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

Adam Y. Liu's "Authoritarian Markets"

Adam Y. Liu is an Assistant Professor in the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Authoritarian Markets: The Politics of China's Banking Explosion, with the following results:

Page 99 sits in Chapter 4, “Glorious Market Yang,” in the section “Six National Surveys Before 2012.” There I test whether bank competition actually helps firms. Across six national firm surveys, I find that in five of the six years, greater local bank competition reduced the probability that private-firm managers reported unmet capital needs, and reduced their reliance on the informal financial market. Then comes the anomaly: 2009. The “magic” of competition disappears—because that is the year the state launched its post-crisis stimulus. Beijing issued campaign-style directives ordering banks to lend to the real economy, fast-tracked a wave of local- government projects, and, tellingly, firms whose owners were Party members—especially those sitting on the local People’s Congress—were far less likely to report credit constraints. The page closes by turning to a 2017 survey (Table 4.2) in which I asked firm owners directly whether their borrowing had truly hardened.

Does the Page 99 Test work?

Better than I would have guessed. Page 99 does not announce my thesis—for that a browser would want the introduction—but it stages the book’s central drama in miniature. The whole book is about two faces of the Chinese market: the “yang” of genuine competition that lowers borrowing costs and frees private firms, and the authoritarian hand that can override that competition at will. Page 99 catches both in one motion—competition working for five years, then dissolving the instant the state mobilized its banks in campaign style and political connection, not market merit, decided who got credit. A browser landing here would correctly infer that this is a book about how Chinese markets are made, and unmade, by politics—and would even meet two of my recurring devices: the firm survey and the telltale weight of political connection.

What the page cannot show is the puzzle that drives the book. China built the world’s largest banking system—from a handful of state banks to more than four thousand—without secure property rights or limited government. Authoritarian Markets argues the market grew not in spite of authoritarian rule but because of it: elite bargaining and political competition, not institutional constraints, drove banks to multiply and compete. Such “authoritarian markets” run on three properties—rationed entry, reflective competition, and rigged regulation—and the same politics that fueled three decades of growth also seeded the financial risks China confronts today. Page 99 is one beat in that larger story: the moment the market’s promise meets the state’s grip.

Learn more about Authoritarian Markets at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Laura Kalpakian's "Undesirable"

Laura Kalpakian is the author of Memory into Memoir: A Writer’s Handbook, a memoir, sixteen novels, and five prize-winning collections of short fiction. She lives in the Pacific Northwest.

Kalpakian applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Undesirable: The Vietnam War and a Father's Battle for Justice, and shared the following:

Page 99 is taken from Chapter 10, “My Boy Must Be Saved” of Undesirable, a book created from letters that chronicle my father’s struggle on behalf of my brother Doug Johnson (1950–2021) who went to Vietnam at the age of nineteen in 1969 and paid for it with the rest of his life.

Page 99 offers portions of letters both to and from my father, Bill Johnson, when Doug was still in a military hospital in Japan suffering from hepatitis. Doug had been airlifted to Japan from Long Binh Jail in Vietnam where he was imprisoned in December 1969 following a court-martial for AWOL and drug possession.

Page 99 also offers bits and pieces of letters from and to Army personnel, chaplains, senators, congressmen, up to and including President Richard Nixon.

Page 99 is indeed a sort of microcosm of Undesirable. “My Boy Must Be Saved” was my father’s mantra for three years as he besieged various entities on Doug’s behalf.

Here on page 99 his efforts were aimed at getting Doug removed from combat after the hospital. Later, in the summer of 1970, my dad’s approach would evolve into attack as he desperately cage-rattled politicos, chaplains, and the Army in an effort to discover Doug’s whereabouts after he went AWOL in Cambodia. In late August 1970, Doug Johnson left the Army with an Undesirable Discharge and shattered health. His father was there to meet him on the tarmac at McChord AFB. From October 1970 to 1972, Bill Johnson assailed (in turn) the Army’s Inspector-General’s office, the Army Medical Department, the Army Discharge Review Board, the Army Board for Correction of Military Records. My father created and dispersed documents—thousands of words of testimony—in support of his conviction that the Undesirable discharge was not only undeserved, it was unjust. In response, he collected replies from uniformed brass (all of which he kept, all of which I found in the safe fifty years after these events) telling him: No, Mr. Johnson, you may not have our cooperation. Indeed, you can only have our obstruction, a brick wall of No.

So, imaginatively speaking, take these few replies (or lack thereof) from page 99 and multiply them by the hundreds. Then, dear reader: consider what that avalanche of persistent rejection, deflection, defeat, and denial would do to the psyche. My father despaired, but he did not give up. Such was his dedication to his son that through all the dismissals, the kiss-offs cast in Officialese, the paragraphs of stale BS that the Army swathed all over their responses, he persisted. In December 1972, the Army offered a compromise, a General Discharge Under Honorable Circumstances. My book argues that this was a cover-up. Did my father know this? I have no way of knowing. In any event, he and Doug accepted it. But his boy was not saved. Thirty years of addiction, PTSD, mental illness, and heartbreak lay ahead.

Visit Laura Kalpakian's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Marc A. VanOverbeke "Playing the Game"

Marc A. VanOverbeke is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). He explores the history of education and education policy, and specifically examines the history of educational access and opportunity. His first book, The Standardization of American Schooling, considered the interconnectedness of secondary and higher education at the turn of the twentieth century and the ways in which those connections influenced access to college.

VanOverbeke applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Playing the Game: How State Colleges Used Athletics to Expand Educational Opportunity, and reported the following:

Playing the Game explores the period between World War II and 1970, when state colleges expanded rapidly from normal schools or vocational institutes into four-year colleges and when some first opened as new campuses. Administrators and students fully embraced athletics as key to this expansion and to the state college mission to be open and accessible. Page 99 falls in the middle of a short introduction to the second period in the postwar development of state colleges (and to the last half of the book). A few of the passages relevant to an understanding of the whole book are the following sentences from page 99:

…The activism around and through sport reflected the central role that sport had assumed on these campuses and its significance to collegiate life. Athletics was both the target of activism and a means of broader protest, and it proved to be a powerful tool for protesting students who expected their institutions to live up to a mission of openness and accessibility.

What came in this second period was a more full-throated defense—driven largely by this student activism—of equality of access, of making college readily available to greater numbers, and of arguing that colleges had an obligation to develop the means for students to overcome any challenges that they had in accessing college and succeeding there.

From 1954 to 1962, state college enrollments doubled to nearly 1 million students and then to 2.3 million in 1970.

A reader opening to this page will find information on the dramatic growth in enrollment at state colleges, as well as a sense of how student protests in and through athletics shaped state colleges between 1962 and 1970. What the reader will not get from this page is any definition or context for state colleges and their mission of accessibility and opportunity. Still, I am pleased that the page provides a reasonable overview of the pages to come, while also showing how the second half builds on the first part.

As detailed in the first part of the book (but not on page 99), administrators embraced athletics to build public support for their institutions, rebrand from normal schools to “real” colleges, recruit students, and create a sense of loyalty among players, students, and community members. The second half of the book, which picks up after page 99, continues to explore athletics as key to state college growth and shows how students turned to athletics to promote their goals, dreams, hopes, and wishes. Students used the same athletic playbook that administrators had adopted in the first period but did so to pressure their colleges to truly become accessible institutions. Athletics and sports have been fundamental to state colleges. Page 99 may not provide a full sense of this role or of the book, but it does highlight the significance of athletics to the development of state colleges and to the expansion of higher education to greater numbers of students.

Learn more about Playing the Game at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Julie-Ann Scott-Pollock's "Stories of Raising Boys"

Julie-Ann Scott-Pollock is Professor of Communication and Performance Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. She is the author of Embodied Performance as Applied Research, Art and Pedagogy, which was awarded the Lilla A. Heston Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Interpretation and Performance Studies by the National Communication Association.

Scott-Pollock applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Stories of Raising Boys: Masculinity, Disability, Gender Expansiveness, and Anxiety, with the following results:

From page 99:

…costume for Theo, and luckily, he loves it. Vinny walks tall and regal. Nico holds my hand tightly, careful as he looks up at me with big, dark eyes.

“You’re so beautiful, Nico.”

He looks away with a smile, and I think about how his gender-expansive swim differs from Vinny’s, which carefully and strategically chooses exclusively feminine strokes. Nico seems to have inherited my anxiety, according to our pediatrician, and treads water carefully between binary gender streams even though he seems to be the happiest in ultrafeminine attire. The next chapter is the story of our second gender-expansive boy’s anxious swim.

Page 99 ends chapter 3, so there isn’t a whole page of text. Still, it gives the reader a glimpse into my book. It mentions three of my boys and draws on the metaphor of swimming through the ocean that I use to explain what it means to navigate the world as parents of boys that are both privileged by being born into a white, middle-class family, with engaged, educated parents who advocate for them, and who are marginalized because of their disability, gender identity, and/or anxiety in an ableist, patriarchal culture. It also reveals the book's overall structure, which is organized so that each child has their own chapter.

I would be disappointed if a reader only opened to this page because they can’t know the context of Theo, Vinny, and Nico having makeovers at the Bibbity Bobbity Boutique on a Disney Cruise a few pages earlier and how their Fairy Godfather explained that Disney knows that being a princess is an aura and mindset that has nothing to do with being a boy or a girl. A reader might think the entire book is about gender-expansive sons because most of the central characters are missing. Theo, one of my two conventionally masculine sons, is only mentioned in a fragment of a sentence. My big, powerful, and emotionally exhausted oldest son, Tony, who has frequent, uncontrolled seizures, and their baby sister Rosalie are also not on page 99. From just this section, readers also wouldn’t know that I am physically disabled, and know social stigma in ways their dad, who has always been an athletic, smart, tall, conventionally attractive man, cannot quite access, despite his empathetic and protective spirit.

I worry that, based on just page 99, readers would not realize this book is not a memoir. It is an autoethnography that examines the power structures of society through the stories we choose to tell from the cultural locations we occupy and the bodies we’re in. From just this page, readers won’t know that my stories of raising boys are approved by them and deepened through interweaving interviews with adults who also live with seizures, are gender expansive, and/or are diagnosed with anxiety. Page 99 does not reveal that this book is a story of raising boys at the cultural intersections of masculinity and an analysis that offers hope for inclusive, safe swims for all bodies through culture.

Learn more about Stories of Raising Boys at the Temple University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joseph Turow's "The Problem with Personalization"

Joseph Turow is the Robert Lewis Shayon Professor of Media Systems & Industries Emeritus in the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of thirteen books and the editor of five, including The Voice Catchers: How Marketers Listen In to Exploit Your Feelings, Your Privacy, and Your Wallet; The Aisles Have Eyes: How Retailers Track Your Shopping, Strip Your Privacy, and Define Your Power; and The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry Is Defining Your Identity and Your Worth.

Turow applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The Problem with Personalization: How Advertisers Learned to Make and Break Us from Ancient Times to the AI Age, and shared the following:

As it happens, page 99 of The Problem with Personalization marks the beginning of chapter 4 of 8 chapters. In that sense, it lies squarely in the middle of the book, and of my argument. The book’s subtitle is “How Advertisers Learned to Make and Break Us from Ancient Time to the AI Age.” Chapters 1-3 tackle the pre-internet versions of personalization, from street hawkers and peddlers of centuries past to the rise of direct mail and direct marketing in the 20th century. Those chapters demolish the widespread notion that personalization in advertising is a product of the 21st century; far from it. Chapter 4 pivots to our current century. It and the ones that follow show how advertisers draw on past aspirations and assumptions about personalization. But advertisers of today do that using artificial intelligence and the internet. They weaponize data in unprecedented ways that drive mono-segmentation and, over the next decades, the disappearance of shared reality and community.

Chapter 4 is called “Cookies, Barcodes, Smartphones, and Location Targeting: The Internet Takes the Direct Marketing Crown.” Here is how it begins on page 99:

In 1994 Lou Montulli worked for Netscape Communications, a company that made the Netscape Navigator World Wide Web browser. His bosses asked him to address a difficulty bedeviling companies trying to sell things in the new web world. There was no way to keep track of an individual’s visits to or clicks on a website. Online stores could therefore sell only one item at a time. If you wanted to buy something on a store’s site, you would click to place it in the website’s “shopping cart” and then you would have to check out right at that moment. You could not leave it in the cart and look again on the site for something to buy because you’d lose the first item. The website had no way to know if the same visitor was coming back to the cart. To grease the wheels of browser commerce, Montulli was, in essence, charged with creating a persistent identity tracker for an individual’s presence where others at Netscape had tried and failed.

This, page 100 points out, was the beginning of the cookie. The cookie was crucial to making direct marketing the mainstream model for audience construction in the internet era. It caused marketers to continually search for ways to splinter their profiles of consumers and then target them using those hypersegmented, even individualized, understandings. Chapters 4 through 8 cover how that process evolved into a new era of predictive and generative artificial intelligence—and what it means for individuals and the larger society.

A person reading page 99 alone would probably not get a good idea of the entire work because the Montulli anecdote, not the book’s theme, takes center stage. The chapter title may offer a hint of the prior and forthcoming topics, but certainly not in an explicit way. Nevertheless, a reader of the book will find page 99 as a crucial pivot in the book’s trajectory. At this point the story is moving from the “mass” oriented analog and early digital-media environment of the late twentieth century (think cable TV, CDs, and early PCs) to our era where artificial intelligence technologies linked to increasingly personalized digital platforms are transforming our lives fundamentally. Chapter 5 is called “Machine Learning, Predictive Analytics, Identity Resolution: AI and The Data Deluge.” Charter 6's title is “Dynamic Personalizations, Unprecedented Permutations, Virtual Influencers: Enter Gen. A.” Chapter 7 deals with “Consumer Data and the Law Governments Pushback, Marketers Push Forward,” and Chapter 8 confronts the basic question “Why Don't People Revolt?”

So, while page 99 doesn’t presage all this, it serves as the key entry point for it. Perhaps that’s a useful variation on the Ford Madox Ford quote.

Stepping back to focus on the book’s theme, I ought to say that concerns, including in my own work, about marketers’ data-hoovering activities typically focus on privacy. But I have come to believe that companies’ frenetic drives toward AI-created personalization is leading to an even costlier predicament: It is making it impossible to sustain the kind of healthy media system required to cultivate a healthy society. That is why I wrote The Problem of Personalization. The book makes its argument by telling stories that put the personalization problem into historical, technological, legal and social perspectives. I hope this discussion of page 99 makes you want to explore the book as a whole.

Learn more about The Problem with Personalization at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Xian Aubin Wang's "Islam and Maoism in Southern Yunnan"

Xian Aubin Wang is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Islam and Maoism in Southern Yunnan: State Violence and Resistance, 1949–2024, and reported the following:

Page 99 sets the stage by comparing the oral history testimonies of a Muslim villager with the official accounts of the conflicts that developed between the Shadian Muslim militia and the Maoist revolutionary People’s Militia. Unlike the narratives of the Maoist work teams that blame the Muslim villagers as a “chaos-making mob,” the oral testimony indicates that the Muslim villagers established their own militia because they felt threatened by the aggression of the weaponized Maoist revolutionary militia, from whom the villagers attempted to seize guns. The antagonism between the two groups intensified, and members of both sides engaged in armed conflict. The page concludes by stressing that the official narratives “offer little information about how a series of conflicts between the Shadian Muslim militia and the People’s Militia unfolded, leading to the Party Center’s direct intervention and the eventual negotiations between Muslim representatives and top CCP leaders in Beijing.”

The Page 99 Test works surprisingly well because it introduces a crucial point that the book makes to readers. That is, besides official documents, Muslim villagers’ written materials and oral testimonies are vital sources that allow us to more comprehensively understand the religious motives and agency of individuals who resisted Maoist work teams and the PLA in the 1960s and 1970s. Therefore, the voices of the Muslim villagers are integral to the book as a whole.

The page begins with the term “religious traitor[s],” who are nowhere to be mentioned in the official documents. Nonetheless, the Muslim villagers’ oral testimonies revealed that these “religious traitors”, identified as local CCP Muslim leaders, cooperated with Maoist work teams to ban Islamic practice, close mosques, and blaspheme Islam. In other words, the Maoist work teams cultivated a patron-client relationship between Maoist revolutionaries and local CCP Muslim cadres, through which the secular state power was able to infiltrate into the religious communities, further escalating the tensions between the atheist revolutionary state, Muslim collaborators, and the ordinary Muslim villagers. Without oral history interviews, such important local dynamics would have been neglected as we interpret how conflict between the Muslim villagers and the party-state originated, developed, and escalated to the point of antagonism.

As the first study investigating how and why conflicts between the Chinese Communist Party authorities and southern Yunnan Muslims, beginning in the early 1950s, culminated in the 1975 massacre, this book suggests a new methodological approach to understanding the development of conflicts between state power and religious communities in borderland regions by emphasizing the importance of connecting elite politics and statecraft to local dynamics and experiences.

Learn more about Islam and Maoism in Southern Yunnan at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rachel Grace Newman's "The Future in Their Hands"

Rachel Grace Newman is a historian of modern Mexico with particular interests in migration, family, and social inequality. She is an Assistant Professor of History at Colgate University. At Colgate, she teaches on these themes and other topics in modern Latin American, global history, and historical methods.

Newman applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, The Future in Their Hands: Making Mexico's Foreign-Educated Elite, with the following results:

What’s on page 99 of The Future in Their Hands:

This falls in the book’s fifth chapter, set in the mid-twentieth century. That chapter explores the political agenda of Mexican students studying abroad, mostly in the United States. This agenda, I argue, was not explicitly ideological and perhaps seems even apolitical: young, middle-class Mexicans sought to protect and uplift their social status by securing generous scholarships to support themselves and their families, expecting that their foreign degrees would ultimately shore up their future careers with prestige and good salaries.

On page 99, we find several stories relating to Mexican students’ family commitments both during and after their studies abroad. First, we encounter the end of the story of Concepción Reza Inclán, who studied economics at UCLA in 1952-1953. She sat for several interviews with a researcher during her time in Los Angeles, and she told the interviewer that she aspired to be both a professional economist and a wife, which the interviewer found hard to believe possible. On page 99, we learn that in 1959, several years after returning from UCLA, she was working as an economist for Nestlé México. I explain that we don’t know whether she also had formed her own family by that point. It is the case, though, that some US-educated Mexican women I interviewed ended up being very successful researchers and mothers, too.

In the mid-twentieth century, scholarship program officers (such as those working for the Rockefeller Foundation) saw women’s family commitments as impediments to their professional careers, and so they were generally unsupportive of women who married or worse, had children. However, as I explain on this page, the Rockefeller was also unsupportive of men who provided for family members other than their wives or children. Subscribing to a vision of a breadwinner for the nuclear family that presumed that young professional men did not need to take care of their own parents, siblings, or other relatives, Rockefeller officers were surprised to find that the Mexican students they invest in with scholarships had just these kinds of “other dependents.” As I explain on page 99, these commitments were common, but usually scholarship recipients were not given extra support from the Rockefeller to provide for these relatives. An exception was one young playwright, considered to be very promising, Jorge Ibargüengoitia—who did actually become famous several years later. Because he negotiated for it, he garnered an extra stipend of $80 monthly so that he could continue to support his widowed mother and his aunt back in Mexico while he was studying theater in the United States.

Does the Page 99 Test work for this book?

The sources I used to write page 99 are some of my favorites, so the test pinpointed a place where my personal scholarly predilections really come through. Indeed, this test works fairly well for my book, although the contents of page 99 might come as a surprise to the browser who opened up to this page after seeing the book cover. Invoking “foreign-educated Mexicans” (as in the book title) usually brings a very specific image to mind: US-trained technocrats who ushered Mexico into neoliberalism in the late twentieth century. But I’m interested in how Mexicans pursued foreign education, what scholarship programs aimed to do and how they worked, and how upwardly mobile youth’s ambitions and experiences abroad related to their social origins. That will be an unexpected turn for many readers, and page 99 indicates just how deep we venture into the social history of Mexico’s ordinary elite. In the book, I argue that social imperatives were just as important as intellectual (or political) motives for studying abroad because a foreign education both signified and enhanced Mexican social privilege. That privilege was conditioned by family responsibilities and gender norms, both points which come across on page 99.

Elsewhere in the book, we learn about the political history of their relationship with state institutions. The book’s main argument is that the Mexican state created cohorts of foreign-educated Mexicans through scholarship programs at the behest of ambitious elites themselves. The idea is that scholarship programs, whether yoked to discourses of nationalism, modernization, or development, have always obeyed a hidden agenda: opportunities for elites to shore up their own status with support from the state in the form of merit-based, selective benefits. The Mexican state is mostly absent on this page (though its first systematic scholarship program, run by the Banco de México, does get a mention, and it is featured elsewhere in the book). But page 99 is not quite misleading because my book is not only about the Mexican state, but about the forces outside of it in Mexican society and even beyond Mexico that shaped its policy. The Mexican state was never been the only source for funds to study abroad. Besides family-financed study, Mexican students have also had access to scholarships from foreign and international organizations, like the Rockefeller.

Visit Rachel Grace Newman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue