Emma Taylor's "An Elite Education"

Emma Taylor is a Lecturer in Education at King's Academy, King's College London where she currently leads on the development of an induction programme for all new teaching staff at King’s. She joined King’s from LSE where she held the position of teaching fellow on LSE’s flagship interdisciplinary course for all undergraduate students, LSE100.

Taylor applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, An Elite Education: How Privilege Is Produced in a Private School, and shared the following:

On page 99 of my book I introduce the idea that the students I teach and interview for this research are struggling to reconcile the tension between being aware of the advantages their privilege has given them over others, whilst being unable to shake the feeling that they still deserve to attend elite higher education institutions such as Oxford and Cambridge. They feel that their privilege should not negate the hard work they put into the process of preparing for the intense admissions processes of these institutions.

This is not a central theme of the book, yet it introduces the reader to a key finding regarding the ways in which the students in my study confront their own privilege. They don't outright deny it, nor do they deny some of the practices that have enabled their success (such as extensive practice and preparation for university admissions interviews), instead they negotiate a messy boundary between acceptance and denial, particularly when, as I report earlier in the chapter, they leave school and start to spend time with people for whom privilege is not the norm. This negotiation takes on added significance when considered alongside the influential positions that many of these students are likely to occupy in later life.

Indeed, what’s is missing from this single page is the broader UK context where research by the Sutton Trust (a leading social mobility charity) tells us that those who have attended private schools in Britain continue to be disproportionately represented in positions of power and responsibility with, for example, 68% of FTSE chairs having attended private schools despite only 7% of the school age population being privately educated. We can therefore be relatively confident that many of the people in my study will become influential figures in one way or another. And, later in the book, I ask how the students’ realisation and acknowledgement of their own privilege might be leveraged for the greater good, or more specifically, how it could be harnessed to broaden the range of lived experiences represented among those who hold positions of power.

So, the test enables me to flesh out one element of the book’s argument, but not the central theme – which is ultimately to better understand how private schools in Britain support an environment in which certain privileging dispositions are inculcated and leveraged to propel students into elite higher education institutions and professions. Ultimately, I find that the school serves as a training ground in which a form of audacity in the face of authority can be practiced and honed, enabling those students who are multiply advantaged to feel a sense of comfort when they find themselves in potentially intimidating positions in later life. To bring it back to page 99, this audacity is frequently mistaken for merit by the students themselves and, on a wider scale, British society more generally.

Very happy to hear any thoughts or reflections from anyone who does read the book as a result of this blog – please do get in touch!

Visit Emma Taylor's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jason Baehr's "Inquiry and Agency"

Jason Baehr is the Casassa Chair in Social Values and Professor of Philosophy at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. He specializes in theoretical and applied virtue epistemology. His other books include Deep in Thought: A Practical Guide to Teaching for Intellectual Virtues (2021), Intellectual Virtues and Education: Essays in Applied Virtue Epistemology (2016), and The Inquiring Mind: On Intellectual Virtues and Virtue Epistemology (2011). He is co-founder of the Intellectual Virtues Academy of Long Beach and is presently co-directing the LMU Intellectual Character Initiative, which is sponsored by a grant from the Educating Character Initiative at Wake Forest University.

Baehr applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Inquiry and Agency: A Theory of Intellectual Virtues and Vices, and reported the following:

From page 99:

In keeping with this, when thinking about the persons we aspire to be, or the qualities we desire in ourselves, our friends, partners, or children, I take it that few of us would not regard as best or most admirable the relevant harmony between action and affection. We desire, not only to think and act well, but also to enjoy thinking and acting well. One way to put the guiding principle here might be that it is good, and good in a way that is relevant to personal worth, to enjoy and delight in that which itself is good, including the good of virtuous activity (cf. Hurka 2001: Ch. 1; Sripada 2016: 1210). This applies, not just to morally virtuous activity, but also to intellectually virtuous activity.

Often it is a matter of luck (e.g., of how we’ve been parented or our natural temperaments) whether we are constituted so as to enjoy intellectually virtuous activity or experience other intellectually virtuous affections. Might it, then, be a mistake to think of these affections as an element or dimension of intellectual virtues?

Page 99 is a representative sample of Inquiry & Agency. The book explores the nature, structure, and evaluative status of intellectual virtues and vices. It treats intellectual virtues – such as curiosity, open-mindedness, and intellectual humility – as having four primary dimensions, one of which is an affective dimension. The key idea is that to possess an intellectual virtue in its fullness, one must be disposed to experience certain fitting affections in connection with its exercise. Virtuously open-minded people, for instance, aren’t merely willing to explore alternative perspectives; as a general rule, they enjoy doing so. This disposition says something important and favorable about who they are as persons.

However, this feature of intellectual virtues gives rise to some difficult questions: for instance, given that we don’t have direct voluntary control over our affections, how can they reflect favorably or negatively on who we are as persons? How can they contribute to our personal worth?

These issues are representative of the book as a whole in two ways. First, while the chapter that contains page 99 explores the affective dimension of intellectual virtues, several additional chapters offer similar treatments of the other primary dimensions of an intellectual virtue: namely, competence, motivational, and judgment dimensions. Second, a recurring theme throughout the book is whether or in what sense intellectual virtues and vices – understood as qualities that necessarily contribute positively or negatively to our personal worth – can be a matter of luck. I argue that while intellectual virtues are immune to certain forms of luck (e.g. environmental luck), they are consistent with other forms (e.g. constitutive luck).

Visit Jason Baehr's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Susannah Crockford's "A Perturbed System"

Susannah Crockford is a lecturer in anthropology at the University of Exeter. She is the author of Ripples of the Universe: Spirituality in Sedona, Arizona.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, A Perturbed System: Religion and Climate Change from the End of a World, with the following results:

Page 99 of A Perturbed System is just one paragraph at the end of chapter two:

The language of salvation, of saving the planet, leads not to answers but to further questions: Can the planet be saved? If so, who will save us? What will we have to sacrifice to save ourselves? News media employ theological motifs that lead toward individualized solutions, while diminishing collective action, whether in the form of private retreats or public protests. This results in an implicit denial of systemic change, a denial constructed through omission. Some things are rendered unsayable, which perpetuates an inertia that maintains political-economic systems. This inertia is not possible for those in high-intensity struggles, like the residents of Lake Charles, because they are already fighting for their continued existence, living through sacrifice on a daily basis. For those still, for now, in low-intensity struggles, who have a degree of separation from the material-somatic effects of their environments and climate, mediation remains necessary.

The Page 99 Test works relatively well for my book. It makes clear that the book is about climate and environment, about how religious language, such as salvation and sacrifice, features in climate discourse, and how this can limit and constrain climate action. However, it only provides a partial understanding of the range of the book. For example, the reference to Lake Charles may lead readers to think that the book is about Louisiana, the state that the city of Lake Charles is in. It may mislead further, depending on what Lake Charles means for readers outside of the US, as it is also a location in Nova Scotia, Canada. In fact, the book is a multi-sited ethnography that incorporates fieldwork undertaken in Arizona, Missouri, England, Belgium, and Sweden, as well as Louisiana. There is also little in this specific paragraph that makes the ethnographic methodology apparent. The reference to news media may lead the reader to assume this is a work of media criticism, rather than an anthropological work. The test is limited in its efficacy because there is just one paragraph, and it would be difficult to understand the entirety of this book in one paragraph. Beyond the argument that religious language, rooted in Christianity, constrains and enables climate discourse, this is a book about how people in English-speaking Global North contexts respond to climate change. It is a book about how people are living in a time of endings, when ecosystems are collapsing, mass extinctions are underway, and political systems are stymied. How do we live in a time of death? The book makes the argument that religion is essential to understanding how climate discourse is framed, and it also makes the argument that a new climate ethics, a new theology of climate, is required to navigate between despair and denial and find a way forward in this time.

Learn more about A Perturbed System at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mengqi Wang's "Anxious Homes"

Mengqi Wang is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Duke Kunshan University. Her research interests include economic anthropology, urban anthropology, political economy, gender studies, and science and technology studies.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Anxious Homes: Inflexible Demand and China's Housing Market, and shared the following:

From page 99:

…Yanlin’s house is a two-story construction, and she has been waiting for years for the government to demolish it. People in Sky Realty Group sometimes teased her: “Come on, we know that you married because you thought they (her in-laws) would be chaiqian hu.”

“Shut your mouth or I will show you how to,” Yanlin replied. “We are living perfectly fine in our house.” In the past ten years, generous compensation policies had fashioned the status of chaiqian hu as a synonym for overnight riches in the Qilin neighborhood. Yet Yanlin’s family was not yet a chaiqian hu. The 2001 construction of Eastern Town stopped eight hundred meters to the left of her house. The 2006 road construction missed them by five hundred meters. Now the house stands, with some other unlucky neighbors, among high-rise buildings and wide paved roads.

The passage on page 99 accurately captures the anxiety ordinary Chinese people experienced as they grappled with the country’s fast pace of urbanization and the windfall of wealth coming through the real estate market in this process. The book is an anthropological monograph about the everyday making of a housing market at East Nanjing’s urbanizing frontier, shown through ethnographic stories about how brokers, buyers, and developers assemble the local market from 2012 to 2015, during which time China’s real estate economy experienced the fastest growth. The book asks what made people embrace homeownership and housing financialization, apart from their desire for wealth accumulation.

In particular, the book examines a vernacular concept called “inflexible demand/gangxu” that local actors draw on to refer to, and construct, a non- negotiable need for homeownership. Inflexible demand originally appeared as a shorthand for the microeconomic concept of inelastic demand. In everyday language in contemporary China, however, people use the concept to express a rightful demand of a home of one’s own. The newlyweds, for example, claim to inflexibly demand a home so they can start a family; developers built relatively cheaper housing to target buyers with an “inflexible demand” for homes; and the government regulates the market in the name of protecting ordinary citizens’ inflexible housing need. Resettled families, such as the ones depicted on page 99, could often expect to receive properties as compensation in urban expansion plans. The government gave such compensation to meet resettled families’ housing needs. However, in a time when rising property values drastically widened the gap in wealth between urban homeowners and the rest of the population, such compensation brought wide dreams of riches as well as anxiety over the value of one’s home.

The book argues that China’s real estate economy was able to extract enormous wealth from its urbanizing population through the popular discourse that frames homeownership as an inflexible demand. The concept also strongly shapes how people view private homeownership in China. Grounded in ethnography, the book argues that homeownership does not suggest independence, but rather, a fuller inclusion of citizens within the developmental state. In the popular narrative, the home emerges as the original source of value and an inalienable possession that collapses the distinction between use value and exchange value.

Learn more about Anxious Homes at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Carlton F. W. Larson's "One Nation Under Law"

Carlton F.W. Larson is a Martin Luther King, Jr., Professor of Law at the University of California, Davis, School of Law, where he teaches constitutional law and English and American legal history. He earned his undergraduate degree, summa cum laude, in history from Harvard University, and his law degree from Yale Law School, where he was an Articles Editor of The Yale Law Journal and Executive Editor of The Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities. After law school, he served as a law clerk to Judge Michael Daly Hawkins of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and was a commercial litigator at Covington & Burling in Washington, DC.

Larson applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, One Nation Under Law: The Meaning of the Declaration of Independence, and reported the following:

From page 99 (the introduction to Chapter Six):

The view that the Declaration of Independence created an American nation isn’t just supported by the document’s text and history; it is also supported by how the Declaration has endured in legal, political, and cultural memory. If the Declaration created thirteen independent nations, then courts, legal analysts, political figures, and the American public have been getting it wrong for a very long time. The one-nation view is amply supported by judicial decisions that have carefully considered the issue, by the public statements of some of the leading lawyers of the nineteenth century—Joseph Story, Daniel Webster, and Abraham Lincoln, and by the long tradition of celebrating the Fourth of July as the birthday of the American nation.

This excerpt provides a decent representation of the book. It is part of my larger argument in Part Two that the Declaration of Independence created an American nation, in which the states were confederated together under an unwritten constitution and presented themselves as one nation to the rest of the world. Chapter Four addresses the textual arguments in support of this position, and Chapter Five considers the history between 1775 and 1787. Chapter Six, which is entitled “Memory,” turns to how the Declaration was viewed in later periods, with the primary emphasis on the 1790s and the early nineteenth century.

It is also reflective of the book’s overall prose style. Even though the book contains a fair amount of legal material, I wanted it to be accessible to non-lawyers, so I sought to avoid jargon and technicalities. My hope is that any reader can pick up the book and easily follow its arguments.

The excerpt, which is drawn from Part Two on nationhood, is less reflective of other parts of the book. Part One addresses the text, authorship, and legal status of the Declaration. Part Three turns to the Declaration’s commitment to the rule of law and constitutional structure, and Part Four considers how courts have treated the Declaration’s language about liberty and equality. Readers seeking to learn more about those issues would be better served by a page from one of those parts.

Visit Carlton F. W. Larson's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Trials of Allegiance.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael W. Childers's "The Mountains are Calling"

Michael W. Childers is an associate professor of history at Colorado State University. He is the author of Colorado Powder Keg: Ski Resorts and the Environmental Movement, winner of the International Ski History Association 2013 Ullr Award.

Childers applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Mountains Are Calling: Tourists and the Unmaking of Yosemite National Park, with the following results:

On opening to the top of page 99, a reader would read the sentence, “After more than a decade of financial struggles, the Yosemite Valley Railroad made its final run in August of 1945.”

After briefly learning of the railroad’s mounting financial issues, the destruction of a key trestle by an errant cigarette butt, and the final run of Train Number 23 from Merced to Merced Falls to pick up two railcars, the page jumps to the 1970s, when environmentalists begin arguing that rail travel might just be the solution to Yosemite’s growing traffic problems. Among them was a young University of California, Santa Barbara graduate student, and future dean of National Park history, Alfred Runte argued in National Parks and Conservation Magazine returning to railroad to Yosemite would guarantee maximum protection with maximum visitation.

In one of my favorite stories in the book, page 99 then introduces readers to designer and writer Christopher Swan and City of San Francisco professor Chet Roaman’s novel yv88: An Eco-Fiction of Tomorrow. “Part science fiction novella, part illustrated schematic, the book proposed a radical transformation of how visitors enjoy Yosemite by removing all the roads into the park and replacing them with a solar-powered railroad that carries visitors from Merced into the Yosemite Valley.”

In many way page 99 captures the struggle at the center of the book’s story of Yosemite on how to ensure access to visitors while protecting its environment. Trains, even solar powered ones, solved what many saw as the primary problem facing the park: cars.

Visit Michael W. Childers's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ben Jones's "Protecting Life"

Ben Jones is an assistant professor of ethics and public policy at Penn State. His books include The Ethics of Policing (coedited with Eduardo Mendieta), Apocalypse without God, and Antiracist Policing (coauthored with Karin Martin). His research on policing has received awards from the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics and University of Houston's Elizabeth D. Rockwell Center on Ethics and Leadership. He cofounded and coordinates the Policing, Policy, and Philosophy Initiative (3PI) based at Penn State's Rock Ethics Institute. Previously, he worked in the nonprofit sector on criminal justice, which included directing the campaign that repealed Connecticut's death penalty.

Jones applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Protecting Life: The Ethics of Police Deadly Force, and shared the following:

If you turn to page 99 of Protecting Life: The Ethics of Police Deadly Force, you’re in the middle of Chapter 5, which explores what obligations police have to persons with mental illness. There are a lot of debates in philosophy and law about how to understand these obligations, especially when someone with diminished culpability is violent and poses a threat. Page 99 comes after considering several proposals and ultimately rejecting them. It’s part of the section that outlines my proposal for what police owe to persons with mental illness.

At first glance, page 99 might not appear to be a good snapshot of the book. The page starts in the middle of a longer explanation, mentioning what I call “the fusion account”—my proposed account of police’s obligations to persons with mental illness. But you need to read the preceding page to know what that term means.

If, though, you can get past the unfamiliar terms at the start, the rest of page 99 dives into ideas central to the book. Protecting Life unpacks the specific moral concerns raised by many police killings and then proceeds to identify policies, laws, practices, and training to address those concerns. It notes two overarching worries with police killings, especially in the US: (1) too often police use deadly force in circumstances where it’s not necessary, and (2) the harms from police deadly force fall disproportionately on marginalized groups.

Killings of persons with mental illness illustrate both concerns. Sadly, there have been a number of incidents where police have used unnecessary and deadly force against individuals with mental illness. A few pages earlier, on page 89, the book discusses the 2011 brutal beating death of Kelly Thomas—an unarmed man with schizophrenia living on the street in Fullerton, California. Data back up what these anecdotes suggest: persons with serious mental illness in the US die from police violence at disproportionately higher rates.

That reality represents a moral failure. Page 99 emphasizes that both police institutions and individual officers have obligations to better protect vulnerable groups. By exploring those obligations and how to make them a reality, Protecting Life serves as a resource to police professionals, policymakers, and the public.

Visit Ben Jones's Penn State webpage.

Coffee with a Canine: Ben Jones & Sloopy.

The Page 99 Test: Apocalypse without God.

--Marshal Zeringue

Aarthi Vadde's "We the Platform"

Aarthi Vadde is E. Blake Byrne Associate Professor of English at Duke University. She is the author of Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism Beyond Europe, 1914–2016 (2016) and coeditor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, volume F: The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries (2024), among other books. She is the president of the Society for Novel Studies (2025–27) and cofounder of its podcast Novel Dialogue.

Vadde applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, We the Platform: How the Internet Changed Twenty-First-Century Literature, and reported the following:

If you turn to page 99 of We the Platform, the first thing you’ll see is the answer to a question posed on page 98 (uh oh).

Jeopardy-style, here’s the answer:

At least three things: First, many authors and publishers are “profoundly suspicious of the internet but recognize the need to revise their business models to find ways of profiting from it.” Second, “the effect of multiple book formats (print, e-book, audio) alongside platforms for self-publication has changed what it means to own fiction intellectually for authors and consume fiction physically for readers.” Third, the circulation of literature, in which “the owning of books and the sharing of written stories are two separate things, has influenced the styles, subjects, and locations of literary writing.

The question: What happens to literature when the internet dominates book culture?

Surprisingly, maybe even reassuringly, the Page 99 Test produced satisfying results. We the Platform is about how the internet changed twenty-first century literature (that’s my subtitle) and page 99 covers both the economic changes to the landscape and the stylistic innovations that resulted from major authors deciding to write fiction for social media. The rest of page introduces three such authors – Jennifer Egan, David Mitchell, and Teju Cole – all of whom wrote fiction on Twitter in the 2010s. I claim, crucially on page 99, that writing for Twitter led them to make “formal and rhetorical adjustments away from the printed book” and these in turn led to stylistic changes in their major post-Twitter novels (like The Candy House, Slade House, and Tremor).

So in a nutshell, page 99 gets to the heart of my book’s thesis even if it only provides a peek into one of my chapters. Other chapters provide answers to different questions: like how did Creative Commons turn authorship into a mass cultural category? Why did Margaret Atwood partner with Wattpad? Does the online growth of fan fiction shed new light on literary fiction? (Hint: it absolutely does). As a whole, We the Platform strives to be a two-way street: it shows how the internet changed literature but, just as importantly, how literature changes our perspective on the internet.

Visit Aarthi Vadde's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Leah Kalmanson's "Local Gods"

Leah Kalmanson is associate professor and Bhagwan Adinath Professor of Jain Studies in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of North Texas.

She is the author of Cross-Cultural Existentialism: On the Meaning of Life in Asian and Western Thought (2020) and coauthor of A Practical Guide to World Philosophies: Selves, Worlds, and Ways of Knowing (2021).

Kalmanson applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Local Gods: A Philosophy of Spiritual Diversity, with the following results:

The first thing readers encounter on page 99 of Local Gods is the following line of text, set as a block quotation:

山林、川谷、丘陵，能出雲為風雨，見怪物，皆曰神。有天下者，祭百神。諸侯在 其地則祭之，亡其地則不祭。

This is a passage in classical Chinese from the Liji or Book of Rites. The block quote corresponds to my English translation at the end of page 98:

Mountains and forests, rivers and valleys, hills and mounds [i.e., tombs], which can cause the clouds to produce wind and rain or strange things to appear—these are called gods. The one who possesses all under the sky [i.e., the emperor] sacrifices to a hundred gods. The various regional lords make sacrifices when in their own territories; when not in their own territories, they do not sacrifice.

My discussion of this content on page 99 does, indeed, reflect the central questions of the book: How “local” are local gods? How should we behave toward gods outside of our own home locales? And how can godly powers be cultivated locally, either in the landscape, at the burial site, or within the crucible of one’s own heart?

The content on page 99 also reflects larger trajectories in my work in general. My research has often been spurred by gaps I’ve found in my options for classroom materials. Local Gods was born because I was looking for a book to use for a philosophy of religion class. My previous book, Cross-Cultural Existentialism, was also written for use in a class.

So, you would think I would write books that are approachable and accessible. But my undergraduates, who have dutifully plodded through these texts, will readily tell you otherwise! Philosophy, with its technical jargon, can already feel uninviting. My books contain technical philosophical terminology in a variety of languages and scripts. Moreover, for Local Gods, my publisher agreed to my requests to incorporate non-English terms without the usual italicization. I had specific reasons for this (which I discuss on pages 14 to 16), but I recognize that the frequency of unfamiliar words and diacritical marks can be jarring.

I am not a polyglot. Local Gods is the product not only of countless hours of my own research and language study but also the time and effort of specialists who graciously responded to my emails to evaluate specific portions and lend their expertise. For many readers, the opening content on page 99 of Local Gods might be inviting and intriguing. Roughly twenty percent of the world’s people are familiar with Chinese characters to some degree. For many other readers, flipping to page 99 might give the impression this book is too specialized or too obscure. But I wrote Local Gods with a sincere desire to learn, and I found what I learned fascinating from beginning to end, so I hope that a deeper dive into the book makes it worth the reader’s effort.

Learn more about Local Gods at the Columbia University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Chad M. Topaz's "Unlocking Justice"

Chad M. Topaz is professor of complex systems at Williams College and cofounder of the QSIDE Institute, which uses data science to promote equity and justice. An award-winning educator and researcher recognized by the National Academy of Sciences, the Association for Women in Mathematics, and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, he has authored numerous studies at the intersection of data science, social justice, and public policy. His opinion pieces have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, the New York Daily News, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Inside Higher Ed, and other publications.

Topaz applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Unlocking Justice: The Power of Data to Confront Inequity and Create Change, and shared the following:

Page 99 of Unlocking Justice distinguishes jails from prisons. Jails are short-term holding places, high-turnover and sparse on programming. Prisons hold people convicted of serious crimes and, at least in theory, offer more rehabilitation. From there, the page turns to Rikers Island, New York City's infamous jail complex, long associated with violence, neglect, and official failure. It begins a section called "A Brief History of Terrible Things" and warns the reader that the material ahead is hard to read.

Does the Page 99 Test work? Mostly. A reader who opened to page 99 would meet one of the book's central concerns, which is what powerful systems do to people when the public is not looking. The page is not abstract. It is about a place, a history, and people trapped inside an institution that has somehow survived scandal after scandal.

But page 99 would mislead in two ways. First, Unlocking Justice is not only a book about harm. It is a book about data. Court records, public-records requests, jail data, sentencing data, risk-assessment algorithms. Page 99 starts to move toward why the work matters. It does not show how the work is done.

Second, the page is much darker and more solemn than the book as a whole. The book spends real time with violence, secrecy, and racial disparity. It has to. But it is also, in places, funny, and it is, above all, hopeful. And although it is a book about data, it is not a technical book. You do not have to love numbers, or even like them, to follow it. Its argument is that data is not just for experts and institutions. It is for residents, organizers, students, journalists, and anyone willing to ask what the numbers show.

Unlocking Justice walks through the criminal legal system. A rural New England town with a portrait of Hitler in the police station, which became the starting point for an investigation of racial bias in policing. Public judicial records that, once pried loose, named the New York City judges setting bail at disproportionate rates. Florida's COMPAS algorithm, which I examined for the inequity buried in its risk scores. And more. Again and again, the institutions with the most power over people's lives are the ones working hardest to keep their data out of view. The point of the book is that people can force that view open, and use it to demand transparency, accountability, and justice.

Visit Chad M. Topaz's website.

--Marshal Zeringue