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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Page 99 Test: Too Much to Know.

--Marshal Zeringue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Visit Sergey Gavrilets's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Greg Garrett's "White Lies"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Follow Greg Garrett on Facebook and Substack.

The Page 99 Test: Entertaining Judgment.

Writers Read: Greg Garrett (June 2017).

The Page 99 Test: Living with the Living Dead.

--Marshal Zeringue

Marina Cano's "Theatrical Afterlives"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

Sophie Gee's "The Barbarous Feast"

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

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

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

I write:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Writers Read: Sophie Gee (June 2009).

--Marshal Zeringue

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

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

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

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

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

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

Visit Thomas Leonard-Roy's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Bond's "Animate"

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

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

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

Visit Michael Bond's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Visit Ahsan I. Butt's homepage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Carol Lin's "When News Breaks"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Visit Carol Lin's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Violaine Roussel's "Data-Driven Hollywood"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue