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

James C. Nieh's "The Language of Bees"

James C. Nieh is a Professor in the Department of Ecology, Behavior, and Evolution and an Associate Dean in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. He is a Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society and a recipient of the Hambleton Award for his bee research and the Springer Nature Editor of Distinction Award.

Nieh applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Language of Bees, and shared the following:

Page 99 finds me trying to determine how the stingless bee Melipona panamica tells nestmates where to find food. One possibility was “piloting”: perhaps an experienced bee simply flies ahead and leads recruits to the food source. Unfortunately, these bees shoot out of the nest remarkably quickly, making them extremely difficult to follow. We tried large white backgrounds, fluorescent powders, and even an elaborate arrangement of fishing lines and bee-like objects designed to misdirect departing recruits. None worked. The page ends as we turn to a different experiment: separating recruiters from recruits to test whether recruits can still obtain information about distance and direction.

For The Language of Bees, the Page 99 Test works surprisingly well. A reader opening the book to this page would get a good sense of both what the book is about and how I tell the story.

The book is about how bees communicate, but it is equally about how scientists discover what their signals mean. Page 99 captures that process well: there is a biological mystery, a plausible hypothesis, several failed attempts to test it, and then a new experiment prompted by those failures. That pattern recurs throughout the book. Science rarely proceeds neatly from question to answer, and some of the most interesting discoveries arise when an apparently sensible approach does not work. It can be heartbreaking, especially in the tropical heat, but sometimes the sweat is worth it.

It is also appropriate that page 99 features a stingless bee rather than the familiar honey bee waggle dance. One of the book’s central themes (despite its title, and this is deliberately provocative) is that there is no single “language of bees”. Different species have evolved remarkably different ways of sharing information, shaped by their ecology and social lives.

So page 99 is not a summary of the whole book, but it is a good shortcut to its spirit: follow the bees, test the idea, and when an approach fails, try another way of asking the question.

Learn more about The Language of Bees at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

W. Jason Miller's "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood"

W. Jason Miller is a Distinguished Professor and public scholar who acts as a cultural detective, unearthing the hidden connections that reshape American history. From discovering a lost recording of MLK’s first "I Have a Dream" speech to his latest revelation of the secret mentorship between Langston Hughes and Nina Simone, Miller bridges the gap between rigorous archival research and compelling public narrative.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood: Nina Simone, Langston Hughes, and the Birth of Black Power, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood: Nina Simone, Langston Hughes, and the Birth of Black Power reads:

But before he left Lagos, Nigeria, just in case he had wondered how it truly felt to be a father of the bride, Hughes found himself trying to check out of room #203 of the Federal Palace Hotel owing more than five hundred dollars. The sum, accrued from various charges not covered by AMSAC, forced him to wire home and wait through an excruciating series of telegrams and transfers.

Readers opening to page 99 of the book, the last paragraph of chapter 6, would get an innate sense of the podcast-style storytelling and detail captured throughout the book. Flipping to this page, a reader would be intrigued to wonder exactly how Langston Hughes used a 1961 lunch invitation at John F. Kenedy’s White House to secure singer Nina Simone a honeymoon sponsored by the CIA.

December 1961 featured a series of American musicians traveling (all expenses paid by the CIA) to perform in Nigeria to unknowingly promote American capitalism at the height of the Cold War. I listened to several podcasts to shape the opening hook, storyline, and suspense of this entire chapter. The seven years of research anchoring the book comes through in the details of naming the exact hotel rooms used by Hughes and Simone. Flipping back just one page reveals why Nina could not stay even longer (as she wanted) on her first overseas trip. On New Year’s Eve of 1961, “The Amazing Nina Simone” played Carnegie Hall for the first time as an “added attraction,” joining fellow North Carolinians John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk as concert headliners.

Visit W. Jason Miller's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jen Thompson's "Wild Pivot"

Jen Thompson is a former political campaign manager and counsel in the US House and Senate. She successfully made up for a massive campaign deficit by orchestrating events with the President of the United States and other key figures. She has been quoted in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, and others. Thompson left politics after managing the most nationally watched Senate campaign in 2002 and moved to Australia. Born in Chicago, Thompson has lived in twelve cities, seven states, and three countries, and has traveled to many more. She currently lives in Redlands, California.

Thompson applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Wild Pivot: Notes from a Political Life Rewritten, with the following results:

From page 99:

It was Sunday morning, and the street was totally silent. I stood on the front stoop for a few moments to get my bearings, and as I began walking, I remembered the old saying about how discovering God’s meaning is like chasing a wild boar in the forest. Even if you search for many days on end, you might never catch the boar; you might not even catch a glimpse of him. But there is absolutely no chance of catching the boar if you don’t even attempt the chase.

I had never heard of the Page 99 Test before, but then I turned to page 99 of my memoir, Wild Pivot: Notes from a Political Life Rewritten. How brilliant of author Ford Madox Ford to come up the idea that the quality of the whole will be revealed to you by turning to page 99. Wow! That is an absolute truth about page 99 of my memoir.

Chasing the Boar is an old proverb that I use throughout my book. It appears in the third vignette, several chapters are entitled Chasing the Boar, and it is the very last sentence of my memoir. It is also front and center on page 99!

I say often that Wild Pivot is a book that’s all about politics that has absolutely nothing to do with politics. Yes, the thread of the book is the nationally watched, very intense Senate campaign that I ran years ago, but really, Wild Pivot is about having the courage to listen to our inner calling and transform ourselves into the most real, truest versions of who we are. “Chasing the Boar” is how I’ve described that process.

After I almost died in a fiery car crash on the campaign trail, I had a moment of clarity that changed my life, and I started to listen – finally, after decades of shutting my inside voice down – to what my insides were trying to tell me. I discovered that everything I’d given myself to promoting (achieving power, money and fame at any cost to boost my own ego) was fundamentally misaligned with the person I am at my core. This process of discernment took me years. It was messy, painful, and confusing. I mean, really: Who gives up all the things I did in a search for inner truth? Nobody! It’s so difficult to admit that the job, or the marriage, or our lives don’t fit who we are. But I believe we all have that inner voice, and mine told me to keep chasing the boar.

Wild Pivot travels back and forth in time through vignettes between my past and present with painful lessons described in raw, jarring detail. But it is also funny, because I believe that laughing at myself is a very powerful medicine. In the end, Wild Pivot is meant to be a memoir of hope. The rewards of authenticity are immeasurable.

I’m still chasing the boar!

Visit Jen Thompson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lara M. Brown's "Thomas Jefferson’s Landmark Deal"

Lara M. Brown currently serves as a senior policy advisor to the Center on Civility and Democracy at The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute. Previously, she held academic posts at the George Washington University and Villanova University. Among her scholarly publications, she is the author of Amateur Hour: Presidential Character and the Question of Leadership.

Brown applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Jefferson's Landmark Deal: The Politics of the Louisiana Purchase, and shared the following:

If you were to solely examine page 99 of Thomas Jefferson’s Landmark Deal, you’d find a lot of information about the entire book. The reason for this is because page 99 falls within the book’s conclusion and happens to be centered around the character of Jefferson’s political leadership. This page number coincidence is because this book is part of a University of Kansas Press series of short—under 50,000 words—texts on landmark presidential decisions.

Starting at the top, I discuss and quote a few renown scholars—Susan Dunn, Doris Graber, Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter Onuf, who summarized Jefferson’s aspirations for expanded liberty in an expansive republic, while noting his contradictory impulse to act as the public's trustee and the nation’s patriarch. Jefferson believed he knew what was best to restore the revolutionary values of 1776, and to chart a course for America’s future. Although often pleasantly solicitous, Jefferson didn't really think he needed to ask anyone much of anything. Consequently, when it came to the diplomatic maneuverings and convoluted negotiations that eventually manifested in the Louisiana Purchase Treaty, Jefferson was neither transparent nor democratic. Adapting his tactics to political circumstances, he tended towards secrecy and duplicity in his dealings with his fellow partisans, the public, and Congress. All told, Jefferson cared more about his preferred policy ends than his specific political means. In this instance, his ends included Americans controlling the port of New Orleans, possessing navigation rights on the Mississippi River, and resetting relations and reviving trade with France.

But as the book shows, and is also discussed on page 99, there was nothing novel about Jefferson’s foreign policy leadership during his presidency. He was who he had always been. As I explained, “character is the constant that infuses all aspects of presidential leadership,” and Jefferson had always been more focused on realizing his political ideals than remaining consistent in his personal actions. His temperamental inclination to avoid direct conflict often led him to surreptitiously pursue his aims. In a longer discussion of the book, I remarked that Jefferson was a “politician who was more apt to stab you in the back than shoot you in the face.” It was precisely these tendencies that helped make Jefferson well-suited to patiently pursue a diplomatic deal with Napoleon Bonaparte.

While there is certainly a lot more in this compact volume, page 99 gets to the heart of the book’s argument about the character of Jefferson’s political leadership.

Visit Lara M. Brown's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alex Edmans's "The Madness of Markets"

Alex Edmans is Professor of Finance at London Business School and a widely recognized global expert on behavioral finance, responsible business, and misinformation. He has spoken at Davos, testified in the UK House of Commons, and reached millions through his TED talks and contributions to the BBC, CNBC, and The Guardian. He is the author of May Contain Lies, which received huge acclaim from the Times, The Guardian, Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times. His first book, Grow the Pie, was a Financial Times Book of the Year.

Edmans applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Madness of Markets: Why Smart Investors Make Crazy Decisions–and How to Exploit Them, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Madness of Markets: Why Smart Investors Make Crazy Decisions – And How To Exploit Them is about herd behavior in investing. It says:

But blindly copying someone else’s trades is too naive a strategy. What really matters is access to information. The skill lies in taking other people’s insights, mixing them with your own research, and then deciding whether to act. Veronika Pool, Noah Stoffman and Scott Yonker studied how fund manager networks affect how they select their stocks. They found that, when investors happen to live in the same neighbourhood – literally just down the street – their portfolios overlap more than if they only share the same city. Looking this closely rules out other explanations like city-wide newspapers or a conference coming to town. And when money managers become neighbours, the overlap only appears after the move, not before – so it’s not just similar preferences. Most importantly, the information they shared was useful. Trades linked to neighbourhood ties outperformed by 6-7% per year: what spreads from over-the-fence chats is signal, not smoke. Sometimes, the crowd really does have wisdom.

But fund managers don’t just talk shop with other fund managers. Their circles are wider. As we’ve seen, Facebook allows us to trace these broader networks. That earlier study [by Michael Bailey, Ruiqing Cao, Theresa Kuchler and Johannes Stroebel] measured friendships between individuals; a similar research team linked entire places. They built a “Social Connectedness Index”, which measures how strong Facebook friendship ties are between two areas.

The Page 99 Test works well for several reasons. First, the book is based on top-tier academic research that’s but highly relevant for practitioners. These papers are on whether following the crowd improves returns. Second, the book is nuanced. It’s easy to say that following others is mindless mimicry, but data isn’t always on the side of the snark. It depends on who you’re following and what. Page 98 describes a study which shows that fund managers who simply copy their peers’ trades underperform. However, Pool, Stoffman, and Yonker study connections with fund managers, rather than simply mimicking fund managers. If you discuss ideas with them, this might indeed be valuable – just like working on a group project at school helps you learn more than copying your classmate’s homework. The Facebook study investigates connections with friends, rather than professional fund managers, and page 100 explains how it doesn’t improve returns.

Page 99 is part of Chapter 4 of the book, “Monkey See, Monkey Buy: Viral Herding in Markets”. It discusses one of the newest and most exciting strands of research in finance – social forces – and one that is particularly relevant for the real world. In the past, interaction was confined to people you see at work or in the pub. Now, you can discuss stocks with Facebook friends you haven’t seen for years, or Redditors without even knowing their name or face.

Neither copying everyone blindly nor tuning everyone out is the way to go. Instead, you should distinguish signal from smoke, and decide whether you want to learn from the crowd, front-run it, or bet against it. The danger lies in drifting from one role to another without realizing it. Herding can ruin you – or it can rescue you. The key is knowing which footsteps are worth following.

Visit Alex Edmans's website.

The Page 99 Test: May Contain Lies.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jeremy Tirrell and Kate Maddalena's "Disgustatory!"

Jeremy Tirrell is associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. His articles and chapters have appeared in publications such as Technical Communication Quarterly, Enculturation, POROI, Kairos, American Journal of Entrepreneurship, and Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition.

Kate Maddalena is associate professor at the Institute of Communication, Culture, and Information Technology at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Her articles and chapters have appeared in publications such as Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Canadian Journal of Communication, International Journal of Communication, Theory, Culture & Society, and POROI.

Tha authors applied the "Page 99 Test" to their new book, Disgustatory!: A Gothic Rhetoric of Consumption, with the following results:

Page 99 of Disgustatory! describes a paradigm shift in microbiology that happened around 2015 and had implication for all of the life sciences, especially medicine. Basically, researchers declared that we should no longer consider individual organisms–the human body, for example–as individuals, at all. Rather, we should think of our bodies as holobionts, or “biomolecular networks” that include the microorganisms that live on and inside us. From this perspective, I am not an autonomous, singular creature. I am a large colony of microorganisms. Further, I am not easily distinguishable from my environment; the bacteria on the table in front of me that get on my fingers and into my mouth are constantly becoming part of me, and when I leave my biological traces on the table, I am becoming part of it. The very bottom of page 99 transitions to our consideration of this holobiontic paradigm via Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection.

At first glance, the Page 99 Test does not work very well for our book. A passing reader might think that the book is a history of microbiology, which it most definitely is not. But looking closer, it does exemplify a few things about the experience of reading Disgustatory! First, you’ll find out lots of things you didn’t know. The book is full of little mini-histories and facts that fascinate and intrigue. The fact that microbiology had a profound paradigm shift in 2015 is probably news to most people. Second, you’ll probably be able to relate to it–when you think about it, you might realize that you did notice that your own conversations about health had turned away from cleanliness and sterility to things like probiotics and maintaining a healthy microbiome during the last decade.

And finally, the turn to Kristeva’s concept of abjection at the bottom of the page is a sample of the larger lens of the book. We take theories of the Gothic (in this case, a sense of profound body horror) and map them onto the weird wellness discourses of our contemporary moment: restrictive diets, lab-grown meat, fecal transplants, kombucha cultures, meal replacement powders, intentionally ingested intestinal parasites, to name just a few. All of these things are compelling and strange aspects of “health” discourse that contribute to a confusing and frankly scary moment in the history of health.

Visit Jeremy Tirrell's website and Kate Maddalena's faculty webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Trevor Herbert's "The Brass Band Story"

Trevor Herbert is a former foundation scholar of the Royal College of Music. He was a trombone player (modern and period instruments) with various orchestras and ensembles, particularly the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Welsh National Opera, the Taverner Players and the Wallace Collection. He is Emeritus Professor of Music at the Open University where he developed a global reputation as an expert on the history and performance practices of brass instruments.

Herbert applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Brass Band Story, and shared the following:

‘Nothing separates the brass band more clearly from the rest of the musical world than the resilient centrality of contesting in its culture.’ These are the opening words of the new chapter that begins on page 99 of my book. I explain the Victorian origins of contesting and how it has been adopted in every country where the British model of the brass band is used. Contests occupy a marginal place in other forms of music making, so their pre-eminence in the world of the amateur brass band has prompted ridicule: to Charles Dickens they were ‘a musical prize fight’. The problem is easily understood. Listening to twenty or more bands, each playing the same piece in succession, is not an inviting prospect for everyone, and the idea that musical expression can be measured and scored to select ‘a winner’ is heavy with aesthetic contradictions. But that’s only how it’s seen from the outside.

An argument can be easily made to show that contests and brass bands were made for each other. They were introduced in the nineteenth century as mass entertainment for the working class. A standard instrumental format was introduced to encourage equivalence; this led to a bespoke repertoire and a unique musical idiom. Contests were and remain congregations of like-minds, and while local rivalries once drew vast audiences, a more subtle set of factors are at play in the modern era. They have become sites of pleasure that produce performances rich in musical nuance.

In my book I plot a much wider narrative about bands, their players and the lives they have led in music, how they weathered industrialisation and deindustrialisation, survived, modernised, internationalised and thrived over almost two centuries. This very British musical phenomenon has a fascinating and multi-faceted history. At every stage its momentum has been nourished by the heady excitement of the contest. Without it this very distinctive form of music making might prevail only as a memory: of a brief, temporary phase in Britain’s music history. For the full story read from page 99: remarkably it hits the exact spot – the epicentre.

Learn more about The Brass Band Story at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David B. Williams's "In the Range of Fire and Ice"

David B. Williams is an author, naturalist, and tour guide. He is the author 12 books, including the award-winning Homewaters: A Human and Natural History of Puget Sound plus Wild in Seattle: Stories at the Crossroads of People and Nature, Cairns: Messengers in Stone; Stories in Stone: Travels Through Urban Geology; and Waterway: The Story of Seattle’s Ship Canal and Locks, the latter two of which were finalists for the Washington State Book Award. Williams is a Curatorial Associate at the Burke Museum and writes a free weekly Substack newsletter, the Street Smart Naturalist. He lives in Seattle.

Williams applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, In the Range of Fire and Ice: A Human and Natural History of Washington’s Cascade, and reported the following:

Ninety-nine pages into in my new book about Washington’s Cascade mountains, In the Range of Fire and Ice, and I am still making connections between people and geology. The page comes in the middle of my chapter focusing on mining and quarrying, a story that stretches back more than 10,000 years to the earliest visitors to the Cascades. Those people who first found high quality rock in the mountains quarried material that they used to make exquisite tools, many of which have been unearthed in archaeological sites. The early visitors also traded the rock they quarried and those tools reveal the extensive trade networks across the region.

For mining, I focus on the one important mining town in the Cascades, Monte Cristo, where a lone miner first came across gold ore in 1889. His discovery led to John D. Rockefeller spending more than $2.5 million (about $850 million today) on developing the mines. This included building almost 60 miles of railroads, a massive ore concentrator, and a smelter. Because of the harsh weather, which restricted most activity to late summer and early fall, workers took six years to fully ramp up mining. Two years later, an epic rainstorm hit and wiped out much of the infrastructure. Monte Cristo never recovered and the population dropped from a peak of perhaps 2,000 to almost none.

Is page 99 a good illustration of the book? Yes. As illustrated in this section, each chapter, which focus on subjects such as glaciers, wolverines, mountain goats, fire, fish, and Mount St. Helens, weaves history, information from experts, and thoughts on how the mountains influence human history. Page 99 though lacks my time in the field and some of my personal perspective, which I hope draws people more into the stories of place. Ultimately, I hope this mix of science, history, and field time encourages people to head out into the mountains and find their own stories of this magical range of fire and ice.

Visit David B. Williams's website.

The Page 99 Test: Stories in Stone.

The Page 99 Test: Homewaters: A Human and Natural History of Puget Sound.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Sorkin's "The Emancipationists"

David Sorkin is the Lucy G. Moses Professor of Jewish History at Yale University. Sorkin has received multiple honors, including Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Whitney Humanities Center fellowships, as well as a National Jewish Book Award for Scholarship.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Emancipationists: Nineteenth-Century Jews' Campaign for Citizenship, with the following results:

The Page 99 Test does in fact work. Page 99 describes two editors of the French Jewish newspaper, the Archives Israélites (1840), Samuel and Isidore Cahen, who were father and son. Samuel founded the newspaper as an organ of French Jewish politics. He was an advocate of the economic and moral "regeneration," as well as religious reform, central to the emancipationists' effort to gain equal rights. He understood this agenda to be a form of “self-emancipation.” Isidore, editor from 1860, continued the campaign for self-emancipation but was more politically radical than his father, promoting general as well as specifically Jewish political issues e.g., "democratic liberties."

The father-son editors exemplified the transition in leadership across the nineteenth century. Samuel studied at a Yeshiva but in secular subjects was a self-educated "maskil" or Jewish enlightener. Isidore attended a prestigious lycée and then one of the most élite universities, the École Normale Supérieure.

The newspaper they created played multiple roles in promoting and defending the Jews’ rights: providing news and information that shaped an informed Jewish public as well as suggesting new activities and institutions to further their cause. For example, Isidore used the paper’s pages to suggest the establishment of a self-defense organization and was then one of the founders of the Alliance Israélite Universelle (1860).

Learn more about The Emancipationists at the Yale University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Jewish Emancipation.

--Marshal Zeringue

Carly Thomsen's "Reproductive Justice, Queerly"

Carly Thomsen is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing and the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Rice University. She is author of Visibility Interrupted: Rural Queer Life and the Politics of Unbecoming and coeditor of Feminist Studies: An Introductory Reader. She is also the proud creator of the world’s first reproductive justice mini golf course.

Thomsen applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Reproductive Justice, Queerly, and shared the following:

Page 99 of Reproductive Justice, Queerly plops readers squarely into my queer theoretical critique of Marxist feminism’s most well-known concept: social reproduction theory, or the labor of life-making, typically imagined as being done by women in their own homes. On page 99, I draw from the insights I developed in my first book Visibility Interrupted: Rural Queer Life and the Politics of Unbecoming to articulate the limits of Marxist feminists’ desires to make labor “visible.” Making domestic labor and work visible, I argue, will not on its own do anything to change how this labor is compensated, valued, or redistributed. Visibility is, in short, not ambitious enough.

But Reproductive Justice, Queerly is not only, or even primarily, about care labor. In fact, the broader topic of chapter three, where page 99 lands, is on paid parental leave and how so much of the conversation around parental leave that claims to be feminist or queer relies on and reproduces heteronormative ideas. One wouldn’t get a sense of my broader critiques of paid parental leave from reading page 99, where I’m deep in the weeds of social reproduction theory.

Page 99, then, not a good representation of chapter three.

It is also not a good representation of the book more broadly. Reproductive Justice, Queerly is, in many ways, about the shift away from discussing reproductive justice issues as women’s or feminist concerns and the centrality of discourses of “queerness” to that shift. As I trace this move across topics—from abortion to surrogacy to parental leave to parenting—I noticed three patterns in these conversations:

1.) They end up centering men, sometimes gay and sometimes trans, but still men
2.) They call up LGBTQ people as a way to index progressive politics
3.) They focus on discursive inclusion, rather than material change

Reproductive Justice, Queerly argues that we can do better. Often, when reproductive justice supporters invoke LGBTQ+ness, what they are advocating for is actually quite conservative. A slight variation on the status quo. In the case of parental leave, which I discuss in chapter 3, where page 99 lands, advocating for a shift in language use from maternity leave to parental leave and rooting that advocacy in the claim that maternity leave doesn’t capture the needs of gay men couples is not radical. This shift continues to assume that people who have children are necessarily partnered and that the only care labor we should be concerned about is in relation to children and the household. What would be far more radical: Advocating for social reproduction leaves through which anyone who is doing care labor for their community could get a paid leave from work to either invest in their community work or to recover from investing in that work. Reproductive Justice, Queerly demonstrates that there are queerer ways to do reproductive justice.

Visit Carly Thomsen's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Shelly Lundberg's "How Economics Discovered Women"

Shelly Lundberg is Distinguished Professor of Economics and Leonard Broom Professor of Demography at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is also a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association.

Lundberg applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, How Economics Discovered Women: Bringing Gender Economics into the Twenty-First Century, and reported the following:

The Page 99 Test gets only a partial pass. This book is a history and critique of how the growth of gender economics since the 1970s has been hampered by the persistence of simple conceptual models in the face of an explosion of empirical research that contradicts them. A reader of page 99 would be dropped into the middle of a discussion about preferences that is more formal than most of the book, but that illustrates the most important theme—that it’s time to revisit some of the foundational assumptions of economics.

Economic analysis focuses on how behavior responds to changes in constraints such as prices and regulations with the preferences of these actors simply taken as given and unchanging. To economists, people want what they want and getting what they want increases their wellbeing. This assumption makes our theories very simple and is foundational to our evaluations of social programs, but runs counter to extensive evidence that, in fact, preferences are molded by social forces and evolve in response to economic and political events.

This assumption has been debated in economics in the past, but without generating any substantive change. Page 99 occurs in the middle of a discussion of one past attempt to shift the discussion—Amartya Sen’s rejection of a traditional approach to assessing the wellbeing of women in societies in which their ambitions and independence have been stifled for generations—he argues that, since gender norms are adaptive and respond to cultural pressures, the fact that women acquiesce to these constraints do not imply that freeing them would not improve their wellbeing.

Page 99 begins with philosopher Martha Nussbaum placing Sen’s critique in the context of an older questioning of economics’ non-judgmental approach to preferences. What if preferences are based on misinformation? Are clearly irrational? What if someone’s preferences are downright wicked? This discussion needs to be revisited, since,

…many models of domestic violence in economics attribute this phenomenon to, at least in part, the preferences for violence of the perpetrator. If we treat all preferences “on a par” for purposes of welfare analysis, then we are forced into the uncomfortable position of concluding that efficiency requires a positive quantity of violence between some intimate partners. (p. 99)

This is abhorrent, and recent work on domestic violence has been relentlessly atheoretical in response, but we can’t tiptoe around the problem forever—the contradictions between facts on the ground about the role of gender in economic behavior and our models need to be faced.

Visit Shelly Lundberg's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Chandra Shekhar's "The Logic of Corruption"

Chandra Shekhar is an Assistant Professor at the University of Oklahoma. Before going to OU in August 2024, he completed his PhD in Public Policy and Environmental Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2022, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

Shekhar applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Logic of Corruption: Why it Persists and Why Reforms Fail, with the following results:

From page 99:

The survey specifically assessed whether the observed district-level patterns—corruption in intra-district transfers, petty corruption in the marketplace, and the linkages between them—are features of the district-level bureaucracy as a whole.

According to the survey, 79.2 percent (95 percent CI: 68.3 to 90.1 percent) of the street-level bureaucrats affirmed that grand corruption remains widely prevalent in intra-district transfers and agreed that it would be difficult to obtain an important assignment without resorting to such corruption. “Important” assignments referred to certain police stations that differed in their geographic locations and earning potentials, or distinct police categories within a district (for example, the civil police, who are the primary enforcers of the law in the district, versus the reserved police of the district, who are called upon only in situations of emergency). Further, 70.5 percent (95 percent CI: 59.1 to 81.9 percent) admitted having used either bribery or political influence or both at least once in their careers to secure their preferred assignment choice. The choice in this response referred to a district, a specialized unit, or a place within a district, hinting at the ubiquity of corruption in assignment allocations of street-level bureaucrats. A large percentage of officials (82.1 percent) (95 percent CI: 71.4 to 92.8 percent) reported that petty corruption like street-level bureaucrats taking bribes from street vendors in the marketplaces is not a district-specific phenomenon; similar practices occur in other districts as well, indicating the bureaucracy- wide presence of these petty corruption markets.

A total of 80.2 percent (95 percent CI: 69.4 to 91.0 percent) of the officials in the survey also believed that the market for corruption in transfers at all levels in the hierarchy remains the principal locus around which corruption is organized. This view reinforced the findings of the internal survey conducted by the Indian government (Figure 2.3), which showed that senior civil servants believed that a majority of their colleagues resorted to unethical means to obtain preferred assignments. It also echoed the views expressed by street-level bureaucrats during the first phase of the interviews, particularly regarding (a) the corrupt and unfair practices in the appointment of senior officials and not just street-level positions, and (b) an artificial sense of legitimacy based on the purchasing of office among street officials to extract rent in implementation. Finally, 77.3 percent (CI: 66.2 to 88.3 percent) agreed that the occurrence of grand corruption in the transfer of street-level bureaucrats is independent of who holds political power…

It will not be inaccurate to term page 99 as the most important page in the whole book. Surprisingly, someone opening the book to page 99 will see what probably is its most important empirical result, including getting a good sense of what the whole project is all about. Of course, the core puzzle of the book is not stated verbatim on page 99, but it becomes quite clear to the reader through the description of the survey and its main results that the project is about the grand corruption of political and bureaucratic elites and petty corruption of street-level bureaucrats, and their linkages. By reading page 99 alone, the reader will learn that the book identifies corruption not as a uniform phenomenon, but categorizes the corruption of elites as grand corruption and the corruption of street-level bureaucrats as petty corruption. The reader also learns from this page that petty corruption at the grassroots and grand corruption, especially in the transfers and postings of both street- and senior-level bureaucrats, are widely prevalent, a key result that has been tested across India’s state police, environmental, and infrastructure bureaucracies.

The book examines why corruption exists and persists in government bureaucracies using an extensive seven-year-long fieldwork with three of India’s major state bureaucracies: the police, environmental, and infrastructure. The core puzzle derives from three realities. First, both grand and petty forms of corruption exist in India’s state bureaucracies. Second, grand and petty corruption are organized around the market for public office, especially the transfers and postings of street-level bureaucrats by political and bureaucratic elites. Finally, grand corruption causes petty corruption to exceed it beyond the level explained by standard principal-agent relationships inherent in large, complex bureaucracies. Street-level bureaucrats have strong preferences over assignments, which they categorize into choicest and punishment postings. Political and bureaucratic elites allocate choicest street-level offices in exchange for bribery and political influence, a mechanism I conceptualize as “the market for public office.” (This term was coined by Robert Wade in 1980s.) After participating in the market for public office, street-level bureaucrats view it as legitimate to extract rent and accommodate elites’ informal expectations in the implementation, explaining the existence of high levels of petty corruption. To maintain their choicest assignments, street-level bureaucrats also regularly share a portion of the rent with their superiors, which accounts for the persistence of high levels of this corruption.

Learn more about The Logic of Corruption at the Cambridge University Press website. Visit Chandra Shekhar's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

William I. Hitchcock's "A Shadow Over the World"

William I. Hitchcock is a New York Times bestselling author and award-winning teacher who has published numerous books relating to World War II and the Cold War, including The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and a winner of the George Louis Beer Prize from the American Historical Association. He is also the author of The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s. He received his BA degree from Kenyon College and his PhD from Yale University. He has been a Fulbright scholar, a fellow of the Nobel Institute in Oslo, the holder of the Henry Kissinger Chair at the Library of Congress, and a Berlin Prize fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. He is now the William W. Corcoran Professor of History at the University of Virginia.

Hitchcock applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, A Shadow Over the World: Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Rise of Fascism, and the Making of America's World War II, and shared the following:

On page 99 of A Shadow Over the World, readers find columnist Walter Lippmann describing Franklin Roosevelt as “a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications, would very much like to be president.” In was January 1932; FDR had just announced his intention to run for president; and the critics were ready to pounce.

The reason this works so well in setting up the book’s central story is that Lippmann reminds us that there was nothing inevitable about FDR becoming president. Even Democrats doubted his abilities, and many wanted Governor Al Smith, a seasoned party elder, to get the party’s nomination for president instead. FDR was rather unknown outside New York. He had been governor for four years and worked in Washington in the Navy Department under Woodrow Wilson. Beyond that, his resumé was thin, and he certainly knew very little about foreign affairs or the crisis of democracy then unfolding around the world.

So we sense, upon reading Lippmann’s dismissive remark, how much Roosevelt will have to change and grow before he emerges as the defender of democracy in the coming global struggle with fascism. And that’s the story the book tells: how he and the country gradually concluded that America’s fate was indeed tied up with the world’s. If democracy was to survive in the United States, it must be defended everywhere it faced attack from fascists, Nazis, militarists, and authoritarians. By 1940, FDR came to believe that the United States could not exist as “a lone island in a world dominated by a philosophy of force.” To secure America, democracy itself must be made secure in the world. That idea would carry the country into the war and into the postwar world.

Learn more about A Shadow Over the World at the Simon & Schuster website.

The Page 99 Test: The Age of Eisenhower.

--Marshal Zeringue

Duncan Pritchard's "Tempting Fate"

Duncan Pritchard is distinguished professor of philosophy and director of the Center for Knowledge, Technology, and Society at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Epistemic Luck; Epistemological Disjunctivism; Epistemic Angst: Radical Skepticism and the Groundlessness of Our Believing; and Scepticism: A Very Short Introduction.

Pritchard applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Tempting Fate: A Philosophical Guide to Risk, Luck, and a Meaningful Life, and reported the following:

If you opened page 99 of Tempting Fate, then you would be jumping into the heart of my discussion of the nature of achievements. I’m arguing that achievements require more than merely the conjunction of skill and success. I illustrate this point by describing an archer skillfully firing at a target but the arrow being intercepted mid-flight by a friendly dog who catches it and places it in its intended destination. That the skillful archer’s arrow ends up in the target would not count as his achievement. This is because for an achievement one’s success must be primarily attributable to one’s own skill rather than to other factors, like something else intervening. The dog may have achieved something, but the archer did not.

This discussion gives you a sense of one of the issues we explore in the book, which is how luck of a certain kind can undermine achievements, but it wouldn’t be particularly representative of its main themes. The overarching goal of Tempting Fate is to convince the reader that we need a completely new theory of risk. This is not just because the existing ways of thinking about risk are wrong, but because having the right theory of risk is crucial to making sense of how taking risks can confer value and meaning in our lives. Think about Alex Honnold and his free solo climb of El Capitan. The risk he took was monumental, but rather than diminishing his achievement it enhances it. We need the right theory of risk in order to explain how this is possible.

Thinking about Honnold’s climb helps to explain the connection between what’s on page 99 and the book as a whole. The risk-taking that leads to a flourishing life is aimed at significant achievements, which is why it’s so important to the book that we understand not only what achievements are but also how they relate to luck and risk. Honnold’s ascent of El Capitan is a great example of this. It’s a peerless achievement, but it also essentially involves a lot of risk and a fair amount of luck too. But as the book makes clear, the value of risky achievements isn’t just relevant to extreme endeavors like free-solo climbing. This is because all of us will at some point need to make fundamental life- decisions if we are to lead authentic, and thus flourishing, lives. Getting married, switching career, starting a family, moving to another part of the world—these are all decisions that are inherently risky. No matter how skillfully one makes them, there’s always the possibility of things going awry. That’s why we all must tempt fate, and thus embrace risk, at some point if we are to flourish.

Visit Duncan Pritchard's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Steven Casey's "The Sceptic Isle"

Steven Casey is Professor in International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of eleven multi-awarding-winning books, including Cautious Crusade: Franklin D. Roosevelt, American Public Opinion and Nazi Germany, 1941-45 (2001); Selling the Korean War: Propaganda, Politics, and the Press in the United States, 1950-1953 (2008); The War Beat, Europe: The American Media at War against Nazi Germany (2017); and The War Beat, Pacific: The American Media at War against Japan (2021). His articles appear in such outlets as Foreign Affairs, History Today, the Sydney Morning Herald, and The Spectator.

Casey applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Sceptic Isle: How the British Government Sold the Second World War, with the following results:

In Britain, World War II is remembered as the “People’s War.” Crucial to this image is the notion of the so-called “Blitz spirit,” when people in all parts of the country kept calm and carried on, despite the relentless nature of the nightly German bombing raids. Yet this was only one aspect of what had happened. As the propagandists knew only too well, beneath this surface unity there remained plenty of unrest, much of it directed at them whenever they sought to massage the war news.

While The Sceptic Isle covers Britain’s entire World War II experience, page 99 specifically addresses a key element of the argument as it relates to the Blitz.

By November 1940, the British public had come to dislike and distrust the complex blend of censorship and public relations on the nightly air attacks. On the one hand, the government had prohibited the press from publishing not just casualty figures, but also the names of towns outside London and Liverpool, as well as specific locations that had been hit. On the other, it had sought to “play up” the destruction of “places to which special sentiment attaches” or that enjoyed “outstanding ‘news value,’” such as schools, churches, and hospitals.

The first two months of the Blitz had already seen a rise in corrosive gossip, including the belief that London “casualties are really ten times bigger than what we are told.” Then came the disastrous German raid on Coventry on November 14. Here, the survivors, dazed after the first attack and scared of a repeat, engaged in a particularly vigorous bout of speculation, resulting in “strongly exaggerated rumours about casualties and damage which quickly spread to the surrounding countryside.” Yet still the government tried to clamp down hard, placing a cordon of soldiers ten miles around the city to stop anyone, including reporters, from entering the stricken city.

Small wonder that the British public were often sceptical about what they were told. Page 99 offers a perfect illustration of government censorship and propaganda and its most brazen.

Learn more about The Sceptic Isle at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: When Soldiers Fall.

The Page 99 Test: The War Beat, Europe.

The Page 99 Test: The War Beat, Pacific.

--Marshal Zeringue

Verena Hanna Meyer's "Theologies of Remembering"

Verena Hanna Meyer is Assistant Professor of Islam in South and Southeast Asia at Leiden University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Theologies of Remembering: Modernity, Ambiguity, and Transcendence in Islamic Indonesia, and shared the following:

From page 99:

[Without denying the historical] factuality of Dahlan’s long dwelling on Sūrat al-Māʿūn, Pak Syukrianto cited other historical data to contextualize Dahlan’s agenda and to put his focus on Sūrat al-Māʿūn into perspective.

It is significant that neither of the two men criticizing the contemporary status of Fikih al-Maun questioned the significance of Dahlan’s historical actions for the organization’s current norms. Neither is the normativity of Dahlan’s example ever called into question. On the contrary, according to Pak Munir and Pak Syukrianto, the problem was precisely that Muhammadiyah members did not know their history well enough. As Pak Munir criticized very explicitly, what other activists were doing was to project the present into the past. His critique articulates an insight familiar from social or collective memory studies as formulated by Maurice Halbwachs and his successors, that because memory is constituted by the frameworks and needs of present society, it has little to do with what actually happened. Pak Munir feared that Muhammadiyah members were doing a superficial exegesis of Dahlan’s life, simply accepting hearsay without inquiring into its reliability. Doing so leads to a collapse of the alterity of the past, leaving one with an unimaginative present and a subtly self-serving agenda. His insistence on proper historicity—utopian as this ideal may be—emphasizes that, for him, the organization’s focus on present and future does not erase the responsibility the living have to the past. This responsibility is to accept the past’s agency in subverting itself as it projects its mandate for change into the future, and to be mindful of the traces left behind as this past is erasing its own normative content. In this way, the crossed-out past can open possibilities for signification and the realization of true Islam.

Just like the authority of the Qur’an is not called into question among Islamic reformists (or really, most Muslims) on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, the same is true for Muhammadiyah’s understanding of the normative content of Dahlan’s life. At the same time, as is the case with the Qur’an, understandings of the message’s normative essence, separated from the historically contingent and applied to contemporary times, often widely diverge from one interpreter to the next. For some prominent voices in the organization, the historiographic and hermeneutic process needs to be improved, because a faulty understanding of Ahmad Dahlan’s life ultimately leads to decay and corruption. People like Pak Munir and Pak Syukrianto seek to provide corrections through debates that take the form of seminars, publications, or, in Pak Syukrianto’s case, films. The point of these debates is not so much to reach an authoritative conclusion, but—as [detailed in the previous chapter—to keep the conversation open, to challenge and dispute dominant views, and to revise insights based on increases in knowledge and changing times.]

Someone cracking open page 99 and reading it top to bottom may not immediately grasp the primary argument of the book. Nonetheless, page 99 is surprisingly illuminating in specific ways.

The page begins with an ethnographic example, the voices of Pak Munir and Pak Syukrianto, two long-time activists in Muhammadiyah, one of the two Indonesian Islamic mass organizations the book focuses on. While an ethnographic example is necessarily specific and only contributes a small piece to the broader puzzle the book discusses, it highlights a principal methodological commitment of the book: Centering local voices as experts on theological and historiographical questions.

But while small, the piece put in place by the two men’s theologizing is indispensable for the book’s broader argument. Both bemoan the fact that an uncritical and mythologized reading of the biography of Muhammadiyah’s founder Ahmad Dahlan has become widespread in their organization. Their concerns remind us of the problem that remembering the past, while compelling for its potential as a source of motivation and belonging, is also fraught within the forward-looking ideology adopted by Muhammadiyah, a self-consciously modernist organization. And this ambiguity about the relevance of the past in modernist Muhammadiyah is a central puzzle in the book.

Crucially, the book argues that this ambiguity is not an impasse or a symptom of the contradictions inherent in modernist movements. It is a theologically generative tension that we are more familiar with in traditionalist Islamic movements, where it often expresses the fundamental transcendence of and knowledge about God. Here, this tension organizes the theological meaning of the past: It gives rise to a kind of memory that allows the past to be normative, precisely because remembering itself, the process of retrieving the past, has to be accountable to the modern insights, including — in the case of Pak Munir and Pak Syukrianto — the epistemic norms of modern historiography. This kind of accountability to progress was already mandated by Ahmad Dahlan, who bequeathed to his successors the responsibility to constantly renew the movement. This responsibility, as we read on page 99, “is to accept the past’s agency in subverting itself as it projects its mandate for change into the future, and to be mindful of the traces left behind as this past is erasing its own normative content. In this way, the crossed-out past can open possibilities for signification and the realization of true Islam.”

Learn more about Theologies of Remembering at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Colin Farrelly's "Aging and the Ethics of Longevity Science"

Colin Farrelly is Sir Edward Peacock Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Studies (cross-appointed with Philosophy) at Queen's University in Ontario. He also runs the blog entitled “In Search of Enligthenment.“

Farrelly applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Aging and the Ethics of Longevity Science, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Aging and the Ethics of Longevity Science begins in mid-sentence, detailing how, in her novel Frankenstein, Mary Shelley portrays the potential perils of experimental science that transcends the boundaries between life and death. Shelley’s creature represents those perils, and he ends up killing everyone that Victor Frankenstein loves. The page then details how, like Shelley’s invocation of the creature, many philosophers invoke the potential harms of experimental gerontology by engaging in the creative use of their imagination. These harms are sometimes portrayed as perpetual boredom, or the harmful impact life extension would have on jobs or the damage to the environment. But, as page 99 later contends, what most philosophers ignore or marginalize are the potential benefits of translational gerontology, such as improving quality of life in late life. The page concludes by detailing how, given the “medialization” of the science profession- where celebrity scientists can reach large audiences of the public but often make claims that are not scientifically credible- the public can form a distorted understanding of the societal implications of the science of healthy aging.

Perhaps surprisingly, page 99 actually provides a succinct summation of the central argument in the book! Aging and the Ethics of Longevity Science is concerned, primarily, with the role of imagination both in experimental science and in bioethical debates and political imagination. The imagery of the creature in Frankenstein is mentioned with the opening words on page 99, which reads “…electricity, and body parts into science that transgressed the boundaries between life and death,…”. The cover of the book has the image of the shadow of the creature from Frankenstein off in the distance, standing on an iceberg (which represents aging). The image of the creature represents the imaginary harms the human mind can conjure up for research on the biology of aging. And the book’s central argumentation is that, while there are real potential harms that must be safely navigated to bring experimental gerontology from the bench to the clinic, a credible harm/benefit ethical analysis must consider the full range of potential benefits that would come from slowing the rate of biological aging. These include: (1) improving quality of life throughout the adult lifespan, but especially for people reaching older ages; (2) reaping significant economic benefits from healthy longevity, especially when accompanied by a reduction in (vs. expansion of) the healthspan– lifespan gap; (3) reducing some of the persistent health disparities that arise from variations in unequal environmental exposures; (4) increasing reproductive longevity and improved maternal health; (5) reducing the care burdens that typically fall (at least disproportionately) on daughters to care for their aging parents; and (6) Improving human, animal, and environmental health. While page 99 does not address the details of these six points, if does effectively frame a critical insight of the book – that the exercise of our imagination about the potential benefits and harms of experimental science can have a profound impact on how we approach the regulation of, and support for, this science.

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--Marshal Zeringue