George G. Szpiro's "Ignorance"

George G. Szpiro is an author and journalist who was a longtime correspondent for the Swiss daily Neue Zürcher Zeitung. His books include Risk, Choice, and Uncertainty: Three Centuries of Economic Decision-Making (2020) and Perplexing Paradoxes: Unraveling Enigmas in the World Around Us (2024). Szpiro was on the faculty at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Ignorance: What We Do Not Know, Cannot Know, Must Not Know, and Refuse to Know, with the following results:

If you open Ignorance on page 99 you would get a good sense of what the book is about—especially if you simultaneously look at the illustration on page 98. The case turns on a specific form of ignorance: computers rely on sequences of random numbers whose outcomes we cannot predict, even though they are generated by strict rules. It shows how such managed ignorance allows random numbers to be used to solve problems that would otherwise be intractable.

The underlying tension is that computers produce these numbers deterministically from preceding values. In that sense, they are only quasi-random, not truly random. For practical purposes, however, we must remain ignorant of how each number is produced; otherwise, the sequence would lose its usefulness as a stand-in for genuine randomness. The discussion harkens back to my recent book Random Numbers Unveiled: The Secrets of Numbers That You Can’t Predict but Can Rely On (Taylor & Francis, 2026). Even though the computer follows strict rules, one remains ignorant of the next number in the sequence—an ignorance that is not a defect but a feature.

My book examines ignorance across a range of disciplines in sixty short chapters, organized around four categories: what we do not know—say, in mathematics, in law, in philosophy; what we cannot know—like the length of the coast of Britain, the precise location and speed of a particle, or the nature of God; what we must not know—like the costs already sunk in a project, insider information in financial market, the secrets of Kabbalah if you’re under 40; and what one refuses to know—like whether a diamond is real or fake, or—if you are defense lawyer—whether the accused actually committed the crime so as to maintain plausible deniability. Most chapters treat such themes through more familiar and accessible examples; the computational case on page 99 is among the more technical instances.

Across these domains, ignorance emerges not merely as a lack of knowledge but as an organizing principle that structures inquiry, guides decision-making, and conditions belief. At times it is deliberately preserved to enable progress; at others, it marks the limits of cognition or the boundaries imposed by social norms. Rather than standing in opposition to knowledge, ignorance often functions as one of its necessary preconditions.

Visit George G. Szpiro's website.

The Page 99 Test: Perplexing Paradoxes.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm's "The Genealogy of Genealogy"

Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm is Francis Christopher Oakley Third Century Professor of Religion and chair of science and technology studies at Williams College. He is the author of Metamodernism: The Future of Theory and The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The Genealogy of Genealogy: Nietzsche, Foucault, and the Coils of Critical History, and shared the following:

From page 99:

The three essays that make up Genealogy are perhaps, in terms of expression, purpose, and the art of surprise, the most uncanny thing that has ever been written. Dionysus, as is known, is also the god of darkness.
----FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Ecce Homo

In philosophical pedigrees, Friedrich Nietzsche regularly appears as the primeval progenitor or shadowy chimera beyond whom genealogy's history is irrelevant or perhaps vanishes into myth. But, as I demonstrate in this chapter, genealogy was not actually a central term in Nietzsche's work. To be fair, when Nietzsche published Zur Genealogie der Moral in 1887, the word Genealogie (genealogy) was not exactly in common usage in German, either. Nevertheless, genealogy was already interwoven with existing discourses in Germany at the time of Nietzsche's writing.

Addressing these discourses will help us contextualize Nietzsche's usage and provide clues about how he came to the term. It will turn out that Nietzsche's status as founder of a new historical methodology is misguided. Indeed, I will argue that, if we refuse Nietzsche the status of originator, if instead we trace the term back, if we explore the historical vicissitudes that accompany its usage, it will permit us to expose its primordial roots, lowly beginnings, and dangerous inheritance.

Page 99 turns out to be the very first page of my third chapter “Nietzsche as Progenitor.” It is both representative and, in a couple of ways, a little atypical of the book.

What is most representative about it is that in the book as a whole I’m turning the genealogical method—that is, a mode of critical, historical analysis that shows that what looks timeless is actually contingent, bound to shifting relations of meaning, knowledge, and power—back on itself. I am offering, in other words, a critical history of critical history: one meant to expose its blind spots, to see where it fissures and breaks, and where it might yet be remade.

What makes the selection somewhat less representative is that it might give the impression that the book is only engaged with a few philosophical big names. And yes, I do have chapters on Nietzsche, Foucault, and Deleuze. But much of the book is really about the history of history and philosophy as academic disciplines: including their entanglements with eugenics, racial essentialism, and power. In that respect, it blends intellectual history with philosophical analysis. And though much of the book is quite dark, it ends on a constructive note. More than a critical project, the monograph aims to be a philosophical reckoning with the limits of historiography itself. In so doing, I’m trying to open a path toward alternative historiographies, to invite scholars to imagine new ways of doing history and philosophy.

Learn more about The Genealogy of Genealogy at the University of Chicago Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Myth of Disenchantment.

--Marshal Zeringue

Dan Turello's "Connection"

Dan Turello is a writer, photographer, and cultural historian, and a Technology and Humanity Fellow at the Center for Future of Mind, AI & Society at Florida Atlantic University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Connection: How Technology Can Make Us Better Humans, and reported the following:

From page 99:

How the costs required to consume and produce are measured is important, both aesthetically, in terms of how effort and striving are portrayed, as well as philosophically, because how energy expenditures are measured and accounted for influences perceptions of value, sacrifice, and perceived trade-offs. The strands of these debates, at least in the Western world where our current neoliberal ideas about markets developed, can be traced to debates that took shape during the Renaissance, and the three characters I have mentioned provide an excellent entry point.

Page 99 is remarkably representative: it sets a tone and direction for the next pages of Renaissance art and environmental history. The book, however, is not primarily a history, and this too, I hope, is evident from that paragraph—the history shows up in service of gaining our bearings philosophically and existentially, in the present moment.

The “three characters” I refer to had appeared a few pages earlier: “A German engineer, a Florentine Sculptor, and a courtier from Urbino” who, at the start of Chapter 5 (Insatiable Artists: Technology and Consumer Identity in the Renaissance) I had imagined walking into a proverbial bar. Though Benvenuto Cellini (the Italian sculptor), Georgius Agricola (the German engineer, and Baldassar Castiglione (the courtier from Urbino) never knew each other in real life, the strands of their thinking and writing reverberate down through to our time, when discussions around awareness of environmental costs, effort, labor, sustainability, and so on, have become even more important.

What page 99 does not capture quite as well is the breadth of sources I draw from throughout the book: poetry, lyric, autobiography, Medieval and Renaissance history, but also classical and contemporary philosophy, and film (a dialogue from Pulp Fiction appears just a few pages later, while The Matrix had informed an earlier chapter). All of these strands serve to give context and texture to contemporary debates around our fraught, yet ongoing and vital relationship with technology in all its forms.

Visit Dan Turello's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lauren Nicole Henley's "Inquisition for Blood"

Lauren Nicole Henley is an assistant professor in the Jepson School of Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond. She earned her PhD in history from the University of Texas at Austin.

Henley applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Inquisition for Blood: The Making of a Black Female Serial Killer in the Jim Crow South, with the following results:

There’s a lot packed into page 99. First is the speculation of serial murder in the rice belt region of the United States. Second is law enforcement’s theory that the crimes were religiously motivated. Third is Black communities’ recognition that the weapon of choice—an ax—linked the killings in brutal ways. Toward the end of the page, I write: “For all intents and purposes, then, that meant any Black family living within a mile of the Southern Pacific Railroad could be axed to death. No one was safe.” Indeed, the terror of living amidst an unknown serial killer for years on end is well captured on this page.

The Page 99 Test does a surprisingly good job of reflecting the intricate tensions of my book, but fails to tease out a key contribution: a young Black woman named Clementine Barnabet confessed to many of the murders. Although Clementine’s name appears on the page, it is in reference to her first confession as opposed to her second. It was this second confession that thrust her into the limelight as speculation of a supposed Black female serial killer traveled across the United States and beyond.

In fact, when Clementine confessed to murdering 17 people in April 1912, it was frontpage news from New York to Los Angeles. Only the sinking of the Titanic a few weeks later supplanted coverage of her crimes. That a Black female serial killer—whether real or imagined—captured America’s attention in the early twentieth century speaks volumes about who can (and cannot) get away with murder.

Learn more about Inquisition for Blood at the LSU Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Caroline Sharples's "The Long Death of Adolf Hitler"

Caroline Sharples is senior lecturer in history at the University of Roehampton. She is the author of West Germans and the Nazi Legacy and Postwar Germany and the Holocaust, the latter of which was nominated for the 2017 Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Studies.

Sharples applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, The Long Death of Adolf Hitler: An Investigative History, and shared the following:

Page 99 of my book finds us in Chapter 4: ‘Celebrations and Condolences’ which is an exploration of how audiences outside of Germany responded to the breaking news of Adolf Hitler’s death in spring 1945. (German reactions to his demise are explored in a standalone chapter of the book.) Page 99 drops us straight into quirky anecdotes (coal miners downing tools and giving themselves an impromptu day off in jubilation) and various statements from journalists, politicians and the proverbial ‘person on the street’. A range of emotional behaviours are documented here, from cries of relief, through to disappointment that Hitler had not been captured and made to suffer for his crimes.

In some ways, the Page 99 Test works really well because it immediately highlights two distinctive features in my approach to Hitler’s death. First, it reflects my efforts to reposition Hitler’s death story within the realms of cultural and emotional history. It moves away from the conventional, top-down approach of previous literature that has fixated on the military and political collapse of the Third Reich, and/or the resulting intelligence rivalries and Cold War tensions that obfuscated investigations into Hitler’s fate after the war. Instead, as page 99 illustrates, this book puts the thoughts and feelings of ‘ordinary’ civilians centre stage and traces the meanings that Hitler’s demise has held for different audiences. Second, as the stories presented on page 99 traverse public reactions in Australia, the UK, the United States and Nicaragua, they underscore the book’s unique transnational framework. Hitler’s demise was not only newsworthy for Germans, or even Europeans; but resonated around the globe.

In addition, the material presented on page 99 hints at some of the challenges yet to come. The Times newspaper, for instance, treated Hitler’s passing in the same way as it might report on the death of any other head of state, penning a formal, five column obituary. Other newspapers, however, suggested that the Nazi leader had forsaken all right to such a dignified treatment. The question of how to handle Hitler’s death would spill over, just days later, into a sensational controversy over whether neutral nations should follow diplomatic protocol and extend formal condolences to Germany on the death of its leader.

There is no doubt that page 99 captures the central theme of the book: the passionate, public discourse that sprang up around the fate of the Nazi dictator. Yet in giving us a snapshot of opinion in May 1945, the test actually misses the significant chronological scope of my work. Hitler’s death had been anticipated throughout the war years, imagined within visual propaganda, songs, jokes and even military fundraising activities. Then, the years after 1945 witnessed a protracted search for definitive proof of his suicide; various representations of his fate within popular literature, film and museum displays; and enduring questions as to how to prevent the formation of a heroic legend. In these ways, as my book argues, Hitler experienced a peculiarly long death, one that stretched far beyond those excitable scenes of spring 1945.

Learn more about The Long Death of Adolf Hitler at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Dale J. Stahl's "Two Rivers Entangled"

Dale J. Stahl is Associate Professor of History at the University of Colorado Denver.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Two Rivers Entangled: An Ecological History of the Tigris and Euphrates in the Twentieth Century, and reported the following:

On page 99 of Two Rivers Entangled, you will find a map of the dams along the Euphrates River in Syria and Turkey with their opening dates. Only two reservoirs appear, those behind the first big dams: the al-Tabqa Dam in Syria (1973) and the Keban Dam in Turkey (1974). The rest of the river is depicted as a sinuous, free-flowing line making its way southeast off the map toward Iraq and the Persian Gulf.

Page 99 gives a surprisingly good sense of the book. The map visually illustrates the change at the heart of the story: the damming of the Euphrates River and its transformation into a series of reservoirs. By the mid-1990s, “a traveler with exceptionally long legs could step from one dam’s reservoir to another, walking down a set of watery steps…to the plains and deserts” (136). The map shows the beginning of this process in the mid-1970s, while additional notations indicate where future dams would be built.

The map also specifies the dams’ “opening dates” as opposed to completion, which gestures toward a central question of the book: who or what changes our world? Histories of Iraq, Syria, and Turkey have usually focused on human actors—kings, presidents, and high commissioners, or social groups like unions, religious orders, or political parties. Two Rivers Entangled places the ecologies of the Tigris and Euphrates back inside histories of state-building, revolution, economic development, and geopolitics. Focusing on ecological factors—water, salt, and rock—shows the limits of human-centered histories. Keban Dam, for example, wasn’t really finished in 1974: it leaked so badly the project took another ten years to complete. Another dam on the Tigris at Mosul requires regular infusions of concrete to remain standing.

So, page 99 passes the test. It visually represents the book’s subject and hints at its larger meaning: while historical narratives often reassure us that technology will eventually master the natural world, a closer accounting shows the limits of human control, not only over a river but also over the stories we tell about it.

Visit Dale J. Stahl's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Richard Elwes's "Huge Numbers"

Richard Elwes is an associate professor at University of Leeds, and a Holgate Session Leader for the London Mathematical Society.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Huge Numbers: A Story of Counting Ambitiously, from 4 1/2 to Fish 7, with the following results:

From page 99:

[...on three stelae (stone monuments) in the ancient city of Coba, another archaeological site in modern-day Mexico, we find the largest Mayan number discovered so far. They rewrite day zero as: 13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.0.0.0.0

Such inscriptions put the 3114BCE dawn of our world ‘more than 28 octillion years after the true initial base date in the incomprehensible past’, according to Mayan expert David Stuart, in his 2011 book, The Order of Days.]

He argues this date is the basis of a ‘Grand Long Count’, the fullest expression of the Mayan calendar which we usually see only in abbreviated form. The time for this whole grand long count to reset would be a cycle of over 15 nonillion days (1.5 × 10³¹) or 43 octillion years. We will see numbers on this scale in Chapter 7 when we think about the life cycle of the universe from the perspective of modern science. This reset date would take us to a point long beyond the demise not only of the sun but of the Milky Way galaxy itself, whose stars will long since have been snuffed out, and whose freezing remnants will have been consumed by a supermassive black hole or ejected into the cosmic vacuum. So if the Grand Long Count reset is imagined to represent the end of the world, the Maya would appear to have overestimated by some distance.

I think the Page 99 Test works pretty well here! We meet an interesting large number, which is the central thing, and think about it in two contexts: the mythology of an ancient civilisation (in this case the Classical Maya of Central America), and the evolution of the universe according to modern physics.

My book is in three parts, and these two perspectives reasonably well represent the first two parts. In part 1, we discuss different ways people have spoken and written large numbers over the millennia. The classical Maya, for example, were able to write numbers on this scale because they had developed a highly efficient written numeral system (essentially base 20 rather than the base 10 as we are used to). In part two, we consider the largest numbers needed to describe the Universe according to modern scientific understanding. The demise of the Sun, and then of the Milky Way galaxy, are milestones in the predicted life cycle of the cosmos, but the story has much further to run beyond these. The book's third part, not reflected in page 99, is about large numbers in the context of modern mathematics, and specifically mathematical logic, where we find numbers which are enormously bigger than anything ever contemplated previously.

Visit Richard Elwes's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Benjamin A. Saltzman's "Turning Away"

Benjamin A. Saltzman is associate professor of English at the University of Chicago, where he coedits the journal Modern Philology. Saltzman is the author of Bonds of Secrecy: Law, Spirituality, and the Literature of Concealment in Early Medieval England and the coeditor of Thinking of the Medieval: Midcentury Intellectuals and the Middle Ages.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture, and shared the following:

From page 99:

As a turn inward and from others, Augustine’s conversion is also crucially a turn away from corporeal sensation, a turn away from those things outside the soul. In Fra Angelico’s The Conversion, Augustine covers his eyes and holds his hand over his ear. It’s an incomplete disruption of the senses. If conversion is realized as a turn away from the senses, in Augustine’s case it also happens to be initiated through the senses: “Suddenly I heard” (ecce audio) (Conf. 8.12.29). In this sudden and unexpected interjection of sound, memory kicks in: He stops weeping and recalls having heard (audieram) the story of Antony listening to the words of the Gospel (Conf. 8.12.29). And when he returns to the book, Augustine opens it up to the passage upon which his “eyes first set” (Conf. 8.12.29). Sensory experience precipitates conversion to inner sensation.

Augustine experiences darkness: the “dark clouds of doubt” (dubitationis tenebrae) that dissipate upon conversion materialize in Fra Angelico’s use of gesture. As Augustine blocks his eyes, he deploys a gesture that often formally signifies a state of darkness. I will explore this aspect of the gesture more closely in chapter 4, but for now it bears on the relation between Augustine’s separation from the senses and his state of perspectival instability.

These dark clouds emerge from Augustine’s perspectival instability. In Fra Angelico’s The Conversion, as we have seen, perspective is distorted. The buildings and figures are so disunified that distances between objects seem greater or lesser depending on what objects are prioritized in the viewer’s attention. I would like to think that this perspectival play evokes the unreliability of bodily senses, particularly corresponding to the instability of Augustine’s own senses in these moments just prior to his conversion. His senses—hearing and sight—are thrown off. And so are ours. When Augustine reflects on his own fragmentation, a kaleidoscopic ego thus emerges: “It was I who was willing, I who was not willing: I was (ego eram)” (Conf. 8.10.22). The repetition of ego enlarges Augustine in his own words, much as Fra Angelico does by placing him at the center of the painting. But it is a fragmented ego that splits him away from himself and turns him away from the outside world, from Alypius, and from us. We may be dizzy, unsure of where we stand in relation to the scene and to Augustine’s turning self. It requires a different kind of perspective altogether.

One effect of this altered perspective is a ruptured sense of time (insofar as the human experience of temporality is a function of the inner sense, distended in its relation to the past and future). We may take it for granted, but Augustine’s halo signals his status as a saint. As such, it sets the pre-conversion scene of indecision at an already post-conversion moment. Antony’s presence in the cave is similar: According to his vita, he enters the desert only after he has converted and committed to a life of solitude. The distant memory of Antony speaks to Augustine in the instant of the viewer’s present, which is at the same time the instant of Augustine’s decision as he recollects the story of Antony’s own auricular experience. And yet Fra Angelico’s scene already anticipates the resolution of that decision and resolves this temporal distention with the use of gesture. Augustine’s gesture is a turn into memory’s ruptured temporality, creating something akin to what Elina Gertsman recognizes in the “semiotically rich emptiness” of absent images, in which visual voids work as “temporal bridges, between terrestrial and celestial time.”

There are probably more exciting pages in the book—not least, the seventeen carefully sequenced color plate in the middle—but this page does give a sense of the energy of the project. Here we are considering the variety of meanings possibly attributable to Fra Angelico’s depiction of St. Augustine in the Milanese garden where he would find his way toward conversion. And in these meanings, we can see some of the variety of the gesture more generally: from a turn away from corporeal sensation (into spiritual sensation), to atmospheric and emotional darkness, to perspectival instability (turning this way and that), to a ruptured sense of time. In many ways, as I type this, I’m surprised to find that the Page 99 Test actually works! For this is one moment where all of the chapters of the book are brought together in a single iteration: ambivalence, sensation, darkness, retroversion.

Visit Benjamin A. Saltzman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Curtis Dozier's "The White Pedestal"

Curtis Dozier is associate professor of Greek and Roman studies at Vassar College. He is the director of the internationally recognized website Pharos: Doing Justice to the Classics, which documents appropriations of Greco-Roman antiquity by hate groups. He lives in Poughkeepsie, NY.

Dozier applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The White Pedestal: How White Nationalists Use Ancient Greece and Rome to Justify Hate, and reported the following:

Even as a person fascinated by the premise of this test, my jaw dropped when I looked at page 99 of The White Pedestal: How White Nationalists Use Ancient Greece and Rome to Justify Hate. I wouldn’t say this page gives readers a complete picture of the book: you would barely know from page 99, for example, that the book examines the intellectual ecosystem of the contemporary phenomenon known to political scientists as “the intellectual radical right,” and you probably wouldn’t catch one of the main theses of the book, which is that “these people know more than you think.” But it does present the piece of ancient evidence that most surprised me when I was researching the book: an ancient treatise attributed to Aristotle that argues, among other things, that black skin is a sign of cowardice and duplicity. The conventional wisdom, among scholars and the educated public, is that because ancient Greece and Rome didn’t develop a theory of racial difference like that of early modern racist pseudoscience, the ancient world shouldn’t lend itself very well to appropriation by white supremacist activists. But there you have it, right there on page 99, an ancient text expressing something very much like the tenets of modern anti-Blackness. That one citation doesn’t tell the whole story of just how congenial the ancient Greco-Roman world (and the ways it has traditionally been interpreted) is to white nationalist thinking — for that you have to read the book! — but it’s a piece of the story that strikes most directly at the ways that too many people try to protect or insulate ancient Greece and Rome from association with white supremacist politics, thereby perpetuating the very thing they claim to abhor.

Learn more about The White Pedestal at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Craig Fehrman's "This Vast Enterprise"

Craig Fehrman, a journalist and historian, spent five years writing and researching his new book, This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis & Clark. His first book, Author in Chief, was described by Thomas Mallon in The Wall Street Journal as “one of the best books on the American presidency to appear in recent years.” Fehrman lives in Indiana with his wife and children.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to This Vast Enterprise with the following results:

Page 99 finds the expedition about four hundred miles up the Missouri River -- still in their first year but well underway, their fears about encountering Native people as pitched as they will ever get.

I think this page give a great sense of my book because it incorporates multiple perspectives. Each chapter in This Vast Enterprise moves to a different point of view -- think As I Lay Dying or, if you prefer, Game of Thrones. Page 99 is in the middle of a Clark chapter, and I describe him noticing and analyzing Native art. (I found Clark's college notebook; he's an underrated Enlightenment thinker.) But I also describe the perspectives of John Ordway, a working-class soldier who was curious about Native people, and Joseph Whitehouse, a working-class soldier who was terrified of them. When it comes to history, people like to ask whether someone was a "man of his era," but I think that's the wrong question. People believed many different things in 1804, just like they believe many different things in 2026. I tried to capture this period's range of perspectives. Within a few pages, the book will rotate to a new chapter and a new point of View -- that of Black Buffalo, a brilliant Lakota leader who was as interested in using the Americans as they were in using him.

Page 99 also includes details about what the expedition felt like. This was important to me -- I wanted to put readers in the canoe or, for this stretch, on the barge. Here's the page's last paragraph:

July was hotter and harder. The barge continued to wheel, and when the soldiers tried towing it barefoot on the shore, the sand scorched their feet. The Missouri’s bacteria-rich water sloshed in their scrapes and burns, leading to boils and abscesses. Their sweat soaked their shirts in minutes. It was more perspiration, Clark admitted, than he’d thought “could pass through the human body.” The heat produced some positives, including plentiful strawberries and plums. But it also brought ticks and gnats and especially mosquitoes, though Lewis had anticipated these pests and brought netting to help the men sleep at night.

Visit Craig Fehrman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue