Katie Rose Hejtmanek's "The Cult of CrossFit"

Katie Rose Hejtmanek is Professor of Anthropology and Children and Youth Studies at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. She is the author of Friendship, Love, and Hip Hop: An Ethnography of African American Men in Psychiatric Custody and co-editor of Gender and Power in Strength Sports: Strong as Feminist. She is also a world and national champion in masters weightlifting.

Hejtmanek applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Cult of CrossFit: Christianity and the American Exercise Phenomenon, and reported the following:

Page 99 in The Cult of CrossFit: Christianity and the American Fitness Phenomenon tells the story of the CrossFit Hero WOD Murph. Hero WODs are very difficult workout of the day (WOD) named for a fallen US soldier usually during the war on terror. Murph is named after Lieutenant Michael Murphy, a Navy SEAL, and his favorite workout that he called “body armor.” The page provides granular detail of Murph and how CrossFitters relate to this workout, especially as it is performed on the American holiday of Memorial Day. However, the larger story of CrossFit in the United States I try and examine in the book is not part of page 99.

I don’t think the Page 99 Test works for my book because page 99 is about Murph, one small piece of the CrossFit puzzle, one (important) tree in a very large unexamined-on-page-99-forest.

So, what’s the forest?

The Cult of CrossFit is a book constructed through my anthropological investigations of and embodied commitment to CrossFit workouts like Murph. But CrossFit isn’t just about the workouts. It’s a whole forest of frameworks, beliefs, devotions, communities, futures, pasts, ideologies, and stories that are lived out and built into a CrossFitter’s body, gym, and community. Based on seven years of anthropological research on six continents, The Cult of CrossFit reveals how American CrossFit organizes, frames, and sells this forest using what I call cultural Christianity. This isn’t the Christianity preached in the church. It is the everyday Christianity that permeates much of the United States: in the holidays we have, sayings we use (bless you), and redemption stories we tell based on hundreds of years of history. Thus, the book is as much about American history and culture as it is about CrossFit. Using the lens of CrossFit, The Cult of CrossFit reveals how violent, militaristic, devotional American culture and nationalism get embodied, one workout at a time. While page 99 goes into detail about one punishing, military-infused workout, Murph, it leaves out the larger context of suffering, devotion, salvation, forms of oracle and garage capitalism, illusions of science, and understandings of the apocalypse that are also part of American CrossFit.

I encourage you to read the rest of the book if you are interested in a detailed history and cultural analysis of how the brand and community of CrossFit, which includes Murph, became the phenomenon that it is.

Visit Katie Rose Hejtmanek's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Arie W. Kruglanski and Sophia Moskalenko's "The Psychology of the Extreme"

Arie W. Kruglanski is Distinguished University Professor of Psychology at the University of Maryland and a co-founding PI at START, the national center of excellence for the study of terrorism and the response to terrorism.

Sophia Moskalenko is a Research Fellow at Georgia State University and a Program Management Specialist at the UN Office of Counter Terrorism, Behavioral Insights Hub.

Moskalenko applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, The Psychology of the Extreme, and reported the following:

A reader opening the book to page 99 would read about the violent extremism of two Islamic fundamentalists who conducted mass casualty attacks: one against Israelis in Israel, and the other against Americans in Iraq. The page touches upon the psychology that is needed to overcome the normal human resistance to violence, such as the influence of extremist narratives of terrorist groups, the pain of personal humiliations experienced by the attackers, and the motivation to restore the loss of significance.

This page is perhaps not the best representation of the book. Especially because the book’s message was to broaden the understanding of extremism: from the malicious actions of terrorists to the great deeds of luminaries such as Maria Sklodowska-Curie, humanitarians such as Mahatma Gandhi, artistic geniuses like Van Gogh, and other extremists whose pursuit of their passions positively contributed to culture, technology, arts, and sciences. What’s more, the book makes the case that extremism is far more prevalent than these famous cases. It extends to our friends and neighbors (and maybe ourselves)­­––those who give their best efforts and sacrifice for a hobby, a job, an obsession, a relationship, or an addiction. In other words, the book presents extremism as not rare, and that it’s becoming more frequent with the advent of the internet and social media that encourage comparisons, competition, and as a result, extremism.

It helps to see extremism through this wider lens because we can see its origins. Extremism develops in social isolation, often as a result of rejection, bullying, and ostracism. It is often encouraged by radical groups through narratives that glorify self-sacrifice. Stories of heroes overcoming the odds are riveting and inspire emulation. Extremism is glorified by modern Western culture. What hides behind this façade are the costs of extremism, even the constructive kind: to the extremists themselves, their loved ones, and to societal peace and harmony. Through case studies and psychology research, the book shows that moderation, kindness, and diligence can often succeed where extremism fails miserably. Seeing extremism for what it is allows us to make better, more informed choices in our Age of Extremism.

Learn more about The Psychology of the Extreme at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tsering Wangmo Dhompa's "The Politics of Sorrow"

Tsering Wangmo Dhompa is a professor of literature and creative writing at Villanova University. She is the author of the poetry collections My Rice Tastes Like the Lake (2011), In the Absent Everyday (2005), and Rules of the House (2002), as well as the memoir Coming Home to Tibet (2016). Her mother served as a member of parliament in the exile government for three terms.

Dhompa applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Politics of Sorrow: Unity and Allegiance Across Tibetan Exile, and reported the following:

On this page I write about Tenzin Norbu, a monk I interviewed in Bir, India in 2015. Norbu defined the campaign of “unity,” (led by a Tibetan political party in the 1960s) as a responsibility disproportionately placed on new minority populations in exile.

For him, unity had spelled erasure…Tenzin Norbu insisted he desired to be ‘heard’ by the exile government, which I interpreted as his and the Thirteen’s desire to be included in the narrative of the united nation. Separation was most certainly not on his mind.

My first thought on scanning the page (the first half of the page describes a historical event in the seventh century) was that it didn’t provide a good idea of the whole work but on a closer examination I was stunned at how this page indeed gets to the heart of what the book is about: recognition and belonging in exile.

Tenzin Norbu lived in one of the refugee settlements established by the Group of Thirteen and he felt the group had been miscast as antigovernment simply because they were slow to embrace some of the policies enforced by the Tibetan United Party (a powerful organization in the 1960s-70s in the Tibetan exile communities in India and Nepal). Norbu felt that the project of unity led by the United Party was exclusionary. He stated that he never got the chance to explain why he was hesitant to follow their call to unity. His understanding of events and experience of events confirmed his fear that unity meant a standardization of Tibetan identity to a homogenous formation. His desire was to be integrated in a meaningful way. He was asking important questions: What is the relationship between the government and the people? Where are we going? Who is included in the story of the nation?

The book focuses on the first two decades of life for Tibetans who had fled Tibet in 1959 after the Chinese occupation of Tibet, and found themselves refugees in India and Nepal. In addition to the difficult task of organizing an anti-colonial national movement, and establishing a government-in-exile, the community had to respond to complex internal tensions over what it meant to be a Tibetan. While it was easy to galvanize Tibetans to identify a shared timeline to the loss of a nation or feel certainty in not being Chinese, building solidarity behind the idea of what made a Tibetan, a Tibetan proved more complex because people had come from diverse regions and from a variety of political and social formations. The story of the Thirteen in The Politics of Sorrow is a glimpse of exile history from the periphery.

Learn more about The Politics of Sorrow at the Columbia University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thomas Crosbie's "The Political Army"

Thomas Crosbie is associate professor of military operations at the Royal Danish Defence College. He is the editor of Berghahn Books’ Military Politics series and Military Politics: New Perspectives (2023), among other books.

Crosbie applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Political Army: How the U.S. Military Learned to Manage the Media and Public Opinion, and reported the following:

Turning to page 99 of The Political Army will bring you to the beginning of Chapter 4, which is about what I refer to as “the Tet Paradox”. This chapter is essential to the argument of the book, but let us consider the contents of page 99 exclusively. You’ll start the page reading about “black teams” of assassins (members of the US armed services acting without attribution) killing suspected members of the Viet Cong. You will quickly recognize that you’re in the middle of the Vietnam War, looking over the shoulder of US government officials. From the assassins, we make our way over to an awkward exchange between Gen. William Westmoreland, US commander in Vietnam, and Gen. Harold K. Johnson, the chief of the Army back home. And then we get another awkward exchange, this time between Westmoreland and Adm. U.S.G. Sharp. Both Johnson and Sharp were annoyed at Westmoreland’s poor handling of the American journalists reporting on the war. From the exchanges, we learn that far from the press being intractable and out to get the military, there was in fact a high degree of willingness among journalists to work with the Army – but at the same time, a very limited tolerance for Army commanders who wanted to dissemble and mislead. We end the page of another dark note: more public outrage at clumsy efforts to mislead the media, and a nightmarish discover: mass rape and murder at a small hamlet called My Lai.

Readers interested in The Political Army would do well to read page 99, since it does indeed give a feel for the key themes of the work. The Political Army painstakingly reconstructs the U.S. military’s attempts to manage the media in various theaters of operations from World War II to Desert Storm. In some ways, a key theme is repetition: the repeating of mistakes by military leaders like Westmoreland who time and again got their relations with the press wrong; by journalists, who discover the same sorts of stories – of atrocity and mismanagement, and sometimes of human decency amidst the horrors of war; and finally, the Groundhog Day-like experience of public affairs officers, forced to defend again and again the need for an intelligent and democratic attitude toward the press. Page 99 does not quite do justice to the arc of the story, however. The book’s story begins at a time when the media’s own view of its role in war had yet to form. As the Army began to learn about the risks and opportunities represented by the media, Army leaders tended to focus on the potential benefits: the media could help sell the Army’s story to the American public. Optimism gave way to reckless utopian thinking, and the result was a disastrous mismatch between the Army’s expectations and the media’s interests in the beginning of the Vietnam War. Eventually, the Tet Paradox (named for US responses to the North Vietnamese invasion during the festival of Tet in 1968) became apparent to Army leaders: even battlefield victory could appear like a major defeat if journalists presented it that way. What page 99 does not show the reader is the hard battles that followed Vietnam, and which allowed the Army to finally come to terms with the critical role of media management in the success of military operations. Readers are therefore encouraged to read the book in the traditional way: starting with page 1, you will find yourself flicking quickly through the pages until you reach page 216, which ends with some prophetic words about why we cannot afford to ignore the democracies of war and the role of the military in actively supporting democracy. I leave it to readers’ own imaginations to untangle whether such prophecies have merit in the dark days of Trump.

Learn more about The Political Army at the Columbia University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

J. Paul Kelleher's "The Social Cost of Carbon"

J. Paul Kelleher is an Associate Professor of Bioethics and Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

His research and teaching explore ethical and other philosophical dimensions of public policy, especially climate policy and health policy.

Kelleher applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Social Cost of Carbon: Ethics and the Limits of Climate Change Economics, and reported the following:

If readers opened my book to page 99 they would definitely get a good feel for the thing as a whole. They would quickly see that the book is technical and not an easy read for the layperson. I realize this admission is not going to help me sell books, but I also believe in full disclosure! Still, even the uninitiated reader can get a good sense of the book's motivations and aims by reading its accessible and short stage-setting preface, the preprint version of which is available here.

Page 99 of the book has me discussing an important topic in climate change economics, namely the "pure time discount rate." Evaluative economic models of climate change typically assume that if a benefit or harm will come later in time, it is for that reason less worth caring about than if it would be experienced today. Page 99 considers one of the arguments for holding this view, an argument concerning uncertainty. Later in chapter 5 I provide a much longer discussion of pure time discounting in climate change economics and in welfare economics more generally.

After that discussion of pure time discounting, page 99 also kicks off my explanation and analysis of a very important theorem of welfare economics, John Harsanyi's Aggregation Theorem. (Harsanyi won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1994, but for work done in another area of economics.) Harsanyi's theorem provides an axiomatic basis for broadly utilitarian welfare economics, which is the economic framework that underpins many evaluations of climate change policy. But most climate economists do not draw on Harsanyi's theorem. If they give any consideration at all to the theoretical foundations of their models, they are likely to invoke distinct utilitarian theorems that I analyze elsewhere in the book. The discussion that begins on page 99 ends with my commending Harsanyi's theorem to climate economists. I think it is the proper foundation for evaluative climate change economics, and the book as a whole argues for this.

Visit J. Paul Kelleher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Benjamin Wallace's "The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto"

Benjamin Wallace is the author of The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto, an investigation into the murky origins of cryptocurrency.

Earlier work includes his book The Billionaire’s Vinegar, an instant New York Times bestseller which The Economist called “a great tale, well told” and the Times described as “one of the rare books on wine that transcends the genre.”

Wallace applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto finds me coming to doubt that computer scientist Nick Szabo, a usual suspect in the perennial efforts to figure out the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto (in 2015, the New York Times called him the person Silicon Valley insiders believed to be Nakamoto), is in fact Nakamoto. My creeping doubt is both forensic and intuitive. I point out inconsistencies in the details of the case for Szabo as Nakamoto, and also some personality discrepancies.

To the extent that page 99 shows me as the narrator-investigator, in the weeds evaluating a particular candidate and bringing fresh eyes to a stubborn problem, and captures the book's milieu of libertarian computer science, it’s fairly representative. This is a detective story, and there I am detecting. On the other hand, it’s one of the more heady moments in the book, in contrast to plenty of more visceral moments—including a car chase, a visit to a room full of frozen heads and bodies in the Arizona desert, and a bloody incident with a machete—so I wouldn’t say it perfectly captures the experience of reading this book.

One other way in which page 99 Isn’t entirely representative: I wrote this book because I became convinced that the mystery of Satoshi Nakamoto, and the efforts, including my own, to crack it, was both a gripping story in its own right and an organic way for a civilian to gain an understanding of the whole crypto phenomenon. It’s a Trojan horse of sorts, which I’m not sure comes through clearly on this particular page.

Learn more about the book and author at Benjamin Wallace's website.

Writers Read: Benjamin Wallace (February 2008).

The Page 99 Test: The Billionaire’s Vinegar.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mia Bloom's "Veiled Threats"

Mia Bloom is a Professor of Communication and Middle East Studies at Georgia State University and the International Security Fellow at New America. She conducts ethnographic field research in Europe, the Middle East and South Asia and speaks eight languages. Author of Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror (2005), Living Together After Ethnic Killing, with Roy Licklider; (2007), Bombshell: Women and Terror (2011), Small Arms: Children and Terror (2019), and Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon, with Sophia Moskalenko (2021).

Bloom applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Veiled Threats: Women and Global Jihad, and reported the following:

If readers opened Veiled Threats to page 99, they would read both about how ISIS abused and exploited Yazidi sex slaves as well as whether ISIS should be charged with the crime of genocide because it engaged in ethnic cleansing of Yazidi areas, but also the capture of women during combat, requires the implementation of the Geneva accords, that they would be protected from predation. In fact, ISIS did quite the opposite. Page 99 describes the process of selection, where the female prisoners were separated from the men, the combatants separated the old from the young. ISIS terrorists treated the women like chattel, as ISIS evaluated them based on age, eye color, and even breast size.

While the majority of the book is dedicated to the women who exercised agency and joined the jihad, perpetrated acts of terrorism, or recruited others to do so, page 99 explores the ramifications of women’s involvement with Jihadi groups and offers the reader detailed information about the victims.

The book as a whole explores whether women in Jihadi groups were nothing more than victims of men or the patriarchal society. In some instances, the woman have been drugged or manipulated, especially the very young girls who were operatives for Boko Haram. Perhaps the most surprising part of the book, is that what we think we know about women in Boko Haram, or ISIS or Al Qaeda is superficial and stereotypes. The women in these militant groups exercised considerably more agency than the literature has previously allocated them. While women in ISIS did not fight on the front lines, many were as radical if not more radical than their husbands. The lesson patriarchal groups learn is that if you get the women on board, you guarantee the next generation of extremists and make the organization immune to counter terror policies like targeted assassination.

The book also probes how jihadi groups legally differentiate between female hostages (rahina) versus sex slaves (sabayya), drawing on Islamic law and applied to the events of October 7, 2023, in Gaza and Southern Israel. By the Islamic rules of war, what occurred in Southern Israel in 2023 violates multiple hadith and surahs in the Quran. The book presents a theory of why gender-based violence occurs during certain types of ethnic wars in which the ultimate goal is the control of territory, making violence against civilians intentional to force them to abandon their homes and flee. Thus Veiled Threats offers a corrective to the inaccurate stereotypes about veiled women being powerless, voiceless and faceless in the global jihad.

Learn more about Veiled Threats at the Cornell University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Bombshell: Women and Terrorism by Mia Bloom.

The Page 99 Test: Pastels and Pedophiles by Mia Bloom & Sophia Moskalenko.

--Marshal Zeringue

Janet Todd's "Living with Jane Austen"

Janet Todd has been thinking and writing about books for more than half a century. She has been a biographer, novelist, critic, editor and memoirist. In the 1970s, she helped open up the study of early women writers by beginning a journal and compiling encyclopedias before editing the complete works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Aphra Behn, and Jane Austen. She has worked in English departments in Africa, the West Indies, the US and the UK. A former President of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, she is now an Honorary Fellow of Lucy Cavendish and Newnham Colleges and an Emerita Professor of the University of Aberdeen.

Todd applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Living with Jane Austen, and reported the following:

This is part of page 99 where I look at Jane Austen as a letter writer, mainly to her beloved sister Cassandra , her other self, as she calls her:

I have become a fan of Jane Austen’s letters, mischievous portmanteau accounts of a life filled with people – some too fat, some too short-necked, some just too nondescript for comment – and random things, from muslins and sofas to honey, cakes and wine. The letters are unpredictable, skipping from lace collars to a brace of pheasants, from ale to ailments. Austen displays in herself those little grievances we all have as duty bangs against desire, but she never stays long in irritable mode. Soon, she’s off and away to green shoes or missing gloves.

The letters are captivating, with their spurts of excited or tremulous life. A niece has a ‘purple Pelisse’; it may be a secret but not kept well enough to avoid the snooping of an aunt in the bedroom acting like a naughty, middle-aged Catherine Morland poking around Northanger Abbey. Not much escapes this aunt, not much is unrecorded. She’s eager to share the most enticing trivialities.

Page 99 occurs in the chapter called ‘Poor Nerves’. It is part of the section on Jane Austen and the body, the next chapter being labelled ‘The Unruly Body’. In ‘Poor Nerves’ I describe my joy in reading Jane’s letters meant only for her sister’s eyes—or sometimes the eyes of other close family members and friends—but not for ours in the 21st century. Where the novels are the result of careful revision and rewriting, these letters are spontaneous and undoctored. Jane Austen is thrifty with paper, so there’s little question of her jettisoning first attempts; in one letter she chides herself for not writing a smaller hand so that she could get more on to her single page. Paper and postage are expensive.

In the quotation above, the interweaving of my personal response to Austen’s writing and more distanced critical comment is typical of the book as a whole, although elsewhere I provide more background historical and literary material. This includes detail on Regency houses, on the fashionable way of looking at external nature, on contemporary responses to money and the making of money, on the uneasiness over girls’ education and manners in a changing world--and on the anxiety over ailments that result from a seeming interaction of mind and body.

For this topic I put Jane Austen in the context of other writers worried about physical ailments. In this context, her attitude in novels and letters can often seem bracing, sometimes less than sympathetic! She shows how often headaches and nervous diseases result from emotions like jealousy or self-pity; instead of running to physical remedies—many of which, such as bloodletting with leeches and drinking concoctions including mercury, would have worsened the problem—she advises exercise and a change of scene. As so often, there’s much useful advice in Jane Austen--though she never presses it on you!

Austen’s ‘global’ fame means that many people know her from the films and many spinoffs and dramatisations rather than her writings. I hope that my book might draw readers back to the wonderful novels—and that they will share my enduring enthusiasm, and be challenged by some of my unorthodox ideas. (Did Cassandra burn most of Jane’s letters?)

Visit Janet Todd's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Rosino's "Democracy Is Awkward"

Michael Rosino is assistant professor of sociology at Molloy College.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Democracy Is Awkward: Grappling with Racism inside American Grassroots Political Organizing, and reported the following:

Democracy is Awkward is a study of grassroots political organizers and how they respond to racial inequality in politics and society. It focuses on a political organization I call the “Grassroots Action Party.” This matter is clearly relevant to our contemporary struggles to protect rights and democracy through the power of multiracial coalitions that take racial justice seriously. Page 99 of Democracy is Awkard lies in the middle of the chapter on how whites participants racial habits shape grassroots political strategies, it specifically tells the stories of participants who regard conversations about race with people of color as inherently stressful and conflict-laden. As an ethnographer, I have many tools in my toolkit for studying the social world of my participants. In this case, I used a vignette during interviews where I presented them with a hypothetical situation where a white person is uncomfortable discussing racial issues with people of color and therefore avoidant. The vignette seemed to resonate with several of them. In particular, a participant that I call Jacqueline connected it to the following story,

“I had a dear friend, and I still consider her a friend, but I haven’t talked to her in many years. We just hit it off, you know, and had a wonderful friendship, and she was having some struggles at a certain point, and we were in a phone conversation, and it just kind of went down this road where, you know, she was really upset, and she just got more and more upset and she ended up screaming at me which I mean she is one of the sweetest people I know she just screamed 'fuck you' at me and hung up. […] I was kind of like, wow, what happened and what is going on, and I couldn’t… I sort of… it is like do I call her back or do I not? […] She called me back, and she was really upset, and she is like, 'you know, I am really sorry,' and I am like “'it is not a problem, it is really not a problem.'”

Jacqueline told me that if she could talk to her estranged friend now, she would say,

“I love you. You are one of the people that I have been closest to in my life, and I know I am a white person with stupid white person stuff, and I am sorry, you know, and, you know, I am responsible for my behavior at the same time, but there is a way that nobody is to blame for growing up, you know, being born into a racist society […] my guess is that she was angry or, you know, she knew, and you know, knows that I have privilege as a white person, as a middle-class person.”

This page illuminates a critical example of the argument in Democracy is Awkward – that our feelings of discomfort, particularly around unwieldy confrontations with the reality of racial injustice, can undermine real strategies for building grassroots democracy amid racial oppression. The book examines the overall situation and the promise of cross-racial coalitions for grassroots organizing, the shared motivations and experiences of organizers, and the distinct awareness, habits, and strategies of white organizers and organizers of color. Documenting and theorizing the stark contrast between participants of different racial backgrounds is a major plank of the book’s contribution. It represents how racial oppression produces social distance and inequalities that shape our everyday lives and underlying assumptions.

White participants avoided situations that took them out of their comfort zones. Their organizing stuck to the neighborhoods they knew well, the people they felt they had commonality with, and the rituals and routines that they’d come to expect. In contrast, in the next chapter, I highlight the many participants of color who recognized and leaned into productive conflict and attempted to rectify the contradictions and limitations of the organization. These participants, for instance, noted that although the party advocates for racial justice and the empowerment of people of color, it remains overwhelmingly white and struggles to actualize its antiracist agenda. In many ways, navigating conflict, awkwardness, and ambiguity was an inherent aspect of their lived experiences. The point of this book is not simply to describe what people in the Grassroots Action Party did or theorize why it happened but to build real and practical insights about how confronting these racialized contradictions, awkwardness, and conflict inherent in building coalitions for democracy can be a catalyst for making grassroots organizing more effective and inclusive.

Visit Michael Rosino's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stacy Torres's "At Home in the City"

Stacy Torres is an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), core ladder rank faculty in the sociology doctoral program, and affiliated with the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues at UC Berkeley.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, At Home in the City: Growing Old in Urban America, and reported the following:

Readers who flip to page 99 of At Home in the City will receive a glimpse into core themes at the heart of my book: grief, loss, place, memory, coming together, and unconventional place- based communities. This snippet showcases the voices of older adults I met during my five- year ethnographic study, trying to understand how they navigated a range of late life challenges, including health setbacks, depression, gentrification, financial struggles, the accumulated losses of neighbors, friends, and family, and other everyday challenges.

On this page, they share the complex emotions stirred in mourning a special place they’re about to lose—a mom-and-pop bakery in Manhattan that had become something of a public living room. At this point in the book, the store hadn’t yet closed, but as lease renewal negotiations broke down between the bakery owner and the landlord, its patrons began to ponder a future without their special place. They share deep sadness, bitterness, and dark humor as they react to the store’s imminent closure. The mood of this page reflects anticipation of their expectant loss and hints at their growing recognition of what they will lose and how important this “third place” had become to them, allowing them to connect with neighbors and avoid social isolation in retirement.

As I nervously applied this test, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the page captures the stakes of crisis they confronted and their deep attachments to place and to each other. I also found myself on page 99, as a chronicler of their story and a participant observer. Here, I reflect on my own attachments to them and their place, “Their kindness also stirred a twinge of anticipated loss for me as their parting words for the evening reminded me of how they had pulled me into their web of care. I also felt unease, on the precipice of a changing world that had in some ways become my own.”

What’s missing from page 99 is an explicit mention of people’s advanced ages and how their circumstances in old age heightened the significance of neighborhood places to them, as they spent more time closer to home due to financial limitations, surplus time in retirement, and health and mobility issues that constrained traveling far from their residences. But this page capably sets the stage for their unfolding journey—one that I hope readers will join—as they reconfigure long-held routines around new places and people, while also working together to preserve the vital bonds they forged in their lost home away from home.

Visit Stacy Torres's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jessie Cox's "Sounds of Black Switzerland"

Jessie Cox is Assistant Professor of Music at Harvard University and received his doctorate from Columbia University. Active as a composer, drummer, and scholar, his work thematizes questions at the intersection of black studies, music/sound studies, and critical theory. From Switzerland, with roots in Trinidad and Tobago, Cox thinks through questions of race, migration, national belonging, and our relation to the planet and the cosmos. His first monograph Sounds of Black Switzerland: Blackness, Music, and Unthought Voices addresses how thinking with blackness and experimental musical practices might afford the opening of new discourses, such as thematizing Black Swiss Life.

Cox applied the “Page 99 Test” to Sounds of Black Switzerland and reported the following:

From page 99:

Thus, to be with blackness is to be together in music, together in sound, even when not together, both at the same time, because togetherness cannot, here, imply beings reduced to one among others that meet. Rather, Blackness is that which speaks of a together-apartness that is before and out of which all singularities come from—it is radically before any togetherness in contradistinction to apartness. It is like Mighty’s music. This book is not by itself, even when it appears as such: it is always with those who are named within it and those who came before it, but also those who touched my life, the lives of the readers, as well as those yet to come, yet to be unearthed in it, who will Shift the timbre of my voice. Blackness bespeaks an incompleteness theorem, that asks us to keep digging, as a continual reworking of our stories and us. It is not that the future is radically open, marking something that is closed in the past or present—rather, everything is always open, even in its closedness. How otherwise could infinities calculate into singularities from nothing, like in Jérémie Jolo and in Chénière’s musics?

Page 99 is only half full. By itself it is not reflective of the whole book. But in some ways, it is quite an exemplary page. It in fact conveys a key theme found within the book: the importance of the listener (or reader) as part of that which we call the book, or the musical work. This idea is how I approach joining the opening of discourses around Black Swiss life with the unique possibilities of music. As an artform music always asks for listeners’ inventiveness—for people to listen and to do so in new ways. To me this means also to rethink how we hear, which includes recognizing how we can never hear everything and need each other, tools, materials, and experiences (or performances) to re-learn to listen. Music is radically refusing one way of listening, an end to listening, or a claim over what may be audible. This kind of musical listening practice is imaginative and, as Afrofuturists might say, world transforming. While this might seem at first to be about simply our own private worlds, it in fact, as an born in encounters, always also means a transformation of more than us. New sounds means new instruments, means new arrangements of materials, means new spaces (like for different acoustics)... Music is the sound of changing the world. Thus, this page hints to how this book petitions a re-learning to listen to unthought lives and worlds so as to make a better world. How can we critically engage in imaginative practices that create new ways of listening, sounding, making, and living, in and with the world and each other? Listening opens the question of us and our world, it is the not yet heard possibility to an unthought music.

Visit Jessie Cox's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Charles Athanasopoulos's "Black Iconoclasm"

Charles Athanasopoulos is Assistant Professor of African American and African Studies & English at The Ohio State University. He received his Ph.D. in Rhetoric & Communication from the University of Pittsburgh, and his research interests lie at the intersection of Black rhetorics, media, and culture. He has published numerous peer reviewed articles in venues such as Lateral: The Journal of the Cultural Studies Association and the Western Journal of Communication.

Athanasopoulos applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Black Iconoclasm: Public Symbols, Racial Progress, and Post/Ferguson America, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Following Sharpley-Whiting, tracking the slippages in Fanonian thought is fruitful for meditating on how we can use parts of Fanon’s theories against Fanon himself given the limitations presented by his own personal investment in Western icons of gender and sexuality […] Engaging Spillers’ addendum to Fanonian theory, Fanonian slips highlight how Western conceptions of family and gender are inextricable from the racialized construction of Western humanity.

A reader who opened Black Iconoclasm on this page would be thrust into a complex conversation surrounding my concept of a “Fanonian slip” in relation to Fanon’s own commentary on gender and sexuality. Page 99 opens by finishing a paragraph which begins on page 98 and interrogates Fanon’s comments about cross-dressing and that “he know[s] nothing” about women of color in Black Skin, White Masks. It ends by beginning to read Fanonian thought through the addendums provided by Hortense J. Spillers in Black, White, and In Color. I imagine that the reader would likely have to pause and decide to gain a fuller context of the chapter to fully apprehend the unfolding argument on this page. However, I think this page demonstrates that this chapter wrestles with the limitations of Fanonian thought as it relates to gender and sexuality.

In this broader chapter (pp. 89-127), I unfurl the concept of “Fanonian slips” as moments of slippage which accidentally emerge in the attempt to smoothen racial tensions. For example, I interrogate former president Biden’s statement that “poor kids are just as bright as white kids” as a Fanonian slip which accidentally announces his correlation of rich/white, poor/BIPOC. In this chapter, I unfurl three examples across the interpersonal, political, and internal to consider how racial icons – public symbols which reflect Western values of race, gender, class, and sexuality – operate on every level of Western subjectivity and communication. Engaging Fanon and psychoanalysis, I articulate the slippage between Black skin and white mask in, for example, the public address of rapper Killer Mike and former president Obama. Fanonian slips thus reflect how Black iconoclasm manifests as a critical practice to be taken up within the flow of lived experience. This fourth chapter of the book, works in tandem with chapters on activism (Ch. 2), Black radical theory (Ch. 3), popular post/Ferguson films (Ch. 5), and BLM street art (Ch. 6) to unfurl a broader orientation of Black iconoclasm across different cultural arenas. Each chapter discerns the ways Black radicalism exceeds Western Man while also remaining reflexive about how those theories or practices may still contain residues of the very iconography we are trying to unsettle. This ritual process of Black radical discernment thus performs a lived orientation toward Fanon’s call for a “program of complete disorder” which eschews both linear narratives of racial progress and teleological blueprints of Black liberation.

Visit Charles Athanasopoulos's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gary Watt's "Shakespeare and the Law"

Gary Watt is Professor of Law, The University of Warwick. He co-founded the journal Law and Humanities and is general editor of Bloomsbury's Cultural History of Law. He has held a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship on rhetorical performance and as a National Teaching Fellow and national "Law Teacher of the Year" (2009) for many years delivered rhetoric workshops for the Royal Shakespeare Company. His books include Shakespeare's Acts of Will, Dress, Law, and Naked Truth, Trusts and Equity, The Making Sense of Politics, Media, and Law, and Equity Stirring.

Watt applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Shakespeare and the Law, and reported the following:

Page 99, which appears in a chapter on Shakespeare’s props, contends that “To appreciate the performance of legal and governmental power through stage props requires us to appreciate material performances in their wider social and religious contexts”. Two examples are given of props that performed the Elizabethan passage from Roman Catholicism to the Protestant idea of the priesthood of all people. The first is a wooden altar that was moved towards the congregants during the church service. The second is a provision in the burial ritual that empowered attendants to throw dust upon the coffin where this had previously been the exclusive function of the priest. Page 99 then considers the crown as an exemplary instance of a legal and governmental prop in Shakespeare’s history plays, quoting the Duke of Gloucester (the future Richard III) where he says ‘[h]ow sweet a thing it is to wear a crown, / Within whose circuit is Elysium / And all that poets feign of bliss and joy’ (3H6 1.2.29-31). That word “feign” has connotations of dishonesty but here, as elsewhere in Shakespeare, it also refers to the poet’s art of using rhetorical “figures”. This brings us to the key argument of page 99 and of the chapter on props, which is that Shakespeare’s stage props perform rhetorically. The Crown, for example, performs as synecdoche, which is a figure through which a part represents a larger whole. An endless circle of incorruptible gold, the physical crown expresses exquisitely the deathless sequence of regal authority wherein queens and kings die but the monarch never does. It is a small hand prop, but it signifies a large idea.

The question is whether page 99, as a small part of my book, performs synecdochally as an effective representation of the whole. I think it performs quite well in that regard, since the larger argument of the book is that rhetorical performance is the key connection between Shakespeare and the law. Page 99 considers only one Shakespearean prop – the crown – but this invites us to consider other legally significant props (sword, book, seal etc) discussed in the same chapter. Alongside the chapter on props, we will naturally go on to consider the chapters on Shakespeare’s legal “stages” (his historical and physical place), his “roles” (his lawyers and other legal personalities), his “script” (the binding magic of his legal language), and the judgment of his “playgoers”.

Learn more about Gary Watt and his work, and read more about Shakespeare and the Law at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Scott Spillman's "Making Sense of Slavery"

Scott Spillman is an American historian and the author of the book Making Sense of Slavery: America’s Long Reckoning, from the Founding Era to Today (2025). His essays and reviews have appeared in The Point, Liberties, The New Yorker, The New Republic, n+1, the Chronicle Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and he has published academic articles in Reviews in American History, History of Education Quarterly, and North Carolina Historical Review.

Spillman has a PhD in history from Stanford University, and before that he studied history, English, and political philosophy at the University of North Carolina (and Duke University) as a Robertson Scholar. Originally from Atlanta, he now lives in Denver with his partner and their twin daughters. He also spends part of his time in Leadville, where he serves as chair of the city’s historic preservation commission.

Spillman applied the “Page 99 Test” to Making Sense of Slavery and reported the following:

Page 99 of Making Sense of Slavery introduces Francis Lieber, an early political scientist in the United States who wrote an influential code of army conduct during the Civil War. The page gives some background on Lieber’s journey from Germany, where he was born, to the United States and shows him wrestling with the question of how war affects the status of slavery.

This turns out to be a perfect encapsulation of my book, which is all about how scholars like Lieber have studied and wrestled with slavery over the course of American history. In fact, the specific question that interests Lieber on page 99—the question of slaves as people versus slaves as property, or the mixture of “the two ideas Man and Thing,” as he put it—is one of the central themes of the first part of the book. Lieber believed that war washed away the status of slaves as property, leaving only people whom the US government and military should consider free. This was one of the arguments that the Union used to justify emancipation during the Civil War.

The way Lieber approaches that question about the status of slavery in the midst of the war also provides a good example, I think, of the way that the book always tries to connect ideas to lived experience. In other words, this is not just a story of books or arguments flying back and forth, but of embodied people struggling to make some sense of their own lives.

In addition to ideas and individuals, the book is interested in the institutions in which they take shape. Lieber’s background on page 99 provides a nutshell summary of some of the broader changes in the landscape of American intellectual life during the early republic, particularly the influence of German ideas and educational models after the 1820s. The very bottom of the page hints at an even more transformative institutional change that will come after the Civil War—the rise of the research university. The rest of the book deals largely with how the study of slavery would become incorporated into the research university, and with what consequences.

Visit Scott Spillman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Charles Hecker's "Zero Sum"

Charles Hecker has spent forty years travelling and working in the Soviet Union and Russia. He has worked as a journalist and a geopolitical risk consultant, and has lived in Miami, Moscow and London. A fluent Russian speaker, he holds degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University.

Hecker applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Zero Sum: The Arc of International Business in Russia, and reported the following:

Clinging tenaciously by a toenail to the bottom of page 99 is one of the more important topics of Zero Sum: The Arc of International Business in Russia.

Page 99 is where the book starts to discuss the collapse of the Soviet Union and the stampede of adventurous international executives into the newly emerged Russian Federation. In the space of two-and-a-half paragraphs at the very bottom, page 99 also shows how the opening of the Russian market slotted directly into a rapidly globalizing world. Countries that were once too far, too opaque or too dangerous for business were rapidly becoming economic hotspots. Russia in the 1990s fit that trend perfectly.

That said, page 99 will not give you a comprehensive view of the scope of Zero Sum. Missing from the page, for example, the story of what happened to all those intrepid executives once they left the all-you-can-drink comfort of business class and disembarked at Moscow’s squalid Sheremetyevo airport. Also missing is the story of the stampede in reverse, as executives fled Moscow’s skyscrapers at the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. All of that is described in vivid detail in Zero Sum, both before and after page 99.

The top half of page 99 describes the amount of money ricocheting around the world during various peaks of international economic activity. Did you know, for example, that until 2004, when record amounts of money crossed international borders at the speed of light, the world was most globalised in 1914, on the eve of the First World War? That’s right, it took almost ninety years for the world to be as globalised as it was when international connections were facilitated primarily by the telegraph.

Visit Charles Hecker's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robin Derricourt's "Five Innovations That Changed Human History"

Robin Derricourt is an honorary professor of history at the University of New South Wales and a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His books in archaeology and history include Inventing Africa, Antiquity Imagined, Creating God: The Birth and Growth of Major Religions, and Unearthing Childhood: Young Lives in Prehistory, which won the 2019 PROSE Award in Ancient History and Archaeology.

Derricourt applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Five Innovations That Changed Human History: Transitions and Impacts, and reported the following:

The reader of page 99 will encounter there a key stage of a major development in human history. That is the point at which, five millennia ago in the urban civilisation of ancient Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq), symbols used to show objects were developed into symbols to represent sounds – the invention of writing!

So page 99 gives us an image of revolutionary innovation, an excellent example of what I engage with in this book. My goal there was to examine some major transitions in human culture, drawing on archaeology and history to consider what were their impacts, and exploring how many changes can be brought about by one single discovery or invention.

Writing developed from geometric patterns to mark ownership or show numbers in a traded agreement, to pictographic symbols which represented sounds to those trained in reading them. An origin in economic arrangements would lead to writing used for administrative, legal and military roles, religious rituals, political propaganda, and the transition of literature from an oral to a written form, used in the training of a literate elite.

Writing is one of five major introductions in human history I examine in the book: the taming and control of fire, the domestication of the horse (and its later association with the wheeled vehicle), the invention of writing in early civilisations, the creation of the printing press and the printed book, and the revolution of wireless communication with the harnessing of radio waves.

I also use these to raise some broader questions of what we mean by progress and innovation. Until the 18th or 19th century in much of the world innovation was regarded with suspicion by religious and political authorities. Are we now confident that change always beings us benefits? Are we dominated by a “presentist” perspective than biases our understanding of the past and our expectations of the future? Studying the deep past can illuminate our present – and our future.

Visit Robin Derricourt's website.

The Page 99 Test: Creating God.

--Marshal Zeringue

Daniel J. Mallinson and A. Lee Hannah's "Green Rush"

Daniel J. Mallinson is Associate Professor of Public Policy and Administration at Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg. A. Lee Hannah is Professor of Political Science at Wright State University. Their research on the politics and policy of state medical cannabis programs has been published in a several scholarly journals, including Public Administration Review.

Mallinson and Hannah applied the “Page 99 Test” to their latest book, Green Rush: The Rise of Medical Marijuana in the United States, and reported the following:

Browsers who open our book to page 99 will see an overview of what constitutes a comprehensive state medical marijuana program. The concept “comprehensive” is critical to our work in many ways. Fundamentally, it means that a state has decriminalized the sale and possession of medical cannabis by licensed business and patients, respectively. There is a method for patients to obtain access to state-legal medical cannabis and it is broadly available. Additionally, comprehensive programs have oversight on production and dispensing, as well as providers and patients.

The figure on this page provides a 30,000-foot view of the complexity of medical marijuana programs. Due to federal prohibition of marijuana, each state must stand up a distribution system that can go from “seed” to “sale.” Thus, each aspect of marijuana production from cultivation, to processing, to retail must be developed within each state. The Page 99 Test captures a critical argument in our book that you cannot understand the expansion of legitimization of medical marijuana without focusing on the states.

Green Rush tells this story and puts forward the states as the primary drivers of cannabis liberalization and broader drug policy reform in the U.S. It is structured around four stages of the policy process: agenda setting, adoption, implementation, and feedback. This gives the readers a thorough understanding of how and why medical cannabis policy emerged and spread across 38 American states and the effects it has had on governments and patients.

Learn more about Green Rush at the NYU Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nicholas D. Anderson's "Inadvertent Expansion"

Nicholas D. Anderson is Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at The George Washington University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Inadvertent Expansion: How Peripheral Agents Shape World Politics, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Inadvertent Expansion: How Peripheral Agents Shape World Politics brings the reader to the middle of one of the book’s ten historical case studies—in this case, of France’s failed inadvertent expansion into the Vietnamese kingdom of Tonkin in 1873. A French naval officer by the name of François Garnier had, without authorization from Paris, conquered the kingdom by force. While Garnier would be captured and decapitated by Chinese river pirates over the course of this invasion, he had hoped that his fait accompli would be accepted by his superiors in the capital. This page presents key pieces of evidence for why Paris would turn him down: because of France’s weak position in Europe (in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War) and the geopolitical threat it faced from the great powers there. Thus, Tonkin was returned to local authorities, and the French cabinet ordered the immediate withdrawal of all its forces. While another French naval officer would follow almost exactly in Garnier’s footsteps less than a decade later, and would succeed (covered later in the chapter), for now Tonkin was to remain independent.

The Page 99 Test is only moderately successful in the case of my book. On the one hand, it does serve to highlight one of the two key factors explaining when and why inadvertent expansion occurs: variation in geopolitical risk. It also takes the reader into one of the book’s detailed historical case studies and highlights the kind of primary, documentary evidence that is in abundance throughout the book. On the other hand, simply reading this page in isolation wouldn’t tell you much about the book as a whole—about the puzzling nature of inadvertent territorial expansion, about the details of the theory explaining it, about the nature of the quantitative and qualitative evidence presented in it, or about its relevance to contemporary issues and concerns.

Learn more about Inadvertent Expansion at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue