression that people use in regular everyday life: ‘does he know where the bodies are buried?’ It means, does this guy know what he’s talking about? Is this guy for real? Well, here, you see that expression literally applied. Anthony Arillotta knew exactly where the body was buried.”

And, believe it or not, Arillotta had yet another murder plot to confess. (This was a truly prodigious crew.)

We caught a good one with this Page 99 Test: a story about a New York City mafia case that I prosecuted where we dug up a dead body of a guy the mob had killed and buried in the woods seven years prior. This sounds like it’s out of a movie, but it’s all true; I was an organized crime prosecutor for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York, and I use real-life stories from my own cases to illustrate broader points about how powerful people get away with it.

This particular anecdote appears in a section of the book about how powerful people insulate themselves from law enforcement by surrounding themselves with other criminals, lower down in the power hierarchy. Savvy powerhouses – political bosses, corporate CEOs, drug kingpins, actual mob bosses – understand that you always want to stay away from a crime scene, you want to say as little as possible to as few people as possible, and you want to have others do the dirty work. And, if somebody does happen to flip – like Anthony Arillotta, the gangster discussed in this excerpt – the boss can brand that person as a murderer, a criminal, a liar whose testimony for the prosecution should not be trusted by a jury.

But prosecutors (sometimes) have a counter-move: corroboration, independent evidence that backs up the cooperator’s testimony. “It’s not about whether you like the cooperator,” we’d often tell juries, “it’s about whether you believe him.” And we’d urge the jury, in making that determination, to consider the testimony against other hard evidence. Sometimes, prosecutors gather substantial corroboration, and other times we wind up with little to nothing in terms of support. This story focuses on one case where we got especially lucky. The cooperator, Arillotta, was backed up by the ultimate form of corroboration: he led us directly to a dead body that had been missing for seven years.

Follow Elie Honig on Twitter.

The Page 99 Test: Hatchet Man.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eliran Bar-El's "How Slavoj Became Žižek"

Eliran Bar-El is a lecturer in sociology at the University of York.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, How Slavoj Became Žižek: The Digital Making of a Public Intellectual, and reported the following:

Page 99 demonstrates one of the ways by which Slavoj Zizek, the Slovenian Hegelian-Lacanian thinker, became an international celebrity and global public intellectual. Particularly, it describes one of Zizek’s earlier books, The Ticklish Subject from 1999, and shows how in-and-through introducing the book, its topic and goal, Zizek also casts a wide net of intellectual-political positions through which he positions himself.

As one would expect from a single page, this is a fragment of the entire story that my book unfolds, yet, nonetheless it is an indicative one: Zizek’s unique style of performance, his constant act of positioning, as well as frequent interventions in fields such as publishing and academia, these are just a few of the factors that eventually led to his global breakthrough a decade later.

In this regard, page 99 could be seen as a teaser. While it contains some key features related to Zizek’s emergence and reception, the whole story cannot be understood solely based on this page. Given the processual nature of public interventions, they are never a one-off. For Zizek to become a brand, and for his brand to stick, a more sustained positioning process had to be maintained by a network of people including close allies and fierce critics. In this precise sense, what happened before and after page 99 is crucial for understanding how Slavoj became Zizek. For example, Zizek’s early publication in France, roughly a decade prior to the episode on page 99, did not receive much positive attention. Therefore, Zizek started to expand his social network of personal and professional relations and to publish more in England. However, this was still not the big breakthrough that put Zizek on the global intellectual map. This happened shortly after page 99, in another episode that took place in the US. There Zizek brought his ideas to a wide range of publics by intervening with various mediums, including feature films and internet clips. Yet, such an academically unusual and diverse performance, in addition to other reasons as political positions and rate of interventions, resulted in a growing critique of his work and doubt of his intellectual seriousness or authenticity. This is explained as part of the “media-academia trade-off” through which Zizek keeps positioning and re-positioning himself to this day.

Learn more about How Slavoj Became Žižek at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue