Elizabeth Shakman Hurd's "Heaven Has a Wall"

Elizabeth Shakman Hurd is Professor and Chair of Religious Studies and Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Heaven Has a Wall: Religion, Borders, and the Global United States, with the following results:

From page 99:

…the normative order is the sovereign state system and the drive to transcend it the gravitational pull of American sovereign exceptionalism. AmericaIsrael pulls the US toward the latter. It embodies the productive interplay between sovereign territoriality and an American aspiration to collective transcendence of the international order. Performing AmericaIsrael is an exercise in refiguring sovereignty and aspirational borderlessness. This can be seen in the 1985 US-Israel Free Trade Agreement (FTA), the first free trade agreementof its kind. World Trade Organization rules allow FTAs only if they are regional; therefore, the US and Israel have maintained since 1985 that they are a legal “region” together. No party has challenged this claim in WTO courts, and so it stands.

AmericaIsrael is part of a larger mission to realize an American—and would-be universal—political morality. It is not the only example; AmericaUkraine is another. Overwriting sovereign norms of territoriality, and enacting an exception that is also the rule, AmericaIsrael is an example of what Giorgio Agamben describes as “the legal form of what cannot have legal form.” It is an American political theology, in the sense described by Vincent Lloyd, as “a shorthand for religion and politics more generally, or where they overlap, that part of the Venn diagram where religion and politics are connected and that could be approached in a lot of different ways.

I’d say the Page 99 Test works. Heaven Has a Wall is about American borders, and page 99 deals with the US and its (lack of) borders with Israel. I use the term “AmericaIsrael” on this page to refer to a cultural, religious, and political consensus that unites the two countries almost as if they were one, tapping into jointly held fantasies of military prowess, Holy Land fascination, and a righteous overcoming of borders in the name of the right and the good.

The test is slightly misleading in that the book is not only or even mainly about Israel. It’s a broader argument that the US is best understood as a state that simultaneously enforces its borders while also circumventing and even ignoring them. There is something very American about the desire to do both: to enforce and suspend borders, to be first among equals, to make the rules but not be subject to them. The 9/11 commission report captured this with the phrase “the American homeland is the planet.” No limits. Yet borders are limits, liminal zones, places of extremes, exceptions, and special rules. You want to look over your shoulder after you cross. US borders are present and absent, avowed and deferred. Enforced and erased. Fortified and open. Borders are defended even while the ideal of America is borderless. This goes back to the Louisiana Purchase, the annexation of Texas, debates over annexing Cuba, and today, of course, Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal.

It can be tricky to study something that is both present and absent. If the American border isn’t just a line in the sand, what is it? Borders are political: they’re about regulation, control, checkpoints, violence. But they’re also religious sites of redemption, enchantment, salvation, commitment, emotion, and mystery. Each chapter of the book takes on a different aspect of borders: creating, enforcing, suspending, and refusing. These alternate with short interludes meant for a general audience: Where is Guantánamo? What happens if you openly disagree with a border agent at the airport? How does it feel to cross the border as a pilgrim participating in a pilgrimage older than the border itself? What happens if the river serves as a national border, but the river moves? I also want readers to consider their own border stories, and whether they fit into the book’s framework. Tell me your stories!

Visit Elizabeth Shakman Hurd's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jules Holroyd's "Oppressive Praise"

Jules Holroyd is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Sheffield, with research interests in social and political philosophy, feminist philosophy, and moral psychology. Prior to joining the department at Sheffield in 2016, they had positions at Cambridge, Cardiff, and Nottingham. They were a Mind Association Fellow 2022-2023.

Holroyd applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Oppressive Praise, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Oppressive Praise is at the heart of Chapter 3 of this book - this chapter sets out a view of what we do when we express praise: such expressions are vehicles for expressing our values. I articulate the mechanisms by which praise does this; and how the view of praise I develop can explain how (even well-intentioned) expressions of praise can embody and entrench oppressive values.

Page 99 wraps up one key part of my view - that praise has the function of signalling our values, by showing what we’re willing to celebrate and promote - the bravery or kindness that the target of the praise has expressed in their behaviour, say. Then page 99 embarks on the articulation of another key bit of the view: that praise expresses values not only in the things it explicitly celebrates and elevates, but in the evaluative frameworks that an expression of praise presupposes.

Here are two examples of this (to mention examples beyond page 99, that I return to, amongst others, throughout the book): someone might express praise towards a father for the childcare they are doing (my articulation of this case draws on an example from Serene Khader and Matt Lindauer’s work on the ‘daddy dividend’). In doing so, they signal - to the target, as well as to other audiences of the expression - that they value his parenting and perhaps more generally the idea of fathers getting involved in the care of their children. Or someone might express praise for someone’s bravery, signalling that they care about courage, and were able to detect when it was displayed.

But expressions of praise might presuppose wider evaluative frameworks and assumptions that audiences might infer, and take to be widely shared by audience members. For example, praising a father for doing basic parenting might presuppose the insulting belief that fathers are not good at parenting, and doing any of it is exceptional and praiseworthy. If part of a wider pattern where fathers are praised and mothers are not, expressions of praise may presuppose - irrespective of the intentions of the person praising - that mothers’ parenting is not noteworthy, to be taken for granted. Thereby gendered stereotypes about parenting and assumptions about whose labour is valuable can be conveyed by what those expressions of praise presuppose. Or praising a fat person for their bravery in choice of dress can presuppose the oppressive idea that they will be, or ought to be, ashamed of their body (as Aubrey Gordon has written about).

Does page 99 give a good idea of the whole work? In a way yes, because it gets to the core idea of the book, about the role that praise can play in signalling and presupposing values (sometimes good values, sometimes oppressive values). It articulates the mechanisms that make praise an important part of our moral interactions but one that can also be distorted by, and can perpetuate, oppression. On the other hand, I think it is pretty hard to get a sense of exactly what is going on just at page 99, since by then we’re already in the details of the conceptual apparatus that, I argue, are needed to make sense of how praise functions. It presents some fundamental ideas of the book, but for them to fully make sense and be understood in context, I think you need to read a fair bit of what leads up to page 99!

Overall, I think you’d get a better first sense of the book by reading the examples that come earlier on - first introduced at pages 18-23, 54-58, and recapitulated at pages 76-80. Those pages give you the examples of the phenomenon that motivates the whole book - sexist praise, ableist praise, racist praise, transphobic praise and anti-fat praise… Then, if you’re super interested in the mechanisms by which praise works to entrench oppression; the implications for thinking about our practices of holding responsible; the norms for expressing praise well; or strategies for resisting and responding to oppressive praise, including when expressed through honorific statues… then please do read on!

Learn more about Oppressive Praise at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Sanbonmatsu's "The Omnivore’s Deception"

John Sanbonmatsu, Professor of Philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, is author of The Omnivore's Deception: What We Get Wrong about Meat, Animals and Ourselves and of The Postmodern Prince: Critical Theory, Left Strategy, and the Making of a New Political Subject. He is also editor of the anthology, Critical Theory and Animal Liberation.

Sanbonmatsu received his BA from Hampshire College and earned his PhD in the History of Consciousness program at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He lives in the Boston area and has an adult son.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Omnivore's Deception and shared the following:

The reader who opens my book to page 99 will land in the middle of my critique of the celebrity animal farmer Joel Salatin, who was propelled to national fame by Michael Pollan in his bestselling book, The Omnivore's Dilemma (2006). The page begins with Thomas Jefferson's defense of simple American agrarianism against the corrupting influences of European sophistication and "luxury." Similar nationalist and conservative themes, I show, have now surfaced again in a "new" American pastoral ideal that has embraced the supposed "romance" of animal husbandry. The chapter this page appears in offers a critique of Pollan's hagiographic depiction of Salatin as a paradigm of rural virtues and American gumption, with a view to showing how this right-wing libertarian improbably became the doyen of Pollan's legions of well-heeled, urban, educated, liberal readers. As I explain on page 99, Salatin was for many years lionized in the mainstream and progressive press; then, five years ago, Mother Jones published a searing critique of Salatin, exposing his ugly views on race. Salatin, I write, "denied that 'America is systematically racist,' insisting instead that 'the failure in the Black community is dysfunctional family collapse.'"

Although page 99 is representative of my cultural critique of the "enlightened" omnivorism defended by Pollan, Salatin, and others, it is not representative of my book as a whole, because I cover a great many other themes too. My main argument is that we have effectively organized our entire existential identity as human beings around the domination of the other beings of the Earth; that this domination is undermining the ecology of our planet and ruining our souls; and that all exploitation and killing of animals for food--we kill about 80 billion land animals and up to 2.7 trillion marine animals each year--is morally indefensible and must stop. In the first half of the book, I trace the rise and lethal consequences of the modern animal economy, then demolish the myths and bad faith that prop up that system. None of our mass violence against animals, I show, is necessary or justifiable, since we can flourish easily on a plant-based diet. In the closing chapters of my book, I show that other animals have complex consciousness and emotions, and I make the case for treating them as persons or "someones," rather than as things, commodities, and slaves. Animals are not worthless beings--they are worthy of our love.

Visit John Sanbonmatsu's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jennifer Crane's "'Gifted Children' in Britain and the World"

Jennifer Crane is lecturer in health geographies at the School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, working at the intersection of history, geography, and sociologies of health. Before joining Bristol, she held teaching and research positions at the Universities of Warwick and Oxford, including being PI on a Wellcome Research Fellowship. She has published popular and scholarly works exploring how diverse publics access state welfare, analysing diverse case studies of child welfare, the NHS, and gifted children. Much of her work has employed and driven new analysis of 'experiential expertise', including her first book, Child Protection in England, 1960-2000.

Crane applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Gifted Children in Britain and the World: Elitism and Equality since 1945, with the following results:

I looked to page 99 of my latest book, Gifted Children in Britain and the World, with some trepidation, without a clear sense of what chapter or what kinds of analysis would be there. What we see on this page actually feels, to me, central to the ethos and major claims of the final book – the page focuses on making visible and analysing the writings of children and young people themselves. Page 99 discusses a collective letter, written in 1979 by a group of ‘ninth and tenth graders’ in a giftedness programme in California, where, as you’ll see elsewhere in this book, such programmes were relatively prevalent. The ninth and tenth graders wrote to young people who read a British magazine, Explorers Unlimited, produced for child-members of a voluntary group, the National Association for Gifted Children. The ninth and tenth graders reached out, in particular, to share critique of the term, ‘gifted’. They wrote that, having received this label, they were ‘expected to always be straight A or on top’, and ‘push[ed] harder’ by teachers; they could also not always ‘live up to your expectations’. Instead, the children wrote, they’d like to simply be analysed and approached as ‘’human’, and understood ‘a little more’.

This letter, my page 99 argues, shows the ambivalence which many young people felt about the label gifted. And this specific letter, the next Explorers Unlimited edition recorded, merited many responses, with British children agreeing that ‘we are given a label’ and that ‘I felt just like that towards my parents’. The label then travelled, and held similar meanings for children across the Atlantic, despite very different political economy structuring around ‘giftedness’ (also discussed in the book). Some children, discussed elsewhere in the book, of course also loved the label ‘gifted’. Many children relished a sense of specialness attached to it, and in the 1970s and 1980s in particular, when ‘giftedness’ was typically taken very narrowly, to really mean rare, exceptional, special, children mobilised this label to reshape their relationships with teachers, friends, parents, and siblings. Yet other children found the pressure of the label too much, and questioned the arbitrariness of its application and also, significantly, the inequalities embedded in psychological and educational testing, which are also explored in this book. More children still felt ambivalent about this label – these mixed feelings are something that one of my PhD students, Buse Demirkan, is tracing at present through interviews.

Overall then, my book contributes to geographies and histories of childhood by arguing, foundationally, that we can and must trace the voices of the young and include these, and ‘age’ more broadly, as a critical category within our analyses. We can dismiss any claims that the young didn’t have political agency, or that their writings were never saved or recorded, and thus that their stories do not matter or can’t be accessed. With this in mind, the book traces the rise and fall of giftedness as a specific label, and the broadening out of this idea, with new connections to social mobility agendas, in the 1990s and 2000s. And central to the book is the complex ‘agencies’ exercised by young people – both empowered by ideas of their high intelligence, able to access new voluntary spaces, yet also inevitably entwined policy agendas around future leadership and, often, dismissed as critical thinkers with the assumption that any critique merely demonstrated the uniquely disruptive nature of their minds.

Learn more about 'Gifted Children' in Britain and the World at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elizabeth Eva Leach and Jonathan Morton's "Performing Desire"

Elizabeth Eva Leach is Professor of Music at the University of Oxford and the author of Guillaume de Machaut, Sung Birds, and Medieval Sex Lives. Jonathan Morton is Associate Professor of French at Tulane University and the author of The "Roman de la rose" in Its Philosophical Context.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Performing Desire: Knowledge, Self, and Other in Richard de Fournival's "Bestiaire d'amours", and reported the following:

On page 99, the discussion moves between two of the animal examples from Richard de Fournival’s darkly playful thirteenth-century fiction, the Bestiaire d’amours—those of the eagle and the woodpecker. The first-person speaker in the work, whom we call the je (the “I”), uses the eagle breaking its beak to eat as a twisted analogy for the lady needing to break her pride (figured as a “fortress”) to speak and accept the advances of the je. He then describes the woodpecker’s behaviour when a hunter stops up its nest hole with a plug or peg. The bird finds a special herb that has the power to unfasten the plug, allowing it to access its offspring. The je uses this story to figure his own desire to access the lady’s heart, lamenting that he doesn’t possess the “herb” needed to open her up. We read the je’s interpretation as a deliberate but transparent attempt to misdirect the audience of the work away from the clear implication of his own desire to penetrate her, both psychically and physically. This imagery contributes to a sequence of suggestive examples on this page, highlighting themes of penetration and lightly veiled obscenity and potential violence.

This page, nestled within the chapter on “The Place of Bodies,” offers a vivid picture of the complex and often unsettling psychic world conjured up in Richard de Fournival’s prose work. On page 99, we discuss how the Bestiaire d’amours uses animal examples to explore themes of penetration, breaking down barriers, and gaining access to the desired other. This single page represents the whole book in a few ways. It captures the Bestiaire d’amours’s distinctive method of being a warped kind of bestiary, of using animal natures for self-serving analogies. It showcases one of the book’s major lines of argument, namely that the Bestiaire d’amours conceptualises desire and subjectivity through images of containment, entry, and rupture. The overtones of obscenity and the je’s manipulative interpretations, crucial aspects of the work’s unsettling effect, are also clearly visible here.

Of course, page 99 doesn’t tell the whole story. It doesn’t delve into the work’s status as a hybrid “prose lyric”, the subtle games it plays with performance and textuality, the subversiveness with which it parodies authoritative philosophical, Scholastic discourse, or its rich reception history, all things treated in the book as whole. Nevertheless, page 99 offers a glimpse of how the Bestiaire d’amours uniquely (and often disturbingly) uses animal imagery to explore the physical and psychological dimensions of desire.

Learn more about Performing Desire at the Cornell University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Medieval Sex Lives: The Sounds of Courtly Intimacy on the Francophone Borders by Elizabeth Eva Leach.

--Marshal Zeringue

Josée Johnston, Shyon Baumann, Emily Huddart, and Merin Oleschuk's "Happy Meat"

Josée Johnston is Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on food, gender, culture, and politics. She is the co-author, with Shyon Baumann, of Foodies (2015) and, with Kate Cairns, of Food and Femininity (2015). Shyon Baumann is Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. His work addresses questions of evaluation, legitimacy, status, classification, and inequality. Past book projects include Hollywood Highbrow (2007). Emily Huddart is Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. She is an environmental sociologist with a focus on consumer attitudes and behaviors. She is the author of Eco-Types (2022). Merin Oleschuk is Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Happy Meat: The Sadness and Joy of a Paradoxical Idea, and shared the following:

Page 99 of our book falls in the chapter "Happy Meat Makes Me Feel Good," which explores the happy stories about ethical meat that some consumers focus on when thinking about their meat consumption choices. On page 99 specifically, there is an anecdote from two focus group interviewees about a pig slaughtering they witnessed. The interviewees explained that the event caused them to be especially attuned to the conditions under which animals are raised and killed and to consume mindfully. We argue that this anecdote illustrates psychologist Paul Rozin's idea that meat has become moralized, which is to say that meat consumption was previously morally neutral but has in recent decades come to be seen as having clear moral consequences. We argue also that this anecdote illustrates Sara Ahmed's argument that happiness can be ascribed to an object, which then has enhanced positive social valuation.

Readers turning to this page would learn something significant about our book, but it would be a limited window into what the whole book is about. The book covers many more concepts, arguments, and empirical findings. At the same time, the ideas of moralization and happy objects are two of the most important concepts in the book. In trying to understand why people eat meat, and why happy meat in particular, we find that happy meat helps to manage people's moral qualms about meat. Happy meat is morally acceptable because the animals are treated humanely. Animals raised ethically are objectified as highly valued and they can generate happiness via consumption. These are some of the core ideas underlying why happy meat works well for some consumers to continue to eat meat. It would seem that the Page 99 Test does not work quite as well for our book as might be hoped, but it's also not a total failure.

Our book is perhaps less well suited to the Page 99 Test than many others. It is less about advancing a single argument and is more about examining the multiple angles for understanding happy meat as a consumer phenomenon and in relation to meat eating in general. So it is not surprising that page 99 does not tell us about much of the book as a whole. While page 99 draws on a focus group transcript, the book also relies on survey data, interviews and site visits with farmers, and analysis of news stories. The other themes the book addresses include the emergence of a discursive and material "space" for happy meat aside from the industrial meat system; the meat consumption behaviours and beliefs of the average consumer; the perspectives and experiences of farmers and other workers who produce happy meat; and the social dynamics implicated in the choice to eat, or not eat, happy meat vs. industrial meat.

Learn more about Happy Meat at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Niall Docherty's "Healthy Users"

Niall Docherty is a Lecturer in Data, AI, and Society in the Information School at the University of Sheffield.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Healthy Users: The Governance of Well-Being on Social Media, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Healthy Users explores the hidden political costs of nudge, discussing how its paternalistic interventions manipulate the free choice of (assumed-to-be) irrational individuals living in neoliberal societies. Page 99 characterizes nudge as a system of control, despite its proponents arguing that it ensures the autonomy of people subject to its techniques. By subtly shaping environments, through design cues that range from house flies on urinals or default options on administration forms, ‘choice-architects’ direct human thought and behaviour in certain directions, at the expense of others. The book as a whole explores the effects of this in the context of social media interfaces, arguing that the type of agency afforded to users is incredibly narrow, primarily reflective of normative Silicon Valley values to do with self-interest, self-promotion and social competition. The book argues that to engage with social media is to respond to and action these values. To be a user in the terms offered by platforms is to live the neoliberal dream of nudge. A reader opening the book on page 99 would likely get a sense of these arguments, yet may miss how the book also relates these norms to the economic practices of platforms who are keen to keep users scrolling for a primary capitalist function. That is, despite platforms claiming that the design of their interfaces encourage healthy use, meaningful connection, and social flourishing, they also cultivate habitual interactions and dependencies. It is through these repeated, daily user habits that platforms are able harvest profitable data, which is then used to improve their services and sell to interested third parties for a profit - mainly for targeted digital advertising. Habits, therefore, as the book explores in some depth through a range of empirical and theoretical analysis, are the vehicle of users' own normalization and the principal source of capitalist value extraction online today. Overall, then, I think page 99 of Healthy Users reveals some of the core philosophical ground of this critique, but omits its corresponding technological, and deeply contemporary, applications found throughout the book as a whole.

Learn more about Healthy Users at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eunji Kim's "The American Mirage"

Eunji Kim is an assistant professor of political science at Columbia University.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, The American Mirage: How Reality TV Upholds the Myth of Meritocracy, with the following results:

Page 99 of The American Mirage zooms in on the idea of a “natural experiment,” a term social scientists use to describe those rare moments when life, not a researcher, does the randomizing. The page opens with this explanation:

It’s as if an experiment has taken place but without any deliberate randomization by researchers.

From there, I walk readers through a well-known example: the rollout of Fox News across the U.S. in the late 1990s. Because cable providers negotiated channel availability district by district, some Americans got Fox News early, others didn’t—randomly, and for reasons that had nothing to do with politics. That quirk gave researchers a way to study the channel’s effects on voting behavior, ideology, and even how members of Congress talked. Later on the page, I mention another stroke of research luck: how state regulations accidentally determined which towns got early broadband access—giving us a window into how online media deepened partisan divides.

Does page 99 reflect the book as a whole?

Honestly? It does more than I expected. At first glance, it might seem like I’ve gone full research nerd (and fair warning, I do love a clever research design). But this page also sets the stage for one of the book’s central moves: showing how entertainment—often brushed off as frivolous—can shape political beliefs in very real, very measurable ways.

Just a few pages later, I introduce my own natural experiment, one that might surprise readers: the hometown locations of successful American Idol contestants. What happens when someone from your small town suddenly becomes famous on national TV? It turns out that people in those towns watch more of that TV show and then start to believe in the American Dream more strongly. They’re more optimistic about economic mobility compared to their similar counterparts who live in otherwise economically similar towns. Page 99 is the bridge between the methodological rigor of social science and the pop-cultural heartbeat of the book. It’s the part where I ask readers to take both seriously.

For too long, political scientists have treated entertainment as a sideshow. But if we’re honest about how Americans actually spend their time, the picture is clear: most aren’t glued to political news—they’re immersed in stories that entertain, distract, and inspire. The American Mirage starts from that simple, overdue truth. This book argues that the tales we consume—from reality TV competitions to influencer glow-ups—aren’t just harmless fun. They shape how we think about success, who deserves it, and what’s possible in America. They fuel our belief in mobility even when the odds are stacked. They blur the line between fantasy and political reality. Once upon a time, Horatio Alger’s rags-to-riches stories lived in dime novels. Today, they live on glowing screens—and they’re still doing political work. The American Mirage shows how.

Visit Eunji Kim's website.

--Marshal Zeringue