Meryl Gordon's "The Woman Who Knew Everyone"

Meryl Gordon is the director of NYU’s graduate Magazine and Digital Storytelling program. A graduate of the University of Michigan whose work has appeared in New York Magazine, Vanity Fair and the New York Times, she has written four biographies about influential, talented and wealthy women, all born at a time (ranging from 1892 to 1910) when women’s opportunities were limited.

Two of her books -- Mrs. Astor Regrets (2008) and Bunny Mellon: The Life of an American Style Legend (2017) -- were New York Times bestsellers.

Gordon applied the “Page 99 Test” to her newest book, The Woman Who Knew Everyone: The Power of Perle Mesta, Washington's Most Famous Hostess, and reported the following:

On page 99, Perle is giving a 1948 party in honor of President Harry Truman at the gloomy Democratic Convention in Philadelphia, a time when everyone thought Truman would lose the election. She would go on to raise money that fall for Truman at a crucial moment, helping keep his campaign afloat, and he beat Thomas Dewey in an Election Night shocker. (The Chicago Tribune was so convinced of the likely outcome that an early edition ran the erroneous headline: Dewey Defeats Truman.)

At the Philadelphia party (page 99) Perle declared, “This is no wake. I’m tired of this kind of talk. This is a victory party.” She welcomed an NBC camera crew, the first time the networks had covered a convention. With the Democratic Party bitterly at odds over civil rights and segregationalist Southerners threatening a walk-out, one of the few Black delegates was invited to and attended Perle’s party. Noted on page 99, “As far as Perle was concerned, he was a Democrat, he was a delegate and he was welcome.”

The Page 99 Test gives a flavor of Perle’s commitment to Harry Truman and her support of Civil Rights. She was not a crusader but believed in quietly leading by example, consistently including a diverse array of people at her own parties and those she organized for the Democratic Party, such as co-chair of the 1949 Inaugural Ball.

Visit Meryl Gordon's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Phantom of Fifth Avenue.

Writers Read: Meryl Gordon (October 2017).

The Page 99 Test: Bunny Mellon.

My Book, The Movie: Bunny Mellon.

My Book, The Movie: The Woman Who Knew Everyone.

Writers Read: Meryl Gordon.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrea Mansker's "Matchmaking and the Marriage Market in Postrevolutionary France"

Andrea Mansker is the David E. Underdown Professor of Modern European History at Sewanee: The University of the South. She is the author of Sex, Honor and Citizenship in Early Third Republic France. Her research on matchmakers has appeared in Histoire, Économie & Société, French Historical Studies, and the Annales historiques de la Révolution française.

Mansker applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Matchmaking and the Marriage Market in Postrevolutionary France, and reported the following:

Page 99 analyzes an epistolary exchange in a personal advertisement section of the Parisian classifieds that captured the public’s attention during the Napoleonic Empire. The early commercial matchmaker, Claude Villiaume, had invited his male and female clients to communicate their personalities and preferences for a spouse directly to the newspaper’s readership in a column he mediated. Villiaume’s first batch of published letters included an intriguing missive penned by a young, wealthy, unwed mother he dubbed “Emilie.” Emilie requested a platonic marriage with an aging nobleman who had been “ruined” by the French Revolution. Page 99 features some of the published correspondence surrounding Emilie’s unusual entreaty and makes a few points that are central to the book’s argument.

First, I suggest that one of the most attractive elements of Emilie’s advertisement for male readers was her “self-representation as a sentimental heroine,” which she likely modeled on the celebrated eponymous protagonist of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s bestselling 1761 novel, Julie, or the New Heloise. Her case demonstrates that the matchmaker’s anonymous love seekers adopted a writing style that confused fantasy and reality and drew inspiration from the cult of sentimentality when shaping their marriage ads. Emilie’s male suitors responded to her in the guise of Julie’s marriage prospects in the novel. Using a work of fiction as their blueprint, her respondents and the publication’s readers could imagine themselves as characters who had come to life. Page 99 thereby suggests that advertisers used the early personals to experiment with unconventional matrimonial strategies and embrace various personas that may or may not have been rooted in reality.

Second, page 99 also emphasizes the matchmaker’s “formative role in shaping [Emilie’s] story.” Since Villiaume had editorial control over the ads and his client letters exist only in published form, the book argues that we should maintain skepticism concerning the authenticity of these inserts. Rather than attempting to uncover the reality behind these client communications, I ask about the function of these “media fictions” for contemporaries. Why did the public respond to these stories so enthusiastically and how might readers have used Emilie’s tale of forbidden love and revolutionary loss to “make sense of the unexpected” during the First Empire?

The Page 99 Test thereby works rather well to highlight a few principal themes of the book. Matchmaking and the Marriage Market queries how the first commercial matchmakers and their correspondents imaginatively shaped the meaning, format, and allure of the personal ad in an era when the press invited individuals to express their private desires in a newly commodified medium. Like dating apps today, Villiaume’s marriage column blurred the lines between fact and fiction and reproduced the distinctly urban experience of imaginative spectatorship and voyeurism by featuring letters from seemingly real but unidentified authors.

Visit Andrea Mansker's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Shoemaker's "The Architecture of Blame and Praise"

David Shoemaker is a Professor in the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University. He is the author or co-author of over sixty academic papers, four monographs, and an introductory philosophy textbook. He is also the ongoing series editor of Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility. His publications have been about numerous topics in agency and responsibility, moral philosophy, moral psychology, the philosophy of humor, political philosophy, and personal identity.

Shoemaker applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The Architecture of Blame and Praise: An Interdisciplinary Investigation, and reported the following:

The Architecture of Blame and Praise is an interdisciplinary investigation into the nature of those responses we have to one another that, in some way, pertain to our exercises of responsible agency. Two oddities motivate the book.

The first is that, until recently, philosophers have focused on trying to understand just blame, assuming that praise is simply its positive symmetrical counterpart. But that assumption seems belied by work in moral psychology suggesting that our actual patterns of blame and praise reveal asymmetries between the two. For example, people tend to reduce their blame of those who do bad things overwhelmed by emotion, but they don’t reduce their praise of those who do good things overwhelmed by emotion. Of course, the psychologists don’t tell us whether these responses are justified or what their connection with responsible agency is supposed to be.

My book aims to incorporate what’s right about both strands while avoiding their problems. I start by explicating a functionalist account of our blame and praise system, and then I go on to show that there is actually an overarching symmetry between blame and praise, but we can see it only after I’ve revealed a crucial but previously unrecognized form of blame: mockery.

This discussion of this point actually begins on page 99, which makes the Page 99 Test an excellent one for its glimpse into an essential part of my overall argument. I claim on the page that mocking’s positive pair is complimenting, and so it starts by saying that both responses are, “paradigmatically, responses to performances relative to some … standards, including aesthetic, athletic, culinary, epistemic, prudential, philosophical, and many more.”

So what is mockery?

[T]o mock someone is to make fun of them for some failure, in a way that could foreseeably result in their feeling the sting of embarrassment, shame, or even humiliation.

And what makes it appropriate?

The first condition is truthiness: the target of mockery must have…the quality for which they are being mocked. I can’t aptly mock the fast for being slow, or the heroic for being cowards. The second condition…is publicity…. It’s in having that flaw exposed that one’s embarrassment is triggered, so the mockery, in order to be apt, must both be expressed and the aimed at that exposure…. A third condition of apt mockery is…that these flaws or failures be significant, that is, ridiculous. If you’ve come in second place in the Olympic finals of the 100-meter dash by 0.001 seconds, you’ve failed to win, but there is nothing at all mockable about your performance. However, if you’re entered in the 100-meter dash at the local charity event, and you trip coming out of the starting blocks and roll head-over-heels into the long-jump pit, then your failure is ridiculous enough to render you mockable.

Mockery and its positive counterpart, compliments, are one symmetrical mode of blame and praise, typically nonmoral in nature, Moral blame and its symmetrical counterpart of moral praise tend to consist, respectively, in anger and gratitude. I then go on to defend the appropriateness of the whole range of responses in a way that does not appeal to whether people deserve these responses. The presumed need for desert as a moral justification for the sting of blame is what has led most philosophers who theorize about it to argue that we need a robust capacity for free will to do so. If I am right, this entire enterprise has been a mistake: we don’t need desert or free will to justify our blame/praise responses to one another.

Learn more about The Architecture of Blame and Praise at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jennifer Denbow's "Reproductive Labor and Innovation"

Jennifer Denbow is Associate Professor of Political Science at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and the author of Governed through Choice: Autonomy, Technology, and the Politics of Reproduction.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, Reproductive Labor and Innovation: Against the Tech Fix in an Era of Hype, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book is in a chapter dedicated to examining non-invasive prenatal tests (NIPT) as an example of the “tech fix” in the book’s title. On this page, I analyze how makers of these tests market them as a salve for reproductive anxiety that covers over the root of that anxiety. Here is a quote that encapsulates the page’s analysis:

As the producer of the MaterniT test warns, “anyone can have a pregnancy with a chromosomal abnormality—healthy women, mothers of all ages and all ethnicities can be at risk.” These [NIPT] companies stoke fears about “abnormal” fetal development, even in low-risk groups, and subsequently offer products to ease the very anxiety that they played a role in creating. Thus, while it is true that many people experience anxiety about conception and pregnancy, the idea that a prenatal test can fix this problem obfuscates the industry’s role in fomenting this anxiety. It also covers over the deeper structural issues—such as climate chaos, financial instability, and the crumbling of public infrastructure—that have contributed to an uptick in anxiety for parents and nonparents alike. This reproductive innovation, then, sustains the innovation/reproduction binary’s papering over of structural injustices in favor of “solutions” that bolster the wealth and influence of the biotechnology industry and venture capitalists.

This page does represent a key thesis of my book: that although the state, investors, and companies sell innovations as a cure-all for all sorts of personal and social problems, technoscientific innovations in fact tend to obscure the roots of those problems and often make them worse. This page captures how this works with regard to one technology aimed at reproduction, while other chapters look at other technologies such as digital care work platforms and emerging reproductive biotechnologies like making gametes from stem cells.

Page 99 also provides a good sense of my book in that it briefly explains the book’s main argument regarding the “innovation/reproduction binary.” The book is dedicated to understanding how the overvaluation of technological innovations in the United States has come at the expense of addressing structural problems and valuing reproductive labor: the feminized work of caring for each other and sustaining society. In the case of NIPT, instead of offering collective support for caring for children, including disabled children, we are offered a technology to try to control what our offspring will be like.

Learn more about Reproductive Labor and Innovation at the Duke University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mariana Chilton's "The Painful Truth about Hunger in America"

Mariana Chilton is Professor of Health Management and Policy at Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University. She served as the Co-Chair of the bi-partisan National Commission on Hunger. The commission was tasked with advising Congress and the United States Department of Agriculture about how to end hunger in America. She has testified before the U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives numerous times and has served as an advisor to Sesame Street and to the Institute of Medicine.

Chilton applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Painful Truth about Hunger in America: Why We Must Unlearn Everything We Think We Know--and Start Again, and reported the following:

Page 99 is the crux of the Painful Truth About Hunger in America. It’s the culmination of three chapters that carefully bring the reader to understand how trauma is underneath hunger. My narrative moves from people’s lived experiences revealing the transfer of violence and hunger across the generations to a segment called “violence in numbers.” I show how qualitative and quantitative research intersect and support each other to provide the incontrovertible proof that the greatest adversity at the root of hunger is lovelessness. It’s true that page 99 is the best single page to land. But be careful. I’ve invited you to the edge.

The page is like a simultaneous prism and contraction. It is a prism that shows how generations of adversity can land in a single interview at a single moment in time. I refer people to the appendix that shows an image of how a family’s five generations of adversity land in a single report of hunger. I explain,

This depth of experience that people described helps us to begin to see that violence across the generations is associated also with historical, social, and political experiences, which I address in the following chapters.

It is also a contraction, where I show how quantitative research, which reduces people’s experiences to numbers, can sometimes squeeze out people’s humanity. Describing how our quantitative interviews work in the emergency room at the children’s hospital, I say

Often, full stories emerge; sometimes there are tears—mom’s tears or the baby’s—but the survey instrument is a tight mesh sieve, straining out anything quantitative researchers consider extraneous, tears included.

Here, I demonstrate that the suffering of hunger often gets missed or disregarded, because people focus on food access rather than listen for deeper clues. Or they refuse to understand people’s pain. What I found in the numeric research was that people who reported they were depressed and had multiple adverse childhood experiences such as abuse, neglect, or family hardship, are more than thirty times as likely to report hunger.

That contraction creates tension that pushes people to turn the page, where one drops into the middle of the book to learn that one adversity in particular, emotional neglect or feeling unloved, was most associated with hunger.

Because of that lovelessness, we are summoned to find great inner strength and collective courage to bring more love into the world. We can do this through political approaches, such as reparations for slavery and universal basic income, through personal work, by ending our tendency to try to dominate or discriminate against people, and spiritual growth, where we strive to act with compassion and equanimity.

So, yes, please come to the edge with me on page 99. We can leap into action from there.

Visit Mariana Chilton's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael McKenna's "Responsibility and Desert"

Michael McKenna is Professor of Philosophy at University of Arizona, having arrived in 2012. He taught at Ithaca College from 1994-2006, and Florida State University from 2006-2012. He has held visiting appointments at University of Colorado, Boulder, and Bryn Mawr College. McKenna works primarily on the related topics of free will and moral responsibility, but also in ethics, moral psychology, action theory, and metaphysics. His book Conversation & Responsibility appeared in 2012, and Free Will: A Contemporary Introduction, coauthored with Derk Pereboom, appeared in 2016.

McKenna applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Responsibility and Desert, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my 2024 book Responsibility and Desert takes up a potential challenge to my proposed theory of punishment. I argue that a justified form of punishment aims to elicit appropriate guilt from the criminally culpable, and that the pain of guilt for the deserving is noninstrumentally good. (Something is noninstrumentally good if its value is not just in the service of something else that is good.) In The Ends of Harm (2011), Victor Tadros argues that aside from instrumental value, it is never good that one feel badly about one’s own wrongdoing. But even if it is, Tadros argues, punishing a person in order to bring about the (supposed) good of their feeling guilty is never itself good. On page 99 I set aside Tadros’s first point for a later chapter devoted to deserved guilt. But I respond to Tadros’s second point. Tadros thinks of the punishments delivered to the criminally responsible as mere deprivations of the goods that the punished would otherwise have access to. In response, I argue that the only harmful forms of punishment the culpable deserve are those that facilitate an appropriate response of guilt for wrongdoing. Mere suffering or harming has no justification. It is, I argue, only punishment serving to communicate to the culpable an expectation of the sort of attitude of guilt they ought to experience. And the guilt they ought to experience should be fitted for the particular harms they have wrongly caused others. No more. As I note, the crude forms of incarceration in current penal systems like the United State are not equipped to dispense such subtle forms of punishment.

Page 99 does not reveal the quality of the whole of Responsibility and Desert. Instead, it narrowly focuses on one potential objection to one particular point about how to justify punishment. Nevertheless, it’s relation to the whole is telling. This book develops a conversational theory of moral responsibility, wherein both blame and punishment are conversation-like responses to culpable wrongdoing. The conversation theory treats blameworthy conduct as having a meaning revealing the quality of the will (the attitude) of an agent when she does wrong. This meaning can be treated on analogy with a speaker who initiates a conversation with other speakers of a shared language. When others blame or punish the wrongdoer, their responses can be understood on analogy with a conversational response to the meaning of the speaker who initiated the conversation. So, blame and punishment, as well as emotional expressions like anger or indignation, have a communicative and conversational character.

But when are blame and punishment justified? The most common justification is cast in terms of desert; the culpable deserves blame, and in more egregious cases punishment. The central argument of Responsibility and Desert is that what a culpable agent deserves is that others communicate their demands and expectations by way of blaming or punishing. If so, what is deserved has to have the right conversational meaning as a fitting reply to the wrongdoer. Mere eruptions of hostility directed at the culpable, or punishments just in the form of dispensing any sort of suffering, convey no meaning of the distinct wrong done. Moreover, for the wrongdoer to appreciate what is conveyed, she must adopt an appropriate—deserved—response. Plausibly, the response involves accepting and experiencing fitting guilt—guilt tailored to the unique nature of the moral infraction.

Many object to desert as a justification for blame and punishment because it is committed to the noninstumental goodness of harming the guilty. Harming any person, it is argued, is never in itself good. I argue that, indeed, desert implies the noninstrumental goodness of harming the culpable. But, I argue, once one appreciates the limited kinds of harms, the seemingly barbaric character of the thesis disappears. What is good, for instance, is that a wrongdoer feels badly about the harms she has caused others. That’s not objectionable. It’s a better world that one feel badly for wronging others as compared to a world where one does not.

Visit Michael McKenna's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eric S. Haag's "The Other Big Bang"

Eric S. Haag is professor of biology and director of the Biological Sciences Graduate Program at the University of Maryland, College Park. He has conducted research on the evolution of sex and reproduction in animals such as sea urchins, roundworms, and hermaphroditic fish for three decades.

Haag applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Other Big Bang: The Story of Sex and Its Human Legacy, and reported the following:

Page 99 is the second page of Chapter 7, “Land Ho.” Its first paragraph reads:

[As] I rounded a bend, what was left of a puddle a few feet across came into view. I bent down to discover a sad tableau of mass tadpole mortality. One hundred or so whip-tailed, jet-black blobs were cradled in the drying mud, dead or dying and on their way to becoming pollywog jerky. They were optimistically produced by a pair of red-spotted toads a couple of weeks before, and a few even had managed to start sprouting their hind legs before the dry warm air, breezes, and lack of more rain doomed their bid.

While unlucky tadpoles may seem to be unrelated to sex, by the end of the page we learn how the evolution of a different way of reproducing strongly conditions how humans experience sexuality. So, I’d argue that The Other Big Bang passes the Page 99 Test with flying colors.

The passage, recounting a hike in the Mojave Desert, underscores how the need for standing water limits where amphibians can live. It is frankly amazing that any of them succeed there. The vignette sets up the rest of the page, which introduces the evolution of a new type of vertebrate, the amniote. Amniotes include familiar desert animals like lizards, rattlesnakes, tortoises, roadrunners, jackrabbits, coyotes, and other mammals (including humans). They became the dominant land vertebrates by evolving new anatomies that allow internal fertilization (e.g. penises) and new protections for embryos (membranes and the egg shell). With such “reproductive superpowers” amniotes could reproduce virtually anywhere, including very arid or very cold places.

Before amniotes, males and females often differed only in gamete type: males make sperm, and females eggs. In present-day fish the sexes cannot be distinguished until months after hatching, and even then only by closely examining the developing gonads. Fish and amphibians generally lack external genitalia, and the ducts that carry sperm or eggs to the outside are shared between the sexes. Any sex differences in color or body shape develop only with adulthood, under the control of hormones. In the laboratory, adult fish can be easily sex-reversed with hormones. For example, females can be permanently converted into fertile males by adding testosterone to their water. Outside of the lab, hundreds of fish species naturally change sex over their lifetime, with individuals living as both fertile female and fertile males.

In contrast, amniotes develop sex-specific tissues, inside and out, early in embryonic development. At birth it is easy to tell male and female apart (rare intersex cases excepted). This early developmental divergence is associated with the loss of the sexual plasticity found in our ancestors. Like it or not, much of how we experience sex and gender directly connects to these anatomical sex differences, differences that first evolved in our ancient amniote ancestors. Imagine what it would be like if, instead, we humans retained the sexual plasticity of fish. From this one page, the broader message of The Other Big Bang is apparent: we understand ourselves and our human predicament better when we know how we got here.

Visit Eric S. Haag's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor's "America Under the Hammer"

Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor is Professor of History at the University of California, Davis, and author of The Ties That Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary America.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, America Under the Hammer: Auctions and the Emergence of Market Values, and reported the following:

In 1786, lawyer John Antsey was sent by Britain’s Loyalist Claims Commission to the new United States of America on a mission of value. During the war, patriot governments had seized property—land, livestock, clothing, enslaved human beings—from men and women accused of being loyal to Great Britian and auctioned it off to their neighbors. Now in exile with the war over, loyalists demanded that the British government reimburse them for their suffering. Unsurprisingly, they often lacked proper receipts and made questionable assertions about their property’s value. Antsey’s charge was not only to find out how much the goods had sold for, but also to figure out what they had really been worth. Page 99 captures his frustrated conclusion about the relationship between value and price: “The Answer is always in a Circle, it will bring as much as it is worth—and it is worth as much as it will bring.”

Page 99, by summarizing Antsey’s dilemma, highlights one of the central arguments of America Under the Hammer—that value is a social and historical problem, not a number determined by the impersonal forces of the market—and in this way the test works. Antsey could discover the price paid for property, but he knew this was hardly the last word on its value. Rather, it was a product of dozens of forces that my book brings to light. Bids reflected community beliefs, personal jealousy, side conversations, pragmatic deal-making, misinformation, and many more social considerations. Auctions themselves were structured around legal conventions that were designed to uphold social hierarchies, relegating participants to the roles of bidders, bystanders, or property themselves. The shocking notion that a person could be sold in the same way as a chair fundamentally shaped the modern capitalist idea that everything has its price and that price is the measure of value. That modern understanding of markets conceals a long history of sorting out what value itself could or should mean. As they debated the nature of value in everyday life, early Americans deployed auctions to convert familial, labor, and diplomatic relationships into exchanges of goods for money.

In order to trace the history of market-oriented ideas about value, my book investigates many more types of auctions than the loyalist sales discussed on page 99. Auctions in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century North America took place on street corners, courthouse steps, and even jail cells, and they trafficked in a wide variety of new, used, and living “goods.” Chapters discuss the fraught public sales of land seized from Indigenous Americans, the bargain auctions of imported overstock by which female retailers stocked their shelves, and the desperate tragedy of slave auctions. The result is a history of early American capitalism that places complex human relationships at its center.

Visit Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

William Plowright's "The War on Rescue"

William Plowright is Assistant Professor of International Security at Durham University. His research focuses on the dynamics of armed conflict and on the delivery of humanitarian assistance. Plowright has more than ten years managing humanitarian operations in such countries as Afghanistan, Syria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic, and Libya.

Plowright applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The War on Rescue: The Obstruction of Humanitarian Assistance in the European Migration Crisis, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Many European governments had violated the principles of non-refoulement (that refugees should not be forcibly pushed back), including Bulgaria, Croatia, France, Georgia, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Lithuania, Serbia, and Spain. Many governments arrested individuals for distributing assistance in public, including in Italy and France (Ferstman 2019, 30). In Serbia, the distribution of assistance outside of official state-run centers was banned for many organizations, and organizations were compelled to apply for permission to enter them through a complex bureaucratic procedure that was not transparent and rarely granted access. In Switzerland, police entered a church in the middle of Sunday service to arrest a priest who preached compassion toward refugees. He was detained for hosting a refugee in his parochial house (Amnesty International 2019b). In Spain, documentation of interventions by security forces into humanitarian programs was banned, with fines up to six hundred thousand euros (Legislacion Consolidada 2015). In North Macedonia, investigations were opened into fourteen organizations, and they were required to provide a complex set of documentation and information about all activities, grinding most humanitarian activities to a halt. Naturally, the investigation was eventually stopped, and no charges were filed. As with almost all the other cases listed here, there was no evidence of any form of law-breaking by humanitarians (Ferstman 2019, 39). In Greece, small NGOs including Team Humanity and Emergency Response Centre International (ERCI) were the targets of arrests and investigations which destabilized operations for the former, while forcing the latter to cease operations permanently.

Many organizations found themselves the victim of aggressive ticketing and fines from local authorities. Refugee Rescue, an organization founded by professional lifeboat rescuers, worked on Lesbos from January 2016 to assist the local Hellenic Coast Guard with the rescue of calls that the Coast Guard could not respond to. Despite this, it was regularly cited and fined for such petty offenses as failure to have a license to clear garbage from beaches when it cleared life jackets away following rescues. Eventually, organizations like Refugee Rescue would feel compelled to leave Lesbos and cease operations due to the sustained harassment and insecurity from local authorities and right-wing anti-humanitarian groups (Refugee Rescue 2020).

In the Czech Republic, the offices of the Prague Autonomous Social Center (an organization helping refugees) were attacked by masked men and received bomb threats on multiple occasions. Female humanitarians were publicly identified, doxed, and threatened with rape and throat-slitting. In Germany, in 2016 eight people were arrested for attempted murder and bomb attacks on refugees and organizations supporting them (ABD1 2018). Across the country, there were more than 3,500 attacks reported against migrants in 2016 and 2,000 in 2018 (Wallis 2019). In Greece, vigilante groups often led by the far-right party Golden Dawn attacked NGO workers, destroyed property, and blocked access to camps…

Overall, page 99 gives a pretty good idea of what the book is about. The previous part of the book looked at how aid was blocked, which led to boats full of people being stranded at sea. This section turns to some of the ways that refugees and migrants were targeted by European governments in ways that were often illegal. The main point is that democracies can and will violate rights, including the right to receive humanitarian assistance. During the Migration Crisis in Europe, there were countless examples of this, and page 99 of my book only lists a few of them.

Visit William Plowright's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Paolo Heywood's "Burying Mussolini"

Paolo Heywood is Associate Professor of anthropology at Durham University. He is the author of After Difference, editor of New Anthropologies of Italy, and the co-editor of Beyond Description.

Heywood applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Burying Mussolini: Ordinary Life in the Shadows of Fascism, and reported the following:

Burying Mussolini is about how much work it can take to be "ordinary." The Fascist regime in Italy worked very hard to present itself as representing "ordinary Italians," partly by emphasising the "ordinary" youth and upbringing of its leader, Benito Mussolini, in his hometown of Predappio, in the mountains between Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna.

A century later, and Predappio itself looks anything but ordinary. Mussolini rebuilt the whole town as a sort of open-air museum to his early life, and after his body was buried in the family crypt Predappio became a pilgrimage site for neo-fascist visitors and "dark" tourists, drawing hundreds of thousands to it every year. All of this can make it look to the casual outsider like a kind of grotesque, fascist theme park.

Ironically, one of the ways in which people who live in Predappio – who themselves mostly have little sympathy with the politics of their visitors – cope with life in the shadow of this difficult heritage is by ignoring it and working hard to make their town "ordinary."

Page 99 of the book is pretty representative of this wider argument. It comes at the beginning of a chapter about the use of public space in Predappio, and draws a contrast with the famous arguments of Michel de Certeau about the ways in which "everyday" or "ordinary" spaces are accumulations of time and history.

The contrast between this argument and the way use of space often works in Predappio is twofold: firstly, de Certeau sometimes writes as if certain kinds of spaces – like bustling city streets from the pedestrian’s point of view – are "everyday" or "ordinary" by nature. Whereas because "ordinariness" is a marked quality in Predappio, there’s nothing natural about spaces that get designated and imagined as ordinary there. Often when people think about an "ordinary" space they think about a space cleansed of association with the heritage that’s otherwise so ubiquitous in Predappio – that means such spaces take work to create. Secondly, the work involved in making such "everyday spaces" is a kind of evacuation of history. A good example is the castle described on page 99, a mediaeval fortress on a hill above the town, which was given to Mussolini to use as his summer residence. Its interior was recently renovated to remove all trace of this past and turn it into a business centre. The result is that inside it looks like the kind of characterless commercial real estate you can find all over the world – but this sort of "non-placeness" is actually preferable for many locals to the places of history de Certeau imagines as "everyday" and "ordinary."

Learn more about Burying Mussolini at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue