Howard Steven Friedman and Akshay Swaminathan's "Winning with Data Science"

Howard Steven Friedman, an adjunct professor at Columbia University, is a data scientist with decades of experience leading analytics projects in the private and public sectors. His previous books, including Ultimate Price (2020) and Measure of a Nation (2012), have been translated into many languages and featured on national media.

Akshay Swaminathan is a data scientist who works on strengthening health systems. He has more than forty peer-reviewed publications, and his work has been featured in the New York Times and STAT. Previously at Flatiron Health, he currently leads the data science team at Cerebral and is a Knight-Hennessy scholar at Stanford University School of Medicine.

Friedman and Swaminathan applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Winning with Data Science: A Handbook for Business Leaders, and reported the following:

Winning with Data Science is a unique contribution to the data science field. It takes a narrative approach with fictitious characters and dialog to help us understand the trajectories of Kamala and Steve as they work with data science teams in their respective health care and finance companies to help deliver their projects. It focuses on the customer and specifically on guiding the customer to ask good questions and be armed with frameworks that help ensure that they get the most value out of their data science investments.

The process we used to write the book is also unique. We each wrote one character’s experience. We then worked together to finalize the manuscript and make sure all aspects of data science projects are covered.

Page 99 of Winning with Data Science drops us in the middle of a discussion between Kyra, a data scientist, and Kamala who is the data science customer and business expert. From the dialog, the reader immediately understands that they are working on a problem for a healthcare company where they are trying to understand whether the results of a study for a new cancer medication called ClaroMax can be applied to their company.

The coworkers focus on potential weaknesses in the methodology of the study, how patients were recruited, and other factors that might contribute to patient outcomes.

Kyra continued. “Once the inclusion and exclusion criteria are defined, it’s important to consider how participants will be recruited. One of the most important considerations is generalizability. To what extent will the recruitment methodology allow you to extend the conclusions of this study beyond this specific population? Let’s suppose that BioFarm chooses to recruit participants who are being treated at the top cancer institute in the United States. Can you think of any reasons why this recruitment mechanism may affect the generalizability of the results?”

Kamala responds by drawing on her insight into patient care and challenges the generalizability of the study.

Kamala thought for a few seconds. “I can think of a few reasons. For one, patients who are treated at this cancer institute may receive a higher level of care than patients who are treated elsewhere in the country. Second, the patients who are treated at this top cancer center may be different from patients treated elsewhere: they may have better insurance coverage, they may be more well-off, they may have more advanced cancer, etc. The recruitment mechanism would cast doubt on whether the results of the study could generalize to patients who are treated elsewhere in the country. Sure, ClaroMax may work if it’s administered in the top cancer center in the United States, but what about when it’s administered in an underresourced cancer clinic in the rural Midwest? BioFarm should consider recruiting participants from diverse clinical settings to improve the generalizability of its findings.”

Kyra then suggests how they can implement a randomized study to test the impact of the product on some markets.

Kyra was impressed. “You’re sounding like a causal inference expert already! Once a recruitment strategy is in place, the next thing to think about is how to operationalize randomization.

The Page 99 Test works reasonably well in that readers would immediately understand that this is not a traditional data science textbook but rather uses characters and dialog to communicate some fairly complex ideas. It also succeeds because it introduces one of our main characters, Kamala, and shows her modeling what we call a customer mindset toward a real-world example of a data science project. That said, page 99 would not help the reader understand the overall scope of the book, so I would give it a B-.

The main shortcoming is that Kamala is one of the two main characters in the book, and this section does not mention Steve who works at a consumer finance company. It is also limited to a discussion about a single aspect of data evaluation. With only this one page, readers would fail to understand that another industry is discussed in the book, nor could they grasp that the book covers a large assortment of topics from project management to tool selection to supervised machine learning to unsupervised machine learning to ethics.

Winning with Data Science makes data science approachable by allowing the reader to follow the adventures of Kamala and Steve and experience real world scenarios of how data is used by different companies. This approach is unusual, but we are hearing from readers that it is highly effective. The book has generated substantial interest from companies looking to maximize their investments in data science and the authors have been invited to give numerous company presentations on the topics.

Visit Howard Steven Friedman's website.

The Page 99 Test: Ultimate Price.

--Marshal Zeringue

Julie Candler Hayes's "Women Moralists in Early Modern France"

Julie Candler Hayes is Professor Emerita of French at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she served first as department chair and later as dean of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts from 2010 to 2020. Her research interests include early modern philosophy and literature, theories of language, literary theory, and translation studies. A Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques since 2010, she is past president of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the Huntington Library, and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library.

Hayes applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Women Moralists in Early Modern France, and reported the following:

Women Moralists in Early Modern France examines observations on the human condition by seventeenth and eighteenth-century women writers. At a time when women intellectuals were largely barred from French institutions of knowledge, moralist writing—an approach to social and psychological analysis not to be confused with “moralizing”—provided a platform for engaging questions that had exercised predecessors from Aristotle to Montaigne. Each chapter discusses a separate topic: Self-Knowledge, Friendship, Happiness and the Passions, Marriage, Age and Experience, and Women’s Nature and Capabilities. The book has two overarching goals: to demonstrate the relevance of early modern moralist writing to the field of philosophy, which has often dismissed it as “literary,” and to make visible the contributions of women to the genre, which has traditionally been defined in terms of male writers.

Page 99 falls about three-quarters of the way through the chapter on friendship; it begins and ends with quotations from Geneviève Thiroux d’Arconville (1720-1805) one of the key figures in the book. This page focuses on one aspect of her book-length treatise on friendship, De l’amitié (1761), the question of whether women and men can be friends. Opening the book to this page, the reader will quickly understand that d’Arconville takes a dim view of women’s “weakness of character,” but lays the fault for their failings on poor education and a society that rewards vanity and frivolity. It is therefore symptomatic of a broad societal failing that many women lack the strength of character required for true friendship. Like many of her predecessors, d’Arconville finds that mutual attraction between the sexes derails the possibility of friendship between men and women. But whereas the philosophers of antiquity had excluded women from friendship altogether, arguing that true friendship could only exist between virtuous men, d’Arconville takes a different turn. First, women’s weakness of character is cultural, not natural. Second, she rejects same-sex friendship between either women or men as fraught with competition and mistrust. To quote page 99, “Her rare depictions of sincere friendship are thus between men and women who are no longer susceptible to passionate feelings, either because of age or because, as physical desire cools, as it inevitably must, ‘they have had the time to know one another and to learn to love one another before ceasing to desire one another.’ The friendship that comes after love is the rarest and most precious of all in d’Arconville’s lexicon, based as it is not simply on virtue, but on virtue regained.” D'Arconville’s treatise looks at the possibility of friendship in a wide range of life circumstances and relationships and finds most of them wanting, so the chapter on friendship after love stands out. To found friendship on difference, rather than sameness, marks a radical departure from the classical tradition.

There are some obvious ways in which the Page 99 Test does not give an accurate idea of the book. The question of sameness and difference is only one of the issues taken up in the chapter on friendship, and friendship is only one of the topics addressed in the book. Also, page 99 discusses the views of a single figure, whereas the book examines works by over two dozen women writers.

On the other hand, page 99 is a useful microcosm of the book. Here, d’Arconville takes on the standard view of the impossibility of true friendship between the sexes—found in Aristotle, Cicero, and Montaigne—and turns it on its head. For Aristotle, friendship between virtuous men formed the basis of the polis; the exclusion of women from friendship is also an exclusion from citizenship. Rather than simply replacing male friendship with female friendship, d’Arconville (and other figures discussed in the chapter) replaces a politics of sameness with a politics of difference. We see similar intellectual moves in the other chapters. Women moralists were keenly aware of the gaps in the classical tradition; they turn to age-old topics and reimagine them in terms of their own lifeworld.

Page 99 is also representative of the book through its focus on an understudied writer, Geneviève Thiroux d’Arconville, whose extensive published work and unpublished manuscripts have a major role in the book. While I discuss several well-known figures, such as Émilie Du Châtelet and Germaine de Staël, my goal is to broaden the canon of women philosophers and intellectuals by incorporating lesser-known figures as well.

Learn more about Women Moralists in Early Modern France at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew J. C. Clark's "Bjarki, Not Bjarki"

Matthew J. C. Clark received his BA in religious studies from Middlebury College in 2004 and his MFA in Nonfiction Writing from The University of Iowa in 2009. He is a MacDowell Fellow and has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, The Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts and The Maine Arts Commission. His writing has appeared in The Morning News, Ecotone, The Antioch Review, The Indiana Review, The Iowa Review, Fourth Genre, The Seneca Review, and True Story, among other places.

Clark applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Bjarki, Not Bjarki: On Floorboards, Love, and Irreconcilable Differences, and reported the following:

From page 99 of Bjarki, Not Bjarki:

…The wonton soup was like nothing I had ever tasted. This awareness arose in me, it seemed, nondualistically, and with it came the feeling that I was imitating something. A book maybe. But, I said, what I want to make clear is that I am not saying that I do or do not like eggplants. It’s just that now (some of the time) I can accept the diversity of my feelings for them. In fact, I’ll admit, I like their decorative potential. Metaphorically and phonetically, they’re stupendous. Baba ghanoush, ratatouille, etc., etc.

And Bjarki—god bless him, he was nodding along like he had no idea what I was talking about.

He said, How long is The Book going to be?

I swear, Tourette’s appeals to me. It has its own perfections. I love chopsticks and Tootsie Rolls and dragonflies. I love sunshine and whiskey and the way blue sky leaks into a daytime moon, flooding its craters so that the satellite appears transparent. I love purple too and smelling and your enjoying face. I have never been as cool as I wanted to be…

Page 99 of Bjarki, Not Bjarki passes the Page 99 Test! (I love passing tests.) You know, this project started as a magazine style essay about a young man in Maine (Bjarki) who manufactures the world’s widest, purest, most metaphorical pine floorboards you can buy. Only now do I see that The Book turned into a book about me figuring out (or failing to figure out) (or trying to figure out) how to love the world. In this scene, on page 99, Bjarki and I are at a Thai restaurant in central Maine. I am feeling frustrated by my inability to connect with him. And then, suddenly, despite all of my judgements about his political views and his blustering bravado, when Bjarki asks me how long The Book is going to be, I find myself loving him. It happens without me even trying to love him. We might even wonder if maybe I have loved him all along and that it was this dinner and his question that revealed that love to me?

Of course, there’s all kinds of double entendre going on with the eggplant, except that in someways (most ways) the eggplant is a red herring (a redplant?). I sort of want the reader to be disoriented by the eggplant (Did you know that an eggplant, like a banana, is classified as a berry (But what is a berry)?), unsure of why she’s reading about eggplants in a book (ostensibly) about floors. We make so many assumptions and judgements in our lives, have so many strong feelings about each other, about Politics—whatever they are—about the nature of an eggplant, etc. What if we were able to put aside those assumptions and judgements and feelings and were actually able to see the eggplant as an eggplant?

Visit Matthew J. C. Clark's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Shaun Gallagher's "The Self and its Disorders"

Shaun Gallagher is the Lillian and Morrie Moss Professor of Excellence in Philosophy at the University of Memphis, and Professorial Fellow at the School of Liberal Arts, University of Wollongong. He was a Humboldt Foundation Anneliese Maier Research Fellow (2012-18) and has held Honorary Professorships at Tromsø University (Norway), Durham (UK), and Copenhagen (DK), as well as visiting positions at Cambridge, Lyon, Paris, Berlin, Oxford, and Rome. His areas of research include phenomenology, philosophy of mind, embodied cognition, social cognition, and concepts of self. He is editor-in-chief of the journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.

Gallagher applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Self and its Disorders, and reported the following:

The Self and its Disorders presents the case for understanding mental disorders specifically as disorders of the self. This is not a new theory, but my approach to it is new, because I conceive of the self as a self-pattern. The self-pattern consists of a set of diverse processes including bodily, experiential, affective, cognitive, social, normative and narrative processes integrated by their dynamical relations. In several chapters I explain the “pattern theory of self,” I take a deep dive into what the concept of pattern means, and I outline a method for studying the self-pattern. Page 99 falls within Chapter 4, entitled “Dynamical Relations in the Self-pattern and Psychopathology” where I’m exploring the dynamical links between the various processes that make up a self-pattern and how they can go wrong in cases of psychiatric disorders. After looking at some problems with a strictly neuroscientific account of psychopathological changes I consider an alternative approach which involves an analysis of narrative processes in the self-pattern. My claim is that self-narrative reflects all of the other factors that make up the self-pattern, and that we can map out atypical alterations in their dynamical relations by analyzing both the form and content of narratives.

On page 99 I’m in the middle of analyzing an example of a narrative of someone who is experiencing regret about a past action. The affective processes involved in regret can lead to changes in two other aspects of the self-pattern, the sense of agency for one’s action, and the sense of ownership, i.e., the sense that the past action, and the present regret, are one’s own. Despite some constancy in the sense of ownership, for example, my sense of agency changes from the experience of control over my action to a lack of control over the regret since I seem unable to avoid my regret about that action. Regret can also change self-related social/normative processes. For example, my self-narrative may reflect my identification with the values and expectations of others (“I really should be regretful about what I did”) which in turn may increase my emotional suffering. On page 99 I cite some research that shows how this kind of dynamic can, in some cases, lead to further physical and affective changes including anxiety, insomnia and depression, and thence to additional changes in self-narrative.

My book involves much more about narrative than represented on page 99; it also involves much more than discussions of narrative analysis. Later chapters address various types of therapeutic interventions, including deep brain stimulation, mindfulness meditation, the use of AI in therapeutic contexts, as well as the effects of practices of torture and solitary confinement on the self-pattern. Accordingly, although page 99 does not provide a good sense of the overall topic, it does put you right in the middle of things, so I don’t think you would regret reading it.

Learn more about The Self and its Disorders at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Laura Pappano's "School Moms"

Laura Pappano is an award-winning journalist and author who has written about K-12 and higher education for over 30 years. A former education columnist for The Boston Globe, Pappano has written about education for The New York Times, The Hechinger Report, Harvard Education Letter, The Washington Post, USA Today, The Christian Science Monitor, among other publications. She is the author or co-author of three books, The Connection Gap: Why Americans Feel So Alone, Playing with the Boys: Why Separate is Not Equal in Sports, and Inside School Turnarounds.

Pappano applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics, and the Battle for Public Education, and reported the following:

Page 99 of School Moms puts us right in Peggy McIntosh’s home overlooking the Charles River in Waltham and captures what made her famous: Examples of the “unearned assets” she described in her well-known and regarded essay “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” That essay — and McIntosh’s use of “white privilege” — has years after she framed it, been misunderstood and weaponized by the far-right.

McIntosh describes that just as she noticed that some people faced disadvantages because of skin color, she saw advantages that she observed were the result of being white (like: if she is pulled over by a police officer it is not because of her skin color). She also on page 99 delves into how classrooms operate, including that, “a class ‘is a mix of students;’ if the teacher has good relationship skills, it enables discussions ‘in which different students say different things about what they think and feel—and nobody wins. A teacher who is companionable to the students often says, ‘Let’s toss some ideas around…’ which, she says, “is part of the aim of education.”

That sense of comfort and trust that educators create is essential to learning. The Page 99 Test is not perfect, but it does reveal a key point of the book: That attacks on public education are coming from people who don’t understand how schools and classrooms actually work. In School Moms, I connect the dots and get underneath the outrage by breaking down, for example, what Social Emotional Learning is, and how and why it came to be. (No, it does not replace math, it makes students able to focus on the math instead of who stole the glitter pen).

McIntosh and the dive into “white privilege” are at the heart of the chapter “How Weaponizing CRT Disrupts Learning.” It details the time I spent with Matthew Hawn in Sullivan County, TN who was fired for teaching about “white privilege” in his 11th grade Contemporary Issues class. It digs into how a popular Black principal in Texas was fired for no reason other than someone accusing him in a public meeting of “the implementation of critical race theory.”

It also details how the far-right activist Christopher Rufo turned “Critical Race Theory” from a graduate school framework to analyze complexities and contradictions within the law, to “a brand category.” On Twitter, Rufo explained: “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in a newspaper and immediately think ‘Critical Race Theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.” Which he did — much to our collective detriment.

Visit Laura Pappano's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kim Hong Nguyen's "Mean Girl Feminism"

Kim Hong Nguyen is an associate professor of communication arts at the University of Waterloo and the editor of Rhetoric in Neoliberalism.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Mean Girl Feminism: How White Feminists Gaslight, Gatekeep, and Girlboss, and reported the following:

Mean Girl Feminism: How White Feminists Gaslight, Gatekeep, and Girlboss examines the ways in which gender performativity operates as resistance. The book argues that mean girl feminism encourages white subjects to believe that their tone (e.g. say it with snark and sarcasm!), attitude (e.g. be bitchy!), and other communicative cues will help them successfully navigate interpersonal dynamics and relations of power. Such aggressive performances are interpreted as evidence of one’s social commitment to and identity as a feminist. Thus, mean girl feminism collaborates with neoliberalism in ways that most problematically optimize particular forms of articulateness, all the while further diminishing the subaltern’s capacity to speak.

Page 99 of the book is located in the conclusion where I am summarizing and discussing strategies and suggestions to challenge mean girl feminism. Page 99 gestures to the importance of thinking through mean girl feminism as the current state of feminism: “Where traditional femininity might emphasize innocence and niceness, mean girl feminism encourages women to interpret Collins’ figure of the Bitch and Ahmed’s figure of the feminist killjoy as if they are an identity category to be performed, a personhood that has assumed permanence—a defiant attitude, the unsmiling face.” Additionally, I look to Jessie Daniel Ames as an important figure to consider. To this extent, page 99 is a great page for those who seeking a shortcut into the action-oriented discussion about what can be done or what is next.

Learn more about Mean Girl Feminism at the University of Illinois Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christoph Adami's "The Evolution of Biological Information"

Christoph Adami is professor of microbiology and molecular genetics & physics as well as astronomy at Michigan State University. A pioneer in the application of methods from information theory to the study of evolution, he designed the Avida system that launched the use of digital life as a tool for investigating basic questions in evolutionary biology. He is the author of the textbook Introduction to Artificial Life.

Adami applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Evolution of Biological Information: How Evolution Creates Complexity, from Viruses to Brains, and reported the following:

Page 99 in my book has two Exercises in it. Literally, it's part of the problem set at the end of the chapter "Information Theory in Biology". There are two exercises on this page: the first one asks you to do a number of calculations that allow you to derive the information transmission capacity of a class of channels that often arise in biology. The second exercise asks you to calculate the capacity of the communication channel that cotton plants use to alert a type of wasp that the pest (that is presently biting their leaves) is precisely the kind that the wasp likes to lay their eggs in. As you pick up your jaw from the floor ("Excuse me, plants don't talk!") let me explain. The plant does not like it that its leaves are being dined upon. What could it possibly do? It turns out that there are two types of "pests" (they are really caterpillars) that attack these plant leaves, and only one of them will actually, when injected with wasp eggs, bring forth larvae of the wasp (a highly unfortunate event for the caterpillar). Trouble is, the wasp cannot visually distinguish between the two, so in the absence of some helpful info, half the time its brood would be doomed. This helpful info: that's what the plant provides. The bite of the caterpillar includes a substance that is very specific to it. The plant's molecular system then synthesizes a terpene (an aromatic compound) that is specific to that particular bite. Terpenes (think turpentine) are not only highly aromatic but also highly volatile: you can smell them from far away. And so evolution has taken advantage of this situation: the wasp can distinguish the different smells released by the bitten leaf (whether it was bitten by the preferred, or the decoy, herbivore), and will then only lay its eggs in the type that will bear its offspring. Thus, the plant signals to the wasp: "this one here, put your eggs into them" (so that the bugs may die and stop eating my leaves). In Chapter 3, enough data is given to the reader that they can calculate that about a third of a bit is sent to the wasp by the plant, but this is already sufficient so that the wasp selects the correct target about 80% of the time, which is a vast improvement over the 50% you would get in the absence of the herbaceous hint.

So is this exercise emblematic of the whole book? In some ways yes, in some ways no. Yes, in the sense that there is math in the book, and that you can use this math to calculate information, and in the sense that even though this is only a tiny example of how information is crucial to all living things, it is a good example: information is used to gain fitness, to make more offspring. The better your ability to discriminate between good and bad (for you), the more offspring you'll have. You might immediately ask: "But if this is true, why only 80%, surely getting a full bit (thus giving 100% accurate discrimination) would be even better? The answer to this is yes, but there are diminishing returns. It turns out that there is enough information in the signal for the wasp to distinguish perfectly (in theory). The bottleneck is in the wasp's smell: to make it a more accurate detector would require a significant "investment" in more complex molecular machinery. At some point, the cost outweighs the benefits. I would wager (even though this has yet to be proven) that the 80% accuracy is just at the point where no net gain (in overall fitness) is possible.

No, in the sense that the book's themes are far grander than the information exchanged between living things. In my book, I discuss how information allows you to understand every facet of biology better: how information about the world an organism lives in is a good measure of the complexity of the organism, how this information grows (on average) during the evolutionary process, how information is used by organisms (including animals and ourselves) to cooperate, and how information processing is crucial to understand intelligence (chapter 9). I even outline (in chapter 7) how information is key to understanding how life may have arisen in the first place, and how cancer is basically the outcome of a "failure to communicate" (chapter 10). So, page 99 gives a good glimpse of the book, but an imperfect one. It is a set of mathematical exercises, but only a bit more than half the chapters have math. It is about information in biology, but the book's scope is far grander: it tries to make the case that (to borrow a well-known line) nothing in biology makes sense, except in the light of information.

Learn more about The Evolution of Biological Information at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jürgen Buchenau's "The Sonoran Dynasty in Mexico"

Jürgen Buchenau is Dowd Term Chair of Capitalism Studies and a professor of history and director of capitalism studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is the author or coauthor of several books, including Mexico’s Once and Future Revolution: Social Upheaval and the Challenge of Rule since the Late Nineteenth Century; The Last Caudillo: Alvaro Obregón and the Mexican Revolution; and Mexican Mosaic: A Brief History of Mexico.

Buchenau applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Sonoran Dynasty in Mexico: Revolution, Reform, and Repression, and reported the following:

From page 99 [footnotes omitted]:

Arizona, where they would “encounter a difficult situation shameful to our race.” Sure enough, Arizona authorities broke a strike in Bisbee and arrested twelve hundred miners, most of them immigrants. Behind this bluster, Calles used the good offices of the manager of the Moctezuma Copper Company in Nacozari to negotiate. When the CCCC rebuffed these attempts, Calles traveled to Mexico City to consult with Carranza and left Cesáreo Soriano in charge as interim governor.

Calles authorized Soriano to roll back some reforms to facilitate a solution. Arguing that the promulgation of article 123 of the new federal constitution made the Cámara Obrera obsolete, Soriano closed it to the acclaim of Calles, who believed that radical agitators from the Industrial Workers of the World had infiltrated the workforce of the copper mines.116 The gesture worked: on November 17, 1917, the CCCC resumed operations. Calles rewarded the CCCC by cracking down on activists. In January 1918 he ordered the execution of Lázaro Gutiérrez de Lara, the vice president of the American Federation of Labor in Arizona.

The ongoing Yaqui War also posed a serious challenge. In October 1917 state authorities massacred seventy broncos, and Yaqui rebels retaliated by attacking trains and stealing cattle from Yori farmers. On October 24 Soriano and Calles, who once again served as zone commander, promised an “energetic, definitive, and, if necessary, terrible campaign against that relatively insignificant group of individuals who are hostile to any civilizing influence.” They even resumed the deportation of Yaqui rebels, this time to central Mexico. But the Yaqui refused to be cowed. Borrowing from the Zapatistas’ Plan de Ayala, in February 1918 Yaqui leaders published a manifesto under the motto of Tierra y Libertad (land and liberty).

Calles’s posture toward the Yaqui contrasted with a relatively tolerant position regarding the Chinese community, compared to that of other leaders in Sonora. As the home of one-third of all Chinese residents of the nation, Sonora became a hotbed of anti-Chinese sentiment at a time when popular xenophobia primarily targeted Spaniards and Chinese immigrants, especially merchants and moneylenders. In January 1918 Calles ordered the presidente municipal of the town of Magdalena to “give protection to those foreigners [or] you will suffer the consequences.” This statement questions the assertion of one historian that Calles “enthusiastically embraced anti-Chinese racism.”

Page 99 is an excellent example of one of the themes in my book represented in the subtitle: repression. The page describes the measures the Sonoran group took to repress their opponents, especially the Catholic Church and the Yaqui--and this theme reverberates in the entire book. The bottom of the page, dealing with anti-Chinese racism, also represents an important theme in the book, which is the ability of my protagonists to triangulate the political landscape. In the end, to this modernizing and nationalist group, the Chinese were marginally more acceptable than Indigenous or Catholic Mexicans who stood in the way of the Mexico they were imagining: a secular, modern nation. So, all in all, the browser's shortcut works well in revealing important themes in the book.

Obviously, the other two themes--revolution and reform--receive no attention on page 99, because that page is concerned with repression. Those themes are better discussed in the remainder of the book. The discussion of the Chinese and labor would also misrepresent the interpretation of the book if the reader were to fail to read the rest of the book. In the late 1920s, the Sonoran group turned against the Chinese. When Calles's son, Rodolfo, was governor of Sonora, he expelled the entire Chinese population, in contrast to his father's relative toleration a decade earlier. Also, as interior secretary and president, Calles forged an alliance with organized labor, and particularly the Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana (CROM) under the leadership of Luis Napoleón Morones. While he still repressed more radical labor organizations that refused to cow to his government, the alliance with the CROM is noteworthy for its ability to co-opt a significant part of the labor movement, in exchange for concessions. A decade earlier, in Sonora, this co-optation was represented by Governor Adolfo de la Huerta's creation of the Cámara Obrera, or Worker's Chamber.

In all, I believe the Page 99 Test works fairly well for this book.

Learn more about The Sonoran Dynasty in Mexico at the University of Nebraska Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Dane Kennedy's "Mungo Park’s Ghost"

Dane Kennedy is a historian of the British imperial world who has written eight books, including The Last Blank Spaces: Exploring Africa and Australia (2013), and has edited or co-edited three others. An emeritus professor of history and international affairs at George Washington University, he has served as Director of the National History Center and President of the North American Conference of British Studies and he has been awarded Guggenheim and National Humanities Center fellowships.

Kennedy applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Mungo Park's Ghost: The Haunted Hubris of British Explorers in Nineteenth-Century Africa, and reported the following:

What a reader will find on page 99 of my book, Mungo Park’s Ghost, is an account of the crisis that confronted Captain Thomas Campbell, commander of the expedition the British sent into the West African interior in 1817 to trace the course of the Niger River, only three weeks after he and his men had set out on their journey. The horses, donkeys, and other pack animals they used to carry the caravan’s supplies, arms, and gifts were dying off at an alarming rate, slowing their progress to a crawl. Campbell tried to recruit African porters to meet the expedition’s needs, but this wasn’t possible without the permission of the local almamy (ruler), whose suspicions of the expedition’s intentions caused him to prohibit their hire. As a result, it dawned on Campbell that “our situation… is very perilous.”

Several of the book’s main themes can be discerned from this page. One is the logistical challenges that confronted so many British explorers in Africa. Both iterations of this expedition—the first under Campbell’s leadership, the second under the command of Major William Gray—were reliant on large teams of pack animals, and both ground to a halt when those beasts of burden succumbed to diseases, predators, and poisonous plants. The other theme that page 99 reveals is the power wielded by African rulers. While stock losses exposed the expedition’s vulnerability, the almamy actively exploited it. Implicit in this outcome is a third theme—this expedition, like so many of those that preceded and followed it, failed to achieve its objectives. Each of these themes runs through the book, which recounts the fate of Campbell’s (and Gray’s) Niger expedition and its sister expedition up the Congo River.

It would be simplistic, of course, to claim that a single page (or, in this case, a half-page, since an image takes up the top portion of page 99) can reveal the intentions of an entire book. Other important themes run through Mungo Park’s Ghost. One is evoked by the title itself: Mungo Park’s pioneering journeys through West Africa transformed him into a romantic hero whose reputation haunted many of the British explorers who followed in his wake. Another theme is the enduring impact that slavery and the slave trade exerted on these explorers’ efforts to penetrate the African continent. And a third is Britain’s imperial ambitions, which spurred it to expend many lives and much treasure in Africa in its pursuit of power and profit. While the annals of exploration invariably highlight the adventures of Mungo Park, David Livingstone, and a few other famous explorers, the obscure expeditions of forgotten figures like Thomas Campbell may offer the most revealing insights into this overly romanticized subject.

Learn more about Mungo Park's Ghost at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Luke William Hunt's "Police Deception and Dishonesty"

Luke William Hunt is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alabama, where he teaches in the department's Jurisprudence Track. After graduating from law school, he was a law clerk for a federal judge in Virginia. He then worked as an FBI Special Agent in Virginia and Washington, D.C., followed by his doctoral work in philosophy at the University of Virginia. He is the author of The Retrieval of Liberalism in Policing; The Police Identity Crisis: Hero, Warrior, Guardian, Algorithm; and Police Deception and Dishonesty – The Logic of Lying.

Hunt applied the “Page 99 Test” to Police Deception and Dishonesty – The Logic of Lying and reported the following:

From page 99:

[W]hen members of the public engage in criminality over the course of fulfilling social contractual obligations, we might say the police have the right to rescind their end of the deal—bringing the police and the public to a pre-contract state of nature (and state of war), so to speak. Indeed, that’s how things tend to look in the real world. But this line of argument is deficient…as illustrated by the next analogy to contract law.

The police have what we might call a preexisting duty to engage with the public in good faith. The preexisting duty rule simply means that performance of a preexisting duty is not a valid basis of the bargain in a contract. Suppose there is a murder and a $10,000 reward for anyone providing information leading to the arrest of the murderer. Now suppose the lead detective on the case finds a key piece of evidence; he promptly schedules a press conference and offers the evidence in exchange for the reward. This would of course be absurd, and the doctrine of preexisting duties establishes that public officers such as the police, whose efforts were made in the performance of official duty, are not entitled to share in rewards. There is no “consideration” (basis of the bargain) for the offeror’s promise of a reward because the police had a duty to do the work anyway.

The analogy is not perfect, but it’s reasonable to think that the state’s duty of good faith is not contingent upon the public’s criminality…. [T]he nature and existence of political society is based upon reciprocation that necessitates good faith; this suggests that good faith reciprocation is a sort of preexisting duty. … [S]ocietal deviance can be a correlative of institutional force and fraud. Instead of focusing exclusively on those who are so-called social deviants, we can turn out attention to the institutions that motivate some of that (reasonable) deviance.

If the police foster an environment of deception, dishonesty, and bad faith, they exacerbate fear, distrust, and deviance. So when we think of public deviance and criminality as a “breach” of the social contract, we should pause and consider the possibility of a prior failure by the state [to fulfill its preexisting duties].

I was worried that I might find irrelevant nonsense buried on page 99, but the Page 99 Test works. The above excerpt illustrates how the book draws upon the norms of contract law as a way to understand the normative foundations of the police institution.

Suppose I’m charged with a crime, and subsequently agree to do something for the police (gather evidence, testify, confess) in exchange for a (potentially) reduced sentence. If my agreement is based on a material misrepresentation by the police, then it sounds like I was subjected to a fraudulent bargaining process. The norms of contract law illuminate that point. More abstractly: Societal arrangements modeled on the ideal of a social contract—agreements between the government and the governed regarding security—are relational in nature even if they cannot be captured exhaustively in a literal contract. Persons are conceived as entrusting certain tasks (governing, judging, policing) to agents of the state, and it is through this entrustment that persons can be thought of has having a right to be secured in good faith and free from fraud.

The second half of the book applies these ideas to real-world cases studies focusing on legal and philosophical analysis (including analysis of rare cases in which fraudulent policing might be justified).

Visit Luke William Hunt's website.

--Marshal Zeringue