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

Gila Stopler's "Women's Rights in Liberal States"

Gila Stopler is Full Professor of Law and former Dean of Law School at the College of Law & Business, Israel. She serves as Editor-in-Chief of Law & Ethics of Human Rights.

Stopler applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Women's Rights in Liberal States: Patriarchy, Liberalism, Religion and the Chimera of Rights, and shared the following:

Page 99 of Women’s Rights in Liberal States says:

The extension of the protection of religious liberty beyond churches to a wide range of organizations with a religious ethos is characteristic of many liberal democracies and is highly significant as far as women's right to equality is concerned. As described above, wide nets of religiously based charitable and educational institutions, many of which are publicly funded, are free to preach and practice discrimination against women behind the protective shield of religious liberty. From emergency rooms in Catholic hospitals that refuse to administer emergency contraception to women, through religious schools that teach school children about women's inferiority, to religious employers who refuse to hire women or who discriminate against them in pay, the liberal democratic state aids, protects, and finances the dissemination of discrimination against women in the interest of protecting religious liberty.

In his study of public religions in the modern world, Casanova posits that there are three levels on which religions can be involved in the public sphere. The first is through its establishment at the state level. The second level is the level of political society, through confessional parties and through the involvement of religious institutions and groups in political and electoral mobilization. The third level is the level of civil society on which religions participate in the public discourse on various issues. Casanova argues that ultimately only at the level of civil society can religions have a legitimate public role, consistent with modern universalistic principles and with differentiated structures. In this Chapter I have shown that in contemporary Western liberal democracies religions have a significant public role on all three levels, which adversely affects the situation of women. I would therefore argue that contrary to common perception religion state relations in liberal democracies pose a serious challenge to women's rights....

Does the Page 99 Test work?

Yes, it does. The crux of the argument in the book, which is reflected very well on page 99, is that Western liberal democracies give patriarchal religions too much power, legitimacy and protection. Patriarchal religions then use their power and legitimacy, and the protection of the state, to restrict the rights of women in both the public and the private spheres and to adversely affect women’s status in society, all with the sanction of the liberal state.

Page 99 is the last page in chapter 3 of the book. While it reflects the crux of the argument in the book, the full argument is more multilayered and complex. The book is divided into three parts. The first part (chapters 1 and 2) discusses the historical, societal, and theoretical roots of discrimination against women. It explains the historical rise of patriarchy through patriarchal religion and culture and shows how patriarchy has been embedded in liberal theory and in the practice of liberal states. The second part of the book (chapters 3 and 4), which includes page 99, explains how, contrary to popular belief, religion state relations in liberal states adversely affect women’s rights. Patriarchal religions are regarded as respectable and as promoting public virtue and moral values regardless of and sometimes because of their discriminatory stances toward women, and the separation between religion and the state which is assumed to protect women against the power of patriarchal religion fails to do so. In part III (chapters 5 and 6) the book discusses the decline of liberal hegemony, the rise of populism, and their effects on the rights of women. Through an analysis of American Supreme Court cases such as Hobby Lobby and Dobbs the book argues that the resurgence and repoliticization of patriarchal religion in the twenty-first century has further magnified the threats facing women’s rights in Western liberal states such as the USA. It argues that the repoliticization of religion in the new millennium is often part and parcel of the rise of nationalism and of right-wing populism, and together these phenomena threaten not only the rights of women, but the future of liberal democracy itself.

Visit Gila Stopler's website.

--Marsha Zeringue

Elisabeth Paling Funk's "The Dutch World of Washington Irving"

Born in the Netherlands, Elisabeth Paling Funk received her PhD from Fordham University, taught English at the university level, and is now a translator, editor, and independent scholar. She lives in the Hudson Valley.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Dutch World of Washington Irving: Knickerbocker's History of New York and the Hudson Valley Folktales, and reported the following:

Serendipitously, page 99 of The Dutch World of Washington Irving: Knickerbocker’s History and the Hudson Valley Folktales opens near the beginning of a section in chapter three, entitled “The Oral Tradition.” This chapter deals with all aspects of New Netherland’s popular culture as Irving blends these within the Knickerbocker History’s narrative, and page 99 gives an excellent example of Irving’s major purpose and his way with Dutch-American folk material. Knickerbocker’s History illustrates Irving’s view that traditions and beliefs constitute an essential part of a people’s history. The stories of the Hudson Valley tales are wholly subservient to his purpose: to describe the distinctive life, traditions, and beliefs within the Dutch-American communities of former New Netherland. My first two chapters complete the picture; they investigate Irving’s treatment of New Netherland’s history and the presence in that work of Jacob Cats, a major seventeenth-century Dutch poet. But popular culture in all its manifestations is an important part of Irving’s History of New York and dominates the Hudson Valley folktales. Long before the study of folklore became a scholarly pursuit, Irving’s description of life in the Hudson Valley made him America’s first folklorist.

“The Oral Tradition” of chapter three treats all folk belief—omens, visions, ghosts, witchcraft, demonism—that are represented in The History of New York, and begins with legendry. Much of page 99 examines Irving’s claim, attributed to Juffredus Petri, that America was settled by “a skaiting party from Friesland.” Petri, or Sjoerd Pieters, a sixteenth-century Frisian scholar who intermingled the fabulous with historical facts, told of Frisian noblemen who, in 1030, discovered the New World and populated Chile. The “skaiting party” is Irving’s fiction, but his choice of activity for such intrepid explorers is apt; through the ages, Frisians have been known as master skaters, whose speed skating skills would become legendary in tales of extraordinary prowess.

A discussion of The Flying Dutchman follows. Irving’s use of this legendary ghost ship in the History’s 1809 edition is among the first in world literature and carries all the major elements of the legend in its oral tradition. He returns to it in the tale, “The Storm Ship,” explored in chapter five.

Next, the Dutch Saint Nicholas in religion, folk belief, and celebration is traced from his origin through the Middle Ages, when he acquired an additional role as folk hero. "The Oral Tradition" then follows him through his fateful adventures during the Reformation to his arrival and continued celebration by the Dutch in the New World. Irving’s adoption and transformation of the Dutch folk hero in his History of New York are extensively analyzed and shown to have developed into today’s American Santa Claus, a process that is further investigated in the epilogue.

Learn more about The Dutch World of Washington Irving at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nathan K. Hensley's "Action without Hope"

Nathan K. Hensley is Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University, where he works on nineteenth-century British literature, critical theory, environmental humanities, and the novel. His other areas of research include Anglophone modernism and the cultures of contemporary globalization. His first book, Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty (2016), explores how Victorian writers expanded the capacities of literary form to account for the ongoing violence of liberal modernity.

Hensley applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Action without Hope: Victorian Literature after Climate Collapse, with the following results:

Page 99 of Action without Hope comes in the second chapter, which uses Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights to describe the emergence of a modern way of life that's based on a relationship of extraction toward the nonhuman world. With others in the nineteenth century, she witnessed the slow process by which an exploitative and nonregenerative and therefore, in a way, doomed social order came to feel natural. The book as a whole makes the claim that this is the world whose ruins we live in today, "climate change" or the unraveling of earth systems being just one area where the outcome of this orientation is now palpable to us. Anyway in this chapter I'm arguing that Brontë's weird and still challenging novel suggests that this autodestructive way of life is not permanent or universal, but emerged at a specific historical moment. In this sense she departs from her sister Charlotte, who in Jane Eyre gave shape to the far more pacific view that bourgeois society could enable something like happiness or fulfillment. I write:

Written twelve years after this letter [in which Charlotte refers to the 'spoilt' personality of a neighbor from a slave-owning family], Jane Eyre would expunge this spoilt demon [i.e. Bertha Mason] from the record, leaving the stain of the plantation complex behind in a pile of charred rubble so as to clear space for heteronormative futurity between white characters, such that (as Jane reports) “perfect concord is the result” (C. Brontë, Jane Eyre, 519).19 “My Edward and I,” says Jane in conclusion, “are happy: and the more so, because those we most love are happy likewise” (C. Brontë, Jane Eyre, 520).

Emily’s view was darker. In a now-famous school essay she composed in Belgium, “The Butterfly” (1842), she wrote that “the universe appeared . . . a vast machine constructed only to produce evil” (178). As the semi-fictionalized speaker of the essay works through this insight, (s)he comes to see in the butterfly an image of how splendid beauty, “lustrous gold and purple,” can emerge from pure violence: nature “exists,” the narrator says “on a principle of destruction” (E. Brontë, “Butterfly,” 176).20 In Emily’s school essay, this principle is imagined as universal, valid in all times and all places.

Wuthering Heights would transform this grim metaphysics into a violent scenario many readers have mistaken for eternal. The tendency toward ruin in the novel appears to be a dynamic outside time. In fact it is rigorously dated, the book’s principle of destruction arriving along with its “suitable pair” of central exogamous characters (E. Brontë, Wuthering, 1). Heathcliff arrives at Wuthering Heights in 1781, at the height of the Liverpool-based slave economy, and Lockwood arrives in 1801, at the dawn of a new, modern century: twinned advents marked with a slanted chronological specificity I will describe more below. In this way is the auto-demolishing character of accumulation by extraction marked as historically emergent and dynamic across time, the “convergence between progress and decay” structuring the book (Hiday 248) only one modality by which it investigates the intimacy between luster and ruin across the period of an aspirationally universalizing Atlantic capitalism.

The Wuthering Heights chapter is crucial to the book because it helps frame my point (which is really Emily Brontë's point) that we currently inhabit a world whose normal order of operation is based, as Brontë puts it, on a principle of destruction. The fossil fueled imperialism of our present is in some ways a ghostly replay of the nineteenth century: the rapacious capture of the object world and the domination of subordinated peoples we see when we scroll through the news are in some ways hyperspeed versions of the social order Brontë watched gathering around her in the 1840s. So in that sense there is a representative quality to this passage, for sure. But the book also ranges further than this local argument about a gathering fossil capitalism and its afterlives. It's about how to inhabit systems that are dissolving and breaking and inescapable, and still find ways to elaborate new worlds out of those broken inheritances.

That's a long way of saying that in some ways the Page 99 Test works for Action without Hope—I think. In fact one thread of the book is about just this question of parts and wholes: how a tiny detail can evoke a much larger configuration. As I try to say in the book, this synecdochal quality is a literary effect, of course, but it's also how all thinking happens. We develop emblems for larger concepts, images that feel vivid, but point to something beyond themselves. Observing this scalar and figural quality of all thinking leads me to spend a lot of time mulling over the idea of the detail: what is a detail, how can small things matter, and what kinds of perceptual capacities do we need to appreciate both the texture of the small thing, and the dynamic ways it connects to the broader world of which it's only a partial evocation? This is the plot of Middlemarch, as I say in the book, and it's also why Action without Hope works on two levels: it's an argument for the quiet power of small, nearly insignificant activities, and also a manifesto for the kinds of reading that are necessary to appreciate those tiny things. I think people should look at page 151, too: that's my favorite one.

Visit Nathan K. Hensley's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Matthews's "Sex and Love in Porfirian Mexico City"

Michael Matthews is professor of history at Elon University. He is the author of The Civilizing Machine: A Cultural History of Mexican Railroads, 1876–1910.

Matthews applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Sex and Love in Porfirian Mexico City: A Social History of Working-Class Courtship, and shared the following:

Opening to page 99 takes the reader smack-dab in the middle of one of the many rapto cases that serve as the basis of this book, albeit one of the more salacious and titillating examples. The crime of rapto in turn-of-the-century Mexico, while defined as the abduction of an underage woman from parental authority, also often functioned as elopements planned by young couples in the face of family opposition. This case, which stems from a mysterious set of events that took place in 1907 between one romantically involved couple, although not representative of the entire book, does highlight key themes: societal gender norms and expectations; gendered performativity, especially before legal authorities; concerns about female virginity; and male anxieties about how modernization spurred female sexual freedom. On this page, specifically, we find twenty-seven-year-old police officer Guillermo, defending himself before an investigating judge for the abduction of fourteen-year-old Carmen, a teenage girl who he courted. Guillermo seeks to undermine her social standing before the judge claiming that she was not a virgin when they had sex because she had admitted to him that “one night while dreaming she had introduced her finger and…lost her virginity.” We also find, on this page, that Carmen’s mother seeks to undermine Guillermo social standing and manhood by claiming that he abandoned his pregnant girlfriend to chase after her daughter. The mother, finishing her declaration to the judge, submits a clipping from a popular Mexico City newspaper of a fictional story she claimed Guillermo wrote. Although continuing onto the following page, it tells the tale of a flirtatious coquet also named Carmen—who happens to live on the very street on which the real Carmen lived. In the story, the coquet uses revealing clothes and attractive makeup to lure two young men into a deadly duel over her affection. One dies and the other is sent to prison while Carmen looks on with glee from her tenement building window.

While page 99 highlights key themes, the book, more broadly, seeks to show the vast diversity of different ways that turn-of-the-century Mexico City’s expanding infrastructure, increased factory work, and new leisure and entertainment activities shaped the courtship and sexual practices of the working class.

Learn more about Sex and Love in Porfirian Mexico City at the University Press of Florida website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eugenia Zuroski's "A Funny Thing"

Eugenia Zuroski is Professor of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, Ontario. She is the author of A Taste for China: English Subjectivity and the Prehistory of Orientalism (2013) and editor of the journal Eighteenth-Century Fiction. She has also published two chapbooks of poetry, Kintail Beach (2022) and Hovering, Seen (2019).

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, A Funny Thing: Eighteenth-Century Literature Undisciplined, and reported the following:

Page 99 of A Funny Thing lands us on the page in which I discuss Horace Walpole’s Preface to the second edition of The Castle of Otranto, published in 1765. I would say that this page both does and does not give the reader a good sense of the work as a whole.

It does in the sense that it drops the reader right into a bit of historical literary criticism, in which I analyze how the different prefaces frame the tale for eighteenth-century readers, shifting their expectations of what literature is for. Such is the bread and butter of literary analysis, which is what this book is made of. A reader who is not already interested in literature from this period might conclude that this book would bore them—and maybe they’d be right. A Funny Thing is a work of academic literary criticism, and as such, it dwells deeply with textual detail and cultural context.

But the page does not at all give a sense of the breadth of texts and contexts that the book contains, nor its sense of humor! It doesn’t tell you, for example, that before page 99 you get a long discussion of flying penises in Western art and culture (with pictures!), or that the discussion of Walpole leads to a heartfelt meditation on the forms of intimacy he cultivated through shared creative projects with his friends, or that I connect The Castle of Otranto to Daniel Lavery’s absolutely brilliant series from The Toast, “Erotica Written By an Alien Pretending Not to Be Horrified by the Human Body,” or that the book culminates in an extended reading of Bob the Drag Queen’s “iconic wig reveal” on the show “We’re Here.”

In a way, though, page 99 is perfect, because it contains the epigraph to The Castle of Otranto where Walpole deliberately misquotes Horace from the Ars Poetica in a playful and irreverent effort to make space in British literature for departures from neoclassical standards—to refuse the empirical, the tasteful, the serious, and the proper in favor of the flighty, the silly, the outrageous, the funny. And this exact close reading, of this preface, which I have been teaching for years, was the seed of the entire project. So to me, this page really is the heart of the book, and the book is dear to my heart.

Visit Eugenia Zuroski's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Erin Shevaugn Schlumpf's "Remnants of Refusal"

Erin Shevaugn Schlumpf is Associate Professor of Film Studies at Ohio University.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Remnants of Refusal: Feminist Affect, National Trauma, with the following results:

On page 99 of my book, Remnants of Refusal: Feminist Affect, National Trauma, the reader confronts two film stills: the first, from Yasujirô Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953), and below, the second, from Jia Zhangke’s The World (2004). In both shots, an elderly couple sits on a low concrete wall, their faces in profile, their expressions impassive, their shoulders slightly hunched. The couples are dressed in traditional or anachronistic clothing: in Ozu’s film, they wear kimonos, while in Jia’s, the man dons a Mao suit and cap- the uniform of the latter-day proletariat. The Japanese couple in the first still, denizens of the provincial city Onomichi, have traveled to Tokyo to visit their adult children. However, they are quickly sent away by their distracted, inattentive eldest son and daughter to a hot spring spa in the tourist city of Atami. The Chinese couple in the second still, from impoverished Shanxi province, have come to Beijing to bury their son who perished under dangerous conditions as an unlicensed construction worker. Though not shown in these stills, most of the young people in these two films contrast to their elders in their energy and their frenzy to “make it” in the big city.

In the short paragraph on page 99, I explain—as other scholars have also noted—that Ozu and Jia’s films criticize periods of national transition following historical trauma- in this case the Second World War and the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre. I write, “Ozu’s film laments the cultural fallout wrought by the early years of the Japanese economic miracle; Jia’s film likewise questions what has become of time-honored beliefs as China enters the age of neoliberal globalization.” This coincides with my book’s larger argument that certain works of film and literature reveal what I term “remnants of refusal,” echoes and afterimages of the past that have been left in suspension between nationally dominant rhetorics of constant progress and the affective persistence of the unmourned past.

Should browsers apply the significance of the images on page 99 to my book as a whole, they would also glean several additional incitements that lie at its heart. Remnants of Refusal: Feminist Affect, National Trauma examines literature and film, engaging in how these works speak affectively—though their melancholy, ambivalence, or exhaustion—to the repression of historical trauma. The film stills on page 99—the immobilized elderly couples gazing without a clear aim at the horizon—serve as examples of these affects and of those figures left behind by national campaigns of renewal. My book claims, too, that such responses align with a feminist position. Ozu and Jia’s films feature women protagonists (Noriko in Tokyo Story and Zhao Tao in The World) who identify with their elders, suggesting a feminist protest to historical waves that cast the nation forward over the unresolved past. Finally, while my book primarily stages these arguments though French and Chinese literature and film, the comparison between China and Japan on page 99 reveals a key — if perhaps implicit — argument: that melancholy, ambivalence, and exhaustion may be affective forms of protest in works of art beyond these two nations, that we might consider how they operate globally.

Learn more about Remnants of Refusal at the SUNY Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alexander Menrisky's "Everyday Ecofascism"

Alexander Menrisky is assistant professor of English at the University of Connecticut. He is author of Wild Abandon: American Literature and the Identity Politics of Ecology.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Everyday Ecofascism: Crisis and Consumption in American Literature, and shared the following:

Page 99 of Everyday Ecofascism chiefly highlights the cultural critic Theodore Roszak’s concept of “reversionary-technophiliac synthesis,” which he developed in his long 1986 essay From Satori to Silicon Valley. In it, Roszak, who popularized the term “counterculture,” suggested that participants in the back-to-the-land movement of the late 1960s and 1970s were not as averse to technological advancement as popular media often portray them. Rather, they were often confident that new technologies could (perhaps paradoxically) help them to rediscover and reclaim putatively originary lifeways, social arrangements, and authentic modes of being on the earth. Perhaps no primary text of the time captured this optimism better than Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, which served not only as a guidebook for many communalists but also as a directory of tools they could purchase to help them establish their communities—as well as a sense of their own privileged belonging in a given environment. As I put in the book, “[c]onsuming (and using) products in a marketplace of organic commodities would itself be one way to prove that one had been ‘chosen’ by the land.”

Readers opening Everyday Ecofascism to this page would get a good sense of the scope of this chapter, which focuses on how commodity consumption grounded certain counterculturalists’ claims to a naturalized relationship with the earth. They would likely not, however, immediately understand its relation to the book’s titular term: ecofascism. The word has become increasingly prominent in both popular and academic takes on right-wing environmentalism, especially among mass shooters such as those who targeted Mexicans and Mexican Americans in El Paso, Texas, in 2019 and Black Americans in Buffalo, New York, in 2022. My argument throughout the book, however, is that we should understand ecofascism much as the field of comparative fascist studies has come to understand fascism in general: not as a stable ideology but as a political genre that reinforces white supremacy, in this case in environmentalist contexts. Scholars of fascism have demonstrated that deep-seated, nonpartisan storytelling patterns in Germany, for example, helped propel Nazism to power across the political spectrum. Roszak’s “reversionary-technophiliac synthesis” speaks to similar cultural narratives in the U.S. that have informed not only actors such as the El Paso and Buffalo shooters, who frame people of color as “invasive species” threatening white Anglo-Saxon blood on U.S. soil, but also certain Silicon Valley executives who believe that only the investment of authoritarian power in the hands of tech tycoons can save the world from ecological catastrophe.

Learn more about Everyday Ecofascism at the University of Minnesota Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kathryn C. Lavelle's "Reluctant Conquest"

Kathryn C. Lavelle is the Ellen and Dixon Long Professor of Political Science at Case Western Reserve University and the author of The Challenges of Multilateralism. She has been a congressional fellow and a residential fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.

Lavelle applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Reluctant Conquest: American Wealth, Power, and Science in the Arctic, and reported the following:

Reluctant Conquest fails the Page 99 Test. Hopefully, however, it does not fail the entire “Pages 1-269” Course! If someone browsing the book opened it to page 99, they would find an examination of American foreign policy as it changed early in the Cold War. The page summarizes how during the early years of the Cold War, the American government was revamping itself in order to address its new role in the world following World War II. All of these changes would affect Arctic affairs, beginning with the country’s physical presence on the ground and its bilateral relations with other countries in the region, chiefly Greenland, Iceland, and Norway.

Although it is not the best single page to introduce the book, page 99 does demonstrate the book’s overarching effort to situate Arctic strategy within the arc of broader American foreign policy throughout U.S. history. That is, what factors explain the way the U.S. acts and how do the pieces of economics and science fit within overall national interests? To do this, each section draws direct ties to broader events, isolationism, and internationalism and the efforts of Indigenous peoples within a political system they did not create, but have had to work within.

Most other examinations of U.S. foreign policy in the Arctic focus on one or another aspect of this history. Many present detailed histories of Alaska. While they are valuable, Reluctant Conquest is the first comprehensive study that integrates developments in science, commerce, and military affairs. The Arctic is an area that is experiencing dramatic environmental change as well as global political realignments. This book aims to give scholars, policymakers, and general readers an understanding of how the elements have fit together time so that they will be better equipped to evaluate events as they progress in the future.

Learn more about Reluctant Conquest at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ryan Cull's "Unlimited Eligibility"

Ryan Cull is Associate Professor of English at New Mexico State University.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Unlimited Eligibility?: Inclusive Democracy and the American Lyric, with the following results:

On the one hand, page 99 of Unlimited Eligibility? Inclusive Democracy and the American Lyric is uncharacteristically almost filled with a quotation of an entire poem. On the other hand, the quoted poem, Hart Crane’s “Possessions,” is pivotal to the presentation of the concept of “looking without recognizing,” a phrase introduced at the top of the page that also serves as the title of the chapter. Why is this distinction (looking vs. recognizing) important and how is it connected to a sequence of movements, from the St. Louis Hegelians to cultural pluralism to 60s/70s-era identity politics to more recent multiculturalism, that serve as the backdrop for the poets considered in this book?

Written in 1923, at a time when the New York state legislature amended a “disorderly conduct” law so that it could target gay men, Crane’s poem boldly invites readers to “witness” his life without “apprehen[ding]” him. The latter word, of course, can denote identifying and understanding – and also the act of arresting. A contemporaneous poem, “Recitative” similarly appeals to the reader to “look” without recognizing him. In these works and others, Crane studies how being seen can be a gateway either to greater social inclusion or to deeper social exclusion (or a messy mixture of both). He knows that those who are empowered predominantly determine a culture's ways of seeing and being seen. Brave appeals and demands by minority populations seeking greater social recognition, which have significantly structured a sequence of social movements (including some of those noted above), have secured important, incremental improvements for those populations. Yet participation within this inherently hierarchical system of social recognition (involving a recognizing class, those who are recognized, as well as those partially recognized, and those unrecognized) also can tacitly reinforce those hierarchies.

By inviting readers to “witness” and “look” without “recogniz[ing]” or “apprehend[ing],” Crane resists this approach to social inclusion. Instead, he is characteristic of a group of poets studied in this book (also including Walt Whitman, Jean Toomer, James Merrill, and Thylias Moss) who explore inclusion in terms of an affirmation of ontological proximity and equality rather than an epistemological confirmation of recognizability, locating an invitation to be-with rather than an urge to know-who at the core of their artistic practice. But the book traces how this approach has limits too. Prioritizing ontological affirmation rather than confirmation of recognizability too often comes close to indulging a naïve hope of establishing a world without labels.

Renarrating the sociopolitical dimensions of American poetry through the tension between these two models of inclusion helps us to reflect on the demand that we, albeit falteringly, keep trying to learn the language of democracy, a task we must continue today.

Learn more about Unlimited Eligibility? at the State University of New York Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alexandre F. Caillot's "Late to the Fight"

Alexandre F. Caillot holds a doctorate in history from Temple University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Late to the Fight: Union Soldier Combat Performance from the Wilderness to the Fall of Petersburg, and shared the following:

Page 99 marks the start of chapter four and features two quotes from members of the 17th Vermont and 31st Maine Volunteer Infantry Regiments, the subjects of Late to the Fight. These epigraphs set the tone for the chapter, which then proceeds as follows:

On May 23, 1864, New York Herald reporter Sylvanus Cadwallader rosily depicted the progress of Union arms in the Civil War. Reflecting on the Overland Campaign, he praised the 'transcendant genius' of Grant and Meade. This journalist proclaimed that the two generals had 'triumphed over all obstacles' and 'other glorious victories await[ed] our grasp.' Cadwallader made it appear as though the Union effort to crush the Confederacy depended solely on effective leadership and thus overlooked the contributions of the rank and file at the Wilderness and Spotsylvania Court House. Yet he anticipated 'hard fighting' should the opposing Army of Northern Virginia assume a defensive position along the North Anna River on the road to Richmond. Such a concession highlights an important question for this stage of the campaign: to what extent did the later arrivals overcome the stresses of their first two battles and continue to fight well as newly minted veterans? Contemporary historian John C. Ropes differed from Cadwallader by offering a bleaker assessment of Meade’s Army of the Potomac. Summing up the nature of this campaign, he noted that...

The Page 99 Test works well because the page draws attention to several concepts running through Late to the Fight. Its presentation of quotes from Vermonters and Mainers reflects the book’s focus on the perspective of the officers and men in these two regiments. Also, the page highlights a common tendency to credit Union victory to the generals’ decision-making instead of the soldiers’ efforts that made those plans a reality. To counter this trend, it asks how the New Englanders developed into reliable veterans amid the unprecedented conditions of the Overland and Petersburg Campaigns.

What this test does not reveal, however, is that Late to the Fight is a story about human motivation, endurance, and combat performance in which the Vermonters’ and Mainers’ voices frequently emerge. It examines the experiences of these New Englanders because they epitomized a population of approximately 820,000 soldiers who joined the Union Army after Congress passed the Enrollment Act, or draft law, in March 1863. This research challenges the consensus that contemporaries and historians alike have embraced, according to which these later arrivals lacked the patriotism and fitness for soldiering. It considers what drove them to enlist despite the bloody realities of military service so apparent by this point in the war. The book addresses what these troops faced on campaign and whether they proved worthy comrades of their predecessors in uniform, who have enjoyed greater esteem. Centering on the humble private, Late to the Fight demonstrates that the Vermonters and Mainers did their part to help achieve Union victory."

Learn more about Late to the Fight at the LSU Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Erin Beeghly's "What's Wrong with Stereotyping?"

Erin Beeghly is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of Graduate Studies for the Philosophy Department at the University of Utah. Her primary research interests lie at the intersection of ethics, social epistemology, feminist philosophy, and moral psychology.

Beeghly applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, What's Wrong with Stereotyping?, and reported the following:

Page 99 drops you into the book’s fourth chapter. That chapter opens with a photo of Barbara Gittings, an early gay rights activist in the United States. She’s holding a sign at a pre-Stonewall rally, sporting short haircut, stylish sunglasses, and a smart mid-1960s dress straight out of Mad Men. Her sign says: homosexuals should be judged as individuals. She’s there to protest homophobic policies, rampant and shameless in that era: policies that required the federal government to fire gay employees because they were alleged security threats; that allowed businesses to refuse service to gender non- conforming and queer patrons; and justified police raids on gay bars. In these raids, queer, trans, and gender non-conforming patrons were manhandled, assaulted, and thrown in jail. All of this – and more – was perfectly legal.

The chapter wrestles with the idea on Gittings sign. What does it mean to treat someone as an individual? Is it plausible that all stereotyping – and, for that matter, all discrimination – is wrong because it involves generalizing on people, ignoring their individuality? Is there a moral right to be treated as an individual?

I’m at a point in the chapter where I’m grappling with the slipperiness of the ideal on Gittings’ sign. The most natural ways to interpret the sign’s message don’t work. They suggest, implausibly, that clocking anyone based on looks – as a certain gender, as queer, as belonging to a certain racial or ethnic group, as Republican or Democrat – is inherently wrong.

“For some theorists,” I write on page 99, “the upshot is this. We must stop explaining what’s wrong with stereotyping—as well as what’s wrong with discrimination—by saying that it fails to treat persons as individuals. The claim is philosophically corrupt. However, other theorists take the analysis so far as a challenge. The challenge is to articulate a new interpretation of failing to treat persons as individuals that does not generate the problem of absurdity.”

I am on the cusp of diving into nerdy attempts to vindicate the imperative on Gittings pre-Stonewall sign. If we take Gittings and other early gay rights activists seriously, we should be able to make sense out of that sign’s message, interpret it in a way that is not absurd, find the truth in its meaning.

It’s Pride month right now. Almost sixty years after this photo was taken, it’s still important to make sense of that sign. LGBTQIA+ stereotyping and discrimination continue to plague us, alarmingly so. Page 99 holds out hope that we can push back against anti-queer policies, and the dehumanizing stereotypes that underlie them, with the idea on Gittings sign. On the other hand, the book goes on to argue that individualistic wrongs are only ever part of the story of what’s wrong with stereotyping.

Using queer history as a touchstone, the book as a whole offers a nuanced picture of what’s wrong with stereotyping. It argues that stereotyping individuals – judging persons by group membership – is not always wrong. Nor is characterizing groups in generic ways: queers are fabulous after all. However, when stereotyping is unethical, you can tell because it is characterized by clusters of wrongs, travelling together for systematic reasons, targeting groups for violence and marginalization. All in all, my book provides a rich understanding of wrongful stereotyping that readers can use to identify wrongful stereotyping in their everyday lives. Page 99 exemplifies this, taking readers on a lively philosophical journey.

Visit Erin Beeghly's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joseph Kellner's "The Spirit of Socialism"

Joseph Kellner is a historian of Russia and the Soviet Union at the University of Georgia.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Spirit of Socialism: Culture and Belief at the Soviet Collapse, with the following results:

Page 99 of The Spirit of Socialism: Culture and Belief at the Soviet Collapse finds one Sergei Chevalkov, formerly a colonel in the Soviet Union’s land-based nuclear defense forces, late in the process of converting to a millenarian sect. In keeping with one major theme of the book, he is explaining to me (in interview) why neither his former work (in both its technical and philosophical aspects) nor the Soviet worldview contradict the teachings of Vissarion, the sect leader who, in 1991, proclaimed himself the Second Coming of Christ. Chevalkov, who considers Vissarion to have reconciled all of the world’s spiritual and intellectual currents, was an early and zealous convert, who quickly became the high priest of the sect upon relocating to their survivalist commune in southern Siberia, where my interviews were conducted.

The Page 99 Test, in this case, has succeeded admirably. The book’s analysis shifts regularly between the experience of individual converts, believers and radicals of the early 1990s, and a broad cultural and intellectual portrait of late-Soviet and post-collapse Russian society. Here on page 99, the reader finds the former, in appropriately colorful form. It is a book of eccentrics, oddballs and heretics in some ways, but one that finds such people to be far closer to the center of Soviet society and culture than one would assume—with Chevalkov an excellent example. His story addresses a central question of the text, namely, how and why so many people, possessed of Soviet values and Soviet resources, came to adopt novel and radical worldviews that most would consider un-Soviet, all in the few years surrounding the country’s collapse. With these questions answered—read to see how!—the book then draws a new and I hope compelling picture of Soviet life and its legacies in the new Russian Federation. But its largest conclusions don’t concern the Soviet Union alone. The reader ought to come away thinking about the relationship between science and faith; reckoning with the conditional and fragile nature of their own worldview; and considering how different Russia’s crisis in the 1990s really is from our own crisis today. Page 99 won’t get you there entirely, but it’s not a very long book on the whole.

Learn more about The Spirit of Socialism at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eve Darian-Smith's "Policing Higher Education"

Eve Darian-Smith is a distinguished professor and the chair of the Department of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Irvine.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Policing Higher Education: The Antidemocratic Attack on Scholars and Why It Matters, and shared the following:

Page 99 talks about how attacks on universities and scholars are related to a wider set of attacks on journalists, librarians, writers, political activists and public intellectuals – in fact anyone who challenges repressive political power. This wider set of attacks by antidemocratic regimes, including the MAGA Republican regime, may take various forms. In places such as Brazil, Hungary or India, they can range from censoring what gets published, to closing news outlets, to arrests, detentions, and in some cases even torture, rape and death.

The Page 99 Test is pretty effective in conveying the overarching point of my book, which is that attacks on academic freedom are one strategy exercised by antidemocratic politicians to expel any criticism challenging their authority to govern. We see attacks on academic freedom increasingly under Trump’s second administration as students and scholars are policed and criminalized for public protest, as well as shuttled into cars and relocated to distant detention centers. And we see it in the widespread defunding of science and research that seeks to make universities and colleges bend to the far-right’s ideological agenda. These efforts have a chilling effect on learning. In a very material sense, people are being disciplined to self-censor and not speak up, afraid of real and imminent threats. This is what the far-right wants – to create an environment in which people are scared to think in ways that may question those in power.

Unfortunately, this isn’t just a US problem. My book looks at two interconnected global trends – rising antidemocracy and declining academic freedom. I argue that what is happening in the US needs to be understood as part of a global drift toward authoritarianism that includes aggressive control over knowledge production.

With this book, I hope to open conversations about the value of academic freedom and higher education in general. Despite US education being very expensive and historically exclusive, going to college is vital for training people to question their assumptions and think critically about their place in the world. And importantly, academic freedom is central to revisioning more inclusive democratic societies that respect diverse worldviews and encourage innovative ideas that drive new jobs and solutions.

Being able to think, study, discuss and share knowledge without fear of censorship is essential for everyone, irrespective of age, gender, sex, religion, class, race or ethnicity. This is an urgent and timely message as we face a new era of unparalleled political repression.

Learn more about Policing Higher Education at the Johns Hopkins University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Global Burning.

--Marshal Zeringue

David C. Hoffman's "American Freethought"

David C. Hoffman is an associate professor in the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs at the City University of New York.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, American Freethought: The History of a Social Movement, 1794–1948, and reported the following:

Page 99 of American Freethought takes readers right to the heart of the book’s subject matter. It begins a section devoted to a freethinking feminist named Frances Wright who lived from 1795 to 1852. The section is titled, “Frances Wright: Utopian Abolitionist and Apostle of Science.” It opens,

Frances Wright was one of the most luminous of the British activists who immigrated to the United States in the early nineteenth century. She is honored today as a pioneering feminist and abolitionist who was the first woman to go on a public speaking tour in America, but she also should be remembered for carrying forward [Thomas] Paine’s vision for science by promoting secular scientific education for both women and men.

By way of background, the revolutionary pamphleteer Thomas Paine, whose Common Sense set America on the path to independence, argued that science rather than traditional religion should be the common pursuit that unites a free republic. Wright promoted this idea in her public lectures, urging her followers to establish “Halls of Science,” where a free scientific education would be available to all regardless of gender or social standing.

I am glad to have the opportunity to introduce the readers of the Page 99 Test to Frances Wright, who was a major figure in the freethought, abolitionist, and feminist movements of the early nineteenth century that is all but forgotten today. In the 1820s she invented and pursued a workable scheme for ending slavery in the United States that might have changed the course of history if it had not been brought down by lack of funding and an outbreak of malaria. Wright’s collected works should have a place on the shelf of Penguin Classics next to her mentor Jeremy Bentham, but there is no modern edition of them in any series.

Wright is just one of the many freethinking women and men that readers will encounter on the pages of American Freethought. Among the others are Ernestine Rose, the atheistic daughter of a Polish rabbi who led efforts to establish married women’s property right in New York State; Frances Ellingwood Abbott, a radical Unitarian whose “Nine Demands of Liberalism” ignited the revival of American freethought after the civil war; Ida Craddock, a fervent spiritualist who was persecuted for writing a sex manual; and Queen Silver, a precocious child whose first public lecture in defense of atheism was given at the age of ten in the 1920s. These are some of the many characters in American history who have contributed to the freethought movement’s defense of every American’s right to believe or disbelieve by the light of their own conscience without state interference.

Learn more about American Freethought at the Johns Hopkins University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert N. Spengler III's "Nature's Greatest Success"

Robert N. Spengler III directs the Fruits of Eurasia: Domestication and Dispersal research project and leads the Domestication and Anthropogenic Evolution Research Group at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany. He is author of the book Fruit from the Sands and has published dozens of scholarly articles while running research projects across Central Asia.

Spengler applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Nature's Greatest Success: How Plants Evolved to Exploit Humanity, with the following results:

The ninety ninth page of Nature’s Greatest Success is bisected by two different and equally captivating topics; the page opens with the conclusion of a discussion of strawberry domestication. The popular narrative of strawberry domestication involves a farmer in the 1700s – a bit of a strawberry fanatic – who planted different species of strawberries in his garden, only to notice one day that something rather different was growing in his strawberry patch. I ask whether the process of stumbling across hybrid forms of a crop can be thought of as a proxy for some aspects of domestication in prehistory. If an ancient farmer suddenly discovered a unique form of a crop growing in their field, would they have tried to reproduce it, and, if so, which of the forms of plants in your produce market are a result of this process? The latter part of the page dives into the odd case of quinoa domestication, and I rationalize the ways that the process could not have involved human intentionality. In short, genetic features of the plant prevent active seed selection from fostering the process of domestication.

I believe that a reader picking the book up and thumbing to the page in question would gather enough of an understanding of the overall book that, if the topic catches their attention, they will return to page one and begin reading. The book spans a wide range of topics, using many case studies, with the goal of providing the reader with an idea of what domestication looked like in antiquity and how the foods they eat came into being.

Domestication remains one of the most captivating topics of scholarship across the sciences, as it is a key part of the story of what permitted humanity to become culturally modern. Without domesticated crops, you would not have any of the material goods that you take for granted, human populations would be low, cities could not exist, and the arts and sciences would not have developed. Geneticists, archaeologists, and ecologists have started to realize that humans in prehistory did not intentionally domesticate crops. This means that the evolutionary process that permitted human cultural development was a happy accident, as opposed to a great achievement of humanity. In Nature’s Greatest Success, I explore these new ideas about how domestication traits first evolved. In this book, I encourage the reader to think in different ways about ancient agriculture and the ongoing domestication processes all around you today. In short, the most important questions about humanity have remained unanswered because of long-standing misunderstandings about how ancient domestication occurred, and the true story of domestication is far more interesting than the long-standing narrative.

Visit Robert N. Spengler III's website.

The Page 99 Test: Fruit from the Sands.

--Marshal Zeringue

Steve L. Monroe's "Mirages of Reform"

Steve L. Monroe is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the National University of Singapore. He is a scholar of development, with a primary focus on the Arab world. His scholarship examines two of the region's most pressing developmental challenges: limited economic integration, and gender inequality.

Monroe applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Mirages of Reform: The Politics of Elite Protectionism in the Arab World, and shared the following:

Page 99 defends how this chapter in Mirages of Reform measures the strength of Jordanian industries’ social connections to the state. This measure relies on data from publicly traded firms. It gauges industries’ social-connections strength as the share of chairmen and board members (CBMs) of publicly traded firms in an industry who belong to Jordan’s historically favored ancestral group – Jordanians of East Bank descent.

The first half of page 99 presents the pros and cons of this measure. On the plus side, data from publicly traded firms is publicly available. This helps me identify socially connected CBMs based on whether they have an “East Bank” last name, and cull information on their firms’ size and profits. On the downside, this measure assumes that industries without publicly traded firms have weak social connections to the state.

The second half of page 99 tries to validate this assumption. Compared to industries with publicly traded firms, Jordanian industries without publicly traded firms have on average smaller firms, lower tariffs and are devoid of State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) – all signs of weak social connections. I then argue that if industries without publicly traded firms did in fact have strong social connections to the state, this measure would be a “hard” test of the argument as it would overestimate the social connections strength of weakly connected industries; differences in tariff cuts and profits between industries with strong and weak social connections would be even greater if I had a more accurate measure of industries’ social connections. Page 99’s last paragraph presents qualitative evidence from different industries that substantiates the chapter’s measure of social-connections strength.

The Page 99 Test on Mirages of Reform passes in spirit but not in substance. Page 99 gives the browser a whiff of the book’s essence – its challenges, assumptions, methodological orientations. Defining and measuring social connections was one of the hardest parts of this book project. Page 99 exhibits one of the book’s tactics in measuring social connections. I like how the page begins by acknowledging this measure’s limitations, then segues into an empirical and theoretical defense of the measure, before validating the measure with secondary sources and case expertise. I hope that a browser reading page 99 would infer that I understand the empirical challenges of studying state – society relations, and have made a good faith effort to overcome these challenges.

Nevertheless, page 99 does not reveal the book’s argument: industries with stronger social connections undergo more extensive but deceptive levels of trade policy reform when their state has greater support from the US and the EU. The Page 99 Test also excises the previous chapters’ lengthy explanation and definition of social-connections strength. I conceptualize the strength of industrialists’ social connections to the state as a function of the quality and frequency of their interactions with state officials. By this logic, the economic elite who belong to politically favored social groups have the strongest social connections to their regime – hence page 99’s focus on CBMs of East Bank descent. This information is key to assessing the social connections measure’s validity.

Lastly, in shrinking Mirages of Reform’s measure of social connections to CBMs from politically favored groups, the Page 99 Test excludes the multiple approaches this book uses to assess social connections across time and place. Instead, the page 99 reader might mistakenly conclude that this book restricts its measures of social connections to what is static and quantifiable. For a more complete yet condensed understanding of Mirages of Reform, I encourage the casual browser to skim the introduction.

Visit Steve L. Monroe's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Marcus Alexander Gadson's "Sedition"

Marcus Alexander Gadson is Assistant Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina School of Law and the author of articles published in places such as the UCLA Law Review and the Georgetown Law Journal.

Gadson applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Sedition: How America's Constitutional Order Emerged from Violent Crisis, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Sedition says:

…virulent white supremacy political campaign in American history to shatter the movement for interracial political cooperation. Meanwhile, Democrats in Wilmington conspired to overthrow a government they associated with Black political power, which culminated in an armed mob demanding the mayor’s resignation at gunpoint after a day of bloodletting. If both these efforts succeeded, white supremacists could end Black political involvement in the state and eradicate the spirit of 1868 once and for all.

Someone reading this would get an inkling of what my book is about, but miss important context and not truly understand the argument I make. They would know that they will eventually read a chapter explaining that white supremacy motivated some North Carolinians to overthrow Wilmington’s government and that their insurrection was violent. However, they would not know, just from the excerpt, that the book makes a larger claim: that constitutional crises have been common in American history and have shaped American constitutional law and history in dramatic ways. The Wilmington Insurrection of 1898 is part of that larger story I tell.

Sedition provides six examples of constitutional crisis in American history, most of which readers will never have heard of, such as the Buckshot War, Dorr Rebellion, and Brooks-Baxter War. And by “constitutional crisis,” I mean things like terrorist organizations overthrowing duly elected governments and militias loyal to rival candidates shooting each other dead in the street. I then explain how these crises have affected the drafting and interpretation of both state and federal constitutions. At a time when many commentators are arguing about whether we are in a constitutional crisis, I believe this book can give readers vital context as they assess the debates.

Learn more about Sedition at the NYU Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Adam S. Hayes's "Irrational Together"

Adam S. Hayes is professor of sociology at the University of Lucerne. Before entering academia, he worked as an options market maker and equity derivatives sales trader and was licensed as a financial advisor.

Hayes applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Irrational Together: The Social Forces That Invisibly Shape Our Economic Behavior, with the following results:

Page 99 is the hinge where the book moves from storytelling to method. It really distills the broader mission of the book: to show that economic choices are never purely about numbers or cognitive quirks—they’re also greatly influenced by social forces. The passage invites readers to see how experimental techniques can unpick the ways that price, convenience, and status jostle with trust, loyalty, and shared identity in everyday financial decisions. It’s not about dismissing “economic” explanations or romanticizing the social. Instead, the page makes a case for measuring these factors in tandem. Unraveling the way that our dollars interact with our culture, social contexts, socialization processes, and relationships is indeed a miniature of the book’s central framework.

Does the Page 99 Test work?

Absolutely. The entire argument of Irrational Together is that economic life is governed, in part, by social forces—and that we can measure these influences. Page 99 reveals how the book bridges disciplines, bringing sociology’s insights about things like norms, networks, and identity into conversations typically dominated by economic rationality or behavioral biases. It’s not a rejection of what's come before, but an insistence that to truly understand choice, we have to see how these perspectives mesh and rub up against each other. This page signals a book that’s more than just a critique of “rational economic man”; it’s a toolkit for better understanding how our choices get entangled with who we are, who we know, and what matters most to us.

If this page draws you in, the rest of Irrational Together offers an extended invitation to see economic life in high relief. From meme-stock booms to the hidden scripts of gendered money talk, from algorithmic investing to the moral boundaries of peer-to-peer transactions, the book uses familiar stories, original data, and lived experiences to explore how everything from culture and social identities to interpersonal ties and social networks shape even what we think of as our most private economic decisions. What emerges is a vision of economic life that is less about solitary individuals optimizing abstract curves or even hopelessly irrational beings with limited processing power & cognitive biases--and more about real people navigating the social landscape that is the economy. By the end, readers won’t just have a richer view of economic sociology; they’ll see how these insights can inform more reasonable efforts at navigating financial choices and the crafting of more effective policies. If page 99 made you curious about why you sometimes pay more to buy from a friend—or why an app can nudge you toward “rational” investing—you’ll find the rest of the book picks up that thread and runs with it.

Visit Adam S. Hayes's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Neil Gregor's "The Symphony Concert in Nazi Germany"

Neil Gregor is professor of modern European history and director of the Parkes Institute at the University of Southampton. He is the author of Daimler-Benz in the Third Reich, How to Read Hitler, and Haunted City: Nuremberg and the Nazi Past. Most recently he coedited Dreams of Germany: Musical Imaginaries from the Concert Hall to the Dance Floor.

Gregor applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Symphony Concert in Nazi Germany, and shared the following:

Page 99 of my book falls in a section entitled ‘Guidance, Direction, Censorship’, so takes us straight to the heart of what the book is about – namely the question of how the Nazi dictatorship impacted the work of German orchestras in the 1930s and 1940s. As one would only expect, the regime swiftly developed mechanisms to ensure that orchestras adjusted their repertoire to Nazi demands regarding the promotion of ‘healthy’ German music (whatever that was). Conversely, the regime’s antisemitism was such that the performance of ‘Jewish music’ was rigorously policed – composers such as Mahler or Mendelssohn disappeared from concert programmes very quickly. So in this sense the Page 99 Test works remarkably well!

At the same time, the passage nods to the ways in which the work of monitoring orchestral programming was carried out not by ‘the Nazi regime’ in the sense of something suspended over the musicians’ own world, but by figures co-opted from that musical world into the apparatus of control. In other words, it carries something of one of the core arguments of the book, namely that the remaking of German musical life under the dictatorship was a process in which musicians participated actively themselves. Over the course of the last twenty years historians of Nazi Germany have come to understand that the regime was not so much something that sat on top of German society as something that was embedded in it. This encourages us to think of musicians – and others – not merely as passive objects of the regime’s policies, but as agents in the formulation and implementation of those policies, and to recognise that the participatory dimensions of Nazi rule were in operation in the musical sphere too.

Where the test works slightly less well is in capturing the side of the book that is about audiences. As well as exploring how orchestras changed as institutions, the book is concerned with the question of whether new forms of listening to music emerged among the public. I am interested to explore not only how the transformation of ‘Germans’ into ‘Nazis’ over the 1930s and 1940s can be mapped in the concert hall, but also to think about how the concert hall was a site in which that transformation was pursued. In that way, the book moves beyond thinking about the world of policy and regulation into offering a social and cultural history of the phenomenon of concert-going more generally.

Learn more about The Symphony Concert in Nazi Germany at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sarah Gabbott & Jan Zalasiewicz's "Discarded"

Sarah Gabbott is a Professor of Palaeobiology at the University of Leicester. She researches the fossil record of ancient life and is particularly interested in understanding how fossils form and what they reveal about evolution and ecology. She actively seeks new fossil specimens from across the globe, going on digs to China, South Africa and the Canadian Rockies. She also works in the laboratory analyzing fossils and undertaking grisly experiments to determine how decomposition affects fossilization. Recently, she has turned her attention to the potential fossil record created by human activity, especially thinking about how long our 'artefacts' will endure.

Jan Zalasiewicz is Emeritus Professor of Palaeobiology at the University of Leicester. He was formerly a field geologist and palaeontologist with the British Geological Survey, involved in the geological mapping of eastern England and central Wales. His interests include Early Palaeozoic fossils, notably the graptolites (a kind of extinct zooplankton), mud and mudrocks, the Quaternary Ice Ages, the nature of geological time, and the geology made by humans. In recent years he has helped develop the concept of an Anthropocene epoch. He has written many popular science articles and books.

Gabbott and Zalasiewicz applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Discarded: How Technofossils Will be Our Ultimate Legacy, and reported the following:

Page 99 of our book Discarded takes the reader, fair and square, into the kind of world – or rather worlds – that we as palaeontologists must navigate in our daily work. It casually spans three and a half billion years, as the story stretches out from the microbes that colonize our clothes today to the first microbes that began to grow on the seafloors of the early Earth. It crosses, too, from living world to the chemical one, as it considers which minerals might crystallize to turn this kind of interaction into tangible, durable fossils, whether of primordial microbial colonies or of our modern fashion items. And it’s also a page that takes us into the mechanisms that keep our planet habitable, in introducing the diatoms, oceanic microplankton that provide much of the oxygen that we breathe.

It's a fair sample, we think, of the story that we have to tell: of how our science of palaeontology can throw a new kind of light on many aspects both of our lives and of the workings of our planet, as we show how even our most fleeting of human fashions may become immortal, leaving fossil impressions in strata that can endure until the end of the Earth.

This single page, mind, gives only a tantalizing glimpse of the extraordinary novelty and diversity of technofossils: those objects that we create for our profit and pleasure, and that have durability built into them by human design as a very effective first step to future fossilization. You have to turn to other pages of our book to consider the palaeontological puzzles posed by objects that range from concrete- built megacities spanning thousands of square kilometres to the almost unbelievably minuscule patterns etched onto the microchip within your computer and mobile phone; and, to consider how this new kind of palaeontology is affected by such things as global warming, sea level rise, and the balance between war and peace.

It’s the whole narrative of the book that shows our motive for writing it: that the countless objects that we so casually discard won’t simply somehow go away, but will all too often persist as a challenging, polluting legacy for our and future human generations. As technofossils begin their long journey to geological posterity, looking at them through a palaeontologist’s eyes may help with the vexing problems that they pose today.

Learn more about Discarded at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Jan Zalasiewicz's The Earth After Us.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ross Benes's "1999"

Ross Benes is a journalist, market research analyst, and author. His writing has appeared in Esquire, The Wall Street Journal, Smithsonian Magazine, and Entertainment Weekly. As an entertainment industry analyst, he’s regularly cited as an expert source by the Los Angeles Times, NPR, and Bloomberg. His books include Rural Rebellion: How Nebraska Became a Republican Stronghold and Turned On: A Mind-Blowing Investigation into How Sex Has Shaped Our World.

Benes applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, 1999: The Year Low Culture Conquered America and Kickstarted Our Bizarre Times, with the following results:

The 99th page of 1999 covers how Vince McMahon spun untrue stories about WWE’s primary competitors. One passage states:

Because WWE bought out its competition, it owns their video libraries, which WWE uses for documentaries and series about the companies McMahon purchased. These videos can be a fun trip down memory lane with their fantastic archival footage and interviews with prominent sources. But there’s bias because WWE spins stories so it always appears superior.

Readers seeing this page would get a good sense of what that particular chapter is about. But they wouldn’t get a sense of how 90s low culture connects to our modern world. Later on in that chapter I tie WWE’s revisionism to insincere storytelling by current politicians and business leaders. One of those pages, combined with page 99, would provide a strong example of what the book is about. Because 1999 is a group of essays, no single page covers its multiple subjects. But out of the subjects covered in the book, pro wrestling is arguably influencing the world the most. In that regard, page 99 points readers in the right direction of connecting yesterday’s low culture to current events.

Visit Ross Benes's website.

--Marshal Zeringue