Sergey Gavrilets's "Social Influence and the Logic of Collective Action"

Sergey Gavrilets is Distinguished Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Mathematics at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. He is the author of Fitness Landscapes and the Origin of Species.

Gavrilets applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Social Influence and the Logic of Collective Action, and shared the following:

Page 99 falls in the chapter “Dynamics of Social Influence.” It begins with a figure showing adoption curves in the classic Bass model of innovation diffusion, which combines influence from external authorities with influence from peers. The page emphasizes that “even a relatively weak effect of external influence ... can significantly speed up the spread of the innovation.” It then notes how the model can incorporate individual differences and network interactions before turning to the classic Daley-Kendall model of rumor spread, which adapts ideas from epidemic models.

The Page 99 Test works reasonably well for my book, although it works better as a sample of the book’s approach than as a summary of its full argument. The page captures one of its central concerns: how individual behavior spreads through a population under the combined influence of authorities and peers. It also illustrates the book’s typical strategy: begin with a simple formal model, explain its intuition, visualize its consequences, and then connect it to related models and possible extensions.

At the same time, a browser reading only this page might conclude that the book is mainly about the diffusion of innovations and rumors. Its larger subject is collective action: why groups sometimes solve shared problems and sometimes fail, even when cooperation would benefit everyone. The book asks who contributes and who free-rides, why people punish violators or follow leaders, how norms emerge and change, and when small behavioral shifts can produce large social transformations.

My central argument is that no single mechanism can adequately explain collective action. Material incentives matter, but so do personal attitudes and moral values, beliefs about what others will do, social norms, peer influence, cultural authorities, cognition, learning, and individual differences. The book brings insights from game theory, behavioral economics, evolutionary theory, psychology, and cultural evolution into a common framework. This framework shows how actions, attitudes, and beliefs can coevolve and reinforce one another, sustaining cooperation but also trapping groups in persistent collective failure. It also helps identify tipping points, explain why apparently ineffective institutions endure, and clarify when interventions by leaders, authorities, or committed minorities can redirect a group’s trajectory.

Page 99 therefore reveals an important engine of the book - social influence operating through nonlinear population dynamics - but not the full machine. It gives a good taste of how the book thinks, but only a partial map of what it explains.

Visit Sergey Gavrilets's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Greg Garrett's "White Lies"

Greg Garrett is the Carole McDaniel Hanks Professor of Literature and Culture at Baylor University and Canon Theologian for the American Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Paris, France. He has published over thirty books, including The Gospel According to James Baldwin: What America's Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity (2023) and A Long, Long Way: Hollywood's Unfinished Journey from Racism to Reconciliation (2020).

Garrett applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, White Lies: Dismantling Ten Cultural Myths About Race, and reported the following:

Page 99 of White Lies is a virtual cornucopia of themes and ideas about the power of racial myths to create a caste system and to diminish those who are not white Christian males. On that page, I wrestle with the Supreme Court’s 2023 Students for Fair Admission decision striking down race-based admissions to institutions of higher ed, and with the hypocritical suggestion from Supreme Court justices including Clarence Thomas that racial discrimination is a thing of the past.

In the process, I dig into the truth that since we are a multi-cultural multi-racial nation we will have to reckon with these differences. I use James Baldwin’s seminal essay “The Stranger in the Village” as a way to address how America must confront race and difference, since the Black American is “not a visitor to the West, but a citizen there, an American; as American as the Americans who despise him.”

The page—which is also the concluding page in a chapter about the myth of white Americans celebrating that at least they aren’t Black—ends with how white americans have created myths to keep Black people in their place, to enforce white supremacy, including the simple idea that race can differentiate between two people in identical economic situations by race. “Systems that were created to make people miserable make people miserable,” I write, “and thus has the racial caste system functioned in America.”

Page 99 of my White Lies is a remarkable confirmation of the book’s larger thesis that racial myths shape the way we think, live, and believe. This page 99 offers an incredibly dense summation of the creation of a racial caste system in America and cites Isabel Wilkerson, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, James Baldwin, and theologian Maria Power, and presents a call to action on the myth that we can and should use race to set up who in America matters and who does not.

The largest section of page 99 is a discussion of James Baldwin’s seminal essay “The Stranger in the Village,” which appeared in his first book, Notes of a Native Son. I have argued in a previous book on Baldwin (The Gospel according to James Baldwin) that his experience visiting a Swiss alpine village that had never seen a Black man helped him formulate many of his most important understandings about race. The villagers saw him as exotic. The children wanted to touch his nappy hair. But as he notes, white men in the West (Baldwin divided his time between France and the United States) do not have the luxury of looking upon him as a stranger.

Baldwin—and the villagers of Leukerbad—knew that eventually he would go back down the mountain, and they did not have to deal with him. But for those in the Western democracies, for those in his native United States, the question of the Black person could not be ignored. Either white people would have to acknowledge the shared humanity of the Black person, or everything might fall apart.

I’m particularly happy with my closing paragraph, which is not only the last paragraph on page 99, but the last paragraph of my chapter “At Least We’re Not Black.” It notes how our history has leaned into this harmful myth (often at the detriment of poor whites, who might have more in common with Black Americans than with wealthy whites), and makes an explicit connection to white Christian nationalism, which I write about at length in the book, which has taken and is daily leaning into the idea of a racist caste system that enthrones them to the detriment of everyone else.

Well done, Page 99 Challenge. With White Lies, you absolutely nailed it!

Follow Greg Garrett on Facebook and Substack.

The Page 99 Test: Entertaining Judgment.

Writers Read: Greg Garrett (June 2017).

The Page 99 Test: Living with the Living Dead.

--Marshal Zeringue

Marina Cano's "Theatrical Afterlives"

Marina Cano is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Valencia. She has taught at universities in Scotland, Ireland and Norway. She is the author of Jane Austen and Performance (2017), and the co-editor of Jane Austen and William Shakespeare: A Love Affair in Literature, Film and Performance (2019). More recently, she has co-edited the collection Women, "Failure" and Academia: Activism, Creativity and Critique in the Contemporary University (2026).

Cano applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Theatrical Afterlives: Nineteenth-Century Women's Novels on the Stage, with the following results:

I open my book, Theatrical Afterlives, in search of that potentially defining page, page 99. I am thrilled to discover that it falls on one of my favourite chapters: Chapter 3, “Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford in Suffrage Times.” How exciting!

This chapter explores dramatic productions of Gaskell’s best-known, best-loved novel by groups of suffragettes, and argues that such dramatic offspring sheds light on the novel itself, by making readers aware of its potentially pro-suffrage verve. This links back to the argument of the book as a whole: that the theatrical afterlives of nineteenth- century women’s novels are a prism through which we can look back at the novels, and that, when we do so, we discover different shapes and colours—like with a kaleidoscope.

But, first of all, what exactly is going on here? Page 99 contains part of my discussion of how Miss Pole, one of the formidable spinsters that inhabit the town of Cranford, can be read as a suffragette foremother. The section starts on page 98, so by page 99 we are still at the beginning of the discussion. On page 98, I have been laying out how suffrage actresses, members of the suffrage group Actresses’ Franchise League (AFL), played the character of Miss Pole with heightened aggressivity at the International Suffrage Fair of 1912. By page 99, I turn from the stage to the page to seek what basis there is for such rendition in Gaskell’s novel.

I explore, for example, one of Miss Pole’s speeches in Chapter 10 of the novel, where she claims to know the male sex really well. She knows that men wish “to be considered Samson and Solomon rolled into one.” After all, “My father was a man, and I know the sex pretty well.” On this, I claim that “Gaskell’s Miss Pole appears here as an activist and feminist protester, criticising that sacrosanct system of Victorian authority: patriarchy, and especially parental rule.” Her speech, in fact, is motivated by an encounter with the local doctor, Mr Hoggins, who, Miss Pole claims, has been mugged by a group of robbers, an incident he repeatedly denies (rightly, as it turns out).

So, to go back to the Page 99 Test, is this page representative of the book as a whole? v To my surprise, the answer is yes. The page starts with the sentence “The use of the qualifying adverb ‘even’ points to the connections between Cranford the novel, Cranford the dramatizations and the suffrage movement.” Here I am close reading a review of the AFL’s performance of Cranford. I then turn to the novel to unpick some of these connections between the stage and the page (through the Mr Hoggins discussion and Miss Pole’s aggressivity).

Interestingly, the end of the page takes us back to the stage, to the Cranford productions by the AFL and the WFL (Women’s Freedom League). Page 99 concludes by further exploring the connections between Miss Pole, Gaskell’s character, and the WFL, one of the radical groups of suffrage fighters. To reinforce the connection, I quote the WFL’s call to arms, and make the point that it retrospectively resonates with Miss Pole’s own aggressive harangue in the novel: “To arms, Freedom Leaguers! The thought of our tortured prisoners of war should…” This is where page 99 ends, in the midst of the WFL’s rallying cry.

Now this dance—from the stage to the page and back to the stage and its historical context—is representative of the book as a whole and of the key strands that the book weaves together. It is also representative of its key ideas: these theatrical productions tell us something about the reception history of nineteenth-century novels by British women writers (in this case, that Gaskell and her novel had an eventful afterlife among suffrage fighters and players).

But the plays also uncover something about the novels that has largely gone unnoticed, some socially progressive undercurrent: the pro suffrage sympathies of Cranford in this case, a novel that Gaskell wrote in the 1840s, when the movement for the female vote was budding in England. (Gaskell herself corresponded with some suffragettes and supported their journalistic endeavours). After all, in Gaskell’s Cranford, women are enfranchised already: they are the sole homeowners in town and make all local decisions. They are the “Amazons” that the narrator, half-jokingly, describes them as, at the start of the novel.

Other chapters in Theatrical Afterlives engage in a similar choreography, this time through prison theatricals (in connection to Jane Austen), the Irish stage and colonial histories (in connection to the Brontës), late twentieth-century British experimental theatre (George Eliot), and the woman question and the New Woman of the mid to late nineteenth century (Ellen Wood, Mary Elizabeth Braddon). So, there is much more to discover!

Learn more about Theatrical Afterlives at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sophie Gee's "The Barbarous Feast"

Sophie Gee is professor of English at Princeton University and the Vice Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Sydney. She is the author of Making Waste: Leftovers and the Literary Imagination and The Scandal of the Season, a historical novel recreating Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock. She cohosts the popular literary podcast The Secret Life of Books.

Gee applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Barbarous Feast: Eating and Writing in the Eighteenth-Century World, and shared the following:

Page 99 of The Barbarous Feast gives a pretty good glimpse of what the book is about. I’m saying that in his 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe (usually regarded as the first novel in English), Daniel Defoe uses the image of the cannibal feast Crusoe encounters on his “deserted” island as a surrogate for the ravenous colonial appetites of Britain and Spain, which have turned the entire Caribbean into a contested zone of greed, rapaciousness and bitter conflicts.

I write:

Defoe’s writing in Crusoe and elsewhere figures the region as a site of omnipresent and mutually ravenous hunger among colonial occupiers and “savages” alike. Defoe’s cannibal realist mode in Crusoe, his insistence on cannibal hunger as a defining feature of the area, places the emerging form of the novel firmly within a preexisting tradition of European writing that figures the Caribbean as both devouring and needing to be devoured.

As the chapter continues, I argue that cannibalism has another significance in Defoe’s novel. Real cannibalism, as opposed to the kind burlesqued in European writings from the period, belonged to complex predation rituals for constructing subjectivity in the Arawak diaspora. Such predation rituals (which might once have been practices on the Leeward Islands where Crusoe is set) used ritual eating to construct kinship relationships between enemies and convert strangers into tamed friends. Crusoe, and by extension Defoe, fear cannibals because they fear their non-European models of interiority and selfhood, which defy being folded into European ways of imagining human inwardness and relationship.

The title of my book comes from the cannibalism scenes in Robinson Crusoe. I use the idea of a “barbarous feast” to refer to any eating ritual or practice that sees subjectivity and inwardness in terms that resist, defy or do not comply with mainstream, authoritarian conceptions of how selfhood and inwardness should be.

What won’t be obvious from page 99 is that I am offering a new history of the novel, in which eating rituals and imaginative fictions become entangled and interdependent during the eighteenth century, because of intensified British imperialism. It also won’t be apparent that The Barbarous Feast is unusual because it includes a series of creative non-fiction essays interspersed with chapters of scholarly writing. I wrote these when I was finishing the book, on a sabbatical in Sydney, Australia. On returning to the place in which I had grown up but left in my early 20s, I saw it afresh as a colonial landscape that had been remade by British settler colonizers, informed by the same ideas of interiority and subjectivity that I was describing in my scholarship.

Learn more about The Barbarous Feast at the Princeton University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Sophie Gee's The Scandal of the Season.

Writers Read: Sophie Gee (June 2009).

--Marshal Zeringue

Thomas Leonard-Roy's "Writerly Hate in Eighteenth-Century Britain"

Thomas Leonard-Roy studied literature at the University of Toronto (BA, MA) and Harvard University (PhD). He is Assistant Professor of English Literature at John Cabot University in Rome, Italy.

Leonard-Roy applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Writerly Hate in Eighteenth-Century Britain, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Writerly Hate begins with a full sentence that neatly sums up what follows: “Boswell’s expressions of self-hate were especially potent and direct after encounters with prostitutes, often while drunk.” The browser then finds several examples of those encounters – in an alcove on Westminster Bridge, in Amsterdam, in Edinburgh near the house of David Hume, in a Charing Cross brothel – and those self-hating expressions, the standard form being “I despised myself.” Further examples show how Boswell’s self-hate about such encounters was regularly expressed in the language of the Bible.

It so happens that page 99 comes in the middle of what I consider the odd chapter of the book – odd because it is the only chapter about self-hate in a book that is otherwise about more social forms of hating. The hate I discuss here is tormented, muttered, whereas the styles of hate I showcase in the rest of the book tend to be more lively and good-humoured. This is also the only chapter of the book about the religious contexts of hate. Page 99 might therefore leave the browser with a poor idea of the whole work.

But I wouldn’t say the page has completely failed the test, for a couple reasons. First, Writerly Hate is about the stylistic diversity of hate, a feeling that we now tend to think of in very rigid ways. If a piece of writing is deemed hateful, you would probably assume it was inflammatory, even seeking to incite violence against a group of people. One would probably not assume it was quiet-spoken, laconic, and confessional, as Boswell’s self-hate is. So – am I cheating the test? – the page is representative of the whole book in the way that it closely describes a distinct style of hate that challenges some of our modern assumptions about this feeling. The other reason is that page 99 is generous with quotations (exactly one third of the total words on the page). This is something I’ve tried to do across the book: let eighteenth-century men and women speak for themselves, as much as possible, without drowning out my own voice as scholar and critic.

Visit Thomas Leonard-Roy's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Bond's "Animate"

Michael Bond, the author of the acclaimed Wayfinding: The Art and Science of How We Find and Lose Our Way, is a writer specializing in human behaviour and a former editor and reporter at New Scientist. He won the 2015 British Psychological Society Prize for The Power of Others. Until recently, he taught writing as a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Oxford Brookes University.

Bond applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Animate: How Animals Shape the Human Mind, with the following results:

If a reader parachuted onto page 99 of Animate they'd find themselves in a discussion of the fantastical animals in C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia – the centaurs, satyrs, fauns, marsh-wiggles, unicorns and dragons that have captivated children for generations – beneath an illustration of strange humanesque figures. Since the book is not specifically about children, fictionalised animals or C. S. Lewis, this is not the ideal place to land. It would take a leap of deduction to figure out that Animate is an exploration of human-animal relationships and how they have changed over 40,000 years. Nonetheless, page 99 is part of a chapter that describes an important part of this thesis: the idea that the creative arts is one of the few areas where people have tested human-animal relationships without fear, where mythological beasts are free to roam and the many attributes that we share with animals are examined and celebrated. So we can say that the parachutist lands close but perhaps not close enough. Or we could take a slightly different approach, noting that Ford Madox Ford talked of page 99 revealing "the quality of the whole”, rather than the sense of it. If you landed among the water-spirits and shape-shifting witches of page 99, would you want to read on? I hope so.

Visit Michael Bond's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ahsan I. Butt's "The Lies That Bind Us"

Ahsan I. Butt's is Associate Professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. He is the author of Secession and Security.

Butt applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Lies That Bind Us: Nationalism and History Textbooks, and shared the following:

Page 99 is in a chapter that examines different interpretations of territorial disputes in Latin American history textbooks. This page brings one section of the chapter to a close and begins another, each related to narratives regarding Argentina’s external conflicts. First, the concluding section focuses on its claim to the Malvinas/Falkland Islands, formally British territory. Page 99 explains that although the claim to the Malvinas enjoys broad-based national support in Argentina, the disastrous 1982 war and its association with the military dictatorship makes the episode more complicated for progressive and left-wing nationalists. These groups may affirm Argentine sovereignty over the Malvinas while treating the war itself far more critically than right-wing nationalists do. The page then opens the chapter’s discussion of Argentina’s border issues with Chile, outlining the long history of Argentine-Chilean cooperation and rivalry over borders, Patagonia, and regional power.

Page 99 provides a surprisingly good, if necessarily partial, introduction to The Lies That Bind Us. This page foregrounds one of the book’s central concerns: how countries define their territorial boundaries, and how the stories told about those boundaries vary, depending on which type of nationalism – right-wing, civic, left-wing, or progressive – dominates at a given time.

The discussion of the Malvinas illustrates that territorial claims are not simply accepted or rejected wholesale. Nearly all citizens regard the islands as Argentine territory, but they differ in how strongly they emphasize the claim and how they interpret the 1982 war. Right-wing narratives can celebrate the effort to recover national territory, while progressive and left-wing accounts are more likely to highlight the dictatorship’s brutality and incompetence. The territory remains symbolically Argentina’s, but the meaning of the war changes with the narrator.

The page then turns to Argentina’s border disputes with Chile, especially Patagonia and the Beagle Channel. It introduces the trajectory of the relationship between the neighbors, from allies in the wars of independence to rival regional powers, whose competing territorial claims and broader geopolitical competition in the Atlantic and Pacific produced an arms race, before the 1902 Pactos de Mayo eased tensions. Page 99 therefore captures the chapter’s broader interest in how nationalists narrate a country’s external boundaries: which territories are treated as inherently national, which historical grievances are emphasized and which are forgotten, and how rival states and territorial compromises are portrayed.

Still, much is missing. To begin with, page 99 only addresses Argentina’s external but not domestic territoriality, such as the incorporation of Indigenous lands and peoples. Nor does it touch on the chapter’s second half, which examines Chilean narratives regarding conflicts with Peru and Bolivia, Indigenous peoples such as the Mapuche, and Argentina. Moreover, the page would leave the reader completely unaware of the book’s examination of race and immigration in textbooks from California and Texas or big dates and eras in Indian and Pakistani textbooks.

Finally, page 99 does not display the book’s full theoretical framework, which distinguishes among right-wing, civic, left-wing, and progressive nationalisms, and examines how each constructs the nation’s boundaries of membership, space, and time. The test works well in giving the flavor of one important case study, but only partially for its broader comparative and theoretical scope.

Visit Ahsan I. Butt's homepage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Carol Lin's "When News Breaks"

Carol Lin, best known for being the first national anchor to report the first 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, was a long-time anchor and correspondent for CNN and ABC News. During her career, she covered the war in the Middle East, the aftermath of the Kosovo War, the 2002 Winter Olympics and every imaginable natural disaster from hurricanes, tornadoes, historic wildfires, and floods. Lin received an Emmy, a Peabody, the Alfred I. Dupont Award, and the Greater Los Angeles Press Club Awards for Excellence in both Investigative Reporting and her coverage of the Los Angeles Riots. She currently lives in Hawaii.

Lin applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, When News Breaks: A Memoir of Love and War, and reported the following:

It surprised me to discover that if readers open my memoir, When News Breaks, to page 99, they will gain a remarkably clear understanding of what the book is truly about.

Page 99 captures the emotional aftermath of my journalist husband's marital betrayal. In many ways, it answers the central challenge I face as the author: readers may assume When News Breaks is primarily about my journalism career or the fact that I was the first national television journalist to report the first attack on 9/11. Instead, it is a story about my complicated love for an older newsman, and the journalism careers that tested our marriage.

My husband, Will, had left his position as a television news executive to become communications director for an America's Cup syndicate made up entirely of female sailors. Meanwhile, I was a rising Los Angeles anchor and investigative reporter on the verge of receiving an offer from ABC News. Then ABC's chief investigative correspondent discovered that my husband had engaged in a high-profile one-night stand and intended to feature it in a story about the glamorous lifestyles surrounding the world of competitive sailing.

Page 99 begins after the America's Cup competition ended. Will and I return to the weathered beach house we had just purchased—our forever home, or so we assumed. It was a home that had withstood nature's fury since 1948. Its wooden windows, blistered by the salt air, spoke of quiet resilience. When we bought the house, all we saw was its potential. I recount the sellers' hope that their beloved family home would find the right owners. They asked our realtor whether she was certain the sale would go through. She reassured them with a simple observation: "Carol loves the house, and Will loves Carol."

But the scene that follows asks whether love alone can survive profound betrayal, whether we can survive and thrive through our own breaking news. In my writing program, I learned that every book orbits a single, essential question. Page 99 reveals mine: When is the right time, if ever, to let go of the things we love most?

Visit Carol Lin's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Violaine Roussel's "Data-Driven Hollywood"

Violaine Roussel is professor of sociology at the University of Paris 8 and research fellow at the Paris Center for Sociological and Political Research (CRESPPA). She is the author of Representing Talent: Hollywood Agents and the Making of Movies, How to Do Politics with Art, and other books.

Roussel applied the "Page 99 Test" to her latest book, Data-Driven Hollywood: The New Data Professionals in the Age of Streaming, with the following results:

Page 99 of Data-Driven Hollywood is part of the book’s second chapter, which describes how data specialists came to occupy key positions within streaming platforms—first at the three pioneering organizations, Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime Video—and how they thereby gained increasing influence over the content produced or acquired by the streamers. This chapter is therefore devoted to the origins of data specialists’ “positional power” within Hollywood’s central production organizations. Page 99 focuses on how these professionals helped define their own roles and worked to expand the boundaries of their sphere of influence within the streaming platforms, enabling them to establish themselves as indispensable participants in creative decision-making processes. They achieved this through internal alliances, but also by challenging the power of traditional producers, who until then had largely monopolized the authority to decide what should be produced and to predict what would be successful.

Page 99 of Data-Driven Hollywood can therefore serve as an interesting entry point into the story the book tells: that of the emergence of a new professional category—data and algorithm specialists—who have not only managed to establish themselves in Hollywood but, more importantly, to influence what is symbolically most valuable in that world: the greenlighting process for creative projects. While the Page 99 Test is thus partially successful, the perspective presented on this page does not, however, fully capture all the dimensions the book explores to explain the upheaval caused by the rise of data specialists in Hollywood.

Indeed, simply reading page 99 might leave the reader with the impression that the establishment of data specialists on the content side of Hollywood was the result of a well-coordinated strategy by a professional group or a few figures from the tech sector who set out to conquer Hollywood. The book, on the contrary, rejects this idea: it sheds light on a process of transformation that, as major and profound as it is, was not controlled by any individual or group. It shows how a combination of diversly motivated activities ultimately contributed to the emergence of a powerful new occupational group in Hollywood: that of content data specialists.

The book’s following chapter sheds light on a decisive aspect of this rise of data specialists: it occurred in relation to—and largely in opposition to—another group that occupies a central place in Hollywood, namely producers and creators. The book’s third chapter examines in detail the struggles for power and legitimacy that pitted producers against data specialists, as well as the transformation of occupational arrangements that led them to work together in an increasingly less confrontational manner, until producers recognized that they would henceforth have to work with algorithms and those who create them. The book’s last chapter precisely examines the work and tools of data specialists: it shows that the algorithmic models and instruments they use represent a completely new approach to creative projects and audiences, and reveals the implications that come with it.

Learn more about Data-Driven Hollywood at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joy Dixon's "Sexual Heresies"

Joy Dixon is Associate Professor of History at the University of British Columbia and the author of Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England (2001).

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, Sexual Heresies: Religion, Science, and Sexuality in Modern Britain, and shared the following:

Page 99 of Sexual Heresies is part of a chapter on “Gender, Sex, and the Body in Modern Esotericism,” looking at gender, sex, and sexuality in ritual and sexual magic in the modern occult revival. This section explores sex and gender in the Theosophical Society (founded in 1875) and the associated Order of Universal Co-Freemasonry, an esoteric Masonic Order that admitted men and women on equal terms. The passage makes two key points: that whether and how the sexed body mattered in the ritual work of the Order was in question from the very beginning of Co-Masonic work, and that the rituals worked within the Order tended, paradoxically, both to emphasize and collapse the distinctions between members inhabiting male and female bodies (theosophists’ belief in reincarnation meant that the “true self” used a particular sexed body only for this lifetime).

For Co-Masons, as for the TS as a whole, teaching on sexual difference was complicated, unstable, and often internally contradictory. Over and over again the rites that were worked simultaneously emphasized sexual difference and collapsed or denied those differences; both the movement across the sexual binary and the undoing of that binary were key to the work. Men and women were initially drawn to each other because of their differences—differences derived from the experience of a sexed and gendered body. But through association—inside or outside the Masonic Lodge—they became more alike.

The rest of the page provides examples from The Link, the journal of the Theosophical Society’s secret Esoteric Section, and from The Co-Mason, to illustrate those claims.

If you read page 99 and expected the rest of the book to be about esotericism and sexual magic, you would be wrong – the next chapter deals with the sexual politics of evangelicalism and Anglo-Catholic “social purity” movements. In that sense, the Page 99 Test fails. But in another sense it works really well, because it takes you to the core argument of the book, which is that the emergence of new scientific ideas about sexuality (especially the new emphasis on the closeness of the religious and sexual impulses) set the stage for rethinking not just sexuality but religion too.

Page 99 is the first part of a discussion that moves on to Dion Fortune’s “polarity magic” and the explicitly sexual magic of Aleister Crowley. The willingness of occult practitioners to make sex – both sexual difference and sexual desire – central to their spiritual practice was one of the things that marked these as “alternative” religions (even as they also worked to shore up conventional ideas about sex and gender).

The first chapter of the book sets up what many religious people saw as a problem – that anthropologists, sexologists, and psychoanalysts had apparently proved that sex and religion derived from the same source and were interchangeable. Chapter 2 explores one response: liberal theologians in both the Catholic and Anglican churches worked to rehabilitate religious experience in the light of these new scientific ideas. Chapter 4 looks at the ways that religious conservatives resisted and reworked the same ideas in terms of sin and purity. The final chapter explores how critics of religion used the close relationships between sex and religion to attack religion itself as a kind of perversion.

Over and over you see an emphasis on the idea that spiritual orthodoxy had to be sexually "normal" and that sexual "deviance" was also spiritually “deviant.” Sexual Heresies tells the story of how new ideas about sex transformed ideas about religion, and explores some of what was at stake in that process.

Learn more about Sexual Heresies at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Libby Adler's "Governing the Terrain Called Beauty"

Libby Adler is a Professor of Law and Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. She is the author of Gay Priori: A Queer Critical Legal Studies Approach to Law Reform (2018) as well as numerous articles on LGBTQ legal issues. She was appointed a commissioner on the Massachusetts Commission on LGBTQ Youth in 2026.

Adler applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Governing the Terrain Called Beauty: The Queerness of Political Economy in Cuba and the United States, and reported the following:

Page 99 is in the middle of chapter 4 at a break between sections. The section that is concluding argues that the advent of same-sex marriage in Cuba required a reconfiguration of gay identity. The section that is starting offers a partial theory of how that reconfiguration occurred.

The glimpse via page 99 fairly represents an important piece of the book but does not explain the overall argument.

Part I of the book explains the history of gay identity and regulation in Cuba and the US. In Cuba, the role of imperialism and the fall of Cuba’s prime benefactor, the Soviet Union, are crucial to understanding the evolution of sexual identity in political-economic terms. Part II of the book, in which page 99 appears, is about the advent of same-sex marriage and how that legal reform grows out of distinct historical and economic forces in the two countries (Cuba and the US). Part III introduces Cuban legal voices in the form of interviews and uses these voices to theorize the significance of legal consciousness to divergent forms of legal change.

Learn more about Governing the Terrain Called Beauty at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Patrick Sullivan's "Stay Tuned"

Patrick Sullivan is an assistant professor of performance and visual studies at Texas A&M University.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Stay Tuned: Listening to the Network Era, with the following results:

When you get to page 99, you will find a discussion of the sitcom’s laugh track and how it differs from other empathetic sound, i.e., non-diegetic music. Both music and the laugh track help us judge the emotional register of a scene—a sort of priming or cueing—but the laugh track goes beyond merely prompting us to an intended response. The laugh track grounds an assessment of the show—what the book takes as an aesthetic judgment—into its very soundtrack, so our response to the laugh track is not simply to emotional priming but also to aesthetic assessment, a sort of “do I or do I not find this moment of the sitcom funny.” And as the 99th page’s chapter title, “Laughter’s Labor,” suggests, what is interesting about the laugh track is not whether you agree with the laugh track or that it worked but rather that it raises the work of aesthetic assessment in the first place.

While page 99 would not give the browser the book’s investment in formally reading television sounds nor the production histories surrounding the sounds, it does give them a sense of the intellectual stakes: the commitment to treating aesthetic theory as important to television studies and vice versa. This page works towards understanding how laugh tracks trouble aesthetic judgments, the mental process of experiencing the world through our senses, reflecting on that experience, and assigning a value to it. Other chapters address different aspects of aesthetic experience through different sound—Hanna-Barbera cartoon sound effects and comprehension as well as noises and contemplation. This troubling is not to suggest that these sounds of television aesthetically fail nor that aesthetic theory fails to help us grasp them. Rather, the book uses the tension, which in popular discourse often gets expressed in terms of value, between them to stage a recalibration of aesthetic theory and a reevaluation of the work the sounds of network-era television perform. While the particularities of aesthetic judgment, contemplation, and comprehension are worked out in detail through the chapters, the broader frame of the tension between aesthetic theory, evaluation of television sounds, and formal analysis are covered in the introduction, “The Trouble with Television Sound.” Finally, while I am biased and love every page in its own right, I recommend the browser turn to page 71.

Learn more about Stay Tuned at the Rutgers University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Emma Taylor's "An Elite Education"

Emma Taylor is a Lecturer in Education at King's Academy, King's College London where she currently leads on the development of an induction programme for all new teaching staff at King’s. She joined King’s from LSE where she held the position of teaching fellow on LSE’s flagship interdisciplinary course for all undergraduate students, LSE100.

Taylor applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, An Elite Education: How Privilege Is Produced in a Private School, and shared the following:

On page 99 of my book I introduce the idea that the students I teach and interview for this research are struggling to reconcile the tension between being aware of the advantages their privilege has given them over others, whilst being unable to shake the feeling that they still deserve to attend elite higher education institutions such as Oxford and Cambridge. They feel that their privilege should not negate the hard work they put into the process of preparing for the intense admissions processes of these institutions.

This is not a central theme of the book, yet it introduces the reader to a key finding regarding the ways in which the students in my study confront their own privilege. They don't outright deny it, nor do they deny some of the practices that have enabled their success (such as extensive practice and preparation for university admissions interviews), instead they negotiate a messy boundary between acceptance and denial, particularly when, as I report earlier in the chapter, they leave school and start to spend time with people for whom privilege is not the norm. This negotiation takes on added significance when considered alongside the influential positions that many of these students are likely to occupy in later life.

Indeed, what’s is missing from this single page is the broader UK context where research by the Sutton Trust (a leading social mobility charity) tells us that those who have attended private schools in Britain continue to be disproportionately represented in positions of power and responsibility with, for example, 68% of FTSE chairs having attended private schools despite only 7% of the school age population being privately educated. We can therefore be relatively confident that many of the people in my study will become influential figures in one way or another. And, later in the book, I ask how the students’ realisation and acknowledgement of their own privilege might be leveraged for the greater good, or more specifically, how it could be harnessed to broaden the range of lived experiences represented among those who hold positions of power.

So, the test enables me to flesh out one element of the book’s argument, but not the central theme – which is ultimately to better understand how private schools in Britain support an environment in which certain privileging dispositions are inculcated and leveraged to propel students into elite higher education institutions and professions. Ultimately, I find that the school serves as a training ground in which a form of audacity in the face of authority can be practiced and honed, enabling those students who are multiply advantaged to feel a sense of comfort when they find themselves in potentially intimidating positions in later life. To bring it back to page 99, this audacity is frequently mistaken for merit by the students themselves and, on a wider scale, British society more generally.

Very happy to hear any thoughts or reflections from anyone who does read the book as a result of this blog – please do get in touch!

Visit Emma Taylor's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jason Baehr's "Inquiry and Agency"

Jason Baehr is the Casassa Chair in Social Values and Professor of Philosophy at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. He specializes in theoretical and applied virtue epistemology. His other books include Deep in Thought: A Practical Guide to Teaching for Intellectual Virtues (2021), Intellectual Virtues and Education: Essays in Applied Virtue Epistemology (2016), and The Inquiring Mind: On Intellectual Virtues and Virtue Epistemology (2011). He is co-founder of the Intellectual Virtues Academy of Long Beach and is presently co-directing the LMU Intellectual Character Initiative, which is sponsored by a grant from the Educating Character Initiative at Wake Forest University.

Baehr applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Inquiry and Agency: A Theory of Intellectual Virtues and Vices, and reported the following:

From page 99:

In keeping with this, when thinking about the persons we aspire to be, or the qualities we desire in ourselves, our friends, partners, or children, I take it that few of us would not regard as best or most admirable the relevant harmony between action and affection. We desire, not only to think and act well, but also to enjoy thinking and acting well. One way to put the guiding principle here might be that it is good, and good in a way that is relevant to personal worth, to enjoy and delight in that which itself is good, including the good of virtuous activity (cf. Hurka 2001: Ch. 1; Sripada 2016: 1210). This applies, not just to morally virtuous activity, but also to intellectually virtuous activity.

Often it is a matter of luck (e.g., of how we’ve been parented or our natural temperaments) whether we are constituted so as to enjoy intellectually virtuous activity or experience other intellectually virtuous affections. Might it, then, be a mistake to think of these affections as an element or dimension of intellectual virtues?

Page 99 is a representative sample of Inquiry & Agency. The book explores the nature, structure, and evaluative status of intellectual virtues and vices. It treats intellectual virtues – such as curiosity, open-mindedness, and intellectual humility – as having four primary dimensions, one of which is an affective dimension. The key idea is that to possess an intellectual virtue in its fullness, one must be disposed to experience certain fitting affections in connection with its exercise. Virtuously open-minded people, for instance, aren’t merely willing to explore alternative perspectives; as a general rule, they enjoy doing so. This disposition says something important and favorable about who they are as persons.

However, this feature of intellectual virtues gives rise to some difficult questions: for instance, given that we don’t have direct voluntary control over our affections, how can they reflect favorably or negatively on who we are as persons? How can they contribute to our personal worth?

These issues are representative of the book as a whole in two ways. First, while the chapter that contains page 99 explores the affective dimension of intellectual virtues, several additional chapters offer similar treatments of the other primary dimensions of an intellectual virtue: namely, competence, motivational, and judgment dimensions. Second, a recurring theme throughout the book is whether or in what sense intellectual virtues and vices – understood as qualities that necessarily contribute positively or negatively to our personal worth – can be a matter of luck. I argue that while intellectual virtues are immune to certain forms of luck (e.g. environmental luck), they are consistent with other forms (e.g. constitutive luck).

Visit Jason Baehr's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Susannah Crockford's "A Perturbed System"

Susannah Crockford is a lecturer in anthropology at the University of Exeter. She is the author of Ripples of the Universe: Spirituality in Sedona, Arizona.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, A Perturbed System: Religion and Climate Change from the End of a World, with the following results:

Page 99 of A Perturbed System is just one paragraph at the end of chapter two:

The language of salvation, of saving the planet, leads not to answers but to further questions: Can the planet be saved? If so, who will save us? What will we have to sacrifice to save ourselves? News media employ theological motifs that lead toward individualized solutions, while diminishing collective action, whether in the form of private retreats or public protests. This results in an implicit denial of systemic change, a denial constructed through omission. Some things are rendered unsayable, which perpetuates an inertia that maintains political-economic systems. This inertia is not possible for those in high-intensity struggles, like the residents of Lake Charles, because they are already fighting for their continued existence, living through sacrifice on a daily basis. For those still, for now, in low-intensity struggles, who have a degree of separation from the material-somatic effects of their environments and climate, mediation remains necessary.

The Page 99 Test works relatively well for my book. It makes clear that the book is about climate and environment, about how religious language, such as salvation and sacrifice, features in climate discourse, and how this can limit and constrain climate action. However, it only provides a partial understanding of the range of the book. For example, the reference to Lake Charles may lead readers to think that the book is about Louisiana, the state that the city of Lake Charles is in. It may mislead further, depending on what Lake Charles means for readers outside of the US, as it is also a location in Nova Scotia, Canada. In fact, the book is a multi-sited ethnography that incorporates fieldwork undertaken in Arizona, Missouri, England, Belgium, and Sweden, as well as Louisiana. There is also little in this specific paragraph that makes the ethnographic methodology apparent. The reference to news media may lead the reader to assume this is a work of media criticism, rather than an anthropological work. The test is limited in its efficacy because there is just one paragraph, and it would be difficult to understand the entirety of this book in one paragraph. Beyond the argument that religious language, rooted in Christianity, constrains and enables climate discourse, this is a book about how people in English-speaking Global North contexts respond to climate change. It is a book about how people are living in a time of endings, when ecosystems are collapsing, mass extinctions are underway, and political systems are stymied. How do we live in a time of death? The book makes the argument that religion is essential to understanding how climate discourse is framed, and it also makes the argument that a new climate ethics, a new theology of climate, is required to navigate between despair and denial and find a way forward in this time.

Learn more about A Perturbed System at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mengqi Wang's "Anxious Homes"

Mengqi Wang is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Duke Kunshan University. Her research interests include economic anthropology, urban anthropology, political economy, gender studies, and science and technology studies.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Anxious Homes: Inflexible Demand and China's Housing Market, and shared the following:

From page 99:

…Yanlin’s house is a two-story construction, and she has been waiting for years for the government to demolish it. People in Sky Realty Group sometimes teased her: “Come on, we know that you married because you thought they (her in-laws) would be chaiqian hu.”

“Shut your mouth or I will show you how to,” Yanlin replied. “We are living perfectly fine in our house.” In the past ten years, generous compensation policies had fashioned the status of chaiqian hu as a synonym for overnight riches in the Qilin neighborhood. Yet Yanlin’s family was not yet a chaiqian hu. The 2001 construction of Eastern Town stopped eight hundred meters to the left of her house. The 2006 road construction missed them by five hundred meters. Now the house stands, with some other unlucky neighbors, among high-rise buildings and wide paved roads.

The passage on page 99 accurately captures the anxiety ordinary Chinese people experienced as they grappled with the country’s fast pace of urbanization and the windfall of wealth coming through the real estate market in this process. The book is an anthropological monograph about the everyday making of a housing market at East Nanjing’s urbanizing frontier, shown through ethnographic stories about how brokers, buyers, and developers assemble the local market from 2012 to 2015, during which time China’s real estate economy experienced the fastest growth. The book asks what made people embrace homeownership and housing financialization, apart from their desire for wealth accumulation.

In particular, the book examines a vernacular concept called “inflexible demand/gangxu” that local actors draw on to refer to, and construct, a non- negotiable need for homeownership. Inflexible demand originally appeared as a shorthand for the microeconomic concept of inelastic demand. In everyday language in contemporary China, however, people use the concept to express a rightful demand of a home of one’s own. The newlyweds, for example, claim to inflexibly demand a home so they can start a family; developers built relatively cheaper housing to target buyers with an “inflexible demand” for homes; and the government regulates the market in the name of protecting ordinary citizens’ inflexible housing need. Resettled families, such as the ones depicted on page 99, could often expect to receive properties as compensation in urban expansion plans. The government gave such compensation to meet resettled families’ housing needs. However, in a time when rising property values drastically widened the gap in wealth between urban homeowners and the rest of the population, such compensation brought wide dreams of riches as well as anxiety over the value of one’s home.

The book argues that China’s real estate economy was able to extract enormous wealth from its urbanizing population through the popular discourse that frames homeownership as an inflexible demand. The concept also strongly shapes how people view private homeownership in China. Grounded in ethnography, the book argues that homeownership does not suggest independence, but rather, a fuller inclusion of citizens within the developmental state. In the popular narrative, the home emerges as the original source of value and an inalienable possession that collapses the distinction between use value and exchange value.

Learn more about Anxious Homes at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Carlton F. W. Larson's "One Nation Under Law"

Carlton F.W. Larson is a Martin Luther King, Jr., Professor of Law at the University of California, Davis, School of Law, where he teaches constitutional law and English and American legal history. He earned his undergraduate degree, summa cum laude, in history from Harvard University, and his law degree from Yale Law School, where he was an Articles Editor of The Yale Law Journal and Executive Editor of The Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities. After law school, he served as a law clerk to Judge Michael Daly Hawkins of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and was a commercial litigator at Covington & Burling in Washington, DC.

Larson applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, One Nation Under Law: The Meaning of the Declaration of Independence, and reported the following:

From page 99 (the introduction to Chapter Six):

The view that the Declaration of Independence created an American nation isn’t just supported by the document’s text and history; it is also supported by how the Declaration has endured in legal, political, and cultural memory. If the Declaration created thirteen independent nations, then courts, legal analysts, political figures, and the American public have been getting it wrong for a very long time. The one-nation view is amply supported by judicial decisions that have carefully considered the issue, by the public statements of some of the leading lawyers of the nineteenth century—Joseph Story, Daniel Webster, and Abraham Lincoln, and by the long tradition of celebrating the Fourth of July as the birthday of the American nation.

This excerpt provides a decent representation of the book. It is part of my larger argument in Part Two that the Declaration of Independence created an American nation, in which the states were confederated together under an unwritten constitution and presented themselves as one nation to the rest of the world. Chapter Four addresses the textual arguments in support of this position, and Chapter Five considers the history between 1775 and 1787. Chapter Six, which is entitled “Memory,” turns to how the Declaration was viewed in later periods, with the primary emphasis on the 1790s and the early nineteenth century.

It is also reflective of the book’s overall prose style. Even though the book contains a fair amount of legal material, I wanted it to be accessible to non-lawyers, so I sought to avoid jargon and technicalities. My hope is that any reader can pick up the book and easily follow its arguments.

The excerpt, which is drawn from Part Two on nationhood, is less reflective of other parts of the book. Part One addresses the text, authorship, and legal status of the Declaration. Part Three turns to the Declaration’s commitment to the rule of law and constitutional structure, and Part Four considers how courts have treated the Declaration’s language about liberty and equality. Readers seeking to learn more about those issues would be better served by a page from one of those parts.

Visit Carlton F. W. Larson's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Trials of Allegiance.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael W. Childers's "The Mountains are Calling"

Michael W. Childers is an associate professor of history at Colorado State University. He is the author of Colorado Powder Keg: Ski Resorts and the Environmental Movement, winner of the International Ski History Association 2013 Ullr Award.

Childers applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Mountains Are Calling: Tourists and the Unmaking of Yosemite National Park, with the following results:

On opening to the top of page 99, a reader would read the sentence, “After more than a decade of financial struggles, the Yosemite Valley Railroad made its final run in August of 1945.”

After briefly learning of the railroad’s mounting financial issues, the destruction of a key trestle by an errant cigarette butt, and the final run of Train Number 23 from Merced to Merced Falls to pick up two railcars, the page jumps to the 1970s, when environmentalists begin arguing that rail travel might just be the solution to Yosemite’s growing traffic problems. Among them was a young University of California, Santa Barbara graduate student, and future dean of National Park history, Alfred Runte argued in National Parks and Conservation Magazine returning to railroad to Yosemite would guarantee maximum protection with maximum visitation.

In one of my favorite stories in the book, page 99 then introduces readers to designer and writer Christopher Swan and City of San Francisco professor Chet Roaman’s novel yv88: An Eco-Fiction of Tomorrow. “Part science fiction novella, part illustrated schematic, the book proposed a radical transformation of how visitors enjoy Yosemite by removing all the roads into the park and replacing them with a solar-powered railroad that carries visitors from Merced into the Yosemite Valley.”

In many way page 99 captures the struggle at the center of the book’s story of Yosemite on how to ensure access to visitors while protecting its environment. Trains, even solar powered ones, solved what many saw as the primary problem facing the park: cars.

Visit Michael W. Childers's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ben Jones's "Protecting Life"

Ben Jones is an assistant professor of ethics and public policy at Penn State. His books include The Ethics of Policing (coedited with Eduardo Mendieta), Apocalypse without God, and Antiracist Policing (coauthored with Karin Martin). His research on policing has received awards from the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics and University of Houston's Elizabeth D. Rockwell Center on Ethics and Leadership. He cofounded and coordinates the Policing, Policy, and Philosophy Initiative (3PI) based at Penn State's Rock Ethics Institute. Previously, he worked in the nonprofit sector on criminal justice, which included directing the campaign that repealed Connecticut's death penalty.

Jones applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Protecting Life: The Ethics of Police Deadly Force, and shared the following:

If you turn to page 99 of Protecting Life: The Ethics of Police Deadly Force, you’re in the middle of Chapter 5, which explores what obligations police have to persons with mental illness. There are a lot of debates in philosophy and law about how to understand these obligations, especially when someone with diminished culpability is violent and poses a threat. Page 99 comes after considering several proposals and ultimately rejecting them. It’s part of the section that outlines my proposal for what police owe to persons with mental illness.

At first glance, page 99 might not appear to be a good snapshot of the book. The page starts in the middle of a longer explanation, mentioning what I call “the fusion account”—my proposed account of police’s obligations to persons with mental illness. But you need to read the preceding page to know what that term means.

If, though, you can get past the unfamiliar terms at the start, the rest of page 99 dives into ideas central to the book. Protecting Life unpacks the specific moral concerns raised by many police killings and then proceeds to identify policies, laws, practices, and training to address those concerns. It notes two overarching worries with police killings, especially in the US: (1) too often police use deadly force in circumstances where it’s not necessary, and (2) the harms from police deadly force fall disproportionately on marginalized groups.

Killings of persons with mental illness illustrate both concerns. Sadly, there have been a number of incidents where police have used unnecessary and deadly force against individuals with mental illness. A few pages earlier, on page 89, the book discusses the 2011 brutal beating death of Kelly Thomas—an unarmed man with schizophrenia living on the street in Fullerton, California. Data back up what these anecdotes suggest: persons with serious mental illness in the US die from police violence at disproportionately higher rates.

That reality represents a moral failure. Page 99 emphasizes that both police institutions and individual officers have obligations to better protect vulnerable groups. By exploring those obligations and how to make them a reality, Protecting Life serves as a resource to police professionals, policymakers, and the public.

Visit Ben Jones's Penn State webpage.

Coffee with a Canine: Ben Jones & Sloopy.

The Page 99 Test: Apocalypse without God.

--Marshal Zeringue

Aarthi Vadde's "We the Platform"

Aarthi Vadde is E. Blake Byrne Associate Professor of English at Duke University. She is the author of Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism Beyond Europe, 1914–2016 (2016) and coeditor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, volume F: The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries (2024), among other books. She is the president of the Society for Novel Studies (2025–27) and cofounder of its podcast Novel Dialogue.

Vadde applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, We the Platform: How the Internet Changed Twenty-First-Century Literature, and reported the following:

If you turn to page 99 of We the Platform, the first thing you’ll see is the answer to a question posed on page 98 (uh oh).

Jeopardy-style, here’s the answer:

At least three things: First, many authors and publishers are “profoundly suspicious of the internet but recognize the need to revise their business models to find ways of profiting from it.” Second, “the effect of multiple book formats (print, e-book, audio) alongside platforms for self-publication has changed what it means to own fiction intellectually for authors and consume fiction physically for readers.” Third, the circulation of literature, in which “the owning of books and the sharing of written stories are two separate things, has influenced the styles, subjects, and locations of literary writing.

The question: What happens to literature when the internet dominates book culture?

Surprisingly, maybe even reassuringly, the Page 99 Test produced satisfying results. We the Platform is about how the internet changed twenty-first century literature (that’s my subtitle) and page 99 covers both the economic changes to the landscape and the stylistic innovations that resulted from major authors deciding to write fiction for social media. The rest of page introduces three such authors – Jennifer Egan, David Mitchell, and Teju Cole – all of whom wrote fiction on Twitter in the 2010s. I claim, crucially on page 99, that writing for Twitter led them to make “formal and rhetorical adjustments away from the printed book” and these in turn led to stylistic changes in their major post-Twitter novels (like The Candy House, Slade House, and Tremor).

So in a nutshell, page 99 gets to the heart of my book’s thesis even if it only provides a peek into one of my chapters. Other chapters provide answers to different questions: like how did Creative Commons turn authorship into a mass cultural category? Why did Margaret Atwood partner with Wattpad? Does the online growth of fan fiction shed new light on literary fiction? (Hint: it absolutely does). As a whole, We the Platform strives to be a two-way street: it shows how the internet changed literature but, just as importantly, how literature changes our perspective on the internet.

Visit Aarthi Vadde's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Leah Kalmanson's "Local Gods"

Leah Kalmanson is associate professor and Bhagwan Adinath Professor of Jain Studies in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of North Texas.

She is the author of Cross-Cultural Existentialism: On the Meaning of Life in Asian and Western Thought (2020) and coauthor of A Practical Guide to World Philosophies: Selves, Worlds, and Ways of Knowing (2021).

Kalmanson applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Local Gods: A Philosophy of Spiritual Diversity, with the following results:

The first thing readers encounter on page 99 of Local Gods is the following line of text, set as a block quotation:

山林、川谷、丘陵，能出雲為風雨，見怪物，皆曰神。有天下者，祭百神。諸侯在 其地則祭之，亡其地則不祭。

This is a passage in classical Chinese from the Liji or Book of Rites. The block quote corresponds to my English translation at the end of page 98:

Mountains and forests, rivers and valleys, hills and mounds [i.e., tombs], which can cause the clouds to produce wind and rain or strange things to appear—these are called gods. The one who possesses all under the sky [i.e., the emperor] sacrifices to a hundred gods. The various regional lords make sacrifices when in their own territories; when not in their own territories, they do not sacrifice.

My discussion of this content on page 99 does, indeed, reflect the central questions of the book: How “local” are local gods? How should we behave toward gods outside of our own home locales? And how can godly powers be cultivated locally, either in the landscape, at the burial site, or within the crucible of one’s own heart?

The content on page 99 also reflects larger trajectories in my work in general. My research has often been spurred by gaps I’ve found in my options for classroom materials. Local Gods was born because I was looking for a book to use for a philosophy of religion class. My previous book, Cross-Cultural Existentialism, was also written for use in a class.

So, you would think I would write books that are approachable and accessible. But my undergraduates, who have dutifully plodded through these texts, will readily tell you otherwise! Philosophy, with its technical jargon, can already feel uninviting. My books contain technical philosophical terminology in a variety of languages and scripts. Moreover, for Local Gods, my publisher agreed to my requests to incorporate non-English terms without the usual italicization. I had specific reasons for this (which I discuss on pages 14 to 16), but I recognize that the frequency of unfamiliar words and diacritical marks can be jarring.

I am not a polyglot. Local Gods is the product not only of countless hours of my own research and language study but also the time and effort of specialists who graciously responded to my emails to evaluate specific portions and lend their expertise. For many readers, the opening content on page 99 of Local Gods might be inviting and intriguing. Roughly twenty percent of the world’s people are familiar with Chinese characters to some degree. For many other readers, flipping to page 99 might give the impression this book is too specialized or too obscure. But I wrote Local Gods with a sincere desire to learn, and I found what I learned fascinating from beginning to end, so I hope that a deeper dive into the book makes it worth the reader’s effort.

Learn more about Local Gods at the Columbia University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Chad M. Topaz's "Unlocking Justice"

Chad M. Topaz is professor of complex systems at Williams College and cofounder of the QSIDE Institute, which uses data science to promote equity and justice. An award-winning educator and researcher recognized by the National Academy of Sciences, the Association for Women in Mathematics, and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, he has authored numerous studies at the intersection of data science, social justice, and public policy. His opinion pieces have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, the New York Daily News, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Inside Higher Ed, and other publications.

Topaz applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Unlocking Justice: The Power of Data to Confront Inequity and Create Change, and shared the following:

Page 99 of Unlocking Justice distinguishes jails from prisons. Jails are short-term holding places, high-turnover and sparse on programming. Prisons hold people convicted of serious crimes and, at least in theory, offer more rehabilitation. From there, the page turns to Rikers Island, New York City's infamous jail complex, long associated with violence, neglect, and official failure. It begins a section called "A Brief History of Terrible Things" and warns the reader that the material ahead is hard to read.

Does the Page 99 Test work? Mostly. A reader who opened to page 99 would meet one of the book's central concerns, which is what powerful systems do to people when the public is not looking. The page is not abstract. It is about a place, a history, and people trapped inside an institution that has somehow survived scandal after scandal.

But page 99 would mislead in two ways. First, Unlocking Justice is not only a book about harm. It is a book about data. Court records, public-records requests, jail data, sentencing data, risk-assessment algorithms. Page 99 starts to move toward why the work matters. It does not show how the work is done.

Second, the page is much darker and more solemn than the book as a whole. The book spends real time with violence, secrecy, and racial disparity. It has to. But it is also, in places, funny, and it is, above all, hopeful. And although it is a book about data, it is not a technical book. You do not have to love numbers, or even like them, to follow it. Its argument is that data is not just for experts and institutions. It is for residents, organizers, students, journalists, and anyone willing to ask what the numbers show.

Unlocking Justice walks through the criminal legal system. A rural New England town with a portrait of Hitler in the police station, which became the starting point for an investigation of racial bias in policing. Public judicial records that, once pried loose, named the New York City judges setting bail at disproportionate rates. Florida's COMPAS algorithm, which I examined for the inequity buried in its risk scores. And more. Again and again, the institutions with the most power over people's lives are the ones working hardest to keep their data out of view. The point of the book is that people can force that view open, and use it to demand transparency, accountability, and justice.

Visit Chad M. Topaz's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rod Phillips's "Cats: A History"

Rod Phillips is a professor of history at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. He is the author of Alcohol: A History and A New History of Divorce.

Phillips applied the Ford Madox Ford-inspired “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Cats: A History, and reported the following:

Ford Madox Ford’s love of cats is well-documented and his poem “The Cat of the House” is especially well known. So whether or not he found page 99 of Cats: A History enticing, he might have turned back to page 1 and started reading.

Page 99 is in a chapter titled “Ancient Greece and Rome: The Ambiguity of Cats” because there was no clear-cut attitude toward cats – unlike Ancient Egypt, where cats were regarded positively, even if not (despite popular belief) as gods. The page deals with cats on Greek wine cups and on coins minted in Greek colonies, and it draws the browser’s attention to some of the book’s major themes. A wine cup showing a cat under the chair of a king echoes the Egyptians’ “cat under a chair” motif, but in Egyptian art cats were almost always under chairs occupied by women. This Greek exception draws attention to the association of cats and women (and women’s sexuality) that is one of the book’s major themes.

The coins depict Iokastos, founder of a Greek colony in Italy, dangling something for a cat to leap at, and it exemplifies the challenges to understanding historic relationships between humans and cats. If Iokastos was dangling a piece of meat (one hypothesis), the cat was leaping for food; if it was a stick (another hypothesis), the cat and Iokastos were playing. So, this might be a rare early example of a pet cat in a playful relationship with its owner. I argue in Cats that pet cats are not identifiable in large numbers until the late 1800s – 2,000 years after Iokastos and his cat – and that cats were not commonly kept as pets until as recently as the 1950s or 1960s.

Page 99 is a teaser for Cats and might reflect, in Ford’s words, “the quality of the whole book.” Even so, it’s a fairly pedestrian page in a more complex narrative. Among other things, the book challenges the common notion that cats are “less domesticated” than dogs and it explains the historic associations of cats with heresies, magic, witches, the Devil, women, women’s sexuality, and outsiders – all historically considered socially disruptive forces.

For many centuries, humans have had tumultuous relationships with cats that are totally unlike their broadly harmonious relationships with dogs. Page 99 provides a couple of pieces of the bigger picture, and perhaps that’s the most we should expect of any single page.

Learn more about Cats: A History at the publisher's website, and visit the website for Phillips's books about wine.

--Marshal Zeringue