Jennifer Randles's "Living Diaper to Diaper"

Jennifer Randles is Professor of Sociology at California State University, Fresno, and author of Proposing Prosperity? Marriage Education Policy and Inequality in America and Essential Dads: The Inequalities and Politics of Fathering.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, Living Diaper to Diaper: The Hidden Crisis of Poverty and Motherhood, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Mothers of color were particularly attuned to public perceptions of their children’s diapers and fears of involvement with the child welfare system due to inappropriate or insufficient diapers. ... [M]any mothers of color described rarely leaving their homes, missing work and medical appointments, and not going grocery shopping or to social events because of lack of diapers. Avoiding public places required fewer diapers, allowed children to stay close to personal restrooms for toilet training, and subjected mothers to less surveillance and scrutiny of their diapering habits. Diaper work required mothers to consider intersecting gender, class, and race stereotypes of parental fitness as mothers weighed risks of diaper need against potential consequences of their efforts to manage it.

In this case, the Page 99 Test cuts straight to chase. It takes readers directly to a description of many of the most devastating consequences of the problem at the heart of Living Diaper to Diaper. Nearly one in two families with young children in the United States struggle with diaper insecurity – limited or uncertain access to enough diapers to keep children dry, comfortable, and healthy.

Families of color, especially those headed by Black and Latina mothers living in poverty, are especially likely to experience diaper insecurity, a hidden, harmful, and common problem of poverty in the United States. They are also more likely to experience stigma and surveillance related to their parenting practices, including when they don’t have enough diapers. Despite diaper insecurity’s prevalence and consequences, diapers are not systematically covered by existing U.S. safety net programs when families cannot readily access or afford them.

This crucial page details some of the racialized components of what I call diaper work, the physical, emotional, and cognitive labor mothers do to manage diaper need and related social isolation, stress, and stigma. Beyond the work of buying, changing, and disposing of diapers, diaper work involves the creative strategies mothers devise and the many sacrifices they make to secure basic necessities for their children. Page 99 is part of a window onto the proactive carework poor mothers perform to protect their children's well-being and humanity despite severe economic constraints and inadequate social safety nets.

Learn more about Living Diaper to Diaper at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

George G. Szpiro's "Ignorance"

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

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

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

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

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

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

Visit George G. Szpiro's website.

The Page 99 Test: Perplexing Paradoxes.

--Marshal Zeringue

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

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

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

From page 99:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Page 99 Test: The Myth of Disenchantment.

--Marshal Zeringue

Dan Turello's "Connection"

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

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

From page 99:

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

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

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

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

Visit Dan Turello's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lauren Nicole Henley's "Inquisition for Blood"

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

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

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

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

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue