Samuel Moyn's "Liberalism against Itself"

Samuel Moyn is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University and author of many books on the history of ideas and politics in the twentieth century.

Moyn applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Liberalism against Itself falls within the book’s fourth chapter, which is about Gertrude Himmelfarb, the American historian of Victorian England who died in 2019.

The chapter is framed around appropriations in the 1940s of the great nineteenth century Anglo-German Catholic liberal Lord Acton — when Himmelfarb wrote her dissertation and first book on him. And page 99 explores some differences and parallels between her interest in Acton and that of Herbert Butterfield, the then famous don at the University of Cambridge who hosted Himmelfarb during her visit there in 1946-7 to do archival work.

Himmelfarb later became a neoconservative. But she got there from Cold War liberalism, which is the larger topic of my new book. Page 99 is just another example of the strategy I pursue across Liberalism against Itself. The book is a set of character studies, which I pursue on the grounds that individual Cold War liberals can help generalize about Cold War liberalism. But I look carefully at each character to capture their particularity.

Something unique to the chapter on Himmelfarb is at stake on page 99 too. It is common to observe that Cold War liberals were secular Jews, and Himmelfarb was one too. But it is essential that the ambiance and spirit of the movement made much room for Christian thought and theology.

Himmelfarb revived Christianity in order to reject secular theories of progress — which had supposedly led to the Soviet Union and its crimes. The comparison with Butterfield on page 99 was worthwhile to me because he stressed more forthrightly than she did that Christians believe in providence (Acton certainly did), which is just a cousin of the idea of progress.

As I show, Himmelfarb took Acton’s significance to be his insistence on the relevance of moral norms outside history, ones that allowed potentially severe judgment. Butterfield loved Acton (his predecessor as the Regius Professor of History at the university) too. Butterfield, however, found that worship compatible with a less judgmental and more relativistic stance. He had been friendlier to National Socialism than some might like — indeed, decades later Himmelfarb angrily disowned her one-time mentor for that reason. Where Himmelfarb wanted to contest the Soviet Union’s claims to be the vanguard of progress in history, Butterfield couldn’t conceal that those rejecting a rational theory of progress might do so in order to insist that God is working for humanity’s benefit in more mysterious ways. Is that better—or worse?

Visit Samuel Moyn's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History.

The Page 99 Test: Christian Human Rights.

The Page 99 Test: Humane.

--Marshal Zeringue

Drew A. Swanson's "A Man of Bad Reputation"

Drew A. Swanson is Jack N. and Addie D. Averitt Distinguished Professor of Southern History at Georgia Southern University. He is an award-winning author of four books on the agricultural, environmental, and rural history of the American South.

Swanson applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, A Man of Bad Reputation: The Murder of John Stephens and the Contested Landscape of North Carolina Reconstruction, and reported the following:

My book’s fifth chapter opens on page 99, with the result that the page teases some important book themes but doesn’t give the reader a clear understanding of the larger book on its own. You learn the chapter title—“Pretext”—which is followed by an epigraph hinting at the revisions of the southern and national ideas about what Reconstruction meant. In that quote, a North Carolina historian named Mary Woodson Jarvis instructed her readers in 1902 that, as she imagined it, “The scallawags, carpet-baggers and negroes who composed the large majority were wholly irresponsible, and launched upon a course of wild extravagance in order to feather their nests at the public expense. The work of this mongrel body could not be checked by the few brave spirits, who fought day and night with desperate persistence, to stem the tide of reckless extravagance and corruption.”

The “brave spirits” who Jarvis so admired as courageous reformers were members of the Ku Klux Klan, and, as shocking as it may seem to us today, her take became the mainstream understanding of what had happened in the state during the tumultuous 1860s and 1870s. The paragraph and a half that follows begins an argument that North Carolina’s political landscape was fractured in ways more complicated than most histories of the late nineteenth century suggest.

Although page 99 by itself doesn’t provide readers a clear understanding of my book—which is a history of a Reconstruction-era political assassination, the search for the killers, and the memory of the event—it does mark a crucial transition in the work. The preceding chapters narrate the political rise and subsequent murder of North Carolina Senator John Stephens and the failed attempt to identify and try his killers. The pages that follow turn to the public memory of the assassination and broader Reconstruction, culminating in a dramatic confession fifty years after the event. It is a story that starts in the violent aftermath of the Civil War on the ground in one North Carolina community, extends to the state capital and the federal government’s response to the Ku Klux Klan, and then resonates in histories, memorials, and popular culture in the decades that follow.

It is the intersection of these threads—the tangled skein of the murder and its memory—that lies at the heart of my book, and in that respect page 99 is vital. For it is in the transformation of events into memory that history is made, and few American historical visions have been more malleable and contested than those of Reconstruction.

Learn more about A Man of Bad Reputation at the The University of North Carolina Press.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joshua Ehrlich's "The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge"

Joshua Ehrlich is a historian of knowledge, political thought, the East India Company, the British Empire, and South and Southeast Asia. Currently Assistant Professor of History at the University of Macau, he received a PhD and MA from Harvard University and a BA from the University of Chicago.

Ehrlich applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge finds the East India Company riven by internal conflict over -- of all things -- a college. It discusses the moment in 1801 when the Company's directors in London realize that the College of Fort William, recently founded by the Governor-General of Bengal, Richard Wellesley, is a vehicle for Wellesley's aggrandizement at the expense of the Company's constitution and their own authority.

The page captures an important moment in the overall narrative but perhaps not one that would be intelligible out of context. The clash between the directors and Wellesley is one of the major "knowledge debates" in the book, but a reader would probably need to read more of the chapter to understand it. The page does reflect the main theme of the book: the politics of knowledge. And it happens to mark almost the exact midpoint of the main text. It is also worth noting that the directors' realization about Wellesley is a turning point: from that moment, they begin to lose their enthusiasm for scholarly patronage.

Whereas since the 1770s, the Company had patronized scholars as a way to "conciliate" political classes in India and Britain, Wellesley's challenge, among other factors, led it to abandon this idea. By the 1820s, the directors and other Company leaders had settled on another idea: demonstrating the Company's good government to publics in both places through the construction of a system of mass education.

Follow Joshua Ehrlich on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Emily Hauser's "How Women Became Poets"

Emily Hauser is a senior lecturer in classics and ancient history at the University of Exeter and was a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. She coedited Reading Poetry, Writing Genre, and is the author of a critically acclaimed trilogy of novels that reimagines the women of Greek myth: For the Most Beautiful, For the Winner, and For the Immortal.

Hauser applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, How Women Became Poets: A Gender History of Greek Literature, and reported the following:

How Women Became Poets starts from a single, and unnerving, observation: the first and most famous female poet of ancient Greece, Sappho, had no word to describe who she was. Centuries of male-gendering of the idea of the poet in practice, and the grammatical structure of Greek—which genders nouns masculine, feminine or neuter—meant that the only word available to her, when she sang her songs, was a male one: “male bard”, “male singer”, “singer-man” (the Greek is aoidos). The book traces the journey of Greek literature as it was forged in the crucible of gender: the beginnings, with male-only poets; the processes of shoring up the vocabulary of poets as male; and women writers’ challenging those words to come up with a language to describe themselves and what they did, that was all their own.

Page 99 is a deep dive into one of the case studies of a point in Greek literature where the masculine vocabulary of the poet is being challenged – not by a woman poet, but by a man, the classical Athenian comedian Aristophanes. Aristophanes’ Women at the Thesmophoria – a comedy that was performed in Athens in 411 BCE – is a rib-crackingly funny go at contemporary Greek poets, that imagines the celebrity tragedian Euripides learning lessons on how to be a good poet from a cross-dressing, gender-fluid poet called Agathon. At this point, we’re honing in on the central problem presented by the poet-terms that Aristophanes is poking fun at: a man who is called a poiētēs, a “poet-man” or “maker-man”, will never be able to write properly about women. It’s in the name, Agathon says. (The point is to explain why Euripides is such a misogynist in his plays – Aristophanes’ comic take on the famous poet’s infamous representations of women like Medea.) Here’s a quote from the middle of the page:

Being able to compose poetry, as Agathon has shown in his treatise on gender imitation and the anēr poiētēs, means being able to “do” both men and women. To be a poiētēs, you have to be able to “‘do’ plays about women” (gunaikei’ ēn poiēi tis dramata, 151), and “‘do’ plays about men” (andreia d’ ēn poiēi tis, 154). “We have to compose (poiein) the same way we are,” Agathon finishes at the end of his poetic exposition (167)—just a few lines before Euripides pronounces that he used to be the same as Agathon when he started to write poetry (poiein, 174). Euripides’s description of his past activities of poiein (and its connection to gender-bending by In-law), without a poet-term, right on the heels of Agathon’s delineation of the gender-mimetic activities of the poiētēs, suggests that it is precisely the loss of his gender-mimetic poetic identity (similar to Agathon) that has led to the current problem of his misogynistic representations of women—and thus to the present charge against him by the women at the Thesmophoria. Agathon might, then, look like a double for Euripides at first glance; but he is, in fact, the opposite. He serves to demonstrate just where Euripides fails, in his inability to be gender flexible—both in his poetic representation of women, and in the vocabulary which names him as a poet.

The text goes on to show that there might be some hope for Euripides, though: his final appearance in the play is cross-dressed as a woman carrying a harp (which I suggest might be a sly reference to Sappho herself). Perhaps he has learnt to acknowledge women’s experiences, and women’s voices and poetic identities, after all.

So how does the Page 99 Test work for my book? Across the 289-odd pages of text, there’s a story being told across the sweep of Greek literature, that traces a huge range of different gender-representations in texts from Homer (the epic poet who begins the Greek tradition) to Aristophanes and Plato (the famously anti-poetry philosopher) to Sappho, Nossis, and Anyte (Greek women poets whose voices and new kinds of language I’m foregrounding). Although page 99 of the book represents one kind of deep philological discussion of the way words are used to construct gendered poetic identities in ancient Greek, it doesn’t capture the breadth of the story, or the polyphony of voices – particularly women’s voices – that comes when you put all these texts together and watch how they interact with each other, speak to (and sometimes against) one another. And of course, for me, the biggest problem with the test is that it lands on a piece of poetry written by, and about, a man. If you want to get the whole story – if you want to take the journey to where women’s voices enter the scene – you need to read the whole book.

Visit Emily Hauser's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mariana Alessandri's "Night Vision"

Mariana Alessandri is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, the nation’s first bilingual university. In addition, she and her partner are the founders of RGV PUEDE, a nonprofit whose mission is to promote dual language education in South Texas public schools. They live on the border with their two tesoros.

Alessandri applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Night Vision: Seeing Ourselves through Dark Moods, and reported the following:

On page 99 of Night Vision, I defend a person’s right to grieve hard, to “fall apart” instead of “keeping it together.” I insist that there is no wrong way to grieve. C.S. Lewis grieved hard when he lost his wife, and he was ashamed of his raw, negative feelings. And yet, he published his journals (anonymously) under the title A Grief Observed. The book bombed, but after Lewis died, the publisher put his real name on it, and sales skyrocketed. What readers had thought of as too personal, and even embarrassing, became a source of comfort for grievers worldwide. Page 99 of Night Vision suggests that leaning into grief instead of trying to avoid it can open avenues of connection and self-knowledge we weren’t aware of. Grieving out loud is no less dignified than grieving quietly or privately.

If you were to read only page 99 of Night Vision, you would have a very strong sense of the book as a whole: that it leans toward expressing negative feelings rather than stifling them, that it defends the dignity of people living in all kinds of dark moods. You would get a good feel for the writing, and you would know right away if you would enjoy the book or not. You might feel vindicated for feeling bad, and you might even wish to be more emotionally honest with loved ones. From these paragraphs you would gather that this is not your typical self-help book that asks you to look on the bright side, count your blessings, or #choosehappy. You would know from this page alone that the book will defend the idea that sharing pain with one another is a gift and not a burden. You might even be able to guess that I am an existentialist philosopher who believes that “death gets us all in the end.”

If you only read page 99 on Night Vision, however, you might think the whole book is about grief. What you would not be able to guess is the chapter structure, that the book is about five moods: anger, sadness, grief, depression, and anxiety. You would have no way of knowing that each chapter presents an argument against toxic positivity and for sitting in darkness until our eyes develop a kind of “night vision.” You wouldn’t fully grasp the metaphor, but you would be able to guess at it. You wouldn’t know that I write about my students and myself, as well as ancient and contemporary philosophers. And you wouldn’t know why, at the end of the page, I am bringing up the Anderson Cooper/Stephen Colbert interview…

Visit Mariana Alessandri's website, and learn more about Night Vision at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Liz Przybylski's "Sonic Sovereignty"

Liz Przybylski is Associate Professor in the Department of Music at the University of California, Riverside, and the author of Hybrid Ethnography: Online, Offline, and In Between. Przybylski is an awardee of the National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Sonic Sovereignty: Hip Hop, Indigeneity, and Shifting Popular Music Mainstreams, and reported the following:

In book-length writing, of course there are a lot of strands of ideas that weave together over time. While a single page cannot convey them all, page 99 of Sonic Sovereignty does play with several key points of the book. This page opens with the idea that the radio station Streetz FM, an Indigenous music broadcast and streaming station out of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, provided opportunities for Indigenous hip hop artists to be broadcast on-air in the late 2000s and into the 2010s. It continues to argue that the media that circulates in a city both reflects and creates peoples’ ideas of themselves as a collective.

This quotation from the middle of page 99 hits on a theme that unfolds throughout the book: “Sonic sovereignty entails taking control of narratives of what constitutes Indigenous cultural production and, to a greater ex­tent, what constitutes contemporary Indigenous cultural identities, let­ting this be a dynamic process and allowing these narratives to change over time.” The focus on change over time, and the power of Indigenous popular music in particular, is key.

From just this page, a reader also understands that media professionals and musicians shape the book. A quotation from an interview between the author and a radio station music supervisor is the piece that conveys how listeners get inspired to make their own music, and even names some of the Indigenous artists (Inez Jasper, and A Tribe Called Red, now The Halluci Nation), who have shaped popular music through their output. The interviewee, Miss Melissa, is the expert who shows this here.

This page does not contain any of the listening segments woven throughout the book. In these, I offer ways to listen and re-listen to the same passage, encouraging readers to reflect on their own situated perspective, and to be receptive to other ways of listening. These also engage with hip hop ways of listening, such as moving through time by experiencing the memories you have with a snippet of music that gets sampled, or getting into a loop by listening or dancing to a repeated groove. I play with descriptive writing and different kinds of narrative to encourage a variety of reading-listenings from the book’s audience.

Other pages also do a more thorough job of asking and answering questions about media circulation: how do policies, like those in Canada, Australia and Aotearoa-New Zealand, that privilege music made in-country, impact licensing and listenership? How does streaming audio change audibility, especially for female or nonbinary musicians, or members of other equity deserving groups? And in terms of funding, what kinds of expressions are made possible when musicians are able to move to non-unit-based revenue? These topics are designed to help policy makers and funders, in addition to other segments of the book’s readership.

Visit Liz Przybylski's website.

Listen to the playlist for Sonic Sovereignty. The cover art of Sonic Sovereignty is a piece by visual artist Marc Kuegle, and the featured musician on the cover is Sly Skeeta.

--Marshal Zeringue

Richard Halpern's "Leibnizing"

Richard Halpern is the author of books on topics ranging from Shakespeare to Norman Rockwell. At his retirement, he was Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Literature at New York University.

Halpern applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Leibnizing: A Philosopher in Motion, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book occurs in a chapter titled “How to Build a Monad.” In it, I explore the philosopher G.W. Leibniz’s most famous concept--the monad--via a facetious thought-experiment in which I actually attempt to construct one (and of course fail miserably). A monad is a mind, but a mind all of whose perceptions are pre-programmed into it rather than received in real time from an external world. On page 99, I continue an analogy I had established earlier in the chapter between monadic perception and a video game. A video game likewise produces a “world” but generates it through its own algorithmic code rather than from some external reality. On page 99, I complicate things by acknowledging that a monad is not merely like a video game but rather like the (much more complicated) mental experience of playing such a game. I then go on to discuss two developments in contemporary thought that might bear on this problem. One is a notion proposed by some contemporary philosophers that a mind is an “information state” that happens to exist in our brains but could also be instantiated in a computer. The other is the claim by the physicist Stephen Wolfram that very complicated phenomena, including computers, can be generated from very simple algorithms of a kind known as cellular automata.

My book responds somewhat well but by no means perfectly to the Page 99 Test. I do frequently go back and forth between Leibniz—a seventeenth-century philosopher—and more contemporary figures, partly to demonstrate Leibniz’s continuing relevance and partly to help illustrate his sometimes difficult and elusive ideas. But the book’s focus is still mainly on Leibniz, while page 99’s focus is mostly on other thinkers, so the proportions get reversed. In addition, my book alternates between subject matter that is mostly of interest to humanists, such as aesthetics, and materials involving mathematics and science, though of a basic and easy-to-understand kind. But page 99 tilts heavily toward the science side. In fact, the whole chapter does.

My attempt to “build” a monad is based on Leibniz’s claim that both the content of our perceptions and their sequencing is governed by what he calls a “law of the series.” And there is good reason to believe he means by this an infinite series in the mathematical sense, a very simple example of which would be the harmonic series: 1 +1/2 +1/3 +1/4+… In other words, thinking is for Leibniz a mathematical process. This is an example of how he draws on unexpected areas of knowledge in the course of his philosophizing. To formulate his ideas about the monad, he borrows concepts not only from mathematics but from physics, biology, psychology, optics, painting, logic and theology. His distinctive philosophical style results from creating what cognitive linguists call “conceptual blends” of very different kinds of knowledge. It is one premise of my book that Leibniz’s wild and wide-ranging style of thought continues to inspire thinkers in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries and can even provide a usable model for non-geniuses like ourselves.

Learn more about Leibnizing at the Columbia University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Norman Rockwell: The Underside of Innocence.

--Marshal Zeringue

Asia Friedman's "Mammography Wars"

Asia Friedman is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Delaware. Her first book, Blind to Sameness: Sexpectations and the Social Construction of Male and Female Bodies (2013), won the Distinguished Book Award from the Sex and Gender section of the American Sociological Association in 2016. She is also the co-editor, with Anne Marie Champagne, of Interpreting the Body: Between Meaning and Matter (2023).

Friedman applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Mammography Wars: Analyzing Attention in Cultural and Medical Disputes, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Many interventionists focus their criticisms of the USPSTF on the point that there were no specialists in breast cancer on the panel charged with debating the merits of mammography, with the result that their recommendation was based “only” on computer modeling and “the subjective opinion of the panel members, none of whom had any expertise in caring for women with cancer” (Dr. Adams, radiologist). Dr. Cashman, also a radiologist, similarly argues that the panel did not include any “experts in the field”:

There is a lot of things wrong with their, um, analysis and their conclusions. The first thing that is wrong is that there are sixteen members of this Task Force: about twelve physicians and the rest were, uh, nurses, or nurse practitioners or other researchers. And of the twelve physicians, seven of them were either internal medicine doctors or family practice doctors. None were radiologists that do what I do, that screen and diagnose breast cancer. None were surgeons and do breast surgery, and none were oncologists or other specialists that take care of breast cancer patients. And so they had no experts in the field on this panel.

In terms of attention, interventionists thus stress that in evaluating which guideline to follow, what is relevant to attend is how many organizations support the guideline, and whether those organizations represent the opinions of specialists in breast cancer.

Rather than the number of organizations, skeptics emphasize the quality of scientific evidence supporting each recommendation. They also argue for attending to international comparisons to assess the USPSTF recommendation. For example, skeptics point out that the USPSTF issues guidelines only after a careful scientific process of evaluating the state of the research, whereas other organizations (even if more numerous) are not held to as stringent a scientific standard. As Dr. Price, a clinical oncologist with additional training in public health, puts it: “The Task Force uses a different process, you know, a more formal process of systematic evidence review.” Dr. Jackson, a family medicine doctor and academic researcher in public health, similarly contrasts the “evidence-based” process of the USPSTF with what he disparagingly refers to as a “consensus-based” process used by some other organizations: “a lot of organizations out there including medical organizations that do not do evidence-based guidelines and they basically just do, you know, what’s called consensus-based guidelines, so basically just a bunch of guys sitting around a table saying what they personally think.” In addition to using a more strictly scientific process of evidence review, skeptics pointed to the differing standards or criteria by which various

In several ways, page 99 is a good representation of the book: One gets a sense of some of the empirical data (interviews with doctors and scientists), and it is roughly representative of my analytical approach, which often proceeds by juxtaposing narratives to reveal contrasting patterns of attention. That said, it includes only one form of empirical data (out of three included in the book). The discussion is also narrowly focused on different understandings of the United States Preventive Services Task Force’s (USPSTF) mammography guidelines, which decontextualized does not convey the book’s broader aims. These aims include generating empirical insights into debates over mammography as well as theoretical/conceptual contributions to the sociology of attention, which I develop in chapters focused around general themes such as attentional diversity, attentional battles, and attentional weighing.

The context for the discussion on page 99 is that experts disagree over how best to define and measure the benefits and harms of mammography, and even over the validity of the very idea of early detection—thus the title, Mammography Wars. This is not because of a lack of data. No medical screening has been more scrutinized than the mammogram. Rather, as my research suggests, the two sides interpret the existing data through different frameworks of meaning.

My analysis is based on three types of empirical data—interviews with doctors and scientists, interviews with women age forty to fifty, and newspaper coverage of mammography—through which I identify two dominant patterns of thought that define disputes over mammography: interventionism and skepticism.

Briefly, interventionists firmly believe in the benefits of early detection and minimize any possible harms of screening. They are accordingly critical of any effort to delay the age recommendation for mammograms or reduce the frequency of screening. Skeptics are less confident in mammography’s effectiveness and give more weight to the harms of screening, which they also define more broadly than interventionists. They therefore generally advocate delaying the initiation and slowing the frequency of mammography to limit these risks.

On page 99, I am analyzing how interventionists and skeptics each assess the USPSTF mammography guidelines. Specifically, I highlight the way they apply different frameworks of relevance: interventionists emphasize that the USPSTF did not include enough experts in breast cancer and screening, while skeptics point out that the USPSTF’s recommendations are in line with international norms and based on a systematic scientific review of the evidence.

Learn more about Mammography Wars at the Rutgers University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Adrienne Russell's "The Mediated Climate"

Adrienne Russell is Mary Laird Wood Professor and codirector of the Center for Journalism, Media, and Democracy in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington. Her books include Networked: A Contemporary History of News in Transition (2011) and Journalism as Activism: Recoding Media Power (2016).

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Mediated Climate: How Journalists, Big Tech, and Activists Are Vying for Our Future, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book discusses the ambivalence that permeates the internet. That is, it discusses the fact that the internet is capable of being used to both facilitate and obstruct quality information and discussion. I am building here on the great work of Whitney Philips and Ryan Milner, who use the concept of ambivalence to emphasize the positive and negative potential of online cultural expression, rather than in its colloquial sense to refer to indecision (I could go either way) or to refer to ambiguity (I’m not sure what she means).

The page opens with this reference to a memo from Facebook executive that illustrates the essence of platform ambivalence:

Andrew Bosworth describes the company’s intentional disregard for truth, as evidence. “We connect people. That can be good if they make it positive. Maybe someone finds love. … That can be bad if they make it negative. … Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack. … The ugly truth is … anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good.

It then goes on to describe some of the efforts by climate activists to call out platforms, and professionals whose work supports them, on their environmental ambivalence.

Here is the rest of my page 99:

This ambivalence has spurred activists to turn their attention to platforms. Climate Creatives, a non-profit association of creatives professions, together with Greenpeace, and the youth civic engagement group Hip Hop Caucus, are leading a coalition of climate organizations calling on the CEOs of Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, and TikTok to ban fossil fuel advertising from their platforms. Anusha Narayanan, Greenpeace U.S. climate campaign manager explains: “The definition of hypocrisy is social media giants saying they care about environmental impacts while accepting millions of dollars from fossil fuel corporations to peddle their propaganda.”

In the United Kingdom, the Conscious Advertising Network (CAN) is trying to ensure ad industry ethics is updated to reflect the contemporary realities of the technology behind advertising today. Harriet Kingaby, co-chair of CAN describes how this especially pertains to climate information. She says that the internet has brought about mass data collection, targeted ads, and enormous amounts of ad space (aka ad inventory), factors that are are “turbocharging climate disinformation.” Advertisers are the major driving force behind platforms. And because platforms are the new gatekeeper, promoting the most salacious content and syphoning us off into like-minded groups, advertisers are complicit in creating this toxic environment, by inadvertently paying to support it.

The tests works! Page 99 is a great one for the reader to get a sense of the whole book and how it details the ways the muck in our communication environment gets in the way of our ability to effectively address the climate crisis, and what people are doing to change that.

The Mediated Climate emphasizes the importance of thinking about the climate crisis not just as a physical world phenomenon, but also a communication phenomenon — a story about our degraded information and communications environment, where bad faith flourishes, making noise and muddling messages while emissions mount and societies struggle to head off catastrophe. It's also a story of journalists, activists, scientists and other professionals of all stripes who are fighting to improve both our physical and media landscapes. And it’s an invitation to join them.

Learn more about The Mediated Climate at the Columbia University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew Payne's "War on the Ballot"

Andrew Payne is a departmental lecturer in international relations at the University of Oxford, where he was previously the Hedley Bull Research Fellow in International Relations and a William Golding Junior Research Fellow at Brasenose College. He serves on the board of Chatham House in London.

Payne applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, War on the Ballot: How the Election Cycle Shapes Presidential Decision-Making in War, and reported the following:

Page 99 takes the reader into a case study of Lyndon Johnson’s handling of the war in Vietnam. It examines an argument some scholars have made in explaining why the president clung to a path of escalation with which he was uncomfortable: that Johnson’s advisory system was organized in a way that stifled debate and promoted hawkish perspectives.

Readers will find qualified support for this claim on this page. It is true that skeptics within the administration, like George Ball, were reduced to playing the role of a “devil’s advocate.” And McGeorge Bundy, the national security advisor, did control the flow of information to the president in a way that marginalized dissent. But if the president was poorly served by his advisory system, he was also largely responsible for cultivating a bureaucratic environment in which loyalty and a conformity of views were so highly prized.

To illustrate the point, the book recounts an anecdote Ball shares in his memoir in which Johnson teased him about his subordinate role in decision-making process.

“You’re like the school teacher looking for a job with a small school district in Texas,” Johnson said to Ball. “When asked by the school board whether he believed that the world was flat or round, he replied, ‘Oh, I can teach it either way.’”

“That’s you,” Johnson continued, “You can argue like hell with me against a position, but I know outside this room you’re going to support me. You can teach it flat or round.”

Even Bundy, the advisor many charge with culpability for filtering out meaningful challenge, understood that getting your views in front of a president was only half the battle.

“You can’t organize against Lyndon Johnson without getting bombed before breakfast, because in his view that’s the final and ultimate conspiracy.”

The Page 99 Test offers a mixed account of the book as a whole, revealing more about its style than the substance of the overall argument it makes.

On the one hand, it offers a representative sample of the kinds of evidence deployed in the book. In addition to the voluminous secondary record, War on the Ballot draws on thousands of declassified documents, presidential tape recordings and original interviews with senior administration officials to build an empirically rich narrative of decision-making in the wars in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq. These sources provide readers with an unprecedented account of what really went on behind closed doors during these historically significant conflicts, unfiltered by spin doctors and stenographers.

Johnson’s penchant for parables and crude analogies, for example, is accurately reflected on page 99. Elsewhere in this chapter we find the president characterizing the war as a football game, comparing peace negotiations to the sale of a house, and sarcastically referring to the ambassador to South Vietnam – a person he considered incompetent and unable to work with anyone – as “Mister God.” Indeed, the president routinely referred to his rivals and opponents as idiots, cry-babies, and much, much worse.

On the other hand, page 99 tells us very little about the central argument the book advances about the role of the electoral cycle in shaping presidential decision-making in war. The way in which the domestic political calendar systematically pulls presidents away from courses of action they deem to be in the national interest is addressed only indirectly here.

Elsewhere in this chapter, though, readers will find plenty of evidence that Johnson’s decisions relating to the “Americanization” of the war were profoundly shaped by electoral constraints. Often, Johnson tells us as much in own words. “I’ve got to win an election,” he told Bundy after one meeting in March 1964 in which escalatory plans were debated, “and then you can make a decision.” As Bundy later recalled, Johnson’s “pre-emptive concern” was to “win, win, win the election, not the war.”

Such evidence of the nakedly political origins of wartime decision-making raises serious questions about the normative implications of electoral accountability and foreign policy. War on the Ballot definitely shows that electoral politics matters, then, but whether it should do so is left for readers to decide.

Learn more about War on the Ballot at the Columbia University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue