danah boyd's "Data Are Made, Not Found"

danah boyd is the Geri Gay Professor of Communication at Cornell University, where she works on topics at the intersection of technology and society. She is also the founder of the research institute Data & Society and the author of It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens.

boyd applied the "Page 99 Test" to her latest book, Data Are Made, Not Found: A Story of Politics, Power, and the Civil Servants Who Saved the US Census, with the following results:

Flip to page 99 and you’re immediately greeted with a battle at the heart of the book. The first two sentences remind you of the high stakes surrounding the census - and why President Trump was determined to ensure that the Census Bureau delivered the data on the statutory deadline, despite the massive disruptions introduced by the Covid-19 pandemic. “If the data were delivered on December 31, he would be president, regardless of whether or not he was reelected. But if Trump lost his bid for reelection— and census data were not delivered until after inauguration day in January 2021— he would not be in control of apportionment.”

As the page unfolds, many key characters who appear throughout the book make an appearance, vocalizing their struggle to deliver on the President’s requirements. We get to hear from the man in charge of the 2020 census - Al Fontenot - as he delivers the orders to his team. He is quoted as saying “We don’t have an option now. We were told to put together a plan that would allow us to finish on time.” And then we get to dive into the headspace of the group as a whole, pulled from multiple interviews. “Despite their misgivings, the team took their orders and started to pivot accordingly.”

The last paragraph on the page provides insight into the importance of the earlier dialogue and documented decision-making - as well as the civil servants’ commitment to doing “the impossible,” which is a theme throughout the book. “Time is not nearly as malleable as politicians seemed to believe. Fontenot’s team delivered an August replan, but not without serious doubt.”

Page 99 reflects the ethnographic detail, rich storytelling, and analysis that is woven throughout Data Are Made, Not Found. It also showcases one of the book’s core arguments. The book argues that politicians are playing a game of “Jenga politics,” taking out wooden pieces of the administrative state and adding pressure on top. Unlike the playful version, where everyone laughs when the tower collapses, the consequences of Jenga politics are the collapse of our democracy. Civil servants try to prevent the Jenga tower from falling, but they are struggling to protect democracy’s data. Page 99 is a great example of how civil servants at the Census Bureau are pushed into a corner to appease partisan interests, Constitutional requirements be damned.

Visit danah boyd's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sarah Marsh's "Novel Constitutions and the Making of Race"

Sarah Marsh is Associate Professor of English at Seton Hill University. A scholar of anglophone literature and culture of the long eighteenth century, she focuses on the western Atlantic histories of race, slavery, and antislavery. Her work explores how eighteenth-century writing confronted the moral, spiritual, and political crises of human slavery, and how literary forms helped shape emerging ideas about freedom, equality, personhood, and human flourishing.

Marsh applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Novel Constitutions and the Making of Race: A Literary and Legal History of Slavery in the Anglophone Atlantic, 1688-1818, and shared the following:

Page 99 of Novel Constitutions and the Making of Race opens a section titled “The Interesting Narrative and the Rise of Transatlantic Abolition,” which sets the scene for Olaudah Equiano’s appeal to the British Crown for the abolition of slavery. It begins:

When Equiano was writing in the late 1780s, the British public’s serious engagement with Parliament on the question of Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave system was still less than a decade old. As Christopher Leslie Brown has shown, the first known petition to Parliament on the question of the slave trade was submitted in June of 1783, signed by 273 Quakers. The Quakers found it their “religious duty to lay the suffering situation” of enslaved Africans before the House of Commons “as a subject loudly calling for the humane interposition of the Legislature.” The Quakers continued by voicing their “regret, that a nation professing the Christian faith, should so far counteract the principles of humanity and justice, as by cruel treatment of this oppressed race, to fill their minds with prejudices against the mild and beneficent doctrines of the Gospel.” The Commons, which in the previous century had appealed to ideals of Christian benevolence and generosity to fence in the royal prerogative of the Stuarts, were now appealed to by members of the British public to curb the absolute power of colonial slaveholders.

This page passes the Page 99 Test with something like flying colors. The last sentence of the paragraph above is a solid recapitulation of the book's central finding: Novel Constitutions argues that racial slavery in the English Atlantic, and the concept of race itself, grew out of seventeenth-century England’s great constitutional struggle between the divine right of kings and the immemorial liberties of the English people's ancient constitution. In the colonies, English slaveholders claimed over other human beings the absolute power that people and Parliament had refused to the Stuart kings. By 1783, Britons had begun to ask Parliament to fence in slaveholding planters and slave traders as it had once fenced in the Crown.

This page also pretty well encapsulates the book’s methodology of reading literary and legal texts together: page 99 of Novel Constitutions includes a Quaker petition, a treaty, and a reference to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, whose title character goes outside of royal power to become a slaveholder in his own right. Further, the Quaker petition on page 99 conceives of human slavery as not only a crime against humanity, but a crime against God; in this way, the page points toward Novel Constitution's larger project of explaining why we call racial slavery the "original sin" of the American republic.

Learn more about Novel Constitutions and the Making of Race at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael B. Cosmopoulos's "Rediscovering Homer"

Michael B. Cosmopoulos is the Hellenic Government-Karakas Foundation Professor in Greek Studies at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Royal Society of Canada, he is the author of numerous books on the archaeology and history of ancient Greece, most recently the award-winning The World of Homer: Archaeology, Social Memory, and the Emergence of Greek Epic Poetry.

Cosmopoulos applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Rediscovering Homer: The Human Experience in the Odyssey and the Iliad, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Rediscovering Homer falls in Chapter 4, “War and Violence,” in a section devoted to violence and trauma and presents two particularly powerful scenes from the Iliad. In the first, the Greek and Trojan armies clash in battle, their collision compared by Homer to two mountain torrents crashing together, and a warrior is killed when a spear pierces his forehead. In the second, warriors struggle over the corpse of Sarpedon, their weapons clashing amid blood and dust. Homer compares them to flies swarming around pails of milk, an image that strips the battle of any semblance of heroic glory.

Does the Page 99 Test work?

The Page 99 Test works well for this book, although the page represents only one aspect of its broader subject. One of my principal arguments is that the Iliad and the Odyssey are much more than stories of heroic adventures, because they preserve universal and profoundly human experiences: the experiences of people who lived through war, violence, loss, displacement, and the difficult process of rebuilding their lives.

We tend to associate Homer with heroic ideals, courage, honor, and military glory, but the reality is that the poems also present a different picture, one of suffering, grief, fear, and the devastating consequences of violence. Page 99 captures precisely this tension between the traditional glorification of war and the harsh realities of human experience.

This perspective is also deeply personal. My parents lived through the devastation of World War II and the Greek Civil War, and their experiences shaped my understanding of the lasting effects of violence and loss.

The book explores the full range of human experience, from family relationships and social bonds to political power, economic struggles, religion, and the choices we make in the face of adversity. At the heart of the book is the journey through life, with all its challenges, losses, and uncertainties, a journey embodied by Odysseus, whose story connects the two epics.

The Iliad portrays the devastation of war and its consequences for individuals and communities, while the Odyssey turns to the equally difficult struggle to survive, return home, and rebuild a life after loss. Together, the poems speak to experiences that remain fundamental to the human condition, which is why they continue to resonate with us nearly three thousand years after they began to take shape.

Visit Michael B. Cosmopoulos's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bryant Simon's "For Customers Only"

Bryant Simon is the Laura H. Carnell Professor of History and the academic chair of the honors program at Temple University. He is the author of The Hamlet Fire: The Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives, as well as Everything but the Coffee: Learning about America from Starbucks. He is a regular guest on the History Channel and a contributor to outlets like the New York Daily News, Washington Post, and Philadelphia Inquirer.

Simon applied the Ford Madox Ford-inspired "Page 99 Test" to his latest book, For Customers Only: Public Bathrooms and the Making of American Inequality, with the following results:

Page 99 of my new book, For Customers Only: Public Bathrooms and the Making of American Inequality, lands readers right smack in the middle of the murder investigation of Edgar L. Eckert, an assistant treasurer for a high-end men’s clothing story in mid-town Manhattan.

And it lands them right smack in the middle of a key transition in the book’s trajectory.

On a cool mid-May night in1936, after dinner with a colleague, Eckert, fifty-fours years old, married, and wearing a tailored suit, a gold ring and gold watch, walked towards Times Square. By then, the Bronx resident had lived in the city for almost four decades.

Still, he asked a trio of men how to get to the well-marked subway station a block or two away. They pointed him in the right direction and then followed him into the station, down onto the platform, and then up to a mezzanine and what was later described as an “out of the way” public bathroom.

Just after 2AM, a janitor found Eckert slumped on the bathroom floor, unable to speak and barely conscious. He died a few minutes later.

The police launched a manhunt for the killers and puzzled over Eckert’s movements. That’s what I wrote about on page 99. New York City detectives knew right away that this was a robbery. Eckert’s ring, watch, and wallet were gone, but they also wondered about the “queer” dimensions of the crime. Were the three men hustlers? Had Eckert lured them into a public bathroom for a quick sexual encounter before heading back to his modest outer borough home?

From the time that the first public bathrooms opened in New York in the late 19th Century, men seeking sex with other men (and male presenting people) met at the sinks and in the stalls. The police were alarmed and tried to better surveille these places. Along with allies on the city council, they put laws on the book that outlawed oral sex. But still men engaged in sexual encounters with other men in the city’s public bathrooms and this private act in public disturbed authorities.

After Ecket was killed, New York decided on a new tactic. City officials closed the out-of-the-way bathroom where Eckert was slain and a few others. The idea was to eliminate this place for illicit sex, to take it off the map, and to do what surveillance and arrests could not do, disappear those interested in sex in public from view.

This official move represented a massive change in bathroom governance. The initial public bathrooms were opened to expand the public sphere, to make the city bigger and more accessible to more people. From the 1930s forward, local leaders shifted gears and tried to narrow the public by closing public bathrooms – this happened after segregation broke down, this happened when homelessness came into view, and this is happening now to disappear trans and gender queer people, and this is the action unfolding on page 99 of my book.

Ford Madox Ford was right!

Learn more about For Customers Only at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eric Caplan's "When Healing Harms"

Eric Caplan is author of Mind Games: American Culture and the Birth of Psychotherapy and recipient of the University of Chicago's Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, When Healing Harms: The Doctor Who Put a Hospital on Trial―and the Case That Shook Psychiatry, and shared the following:

Page 99 of When Healing Harms finds Dr. Raphael Osheroff trying to reclaim the life he had left behind ten months earlier. Once a prosperous physician who owned and operated a thriving dialysis practice, Osheroff had spent seven months at Chestnut Lodge, a prestigious psychiatric hospital outside Washington, D.C., where his doctors treated his severe depression with intensive psychotherapy alone. They documented his physical and emotional deterioration in painstaking detail (the relentless pacing, the forty-pound weight loss, the blackened toes) yet refused to prescribe antidepressant medication that might relieve his suffering. He then spent three months at Silver Hill Hospital in Connecticut, where medication and supportive psychotherapy began lifting his depression within weeks.

But his homecoming came with no yellow ribbon tied around an old oak tree. What he returned to was not only an empty house, stripped of its furniture and even its grand piano, but a collapsing marriage and a court order denying him the right to visit his two older sons. Worse still, Dr. Robert Greenspan, his trusted associate and friend, “the brother I never had,” as Osheroff called him, had promised to preserve and protect his medical practice during his hospitalization but had been surreptitiously maneuvering to take it from him. When Osheroff returned to the dialysis center, Greenspan and another colleague refused even to speak with him. Having survived a devastating psychiatric illness, he now faced the loss of the professional life he had spent years building.

The Ford Madox Ford-inspired Page 99 Test works remarkably well for this book, although perhaps not for the most obvious reasons.

When Healing Harms recounts a landmark malpractice case that exposed a profound division within American psychiatry over the treatment of depression. Osheroff’s lawsuit against Chestnut Lodge became a cause célèbre, widely understood as a contest between psychoanalysis and biological psychiatry. At its heart, though, was a simpler question: whether a desperately ill patient had received the standard of care. Its consequences reached far beyond the hearing room, accelerating changes already underway in how America treats mental illness.

The case also raises a question psychiatry has yet to answer. The profession has long held unearned confidence in its theories of both mind and brain. It has given us the Oedipus complex and the chemical imbalance, but not yet the mechanisms that would confirm either. We keep substituting metaphor for mechanism. That need not harm patients, since treatments can work even when we cannot fully explain why. That said, uncertainty is no license to persist in a course of treatment that worsens, rather than relieves, a patient’s suffering. Osheroff’s doctors were so sure of their theory that they interpreted his deterioration as evidence that the treatment was working: he had to get worse before he could get better. When theory becomes dogma, the patient becomes collateral damage.

But the book is also about something more intimate: the distance between medical recovery and personal restoration.

Osheroff eventually prevailed in his legal battle, but vindication was not restoration. His victory could not repair his marriage, restore his bond with his sons, or return the years he believed had been stolen from him. His case became a defining episode in the history of American psychiatry, even as the man at its center struggled to rebuild his life.

Page 99 captures that paradox. Osheroff had recovered from his depression. What he had not recovered was the world he had lost.

Readers can follow each of the book’s notes to the underlying primary sources, wherever the law allows, at whhsources.org.

Visit Eric Caplan's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Barbara Young Welke's "Writing with Fire"

Barbara Young Welke is the Distinguished McKnight University Professor of history and law at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of Law and the Borders of Belonging in the Long Nineteenth Century United States and Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law, and the Railroad Revolution, 1865–1920.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Writing with Fire: The Cowboy Suit Tragedy and the Course of a Life, and reported the following:

From page 99:

On Sunday, April 8, 1945, a double headline spanned the columns of page 1 of the Washington, DC, Times-Herald: “Patton Seizes Nazi Gold Hoard” and “Yanks Smash Japs Naval Power.” But just beneath these headlines, in columns 2 and 3, was an investigative report by Times-Herald reporters Roland Nicholson and Spence Drummond: “D.C. Parents Warned: Inflammable Cowboy Suits Kill One Child Here, Burn 7” and “Fuzzy ‘Chaps’ Flare Like Torches; Stores Are Notified, Probe Launched.” Here was what for so long had been lacking: a story clearly identifying the danger.

Here’s what I like about the Page 99 Test for Writing with Fire: it lands in a chapter about the cowboy suit tragedy. At mid-century, children across the United States suffered burns when their highly inflammable Gene Autry cowboy playsuits caught fire, Americans’ first reckoning with “flammable fabrics.” The history of this tragedy is the heart of the book. One of the questions that troubled me from the start in working on this project was why it had taken so long—close to three years of children across the United States being burned, many dying—before the hazard began to be known for what it was. The Page 99 Test lands in the chapter focused on the role of the press in reinforcing the common-sense narrative that this is what happens when children play with fire, situates readers in the broader World War II context in which this tragedy unfolded; and, just so happens to be the page on which I introduce news stories from DC that identified the dangerously inflammable character of the fuzzy fabric on the chaps of the Gene Autry cowboy suit as the cause of deaths and injuries. As readers later learn, this coverage was key to the first lawsuits brought against Autry and others involved in producing and selling the cowboy suits.

But the test is also misleading. Although the news broke in DC, it did not break elsewhere with the result that children continued to be burned and die. But it’s also misleading because this tragedy is only one of three strands in this braided narrative. Intertwined with the cowboy suit tragedy is a history of the curriculum vitae, the form at the center of academic life. That sounds dry, unrelated, and certainly unexpected. It’s none of these things. It’s here because a traumatic loss in my life—the sudden death of my teenage daughter—led me to question how the CV, as it is colloquially called, claims to represent a life, and yet excludes so much of what gives life meaning, reinforcing norms that ask scholars to distance themselves from their emotions and personal experience in the writing of history and other disciplines. Braided between the two historical strands are letters I wrote my daughter in the year and a half after her death. Together this braided narrative invites readers to think deeply about history and the course of a life.

Learn more about Writing with Fire at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Livia K. Stone's "Without Masters"

Livia K. Stone is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Illinois State University and author of Atenco Lives!: Filmmaking and Popular Struggle in Mexico.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Without Masters: Autogestión, Anarchist Ethics, and Mexico City Punk, with the following results:

Page 99 of Without Masters: Autogestión, Anarchist Ethics, and Mexico City Punk does provide an interesting insight into the book as a whole. It describes a pivotal moment in the recent history of the concept of autogestión (often translated as self-management, or non-hierarchical organization) that the book describes.

From page 99:

The early 1990s saw a proliferation of both anarcho-punk zines and autogestión discourse. The year 1992 was the five-hundred-year anniversary of Columbus's initial (Spain funded) voyage to the Americas, and it spurred a political response across the rapidly increasing number of zines and their increasingly articulate politics that were disgusted by the official events celebrating the anniversary rather than condemning it. While Contraviolencia and Carmelo were early innovators of anarcho-punk zines, after 1992, it would have been difficult to find a punk zine that didn't mix its interviews with bands and concerts announcements with anarchist political essays.

The page goes on to describe that part of the politicization of the punk scene was happening because punks were increasingly hanging out and making their zines at Mexico City’s anarchist library, founded by a man named Ricardo Mestre, who was an exile from the Spanish Civil War earlier in the century. They were becoming acquainted with classical anarchist texts there, but also the library was becoming a social center for producing anarcho-punk publications, including a wealth of zines that formed the basis of this part of the book.

Without Masters overall uses the recent history of autogestión as a window through which to explore some large issues at the intersections of activism and scholarship, including how academics can appropriate activist ideas and how activists can deploy academic ideas. It is a fascinating story of cultural change through time. Although I believe the story of autogestión is a thrilling one in its own right, I think even readers not particularly interested in anarchism, punk, or even Mexico, will find it a compelling story of cultural and political movement through many of the major political moments of the twentieth century: African independence movements of the early 1960s when autogestión emerged, the countercultural and student movements of the late 1960s and 1970s where it was used as a slogan, punk in the 1970s and 1980s when it transformed meanings, Zapatismo and the anti-neoliberal movements of the 1990s that popularized the term and attached it to indigenous organizing, and the turn towards ideas of the local and sustainable in the 2000s where it became a foundational principle for small collectives.

Learn more about Without Masters at the Duke University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kevin Waite's "The Boundless Biddy Mason"

Kevin Waite is Anne Stark Watson and Chester Watson Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Texas at Dallas. His first book, West of Slavery, won the 2022 Wiley-Silver Prize and was shortlisted for three other awards, including the Lincoln Prize. His writing appears in The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Slate, National Geographic, and The New Republic. Waite moonlights in the TV and film industry, most recently as the writer and producer of a six-episode docuseries on the American Revolution for National Geographic and Disney+.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The Boundless Biddy Mason: An Odyssey from Slavery to Freedom Across the American West, and shared the following:

Oh great. This section. That’s what I thought as I cracked open my book to page 99 and confronted a particularly stubborn passage. There weren’t many, if any, sections that I rewrote as many times as I did this one. It describes the various tasks that Biddy Mason performed as an enslaved woman on a remote ranch outside San Bernardino, California in the early 1850s.

Mason had been hauled across the continent on a series of forced migrations – from Georgia to Mississippi to Utah and finally to California – over the preceding years. Although California had technically outlawed slavery in its state constitution, Mason and her daughters continued to labor in bondage for about five years after their arrival in 1851. Her owner, Robert Smith, was by this point the largest slaveholder in the American Far West, with Mason and thirteen others under his control.

What did slavery look like in the free state of California? That’s what this passage attempts to describe. Wheat and dairy, rather than cotton and sugar, dictated the rhythms of the day for enslaved people on Smith’s ranch. Mason probably spent a portion of her day with Smith’s herd of livestock, when she wasn’t otherwise harvesting his fields, cleaning his home, or delivering his neighbors' children. (She was a skilled midwife on top of it all.)

What made this passage particularly difficult to write also makes it representative and illuminating. Mason left no records in her own hand, aside from a few legal documents marked with an “X.” Her story, therefore, must be reconstructed from a fragmentary archival base, often the records of those who viewed her as property, not a person. To avoid scrutiny in an ostensibly free state, California slaveholders rarely described their Black laborers in any detail. This passage, then, is stitched together from the observations of others – often hastily rendered in letters or diaries – as well as the tithing records of Robert Smith, a member of the LDS Church.

The aim of this passage is to render visible what others sought to hide. And that, in effect, is the aim of the book as a whole: to illuminate the life of a remarkable woman, who survived a 3,000-mile forced migration, helped launch the largest freedom suit in the history of the American West, and eventually built an empire in Los Angeles real estate that made her the 19th-century equivalent of a multi-millionaire.

Learn more about The Boundless Biddy Mason at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Scot McFarlane's "The River That Made Texas"

Scot McFarlane is a river historian and founder of the Oxbow History Company.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The River That Made Texas: A Forgotten History of the Trinity, and reported the following:

From page 99:

A map made by Riché in 1899 highlights the unique emphasis placed on Trinity navigation across Texas (fig. 8.6). Riché created it for a different, smaller Texas river survey of the San Bernard River that he submitted to Congress. In the catalog description of the New York Public Library where this map is now archived, there is no mention of the Trinity, but it stands out nonetheless. The map shows all the Texas rivers that flow into the Gulf of Mexico. The rivers are color coded, with blue indicating existing opportunities to navigate and red for river sections where proposed improvements could make the river navigable. Along the coast, most waterways have a mix of red and blue. The Trinity is coded as already navigable up to Liberty, and then from there to Dallas it is colored red. Riché marked no other rivers in this manner, and the result makes the map appear as though a blood-colored gash runs across the state—as if the blood from Fort Worth’s slaughterhouses dyed the Trinity.

Also included on page 99 is an image of the river with this caption: "This image from the 1899 Army Corps of Engineers survey captures three of the key challenges of navigation: low water, snags, and a logjam."

Before I started writing The River That Made Texas, my friend and mentor Matt Klingle had told me about the 99 page test, so I actually began writing the book in the middle with this very test in mind, though where I began writing does not overlap perfectly with page 99 in the final published version.

This excerpt highlights the Trinity River's unique place in Texas history as the state's most navigable river and the one that boosters and engineers dreamed of making even more navigable all the way to Dallas and Fort Worth. This section of the book explains how men like Riché overlooked the communities that already called the river home downstream of Dallas. Essentially they treated it as a wilderness in need of development when in fact it was a vital home. Though this particular section does not share the story of the Trinity River's people, its themes and symbolism are at the core of the book when I wrote how Trinity's representation on the map makes it look "as though a blood-colored gash runs across the state." Funny enough, the book's blurb from Karl Jacoby echoes this line perfectly: "Scot McFarlane shows how the Trinity River cuts like a knife through the heart of Texas history."

Visit Scot McFarlane's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Samantha Barbas's "Hate Speech"

Samantha Barbas is a legal and cultural historian and the author of several books on media history and legal history topics, with a focus on journalism, privacy, defamation, and the First Amendment.

She is a Professor of Law at the University at Iowa, and has a Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Berkeley, and a J.D. from Stanford Law School. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award.

Barbas applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Hate Speech: The Legal and Cultural History of an American Dilemma, with the following results:

Page 99 describes the case of Kunz v. New York, from 1951. The case involved a Baptist minister who made speeches containing vile invective against Catholics and Jews and was convicted for making a speech on the streets of New York without a permit. Kunz had been denied a permit because of a flood of complaints to authorities about his speeches. The Supreme Court struck down the city ordinance, stating that it violated the First Amendment because it gave authorities the power to control, in advance, the ability to speak freely on religious subjects.

Justice Robert Jackson fired off an indignant dissent. He characterized the minister’s hateful statements – especially in light of the Holocaust – as fighting words, akin to physical blows. He believed that a discretionary permit system like New York’s could protect a city against “fanatics who take possession of its streets to hurl into its crowds defamatory epithets that hurt like rocks.”

Page 99 captures the tension at the heart of the book. For over a hundred years, Americans have been torn between the importance of protecting against the violence and inequality that can stem from hate speech, and, at the same time, upholding the freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment. By the early 1950s, the Supreme Court was moving in a speech-protective direction, issuing rulings that cast doubt on the validity of restrictions on hate speech. In Terminiello v. Chicago (1949), the Court struck down Chicago’s breach-of-the-peace conviction of an antisemitic speaker. Justice Jackson – who had returned to the Court after serving as lead prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials – warned in dissent that the Court had overlooked the connections between hate speech and totalitarian takeover and was turning the Bill of Rights into a “suicide pact.”

Jackson lost the fight, and over the next two decades, the Court created a First Amendment jurisprudence that essentially negated the possibility of hate speech laws. Today, there are no “hate speech laws” in America, of the kind that exist in most other countries; hate speech is generally protected by the First Amendment. Although Jackson’s position lost at the Supreme Court, he won in the court of public opinion—he received fan mail and accolades for his “suicide pact” statement.

This dynamic remains: while most Americans support free speech generally, they draw the line at protecting hate speech. There is no more contested free speech idea than “freedom for the thought that we hate.”

Visit Samantha Barbas's website.

The Page 99 Test: Laws of Image.

The Page 99 Test: Newsworthy.

The Page 99 Test: The Rise and Fall of Morris Ernst, Free Speech Renegade.

The Page 99 Test: Actual Malice.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lee Alan Dugatkin's "Nary a Horse Left Standing"

Lee Dugatkin is Professor of Biology at the University of Louisville. The author of How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog), Power in the Wild, Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose, and Principles of Animal Behavior, among other books, he is a fellow in the Animal Behavior Society and has lectured at over 200 universities and museums across the globe. He is a contributor to Scientific American, Psychology Today, and New Scientist.

Dugatkin applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Nary a Horse Left Standing: How a Nineteenth-Century Epidemic Transformed Medicine, Animal Welfare, and the Modern City, and shared the following:

From page 99 of Nary a Horse Left Standing:

In [Henry] Bergh’s speech to the ASPCA in which he invoked “the tribunal of Eternal Justice” for acts of cruelty against animals, he also tells his fellow members to ask themselves this: “Why should a man . . . who without the least remorse torments and destroys other creatures, hesitate to do the same, after such an apprenticeship, to any human being that happens to stand in the way of his caprices or ambition?” Bergh was convinced such a man would not hesitate and was “persuaded that the obduracy of heart and unrelenting disposition which we discover in some men, is owing in a great measure to the early indulgence of such a disposition towards the inferior animals.

The Page 99 Test for Nary a Horse Left Standing works respectably well for one thread in the book: how a massive 1872 outbreak of horse flu that paralyzed almost every major urban center in North America ushered in a revolution in animal rights, led by Henry Bergh and the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA).

That massive outbreak of horse flu soon was dubbed The Great Epizootic, the animal equivalent of a pandemic. In the fall of 1872, horses were the lifeblood of every metropolis across North America. New York City alone had 38,000, who were the living, breathing engines that powered the city. At least half, and likely more, of those horses were laid up for weeks at a time during The Great Epizootic. Suddenly, the power sources driving fire carts, garbage trucks, hearses and delivery carts that stocked the shelves of everything from thousands of mom and pop stores to the new department stores, were convalescing in stables.

And that was just the tip of the iceberg. Before The Great Epizootic, each day more than 300,000 tickets were sold to ride on streetcars powered by horses. Each of these streetcars transported one or two dozen people to work, to shop or to cultural venues like the newly opened Metropolitan Museum of Art and The American Museum of Natural History.

During The Great Epizootic the number of streetcars riding the inlaid rails of Gotham plummeted. This was in part due to all the sick horses in streetcar company stables, but it was also due to Henry Burgh and the ASPCA’s work to make sure that when avarice owners of these companies tried to force clearly sick horses to work nonetheless, they failed at the opportunity to line their pockets at the expense of those animals.

The goings on of October 30, 1872 provide a snapshot of what became a daily occurrence. That day, in the heat of The Great Epizootic, Bergh and a team from the ASPCA stationed themselves near a switch that allowed streetcars from the Third Avenue streetcar line to move from uptown to downtown tracks. Two policemen stood by to keep order. When a Third Avenue streetcar came along, Bergh and his team forced it to stop and inspected the horses. “Mr. Bergh pointed to the yellow looking noses of the horses,” reported the New York Herald, a paper that had already dubbed Bergh “the great philohippic.” “These animals are too sick to work,” the Herald wrote, quoting Bergh, “take the other track and go back to the stables.”

The next day Bergh was back on the streets, this time where the Bleecker Street streetcar line ran, to inspect more horses. So it went every day during The Great Epizootic, when nary a horse was left standing.

Visit Lee Alan Dugatkin's website.

The Page 99 Test: Power in the Wild.

The Page 99 Test: Dr. Calhoun's Mousery.

--Marshal Zeringue

Leah C. Stokes's "The Carbon Wave"

Leah C. Stokes is Anton Vonk Associate Professor of Environmental Politics at UC Santa Barbara. As a leading climate advocate, she has championed climate policy in the United States at all levels of government and was selected for Time Magazine’s Time100 Next list and Business Insider’s top 30 global climate leaders. A recipient of a Harvard University Radcliffe Fellowship, she is the author of the award-winning Short Circuiting Policy, which was listed as one of the top 5 climate books in 2020 by The New York Times.

Stokes applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Carbon Wave: A Story of Democracy, Parenthood, and the Race to Protect Our Planet, and reported the following:

From page 99:

The combination of Gina’s bad quote and the delayed bipartisan infrastructure package caused a bunch of senators to begin speaking up more forcefully. Senator Smith stayed on message, arguing her clean electricity program was key. Senator Heinrich said he wouldn’t vote for a package without climate in it, and Senator Wyden agreed. But the idea really caught fire when Senator Markey told The New York Times that he wouldn’t support an infrastructure deal without climate at its center, saying: “No climate, no deal.” Across the climate movement, folks seized on this phrase, making it our rallying cry. We repeated it again and again, putting it on websites, banners, and tweets.”

Page 99 of The Carbon Wave gives the reader a look at one snippet of the long, tumultuous journey that gave way to the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest federal climate package in American history. This moment comes in the Spring of 2021, when President Biden and Senate Majority Leader Schumer are trying to build support for a climate bill–particularly from moderate Senator Joe Manchin–as a bipartisan infrastructure package is simultaneously being negotiated. I’d say this page is largely representative of the broader story for a couple of reasons.

This moment captures one of the book’s central themes, which is that advocacy is a lot like jazz: it’s highly improvisational and unpredictable, and the fight for the IRA was no different. When unexpected challenges or windows of opportunities arose, we pivoted, focusing on how to capitalize on new openings and make progress. If Gina McCarthy (President Biden’s National Climate Advisor) hadn’t had that accidental slip-up, “No Climate, No Deal” would never have taken hold, pressuring the administration and Senate negotiators to continue prioritizing the climate law alongside the bipartisan infrastructure deal.

This passage also highlights how delicate policy making can be: leaders have different priorities and perceptions of what’s important, and seemingly minor errors or misunderstandings can derail the entire process. Exposing readers to tense political moments like this one helps people understand how bills actually become laws, which is often more coordinated and complicated than the Schoolhouse Rock jingle suggests. In reality, government leaders, policy wonks, outside advocates, and everyday people all form an intricate network to set policy goals, maintain public pressure, and negotiate to get a bill across the finish line.

Visit Leah C. Stokes's website.

The Page 99 Test: Short Circuiting Policy.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jessica Hines's "Forms of Suffering"

Jessica Hines is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Southern Maine where she specializes in Medieval literature and culture. She has a particular interest in the intersection of sexuality, religion, and race, as well as medieval and classical theories of ethics and the emotions.

Hines applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Forms of Suffering: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Chaucerian Pity, with the following results:

Page 99 is part of the introduction to my third chapter, "Pitous Need: Women's Thralldom and Christian Victorie in the Man of Law's Prologue and Tale." The page sets up a particular oddity in the Man of Law's Prologue and Tale, one of the Canterbury Tales by the fourteenth-century poet Geoffrey Chaucer. The central conceit of the Canterbury Tales is that a group of travelers and pilgrims hold a storytelling competition to entertain themselves on their journey from London to Canterbury. The teller of this tale, a lawyer, opens by misrepresenting how a theological treatise that was hugely popular in the Middle Ages, Innocent III's On the Misery of the Human Condition (De miseria humanae conditionis), describes the pain of poverty. The Man of Law uses lines from Innocent to argue that it is terrible to be poor and wonderful to be a wealthy merchant; in contrast, Innocent argues that rich and poor alike suffer and that every person should feel compassion and anxiety for the suffering of others. The Man of Law then tells a strange story with little obvious connection to merchants or poverty: Custance, a Roman emperor's daughter, is married off to a Syrian sultan and then repeatedly set adrift at sea. Page 99 lays out this textual oddity and begins to explain it: Chaucer uses the tale to explore a medieval cultural anxiety about how to read accurately the signs of another person's need and then how best to respond to that need—emotionally, spiritually, and materially.

The Page 99 Test doesn't work particularly well for my book. If you looked only at page 99, you'd come away thinking the book is a dry account of everything Chaucer read, or of how scholars have historically tried to make sense of this strange tale and its seemingly mismatched teller. You wouldn't get a sense of the stakes of my argument—why anyone should care how the Man of Law talks about a (now obscure) medieval theological text.

What's interesting about looking at my page 99 is that it gives a sense of how I tend to tackle interpretative challenges: something odd is going on in one of Chaucer’s poems—why is it happening? Forms of Suffering contends that Chaucer reformulated a wide range of European discourses about pity and its practices for an English audience and, in the process, made pity into a central ethical and aesthetic concern in English literature. For medieval readers, pity was closer to what we would call compassion, and it carried a sense of duty to care for those who suffer. And Chaucer brought to the fore pity's capacity to challenge—even overturn—unjust power structures such as those associated with class, gender, and race. Critically, however, he also explored pity's precarity: the ways it could easily slide from transformative justice into a weapon of oppression. Each chapter first identifies something strange in Chaucer's treatment of pity, then gives the historical context that helps explain that strangeness, and finally unpacks how Chaucer explores the ethical stakes of medieval ideas about pity. In this chapter, that context includes Innocent III and medieval debates over charitable aid to the poor, which worried about how to tell true need from feigned need. The stakes lie in how the tale's heroine, Custance, effectively uses rhetorical signs of pity to navigate her own experience of being rendered terribly needy and vulnerable. Page 99 sits at the transition from describing the oddity to unpacking the historical context.

Visit Jessica Hines's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert Thorson's "The Walden Experiments"

Robert M. Thorson is professor of Earth sciences at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of Walden’s Shore: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth Century Science, The Boatman: Henry David Thoreau’s River Years, and The Guide to Walden Pond.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The Walden Experiments: The Science of Henry David Thoreau, and shared the following:

Page 99 begins with "...of antibiotics, corporate monopolies, and farms the size of townships." The first part of the sentence on page 98 critiqued the "horror show" of the U.S. farm economy. It continues on to embrace the work of the late Wendell Berry, a devotee of Thoreau who "may be the most well-known of those seeing a saner course" for agriculture, in this case regenerative agriculture. Page 99 ends midway through a quote from Walden that illustrates Thoreau's precedent as an activist against what was called scientific farming in his age, but which is now much of its "soul-shattering" economy. This quote is within Chapter 7 - The Bean Field, which describes Thoreau's successful experiment in regenerative agriculture.

Yes, you can get a good sense of the book on page 99, it being a critique of a modern problem followed by Walden's prophetic words about that problem that still apply today, justifying Bill McKibben's blurb quote: "Thoreau was not just ahead of his time but of our time too." Though page 99 is about regenerative agriculture, other pages do the same for extinction, AI, climate change, pollution, evolution, war, and other problems facing the world today.

The book is a logical successor to a series of my three previous books, because it highlights Thoreau's relevance to modern society. With respect to the environmental and sustainability movements, it offers a benchmark or anchor in time for the ideas we need to live sustainably on planet earth. The book also includes many small personal anecdotes of my own life --some of which are funny-- to keep the relationship between author and reader human and personal.

Visit Robert Thorson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mark B. Kelley's "Crimes Against Feeling"

Mark B. Kelley is associate professor of English at Florida International University and former managing editor of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies. His work has appeared in Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers; American Literary Realism; and the Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association; as well as in the essay collection, India in the American Imaginary, 1780s–1880s, edited by Rajender Kaur and Anupama Arora.

Kelley applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Crimes Against Feeling: Piracy, Sympathy, and Ocean Politics in Antebellum American Legal Culture, and reported the following:

From page 99:

[Uncle Tom’s Cabin] does not call for civil disobedience in the name of natural law in the way that [Ralph Waldo] Emerson or [Frederick] Douglass had proposed. It also lacks the dripping resentment of her brother Charles Beecher's abolitionist legal tract The Duty of Disobedience to Wicked Laws (1851). For him, the Piracy Act of 1820 reflected the “deep instinct of every heart.” It affirmed the "intuitive sense of right our fathers felt" that they nonetheless ignored in acts of legal appeasement. Abolitionists who “resist unto blood, striving against sin," Beecher concluded, must break national law in order to protect natural law. Harriet Beecher Stowe likewise recalled the law's moral limits. But her response in Uncle Tom's Cabin squarely places the enslaved on the rack operated by piratical enslavers and calls upon her readers to watch.

Page 99 provides a generally accurate if slightly narrow account of literary piracy, deep-sea enslavement, and international law in the decades prior to the U.S. Civil War. Specifically, it recounts the publication history of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1854) and considers her moral resentment towards slavery relative to her contemporaries. It occurs in the heart of the book, nearly at the median of its second chapter. Its focus on the most visible antebellum woman novelist may entice readers to discover the book’s other central women (who it must be said were equally famous in their time, if not ours).

As Charles Beecher’s appeal to the “deep instinct of every heart” affirms, complicated legal theories often retained an emotional core. The passage is just one example of piracy’s contested definition as a singular moral injury whose legal character could be proven by narrations of alleged pirates’ offenses against blameless families (the “crimes against feeling” of the title). The Piracy Act of 1820 he references is the book’s central legal text, as it was the first American law to declare the deep-sea slave trade piracy (although, tellingly, no one was executed for the crime until 1862). Each of the chapters consider how authors across a political spectrum treated the law as either a first step towards piratical enslavement’s universal abolition or as itself an act of piracy against enslavers’ property rights. Stowe represented a moderate position in this debate, but I am careful not to oversimplify her (or anyone’s) politics. My brief discussion of Stowe v. Thomas (1854) on page 99, in which the author unsuccessfully sued against the published of an unauthorized German-language edition of the novel, gives us a hint that piracy of all sorts often went unpunished. Such legal defeats led Stowe and others to platform if not prescribe abolitionist violence in the years that followed. Like each of the book’s central figures, neither Beecher nor Stowe could prevent an internecine war that resulted from disputes on piracy’s legal definition and the nation’s emotional core.

Visit Mark B. Kelley's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Anna Vincenzi's "Echoes of a Distant Republic"

Anna Vincenzi is Associate Professor of Modern European History at Hillsdale College.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Echoes of a Distant Republic: Italian Perspectives on the American and French Revolutions, with the following results:

The Page 99 Test works great for this book! Page 99 happens to center on one of the book’s central ideas: that of “constitutional pluralism.” By this I mean the idea that no particular form of government is, in itself, necessarily good or best. In the classical formulation, government by one, by the few, or by the many could all serve the common good—or, on the contrary, could become tyrannical and serve exclusively the interests of the faction in power, whether that faction was one, few, or many. Page 99 focuses on a Neapolitan Enlightenment thinker, Gaetano Filangieri, author of the then-famous The Science of Legislation. I argue that Filangieri, like many thinkers before him—from Aristotle through medieval Scholastic and Renaissance authors to William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, whom Filangieri greatly admired—was a “constitutional pluralist,” rather than an advocate of democratic republicanism, as historians have often interpreted him.

This is an important part of the book’s broader argument. Echoes of a Distant Republic explores how people in the Italian states interpreted the American Revolution, and how those interpretations changed in response to the French Revolution. It focuses on Venice, Florence, Rome, and Naples between 1765 and 1799. The book argues that the American Revolution was initially not understood as a “revolution” in the modern sense of the term. Rather, it was generally seen as part of an Age of Reform: an attempt to correct abuses, rather than a radical break with the Old Regime. Nor was it generally understood in Italy—or, arguably, in Europe—as a call for antimonarchical revolution. The French Revolution changed this. As the French Revolution unfolded, earlier interpretations of the American Revolution were transformed as well. The American events came to be understood as the “mother” of the French Revolution and, increasingly, as the beginning of a global movement against the injustices and hierarchies of monarchical regimes. Page 99 captures one small but important piece of that larger transformation.

Learn more about Echoes of a Distant Republic at the University of Virginia Press.

--Marshal Zeringue

Molly M. Brookfield's "Watching the Girls Go By"

Molly M. Brookfield is assistant professor of history and women’s and gender studies at The University of the South.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Watching the Girls Go By: A History of Street Harassment in the United States, and shared the following:

Page 99 of my new book, Watching the Girls Go By: A History of Street Harassment in the United States, is only half text. The top half of the page features an image taken from a travel brochure that the U.S. Navy distributed to seamen on leave in San Diego during World War II. The image is a cartoon depicting a sailor playing checkers with an older woman in old-fashioned clothes. The sailor has whipped his head around, mid-turn, to watch as a younger woman in a shorter skirt and high heels walks by. The caption reads, “In a travel guide for enlisted men on leave in San Diego, illustrations like this one suggested that sailors would encounter young women throughout the city and might ogle them as part of their leisure activities.” You can view the cartoon in its original form in the digitized pamphlet.

The bottom half of the page includes some of the larger context that helps readers understand the significance of the image. It reads:

…troops as no different from the average, virile white American male in their sexual appetites and exemplified the military’s expectation for a certain amount of sexual boisterousness and eagerness among enlisted men. As Marilyn Hegarty has argued, the armed forces harbored a quiet but ‘official acceptance of . . . men’s need for sex’ and hoped to control and direct that need rather than suppress it altogether. A doctor tasked with evaluating the military’s recreation programs espoused this belief when he insisted on men’s ‘normal desire for feminine companionship.’ The doctor worried that recreation programs that employed older women as motherly figures for homesick troops would not fulfill servicemen’s needs. If the military did not put enlisted men in contact with young, attractive women, the doctor warned, servicemen might seek such…

You could do worse than land on this page using the Page 99 Test. For one, analysis of images and popular culture is a big part of Watching the Girls Go By. In the larger book, I focus a lot on how humorous depictions of white men ogling, catcalling, and otherwise accosting women in public space normalized these behaviors as harmless and even desirable. So, the image analysis on page 99 gives readers a sense of one of the key methods I use to show that pop culture helped convince Americans that it was normal and funny for white male strangers to intrude on women’s time, attention, and bodies in public space.

The text on page 99 is less representative of the whole book. On the plus side, it describes part of an important hinge point in the history of street harassment in the United States. During World War II, the U.S. military was instrumental in normalizing behaviors like catcalling and ogling as natural for white men. Military personnel, who worried about troops contracting sexually transmitted infections, warned servicemen to avoid sexual intercourse with women as much as possible. At the same time, higher-ups also feared servicemen turning inward and engaging in same-sex sex with other troops. With these dual fears in mind, military brass encouraged flirtation, ogling, even catcalling amongst servicemen, as a kind of non-physical way of letting off steam and satisfying sexual urges. All kinds of military propaganda and media—including the pamphlet featured on page 99—promoted humorous depictions of servicemen engaging in intrusive behaviors with women. The message: better to catcall and ogle a passing woman than engage in what the military perceived as risky sexual behaviors.

You might get some of this from the text on page 99, but not the whole story. And even this hinge point is just one small part of the over-100-year story I am telling in the book. Still, the Page 99 Test gives a glimpse into what to expect from the tone and methodology of Watching the Girls Go By, and I hope anyone flipping to page 99 will be curious to read more.

Visit Molly M. Brookfield's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew Warner Osborn's "Night Hawk"

Matthew Warner Osborn is associate professor of history at the University of Missouri – Kansas City. He is the author of Rum Maniacs: Alcoholic Insanity in the Early American Republic.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Night Hawk: A Nineteenth-Century Superhero and the Dawn of American Mass Culture, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Night Hawk: A Nineteenth-Century Superhero and the Dawn of American Mass Culture reproduces a print titled Philadelphia Taste Displayed, or Bon-Ton Below Stairs by James Aiken, circa 1830. The print is a color lithograph in which a group of drunk and sloppy white men gather around a table of oysters. To the left is a bar with large decanters of wine and a sign that reads, “City privilege, sell without a license.” The bibulous group are being waited on by two Black men: a waiter, who stands in the foreground with bare feet and a smiling bartender who surveys the scene. The clock is close to midnight. The white men are obviously drunk and dressed in ridiculously foppish clothes, except for one who is dressed in olive drab. He wears a broad, brimmed hat, and knickers, which were decidedly old fashioned in 1830. At the time, this man’s dress would have marked him as a caricature of a Quaker. Aiken was a popular engraver who produced works of political satire, and Philadelphia Taste Displayed was one of his most memorable prints.

Aiken’s lithograph is one of the most compelling pieces of historical evidence in Night Hawk, and thus I do believe it reveals the “quality of the whole.” That said, if this was the only page a reader saw, they would be quite confused, as there is no superhero in the picture nor anything that indicates “mass culture.” At the time I first encountered Aiken’s print, I did not recognize the Quaker, and it took me years to figure out that it was intended to memorialize “The Night-Hawk, No. 53,” which was his most famous column.

My book tells the never-before-told two-hundred-year-old story of a flying, sometimes invisible superhero, whose adventures appeared on the front page of the first radical socialist newspaper in American history. Between July 5, 1828, and July 3, 1830, the weekly Mechanics’ Free Press published sixty-one Night Hawk episodes. Each running around 1,000 words long, they describe the nocturnal adventures of a superhuman vigilante fighting for justice on city streets. The anonymously authored Night Hawk was the public champion of the nation’s first successful labor party.

Oyster cellars were one of the Night Hawk’s favorite haunts. In Philadelphia, African Americans had long held a monopoly on the business of selling oysters from carts on street corners. By the 1820s, Black entrepreneurs were able to rent out permanent locations, usually in basements. While enormously popular among white working-class residents, oyster cellars also caused controversy. Taverns had to pay a hefty fee to the city for the right to sell alcohol. Oyster cellars circumvented the law by increasing the price of the oysters and providing liquor for free. This outraged the city’s temperance society, which was largely bankrolled by Philadelphia’s wealthy business class. The pervasive and virulent racism of the time heightened temperance activists’ fears about these Black-owned businesses.

The Night Hawk became a hero to working men by calling out the hypocrisy of the city’s wealthiest residents, or “the fashionable,” as he called them. In No. 53, the Night Hawk revealed, in a long and comical soliloquy, that young Quakers could be commonly found in the city’s oyster cellars. In 1830, the wealthy Quaker Roberts Vaux was the president of the city’s temperance society. So, the Night Hawk was mocking him by revealing that his children could be found quaffing oysters and liquor in cellars run by Black men. Aiken’s print preserved this joke in the city’s memory. The print is direct evidence of the Night Hawk’s popularity in 1830 but also his enduring influence. This same scene shows up fifteen years later in George Lippard’s novel Quaker City, or the Monks of Monk Hall (1845), which quickly became the biggest best seller yet published in the United States. The novel opens in an oyster cellar, and Lippard references Aiken’s print in two passages. So, this image is also compelling evidence that one of the most influential American novels of the nineteenth century took important inspiration from the radical socialist Night Hawk.

Learn more about Night Hawk at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Philippe Huneman's "Profiling"

Philippe Huneman is Director of Research at the Institut d'Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques (CNRS/Paris I Pantheon Sorbonne), and the author, most recently of Why: The Philosophy Behind the Question (2023).

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Profiling: How Predictive Algorithms Shape Identity and the Social Fabric, with the following results:

Page 99 of Profiling: How Predictive Algorithms Shape Identity and the Social Fabric describes how, during the Covid-19 pandemic, the French government used a technique called "nudge" to influence the overall behavior of the population, deterring people from going outside so that the circulation of the virus could be slowed down, and the curve of new cases flattened. "Nudge" means: slightly reorienting the behavior or beliefs of someone, not by constraining her, nor by incentivizing her financially, nor by trying to convince her with an argument, but by redesigning her environment in order to increase the probability that she will take the expected decision. It is a strategy theorized by economists and legal scholars, designed to make supposedly irrational people, in a market or a society, behave more rationally without constraining them (we are in democracies) or convincing them (which is of no use, since they are irrational). A nudge functions by redesigning the so-called architecture of choices, so that the "best" choice becomes more likely to be taken. Unlike in classical paternalism, "best" here is supposedly best for the individual herself, either directly (not getting ill, not losing money, etc.) or indirectly, through her participation in shaping a better environment. The theory of nudge belongs to what economists call "soft paternalism," since the nudging authority does not intend to impose on citizens an absolute idea of what is good: nudges are supposedly meant to turn people toward their own long- term desires, which they risk forgetting by making short-termist choices. Yet, like any paternalism, this theory assumes that the subjects cannot, by themselves, do what is good for them.

In the context of Covid-19, the nudge described on page 99 was the obligation to fill out a form called the "self-attestation" before leaving home, on which one indicated the reason for going out - walking a pet, helping an elderly relative, etc. - and its timing (staying outside for more than one hour was forbidden). Going outside when it wasn't mandatory therefore became more costly at every level: one needed to spend time filling out a tedious form, and failing to do so would cost €150 if a police officer checked. This made the choice to "stay home" more likely overall, making the circulation of the virus more difficult, and the nudged subject more likely to remain healthy.

Thus, page 99 of Profiling does not pass the test, since it is a description of a particular nudge, illustrating what a nudge is as a technique of governing populations; it does not tell you what is in Profiling, since it functions more as an example of the concept of nudge - examined in Chapter 4 - than as an element or summary of the book's original argument. It does, however, offer another perspective on that general argument.

The book indeed begins with a description of profiles: sets of data points of various kinds related to a given individual (e.g., you), drawn from innumerable data of all types and formats (gathered by diverse and more or less public means), and allowing for detailed algorithmic predictions. Profiles thereby allow firms, governments, banks, insurance companies, and platforms like Amazon or Netflix to predict one's behavior, tastes, and votes, and therefore to offer tailored consumption of goods and services, movies or music, loans, etc. Profiling argues that, together with these profiles, and with a specific anthropology based on the notion of biases - often interpreted within the framework of a simplified evolutionary biology - nudges define a system that has major effects on individuals (their time, their affinities, etc.), on social structures, and on styles of government.

But one can also enter the analysis of this system by focusing first on nudges, and then on profiles and their algorithms. In fact, nudges thrive in digital environments, since a screen constitutes a fully controlled architecture of choice. With these nudges, profiling - the key concept of my book - takes on a second sense: it is not only about predicting behavior (think of the "profiler" in thrillers) but about shaping it. To profile someone here means to give her what is most likely to nudge her toward a targeted behavior, since her profile predicts - through correlation with other profiles—how she would react to exposure to specific content, especially Instagram or Facebook posts, YouTube videos, and so on. The subtitle of the book - How Predictive Algorithms Shape the Social Fabric - can thus be understood through a meditation on what favors and calls for nudging. In this sense, starting with page 99 constitutes a possible entry point into the system of profiles, which is the structure investigated in my book, Profiling.

Visit Philippe Huneman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue