W. Jason Miller's "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood"

W. Jason Miller is a Distinguished Professor and public scholar who acts as a cultural detective, unearthing the hidden connections that reshape American history. From discovering a lost recording of MLK’s first "I Have a Dream" speech to his latest revelation of the secret mentorship between Langston Hughes and Nina Simone, Miller bridges the gap between rigorous archival research and compelling public narrative.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood: Nina Simone, Langston Hughes, and the Birth of Black Power, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood: Nina Simone, Langston Hughes, and the Birth of Black Power reads:

But before he left Lagos, Nigeria, just in case he had wondered how it truly felt to be a father of the bride, Hughes found himself trying to check out of room #203 of the Federal Palace Hotel owing more than five hundred dollars. The sum, accrued from various charges not covered by AMSAC, forced him to wire home and wait through an excruciating series of telegrams and transfers.

Readers opening to page 99 of the book, the last paragraph of chapter 6, would get an innate sense of the podcast-style storytelling and detail captured throughout the book. Flipping to this page, a reader would be intrigued to wonder exactly how Langston Hughes used a 1961 lunch invitation at John F. Kenedy’s White House to secure singer Nina Simone a honeymoon sponsored by the CIA.

December 1961 featured a series of American musicians traveling (all expenses paid by the CIA) to perform in Nigeria to unknowingly promote American capitalism at the height of the Cold War. I listened to several podcasts to shape the opening hook, storyline, and suspense of this entire chapter. The seven years of research anchoring the book comes through in the details of naming the exact hotel rooms used by Hughes and Simone. Flipping back just one page reveals why Nina could not stay even longer (as she wanted) on her first overseas trip. On New Year’s Eve of 1961, “The Amazing Nina Simone” played Carnegie Hall for the first time as an “added attraction,” joining fellow North Carolinians John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk as concert headliners.

Visit W. Jason Miller's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jen Thompson's "Wild Pivot"

Jen Thompson is a former political campaign manager and counsel in the US House and Senate. She successfully made up for a massive campaign deficit by orchestrating events with the President of the United States and other key figures. She has been quoted in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, and others. Thompson left politics after managing the most nationally watched Senate campaign in 2002 and moved to Australia. Born in Chicago, Thompson has lived in twelve cities, seven states, and three countries, and has traveled to many more. She currently lives in Redlands, California.

Thompson applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Wild Pivot: Notes from a Political Life Rewritten, with the following results:

From page 99:

It was Sunday morning, and the street was totally silent. I stood on the front stoop for a few moments to get my bearings, and as I began walking, I remembered the old saying about how discovering God’s meaning is like chasing a wild boar in the forest. Even if you search for many days on end, you might never catch the boar; you might not even catch a glimpse of him. But there is absolutely no chance of catching the boar if you don’t even attempt the chase.

I had never heard of the Page 99 Test before, but then I turned to page 99 of my memoir, Wild Pivot: Notes from a Political Life Rewritten. How brilliant of author Ford Madox Ford to come up the idea that the quality of the whole will be revealed to you by turning to page 99. Wow! That is an absolute truth about page 99 of my memoir.

Chasing the Boar is an old proverb that I use throughout my book. It appears in the third vignette, several chapters are entitled Chasing the Boar, and it is the very last sentence of my memoir. It is also front and center on page 99!

I say often that Wild Pivot is a book that’s all about politics that has absolutely nothing to do with politics. Yes, the thread of the book is the nationally watched, very intense Senate campaign that I ran years ago, but really, Wild Pivot is about having the courage to listen to our inner calling and transform ourselves into the most real, truest versions of who we are. “Chasing the Boar” is how I’ve described that process.

After I almost died in a fiery car crash on the campaign trail, I had a moment of clarity that changed my life, and I started to listen – finally, after decades of shutting my inside voice down – to what my insides were trying to tell me. I discovered that everything I’d given myself to promoting (achieving power, money and fame at any cost to boost my own ego) was fundamentally misaligned with the person I am at my core. This process of discernment took me years. It was messy, painful, and confusing. I mean, really: Who gives up all the things I did in a search for inner truth? Nobody! It’s so difficult to admit that the job, or the marriage, or our lives don’t fit who we are. But I believe we all have that inner voice, and mine told me to keep chasing the boar.

Wild Pivot travels back and forth in time through vignettes between my past and present with painful lessons described in raw, jarring detail. But it is also funny, because I believe that laughing at myself is a very powerful medicine. In the end, Wild Pivot is meant to be a memoir of hope. The rewards of authenticity are immeasurable.

I’m still chasing the boar!

Visit Jen Thompson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lara M. Brown's "Thomas Jefferson’s Landmark Deal"

Lara M. Brown currently serves as a senior policy advisor to the Center on Civility and Democracy at The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute. Previously, she held academic posts at the George Washington University and Villanova University. Among her scholarly publications, she is the author of Amateur Hour: Presidential Character and the Question of Leadership.

Brown applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Jefferson's Landmark Deal: The Politics of the Louisiana Purchase, and shared the following:

If you were to solely examine page 99 of Thomas Jefferson’s Landmark Deal, you’d find a lot of information about the entire book. The reason for this is because page 99 falls within the book’s conclusion and happens to be centered around the character of Jefferson’s political leadership. This page number coincidence is because this book is part of a University of Kansas Press series of short—under 50,000 words—texts on landmark presidential decisions.

Starting at the top, I discuss and quote a few renown scholars—Susan Dunn, Doris Graber, Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter Onuf, who summarized Jefferson’s aspirations for expanded liberty in an expansive republic, while noting his contradictory impulse to act as the public's trustee and the nation’s patriarch. Jefferson believed he knew what was best to restore the revolutionary values of 1776, and to chart a course for America’s future. Although often pleasantly solicitous, Jefferson didn't really think he needed to ask anyone much of anything. Consequently, when it came to the diplomatic maneuverings and convoluted negotiations that eventually manifested in the Louisiana Purchase Treaty, Jefferson was neither transparent nor democratic. Adapting his tactics to political circumstances, he tended towards secrecy and duplicity in his dealings with his fellow partisans, the public, and Congress. All told, Jefferson cared more about his preferred policy ends than his specific political means. In this instance, his ends included Americans controlling the port of New Orleans, possessing navigation rights on the Mississippi River, and resetting relations and reviving trade with France.

But as the book shows, and is also discussed on page 99, there was nothing novel about Jefferson’s foreign policy leadership during his presidency. He was who he had always been. As I explained, “character is the constant that infuses all aspects of presidential leadership,” and Jefferson had always been more focused on realizing his political ideals than remaining consistent in his personal actions. His temperamental inclination to avoid direct conflict often led him to surreptitiously pursue his aims. In a longer discussion of the book, I remarked that Jefferson was a “politician who was more apt to stab you in the back than shoot you in the face.” It was precisely these tendencies that helped make Jefferson well-suited to patiently pursue a diplomatic deal with Napoleon Bonaparte.

While there is certainly a lot more in this compact volume, page 99 gets to the heart of the book’s argument about the character of Jefferson’s political leadership.

Visit Lara M. Brown's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alex Edmans's "The Madness of Markets"

Alex Edmans is Professor of Finance at London Business School and a widely recognized global expert on behavioral finance, responsible business, and misinformation. He has spoken at Davos, testified in the UK House of Commons, and reached millions through his TED talks and contributions to the BBC, CNBC, and The Guardian. He is the author of May Contain Lies, which received huge acclaim from the Times, The Guardian, Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times. His first book, Grow the Pie, was a Financial Times Book of the Year.

Edmans applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Madness of Markets: Why Smart Investors Make Crazy Decisions–and How to Exploit Them, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Madness of Markets: Why Smart Investors Make Crazy Decisions – And How To Exploit Them is about herd behavior in investing. It says:

But blindly copying someone else’s trades is too naive a strategy. What really matters is access to information. The skill lies in taking other people’s insights, mixing them with your own research, and then deciding whether to act. Veronika Pool, Noah Stoffman and Scott Yonker studied how fund manager networks affect how they select their stocks. They found that, when investors happen to live in the same neighbourhood – literally just down the street – their portfolios overlap more than if they only share the same city. Looking this closely rules out other explanations like city-wide newspapers or a conference coming to town. And when money managers become neighbours, the overlap only appears after the move, not before – so it’s not just similar preferences. Most importantly, the information they shared was useful. Trades linked to neighbourhood ties outperformed by 6-7% per year: what spreads from over-the-fence chats is signal, not smoke. Sometimes, the crowd really does have wisdom.

But fund managers don’t just talk shop with other fund managers. Their circles are wider. As we’ve seen, Facebook allows us to trace these broader networks. That earlier study [by Michael Bailey, Ruiqing Cao, Theresa Kuchler and Johannes Stroebel] measured friendships between individuals; a similar research team linked entire places. They built a “Social Connectedness Index”, which measures how strong Facebook friendship ties are between two areas.

The Page 99 Test works well for several reasons. First, the book is based on top-tier academic research that’s but highly relevant for practitioners. These papers are on whether following the crowd improves returns. Second, the book is nuanced. It’s easy to say that following others is mindless mimicry, but data isn’t always on the side of the snark. It depends on who you’re following and what. Page 98 describes a study which shows that fund managers who simply copy their peers’ trades underperform. However, Pool, Stoffman, and Yonker study connections with fund managers, rather than simply mimicking fund managers. If you discuss ideas with them, this might indeed be valuable – just like working on a group project at school helps you learn more than copying your classmate’s homework. The Facebook study investigates connections with friends, rather than professional fund managers, and page 100 explains how it doesn’t improve returns.

Page 99 is part of Chapter 4 of the book, “Monkey See, Monkey Buy: Viral Herding in Markets”. It discusses one of the newest and most exciting strands of research in finance – social forces – and one that is particularly relevant for the real world. In the past, interaction was confined to people you see at work or in the pub. Now, you can discuss stocks with Facebook friends you haven’t seen for years, or Redditors without even knowing their name or face.

Neither copying everyone blindly nor tuning everyone out is the way to go. Instead, you should distinguish signal from smoke, and decide whether you want to learn from the crowd, front-run it, or bet against it. The danger lies in drifting from one role to another without realizing it. Herding can ruin you – or it can rescue you. The key is knowing which footsteps are worth following.

Visit Alex Edmans's website.

The Page 99 Test: May Contain Lies.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jeremy Tirrell and Kate Maddalena's "Disgustatory!"

Jeremy Tirrell is associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. His articles and chapters have appeared in publications such as Technical Communication Quarterly, Enculturation, POROI, Kairos, American Journal of Entrepreneurship, and Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition.

Kate Maddalena is associate professor at the Institute of Communication, Culture, and Information Technology at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Her articles and chapters have appeared in publications such as Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Canadian Journal of Communication, International Journal of Communication, Theory, Culture & Society, and POROI.

Tha authors applied the "Page 99 Test" to their new book, Disgustatory!: A Gothic Rhetoric of Consumption, with the following results:

Page 99 of Disgustatory! describes a paradigm shift in microbiology that happened around 2015 and had implication for all of the life sciences, especially medicine. Basically, researchers declared that we should no longer consider individual organisms–the human body, for example–as individuals, at all. Rather, we should think of our bodies as holobionts, or “biomolecular networks” that include the microorganisms that live on and inside us. From this perspective, I am not an autonomous, singular creature. I am a large colony of microorganisms. Further, I am not easily distinguishable from my environment; the bacteria on the table in front of me that get on my fingers and into my mouth are constantly becoming part of me, and when I leave my biological traces on the table, I am becoming part of it. The very bottom of page 99 transitions to our consideration of this holobiontic paradigm via Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection.

At first glance, the Page 99 Test does not work very well for our book. A passing reader might think that the book is a history of microbiology, which it most definitely is not. But looking closer, it does exemplify a few things about the experience of reading Disgustatory! First, you’ll find out lots of things you didn’t know. The book is full of little mini-histories and facts that fascinate and intrigue. The fact that microbiology had a profound paradigm shift in 2015 is probably news to most people. Second, you’ll probably be able to relate to it–when you think about it, you might realize that you did notice that your own conversations about health had turned away from cleanliness and sterility to things like probiotics and maintaining a healthy microbiome during the last decade.

And finally, the turn to Kristeva’s concept of abjection at the bottom of the page is a sample of the larger lens of the book. We take theories of the Gothic (in this case, a sense of profound body horror) and map them onto the weird wellness discourses of our contemporary moment: restrictive diets, lab-grown meat, fecal transplants, kombucha cultures, meal replacement powders, intentionally ingested intestinal parasites, to name just a few. All of these things are compelling and strange aspects of “health” discourse that contribute to a confusing and frankly scary moment in the history of health.

Visit Jeremy Tirrell's website and Kate Maddalena's faculty webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Trevor Herbert's "The Brass Band Story"

Trevor Herbert is a former foundation scholar of the Royal College of Music. He was a trombone player (modern and period instruments) with various orchestras and ensembles, particularly the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Welsh National Opera, the Taverner Players and the Wallace Collection. He is Emeritus Professor of Music at the Open University where he developed a global reputation as an expert on the history and performance practices of brass instruments.

Herbert applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Brass Band Story, and shared the following:

‘Nothing separates the brass band more clearly from the rest of the musical world than the resilient centrality of contesting in its culture.’ These are the opening words of the new chapter that begins on page 99 of my book. I explain the Victorian origins of contesting and how it has been adopted in every country where the British model of the brass band is used. Contests occupy a marginal place in other forms of music making, so their pre-eminence in the world of the amateur brass band has prompted ridicule: to Charles Dickens they were ‘a musical prize fight’. The problem is easily understood. Listening to twenty or more bands, each playing the same piece in succession, is not an inviting prospect for everyone, and the idea that musical expression can be measured and scored to select ‘a winner’ is heavy with aesthetic contradictions. But that’s only how it’s seen from the outside.

An argument can be easily made to show that contests and brass bands were made for each other. They were introduced in the nineteenth century as mass entertainment for the working class. A standard instrumental format was introduced to encourage equivalence; this led to a bespoke repertoire and a unique musical idiom. Contests were and remain congregations of like-minds, and while local rivalries once drew vast audiences, a more subtle set of factors are at play in the modern era. They have become sites of pleasure that produce performances rich in musical nuance.

In my book I plot a much wider narrative about bands, their players and the lives they have led in music, how they weathered industrialisation and deindustrialisation, survived, modernised, internationalised and thrived over almost two centuries. This very British musical phenomenon has a fascinating and multi-faceted history. At every stage its momentum has been nourished by the heady excitement of the contest. Without it this very distinctive form of music making might prevail only as a memory: of a brief, temporary phase in Britain’s music history. For the full story read from page 99: remarkably it hits the exact spot – the epicentre.

Learn more about The Brass Band Story at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David B. Williams's "In the Range of Fire and Ice"

David B. Williams is an author, naturalist, and tour guide. He is the author 12 books, including the award-winning Homewaters: A Human and Natural History of Puget Sound plus Wild in Seattle: Stories at the Crossroads of People and Nature, Cairns: Messengers in Stone; Stories in Stone: Travels Through Urban Geology; and Waterway: The Story of Seattle’s Ship Canal and Locks, the latter two of which were finalists for the Washington State Book Award. Williams is a Curatorial Associate at the Burke Museum and writes a free weekly Substack newsletter, the Street Smart Naturalist. He lives in Seattle.

Williams applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, In the Range of Fire and Ice: A Human and Natural History of Washington’s Cascade, and reported the following:

Ninety-nine pages into in my new book about Washington’s Cascade mountains, In the Range of Fire and Ice, and I am still making connections between people and geology. The page comes in the middle of my chapter focusing on mining and quarrying, a story that stretches back more than 10,000 years to the earliest visitors to the Cascades. Those people who first found high quality rock in the mountains quarried material that they used to make exquisite tools, many of which have been unearthed in archaeological sites. The early visitors also traded the rock they quarried and those tools reveal the extensive trade networks across the region.

For mining, I focus on the one important mining town in the Cascades, Monte Cristo, where a lone miner first came across gold ore in 1889. His discovery led to John D. Rockefeller spending more than $2.5 million (about $850 million today) on developing the mines. This included building almost 60 miles of railroads, a massive ore concentrator, and a smelter. Because of the harsh weather, which restricted most activity to late summer and early fall, workers took six years to fully ramp up mining. Two years later, an epic rainstorm hit and wiped out much of the infrastructure. Monte Cristo never recovered and the population dropped from a peak of perhaps 2,000 to almost none.

Is page 99 a good illustration of the book? Yes. As illustrated in this section, each chapter, which focus on subjects such as glaciers, wolverines, mountain goats, fire, fish, and Mount St. Helens, weaves history, information from experts, and thoughts on how the mountains influence human history. Page 99 though lacks my time in the field and some of my personal perspective, which I hope draws people more into the stories of place. Ultimately, I hope this mix of science, history, and field time encourages people to head out into the mountains and find their own stories of this magical range of fire and ice.

Visit David B. Williams's website.

The Page 99 Test: Stories in Stone.

The Page 99 Test: Homewaters: A Human and Natural History of Puget Sound.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Sorkin's "The Emancipationists"

David Sorkin is the Lucy G. Moses Professor of Jewish History at Yale University. Sorkin has received multiple honors, including Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Whitney Humanities Center fellowships, as well as a National Jewish Book Award for Scholarship.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Emancipationists: Nineteenth-Century Jews' Campaign for Citizenship, with the following results:

The Page 99 Test does in fact work. Page 99 describes two editors of the French Jewish newspaper, the Archives Israélites (1840), Samuel and Isidore Cahen, who were father and son. Samuel founded the newspaper as an organ of French Jewish politics. He was an advocate of the economic and moral "regeneration," as well as religious reform, central to the emancipationists' effort to gain equal rights. He understood this agenda to be a form of “self-emancipation.” Isidore, editor from 1860, continued the campaign for self-emancipation but was more politically radical than his father, promoting general as well as specifically Jewish political issues e.g., "democratic liberties."

The father-son editors exemplified the transition in leadership across the nineteenth century. Samuel studied at a Yeshiva but in secular subjects was a self-educated "maskil" or Jewish enlightener. Isidore attended a prestigious lycée and then one of the most élite universities, the École Normale Supérieure.

The newspaper they created played multiple roles in promoting and defending the Jews’ rights: providing news and information that shaped an informed Jewish public as well as suggesting new activities and institutions to further their cause. For example, Isidore used the paper’s pages to suggest the establishment of a self-defense organization and was then one of the founders of the Alliance Israélite Universelle (1860).

Learn more about The Emancipationists at the Yale University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Jewish Emancipation.

--Marshal Zeringue

Carly Thomsen's "Reproductive Justice, Queerly"

Carly Thomsen is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing and the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Rice University. She is author of Visibility Interrupted: Rural Queer Life and the Politics of Unbecoming and coeditor of Feminist Studies: An Introductory Reader. She is also the proud creator of the world’s first reproductive justice mini golf course.

Thomsen applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Reproductive Justice, Queerly, and shared the following:

Page 99 of Reproductive Justice, Queerly plops readers squarely into my queer theoretical critique of Marxist feminism’s most well-known concept: social reproduction theory, or the labor of life-making, typically imagined as being done by women in their own homes. On page 99, I draw from the insights I developed in my first book Visibility Interrupted: Rural Queer Life and the Politics of Unbecoming to articulate the limits of Marxist feminists’ desires to make labor “visible.” Making domestic labor and work visible, I argue, will not on its own do anything to change how this labor is compensated, valued, or redistributed. Visibility is, in short, not ambitious enough.

But Reproductive Justice, Queerly is not only, or even primarily, about care labor. In fact, the broader topic of chapter three, where page 99 lands, is on paid parental leave and how so much of the conversation around parental leave that claims to be feminist or queer relies on and reproduces heteronormative ideas. One wouldn’t get a sense of my broader critiques of paid parental leave from reading page 99, where I’m deep in the weeds of social reproduction theory.

Page 99, then, not a good representation of chapter three.

It is also not a good representation of the book more broadly. Reproductive Justice, Queerly is, in many ways, about the shift away from discussing reproductive justice issues as women’s or feminist concerns and the centrality of discourses of “queerness” to that shift. As I trace this move across topics—from abortion to surrogacy to parental leave to parenting—I noticed three patterns in these conversations:

1.) They end up centering men, sometimes gay and sometimes trans, but still men
2.) They call up LGBTQ people as a way to index progressive politics
3.) They focus on discursive inclusion, rather than material change

Reproductive Justice, Queerly argues that we can do better. Often, when reproductive justice supporters invoke LGBTQ+ness, what they are advocating for is actually quite conservative. A slight variation on the status quo. In the case of parental leave, which I discuss in chapter 3, where page 99 lands, advocating for a shift in language use from maternity leave to parental leave and rooting that advocacy in the claim that maternity leave doesn’t capture the needs of gay men couples is not radical. This shift continues to assume that people who have children are necessarily partnered and that the only care labor we should be concerned about is in relation to children and the household. What would be far more radical: Advocating for social reproduction leaves through which anyone who is doing care labor for their community could get a paid leave from work to either invest in their community work or to recover from investing in that work. Reproductive Justice, Queerly demonstrates that there are queerer ways to do reproductive justice.

Visit Carly Thomsen's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Shelly Lundberg's "How Economics Discovered Women"

Shelly Lundberg is Distinguished Professor of Economics and Leonard Broom Professor of Demography at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is also a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association.

Lundberg applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, How Economics Discovered Women: Bringing Gender Economics into the Twenty-First Century, and reported the following:

The Page 99 Test gets only a partial pass. This book is a history and critique of how the growth of gender economics since the 1970s has been hampered by the persistence of simple conceptual models in the face of an explosion of empirical research that contradicts them. A reader of page 99 would be dropped into the middle of a discussion about preferences that is more formal than most of the book, but that illustrates the most important theme—that it’s time to revisit some of the foundational assumptions of economics.

Economic analysis focuses on how behavior responds to changes in constraints such as prices and regulations with the preferences of these actors simply taken as given and unchanging. To economists, people want what they want and getting what they want increases their wellbeing. This assumption makes our theories very simple and is foundational to our evaluations of social programs, but runs counter to extensive evidence that, in fact, preferences are molded by social forces and evolve in response to economic and political events.

This assumption has been debated in economics in the past, but without generating any substantive change. Page 99 occurs in the middle of a discussion of one past attempt to shift the discussion—Amartya Sen’s rejection of a traditional approach to assessing the wellbeing of women in societies in which their ambitions and independence have been stifled for generations—he argues that, since gender norms are adaptive and respond to cultural pressures, the fact that women acquiesce to these constraints do not imply that freeing them would not improve their wellbeing.

Page 99 begins with philosopher Martha Nussbaum placing Sen’s critique in the context of an older questioning of economics’ non-judgmental approach to preferences. What if preferences are based on misinformation? Are clearly irrational? What if someone’s preferences are downright wicked? This discussion needs to be revisited, since,

…many models of domestic violence in economics attribute this phenomenon to, at least in part, the preferences for violence of the perpetrator. If we treat all preferences “on a par” for purposes of welfare analysis, then we are forced into the uncomfortable position of concluding that efficiency requires a positive quantity of violence between some intimate partners. (p. 99)

This is abhorrent, and recent work on domestic violence has been relentlessly atheoretical in response, but we can’t tiptoe around the problem forever—the contradictions between facts on the ground about the role of gender in economic behavior and our models need to be faced.

Visit Shelly Lundberg's website.

--Marshal Zeringue