Tom Parr's "Empowering Workers in an Age of Automation"

Tom Parr is a Reader in Political Theory in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick. He has held previous positions at the University of Essex, Graz University, Princeton University, and Universitat Pompeu Fabra. He is Editor-in-Chief of Law, Ethics and Philosophy.

Parr applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Empowering Workers in an Age of Automation: Social Justice, Technology, and the Future of Work, with the following results:

Page 99 of Empowering Workers in an Age of Automation introduces a moral objection to the structure of contemporary labour markets, which I call the illegitimacy objection. It is an objection to the fact that employers “typically exercise considerable discretionary authority over their staff,” illustrated by the harsh reality for many workers of having to “spend their days subserviently following the commands of their bosses, with little or no say over the nature or order of the tasks that they must carry out.” This objection does not target the specific ways in which such authority is exercised. It is more fundamental than this: it challenges the moral right of employers to tell their employees what to do in the first place, alleging that such workplace authority is illegitimate in much the same way that the political power exercised by undemocratic regimes is illegitimate.

Does page 99 reflect the book as a whole?

Browsers who read only page 99 will, I think, get a relatively accurate sense of what I try to achieve in this book, namely systematically to analyse various moral objections to the structure of contemporary labour markets. What is more, one of my guiding commitments is to present those ideas in the clearest terms, without obfuscation, so that we are better placed to assess their force and implications. In these respects, the text that appears on this page is representative of the broader project.

However, in one way, page 99 gives a misleading impression of the book as a whole, since the objection that I introduce is not one that I endorse. In the pages that follow, I distance myself from this outlook, which seems to overlook the way in which employers’ authority is limited by various laws. Instead, I have come to prefer an alternative approach to theorizing about these matters that focuses on the distribution of bargaining power between workers and firms. I set out that argument in Chapter 1, which is the philosophical heart of the book, and then explore the implications of that approach in the book’s second half.

Perhaps it is a stretch, but I can see one further respect in which this passage does indeed reflect the book as a whole. In particular, it introduces the reader to a novel idea that has become somewhat fashionable these days, at least among a certain category of philosophers, but one that I do not find persuasive because its foundations are too shaky. Conclusions of this kind are ones that recur throughout the entire text, which instead aims to show that more familiar moral objections to the structure of contemporary labour markets are more resilient than often assumed, and that these have more appealing implications than is generally recognized.

Visit Tom Parr's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Anthea Kraut's "Hollywood Dance-ins and the Reproduction of Bodies"

Anthea Kraut is Professor in the Department of Dance at UC Riverside, where she teaches courses in critical dance studies. Her research focuses on the racial and gender politics of U.S. dance. She is the author of Choreographing the Folk: The Dance Stagings of Zora Neale Hurston and Choreographing Copyright: Race, Gender, and Intellectual Property Rights in American Dance, as well as the past recipient of an ACLS fellowship, an NEH fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Kraut applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Hollywood Dance-ins and the Reproduction of Bodies, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Hollywood Dance-ins and the Reproduction of Bodies reads:

It’s February 2019, and I’m at the Jerome Robbins Division of the New York Public Library, paging through an entire folder of clippings and notes devoted to Marie Bryant. The folder is part of the research files of D’Lana Lockett, who, according to the archive catalog, “was a tap dancer, dance instructor, and dance researcher who began research on a book on African American female tap dancers.” Lockett, a Black woman, died in 2006 at age forty-four; these files are what remain of the book that she never got to write. Thanks to Lockett, Bryant’s presence in the archives here, in contrast to the USC film records, is substantive and purposeful. Learning about Lockett through Bryant, and learning about Bryant through Lockett, it is clear that Bryant was never a lost subject waiting to be recovered. It is clear, too, that my own output, like that of the white women stars I’ve been analyzing, exists in a symbiotic but asymmetrical relationship with the labor of a Black woman whose shortened life surely cannot be disentangled from structural racism and racialized health disparities. In tracing Bryant’s flight, I too re­trace the steps and stand in the place of a Black woman before me, and I too participate in a loop that is always in part indexing and in part obscuring its sources and debts.

Page 99 is, on the one hand, a departure from the bulk of Hollywood Dance-ins and, on the other, a kind of X-ray of the book as a whole. The last page of Chapter 2, the passage on page 99 forms a bookend to the opening of the chapter, which narrates my discovery of the African American dancer Marie Bryant’s mis-spelled name in the University of Southern California’s Cinematic Arts Library, which first alerted me to her thirteen-second appearance in the 1949 film On the Town. In contrast to page 99’s first-person narration, the majority of the book tells the stories of dance-ins – dancers who took the place of stars prior to filming and often served as choreographers’ assistants – whose labor supported some of the most iconic stars of midcentury film musicals in the United States between the 1940s and early 1960s.

At the same time, page 99’s single paragraph encapsulates multiple strands of the book’s methodological, historical, and theoretical arguments. The passage references the racialized power imbalances that govern the archives and evokes the methodological tensions involved in researching the off-screen reproductive labor of dancers, especially dancers of color in white Hollywood, whose influence was both everywhere and invisible. Page 99 also reflects the book’s centering of Bryant, an exceptionally talented jazz and tap dancer (pictured on the book’s cover) who was never officially hired as a dance-in, but whose importance to a history of mid-century Hollywood musicals is hard to overstate. And finally, in its allusions to interdependent but asymmetrical cross-racial relationships and to the ability of bodies to simultaneously index and conceal their debts to others, page 99 hints at the book’s theorization of dance-ins as uniquely situated to expose the reproductions, substitutions, and displacements that have helped uphold “the body” as a racialized and gendered site of power in the U.S.

Learn more about Hollywood Dance-ins and the Reproduction of Bodies at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andreas Elpidorou's "The Anatomy of Boredom"

Andreas Elpidorou is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Louisville. His work focuses on the philosophical study of human emotions, with a particular emphasis on boredom. He has published extensively on the subject and developed a novel theoretical model of boredom that sheds light on its complicated nature and diverse psychological, behavioral, and social effects. In his written work, he explores the function, value, and dangers of boredom and strives to offer clear, precise, and critical explications of aspects of our mental lives that often remain hidden from us. He is the author of Propelled: How Boredom, Frustration, and Anticipation Lead Us to the Good Life (2020) and numerous other publications.

Elpidorou applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Anatomy of Boredom, and shared the following:

If a reader were to open The Anatomy of Boredom to page 99, they would be cognitively disoriented—perhaps even lost. Isolated from its context, page 99 offers little insight into either the book’s objectives or its subject matter. The page appears in section 2 of Chapter 3, which belongs in Part I of the book. In this part, the book makes a sustained case—one that unfolds in three chapters—that boredom is, in some crucial sense, a unitary phenomenon. What boredom is, the book argues, is its function: the role that it occupies in our mental, behavioral, and social economy; that is, the ways in which it affects our minds and bodies and drives our actions and opinions. There are many things we have called, and continue to call, “boredom.” As long as they share the same functional core, they count as boredom—even if their psychological, physical, or social expressions differ.

Page 99 is concerned with one of many arguments advanced in this part of the book. It addresses a worry that has been raised by recent psychological studies. Psychologists have observed that the experience of boredom is often associated with different bodily states and levels of arousal. Does this suggest that there are distinct kinds of boredom—perhaps a low-arousal, apathetic type and a high-arousal, agitated type? This section argues that there is no need to divide boredom into distinct affective states on the basis of their associated arousal. Differences in arousal reflect physiological or contextual contingencies, not conceptual or essential distinctions. Boredom’s identity is linked not to its effects on our bodies but to its functional role in our cognitive and behavioral economy. As such, there is unity in boredom despite variation in its somatic expression.

I am not sure there’s a perfect page—one that, if opened at random, would provide not just a concise summary of the main arguments of the book but also a clear view of its methodological commitments. But even if such a page does exist, it isn’t page 99. What page 99 does well is to attune the reader to the level of conceptual and empirical detail that is necessary in order to engage with a phenomenon as complicated and elusive as boredom. This value, however, comes with a cost. The page dwells in the particulars but fails to reveal the bigger picture—page 99 is just one very small part of the fascinating complexities that constitute boredom. It isn’t even a tree, but a bush—perhaps a single flower—in the forest of boredom.

Visit Andreas Elpidorou's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bruno J. Strasser and Thomas Schlich's "The Mask"

Bruno J. Strasser is a historian, a full professor at the University of Geneva, and an affiliate of History of Medicine at Yale University. Thomas Schlich is the James McGill Professor in the History of Medicine at McGill University, and a former practicing physician.

They applied the "Page 99 Test" to their new book, The Mask: A History of Breathing Bad Air, with the following results:

Page 99 reflects quite well the tone and content of the book!

This chapter—“Fog, Fumes, and Fashion”—explores the use of masks against urban pollution in the 19th and 20th centuries. In the late 19th century, such masks became popular in large British cities like London, Manchester, and Leeds. People sought to avoid breathing the mix of coal fumes, industrial vapors, and cold, damp air that made up the winter “fogs.”

Page 99 examines how French physicians reacted to what they thought was the British craze for masks. They were unanimous in condemning the practice. They found it “ridiculous”—and the fact that it was British didn’t help. Some feared that one day “entire families might be seen masked in the streets.” Masks, they thought, were useless, a symbol of the excesses of the hygienic movement. One physician even warned that if masks ever became mandatory, it would mean “the end of the kiss.”

The chapter then shifts to the Great Smog of London in 1952, during which over ten thousand people died from air pollution. Once again, many people—especially the police—wore masks. Churchill’s health minister, a chain smoker himself, didn’t believe masks could protect citizens from the smog. But facing mounting public anger, he gave in and recommended their use to save his political career.

Page 99, like the rest of the book, shows that masks have always been controversial. Masks were often seen as a convenient “technological fix” for complex medical and environmental challenges, but not everybody agreed on this kind of quick fix. In the book, we tell these stories to help us think about what kinds of environments we all want to live and breathe in.

Visit Bruno Strasser's website and Thomas Schlich's faculty webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Moritz Föllmer's "The Quest for Individual Freedom"

Moritz Föllmer is Associate Professor of Modern History at the University of Amsterdam. He has particular interests in Weimar and Nazi Germany, and concepts of individuality and urbanity in twentieth-century Europe. His publications include Individuality and Modernity in Berlin: Self and Society from Weimar to the Wall (2013), Culture in the Third Reich (2020), and, as co-editor, Reshaping Capitalism in Weimar and Nazi Germany (2022).

Föllmer applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Quest for Individual Freedom: A Twentieth-Century European History, and reported the following:

On page 99 of my book I characterize a “major development in Europe’s political history,” namely, “the dual adoption and expansion of liberalism by social democrats.” By this I mean that important protagonists of European social democracy, from the 1900s to the 1970s, argued that an active state was necessary to liberate working-class people from the dependencies created by capitalism and authoritarianism. In their view, widening educational access and housing provision amounted to widening choices. Hence, these social democrats adopted key tenets of liberal thought. They did so in a way that took working-class realities into account while also appealing to progressive members of the middle class. What I label “social democratic liberty” was a remarkably successful project, but it was also vulnerable to attacks. After all, it required taxation and standardization, which made it easy to accuse it of reducing choices and stifling citizens. While this critique spanned the entire twentieth century, in the 1970s it was shared by left-wing protesters, cultural conservatives, and market liberals. By the end of the Cold War, the project of social democratic liberty seemed exhausted.

Page 99 summarizes one of fifteen sections and thus one of a range of specific arguments. Yet it reflects my book’s broader thesis. Europe’s twentieth century was marked by a quest for individual freedom that assumed different shapes and meanings. In their nineteenth-century heyday, liberals might have been able to define individual freedom and impose their definition on others. But they lost this authority in the decades around 1900, and no new consensus formed thereafter. The quest for individual freedom was composed of a variety of claims and occurred in fits and starts. Still, it became so widespread that it even those who were skeptical about individual freedom (as were many socialists) or outright contemptuous of it (as were most communists) had to accommodate it to some extent.

That said, the impression conveyed on page 99 is necessarily one-sided. It privileges political history, whereas my book gives ample space to the quest for individual freedom as it played out in factories and homes, in experiments with drugs as well as discussions of morality. It also focuses on Europe proper, whereas I devote an entire chapter to how individual freedom was defined in relation to the United States and to colonies in Africa and Asia. And it happens to be the conclusion of a chapter and is thus more systematic than the bulk of the book, which pays much attention to ordinary or not-so-ordinary people’s experiences and efforts – including the working-class people who changed jobs to escape the control of a powerful factory owner or made use of what Sweden’s social democratic government had to offer while also insisting on their own choices.

Ultimately, my book is a twentieth-century European history – of the quest for individual freedom but also, even more ambitiously, through this crucial prism. It treats a variety of political currents and systems and offers many glimpses into European lives under often adverse conditions. It is this richness that motivated me to write the book and that I hope to convey to its readers.

Learn more about The Quest for Individual Freedom at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Rooney's "The Big Hop"

David Rooney is a historian and curator specializing in transport, technology, and engineering, and the author of About Time and The Big Hop: The First Non-stop Flight Across the Atlantic Ocean and Into the Future. For almost twenty years he worked at the London Science Museum, which houses the 1919 airplane first flown across the Atlantic. He lives in London.

Rooney applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Big Hop and shared the following:

It is Sunday, March 30th, 1919. We join page 99 of The Big Hop just as an aeroplane, carried aboard the Atlantic steamship Digby, has just arrived at the railway station of St. John’s, Newfoundland, after being diverted by an impenetrable pack of ice off the island’s Avalon peninsula that’s so bad nobody has seen the like in decades:

…encountered on the Newfoundland route. But this was the worst the coast had experienced for sixty years. Nothing could get through. The Sopwith aeroplane had been packed into two large wooden crates, each the size and shape of a railway carriage. They were thirty feet long and weighed over five tons apiece. Between them, they held the fuselage, wings, engine, undercarriage, and fittings. Several smaller cases stored in the ship’s hold carried parts, tools, petrol, engine oil, and other provisions. It should have been a relatively straightforward offloading job onto the dockside at St. John’s. Instead, Digby was forced by the ice field to divert to Placentia Bay, off the peninsula’s western coast. There, in the middle of the bay, it drew up alongside the postal steamer Portia, and the entire Sopwith consignment, as well as the men themselves, were transferred from one ship to the other. Then Portia steamed up the bay to the town of Placentia, where its precious cargo of crates and passengers was delivered, leaving Digby to continue on its way. The next stage of the Sopwith saga was a sixty-mile rail journey across the peninsula. The two giant crates were loaded onto flat railcars, and…

The Page 99 Test works perfectly. The Big Hop recounts the story of one of the greatest journeys of the modern age—the first non-stop flight across the Atlantic. But it was a journey that started long before the aviators Jack Alcock and Ted Brown made it successfully across the ocean in an epoch-marking sixteen hours in the middle of June, 1919. Moreover, the contest involved a cast of characters far wider than Alcock and Brown. Sopwith was fielding a rival team: an Australian aviator, Harry Hawker, and his avuncular navigator, Mac Grieve.

This is why page 99 is such a great representation of the wider story. It describes, in its single paragraph, a journey that was remarkable in its own right: a perilous ship-to-ship transfer of men and a machine in the cold waters off Newfoundland. Will they reach their destination? It acts as the perfect prefiguring of the aerial journey ahead.

Page 99 also shows us just how long ago the first transatlantic flight took place. On the previous page, we meet a young man named Joey Smallwood, who is waiting at St. John’s station to meet the aeroplane and its airmen off the train. In 1949, Smallwood would become the premier of Newfoundland when the dominion joined the Canadian federation. In 1919, he was an eighteen-year-old cub reporter on the island’s Evening Telegram newspaper. None of the other journalists seemed to care that St. John’s was to become the location of the world’s most thrilling race. One of them reported the passengers due off Digby that day. After naming a few notable St. John’s politicians who had been on the ship, the writer added, “and a couple of airmen to fly across the Atlantic.” As if it was no big deal.

Would the Sopwith team arriving at Newfoundland succeed in flying all the way to Ireland? Or would they be beaten by rival contestants? On page 99 of The Big Hop, all this is yet to come; an unknowable future. Suffice to say—the ice field off St. John’s would prove to be the least of the airmen’s troubles…

Visit David Rooney's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elizabeth Shakman Hurd's "Heaven Has a Wall"

Elizabeth Shakman Hurd is Professor and Chair of Religious Studies and Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Heaven Has a Wall: Religion, Borders, and the Global United States, with the following results:

From page 99:

…the normative order is the sovereign state system and the drive to transcend it the gravitational pull of American sovereign exceptionalism. AmericaIsrael pulls the US toward the latter. It embodies the productive interplay between sovereign territoriality and an American aspiration to collective transcendence of the international order. Performing AmericaIsrael is an exercise in refiguring sovereignty and aspirational borderlessness. This can be seen in the 1985 US-Israel Free Trade Agreement (FTA), the first free trade agreementof its kind. World Trade Organization rules allow FTAs only if they are regional; therefore, the US and Israel have maintained since 1985 that they are a legal “region” together. No party has challenged this claim in WTO courts, and so it stands.

AmericaIsrael is part of a larger mission to realize an American—and would-be universal—political morality. It is not the only example; AmericaUkraine is another. Overwriting sovereign norms of territoriality, and enacting an exception that is also the rule, AmericaIsrael is an example of what Giorgio Agamben describes as “the legal form of what cannot have legal form.” It is an American political theology, in the sense described by Vincent Lloyd, as “a shorthand for religion and politics more generally, or where they overlap, that part of the Venn diagram where religion and politics are connected and that could be approached in a lot of different ways.

I’d say the Page 99 Test works. Heaven Has a Wall is about American borders, and page 99 deals with the US and its (lack of) borders with Israel. I use the term “AmericaIsrael” on this page to refer to a cultural, religious, and political consensus that unites the two countries almost as if they were one, tapping into jointly held fantasies of military prowess, Holy Land fascination, and a righteous overcoming of borders in the name of the right and the good.

The test is slightly misleading in that the book is not only or even mainly about Israel. It’s a broader argument that the US is best understood as a state that simultaneously enforces its borders while also circumventing and even ignoring them. There is something very American about the desire to do both: to enforce and suspend borders, to be first among equals, to make the rules but not be subject to them. The 9/11 commission report captured this with the phrase “the American homeland is the planet.” No limits. Yet borders are limits, liminal zones, places of extremes, exceptions, and special rules. You want to look over your shoulder after you cross. US borders are present and absent, avowed and deferred. Enforced and erased. Fortified and open. Borders are defended even while the ideal of America is borderless. This goes back to the Louisiana Purchase, the annexation of Texas, debates over annexing Cuba, and today, of course, Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal.

It can be tricky to study something that is both present and absent. If the American border isn’t just a line in the sand, what is it? Borders are political: they’re about regulation, control, checkpoints, violence. But they’re also religious sites of redemption, enchantment, salvation, commitment, emotion, and mystery. Each chapter of the book takes on a different aspect of borders: creating, enforcing, suspending, and refusing. These alternate with short interludes meant for a general audience: Where is Guantánamo? What happens if you openly disagree with a border agent at the airport? How does it feel to cross the border as a pilgrim participating in a pilgrimage older than the border itself? What happens if the river serves as a national border, but the river moves? I also want readers to consider their own border stories, and whether they fit into the book’s framework. Tell me your stories!

Visit Elizabeth Shakman Hurd's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jules Holroyd's "Oppressive Praise"

Jules Holroyd is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Sheffield, with research interests in social and political philosophy, feminist philosophy, and moral psychology. Prior to joining the department at Sheffield in 2016, they had positions at Cambridge, Cardiff, and Nottingham. They were a Mind Association Fellow 2022-2023.

Holroyd applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Oppressive Praise, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Oppressive Praise is at the heart of Chapter 3 of this book - this chapter sets out a view of what we do when we express praise: such expressions are vehicles for expressing our values. I articulate the mechanisms by which praise does this; and how the view of praise I develop can explain how (even well-intentioned) expressions of praise can embody and entrench oppressive values.

Page 99 wraps up one key part of my view - that praise has the function of signalling our values, by showing what we’re willing to celebrate and promote - the bravery or kindness that the target of the praise has expressed in their behaviour, say. Then page 99 embarks on the articulation of another key bit of the view: that praise expresses values not only in the things it explicitly celebrates and elevates, but in the evaluative frameworks that an expression of praise presupposes.

Here are two examples of this (to mention examples beyond page 99, that I return to, amongst others, throughout the book): someone might express praise towards a father for the childcare they are doing (my articulation of this case draws on an example from Serene Khader and Matt Lindauer’s work on the ‘daddy dividend’). In doing so, they signal - to the target, as well as to other audiences of the expression - that they value his parenting and perhaps more generally the idea of fathers getting involved in the care of their children. Or someone might express praise for someone’s bravery, signalling that they care about courage, and were able to detect when it was displayed.

But expressions of praise might presuppose wider evaluative frameworks and assumptions that audiences might infer, and take to be widely shared by audience members. For example, praising a father for doing basic parenting might presuppose the insulting belief that fathers are not good at parenting, and doing any of it is exceptional and praiseworthy. If part of a wider pattern where fathers are praised and mothers are not, expressions of praise may presuppose - irrespective of the intentions of the person praising - that mothers’ parenting is not noteworthy, to be taken for granted. Thereby gendered stereotypes about parenting and assumptions about whose labour is valuable can be conveyed by what those expressions of praise presuppose. Or praising a fat person for their bravery in choice of dress can presuppose the oppressive idea that they will be, or ought to be, ashamed of their body (as Aubrey Gordon has written about).

Does page 99 give a good idea of the whole work? In a way yes, because it gets to the core idea of the book, about the role that praise can play in signalling and presupposing values (sometimes good values, sometimes oppressive values). It articulates the mechanisms that make praise an important part of our moral interactions but one that can also be distorted by, and can perpetuate, oppression. On the other hand, I think it is pretty hard to get a sense of exactly what is going on just at page 99, since by then we’re already in the details of the conceptual apparatus that, I argue, are needed to make sense of how praise functions. It presents some fundamental ideas of the book, but for them to fully make sense and be understood in context, I think you need to read a fair bit of what leads up to page 99!

Overall, I think you’d get a better first sense of the book by reading the examples that come earlier on - first introduced at pages 18-23, 54-58, and recapitulated at pages 76-80. Those pages give you the examples of the phenomenon that motivates the whole book - sexist praise, ableist praise, racist praise, transphobic praise and anti-fat praise… Then, if you’re super interested in the mechanisms by which praise works to entrench oppression; the implications for thinking about our practices of holding responsible; the norms for expressing praise well; or strategies for resisting and responding to oppressive praise, including when expressed through honorific statues… then please do read on!

Learn more about Oppressive Praise at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Sanbonmatsu's "The Omnivore’s Deception"

John Sanbonmatsu, Professor of Philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, is author of The Omnivore's Deception: What We Get Wrong about Meat, Animals and Ourselves and of The Postmodern Prince: Critical Theory, Left Strategy, and the Making of a New Political Subject. He is also editor of the anthology, Critical Theory and Animal Liberation.

Sanbonmatsu received his BA from Hampshire College and earned his PhD in the History of Consciousness program at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He lives in the Boston area and has an adult son.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Omnivore's Deception and shared the following:

The reader who opens my book to page 99 will land in the middle of my critique of the celebrity animal farmer Joel Salatin, who was propelled to national fame by Michael Pollan in his bestselling book, The Omnivore's Dilemma (2006). The page begins with Thomas Jefferson's defense of simple American agrarianism against the corrupting influences of European sophistication and "luxury." Similar nationalist and conservative themes, I show, have now surfaced again in a "new" American pastoral ideal that has embraced the supposed "romance" of animal husbandry. The chapter this page appears in offers a critique of Pollan's hagiographic depiction of Salatin as a paradigm of rural virtues and American gumption, with a view to showing how this right-wing libertarian improbably became the doyen of Pollan's legions of well-heeled, urban, educated, liberal readers. As I explain on page 99, Salatin was for many years lionized in the mainstream and progressive press; then, five years ago, Mother Jones published a searing critique of Salatin, exposing his ugly views on race. Salatin, I write, "denied that 'America is systematically racist,' insisting instead that 'the failure in the Black community is dysfunctional family collapse.'"

Although page 99 is representative of my cultural critique of the "enlightened" omnivorism defended by Pollan, Salatin, and others, it is not representative of my book as a whole, because I cover a great many other themes too. My main argument is that we have effectively organized our entire existential identity as human beings around the domination of the other beings of the Earth; that this domination is undermining the ecology of our planet and ruining our souls; and that all exploitation and killing of animals for food--we kill about 80 billion land animals and up to 2.7 trillion marine animals each year--is morally indefensible and must stop. In the first half of the book, I trace the rise and lethal consequences of the modern animal economy, then demolish the myths and bad faith that prop up that system. None of our mass violence against animals, I show, is necessary or justifiable, since we can flourish easily on a plant-based diet. In the closing chapters of my book, I show that other animals have complex consciousness and emotions, and I make the case for treating them as persons or "someones," rather than as things, commodities, and slaves. Animals are not worthless beings--they are worthy of our love.

Visit John Sanbonmatsu's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jennifer Crane's "'Gifted Children' in Britain and the World"

Jennifer Crane is lecturer in health geographies at the School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, working at the intersection of history, geography, and sociologies of health. Before joining Bristol, she held teaching and research positions at the Universities of Warwick and Oxford, including being PI on a Wellcome Research Fellowship. She has published popular and scholarly works exploring how diverse publics access state welfare, analysing diverse case studies of child welfare, the NHS, and gifted children. Much of her work has employed and driven new analysis of 'experiential expertise', including her first book, Child Protection in England, 1960-2000.

Crane applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Gifted Children in Britain and the World: Elitism and Equality since 1945, with the following results:

I looked to page 99 of my latest book, Gifted Children in Britain and the World, with some trepidation, without a clear sense of what chapter or what kinds of analysis would be there. What we see on this page actually feels, to me, central to the ethos and major claims of the final book – the page focuses on making visible and analysing the writings of children and young people themselves. Page 99 discusses a collective letter, written in 1979 by a group of ‘ninth and tenth graders’ in a giftedness programme in California, where, as you’ll see elsewhere in this book, such programmes were relatively prevalent. The ninth and tenth graders wrote to young people who read a British magazine, Explorers Unlimited, produced for child-members of a voluntary group, the National Association for Gifted Children. The ninth and tenth graders reached out, in particular, to share critique of the term, ‘gifted’. They wrote that, having received this label, they were ‘expected to always be straight A or on top’, and ‘push[ed] harder’ by teachers; they could also not always ‘live up to your expectations’. Instead, the children wrote, they’d like to simply be analysed and approached as ‘’human’, and understood ‘a little more’.

This letter, my page 99 argues, shows the ambivalence which many young people felt about the label gifted. And this specific letter, the next Explorers Unlimited edition recorded, merited many responses, with British children agreeing that ‘we are given a label’ and that ‘I felt just like that towards my parents’. The label then travelled, and held similar meanings for children across the Atlantic, despite very different political economy structuring around ‘giftedness’ (also discussed in the book). Some children, discussed elsewhere in the book, of course also loved the label ‘gifted’. Many children relished a sense of specialness attached to it, and in the 1970s and 1980s in particular, when ‘giftedness’ was typically taken very narrowly, to really mean rare, exceptional, special, children mobilised this label to reshape their relationships with teachers, friends, parents, and siblings. Yet other children found the pressure of the label too much, and questioned the arbitrariness of its application and also, significantly, the inequalities embedded in psychological and educational testing, which are also explored in this book. More children still felt ambivalent about this label – these mixed feelings are something that one of my PhD students, Buse Demirkan, is tracing at present through interviews.

Overall then, my book contributes to geographies and histories of childhood by arguing, foundationally, that we can and must trace the voices of the young and include these, and ‘age’ more broadly, as a critical category within our analyses. We can dismiss any claims that the young didn’t have political agency, or that their writings were never saved or recorded, and thus that their stories do not matter or can’t be accessed. With this in mind, the book traces the rise and fall of giftedness as a specific label, and the broadening out of this idea, with new connections to social mobility agendas, in the 1990s and 2000s. And central to the book is the complex ‘agencies’ exercised by young people – both empowered by ideas of their high intelligence, able to access new voluntary spaces, yet also inevitably entwined policy agendas around future leadership and, often, dismissed as critical thinkers with the assumption that any critique merely demonstrated the uniquely disruptive nature of their minds.

Learn more about 'Gifted Children' in Britain and the World at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue