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