Brian Hare & Vanessa Woods's "The Genius of Dogs"

Brian Hare is the Director of the Duke Canine Cognition Center and an Associate Professor in both the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology at Duke University. He is the founder of Dognition, a website where people can discover the genius of their dog, and the author of the New York Times bestseller, The Genius of Dogs.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Genius of Dogs and reported the following:

From page 99:

Miraculously, a beach appeared, the kind you would expect to see in the Bahamas. The sand was white and fine, strewn with dried palm fronds. We pulled up and dragged the canoe onto this unlikely shore.

A black form shimmied down a tree trunk and lead her family onto the beach. They were bonobos - our closest but almost forgotten relatives.

Page 99 finds me deep in the Congo basin with our closest living relative – the bonobo. What does this have to do with dogs? It turns out, quite a lot. One of the biggest surprises in my research with dogs was that they have a special kind of intelligence – the ability to read human gestures. Normally, we assume that you have to breed smart animals to get smart animals. But what I found out on a fox farm in Siberia was that actually, dogs were probably bred to be friendly, then got smarter by accident.

It looks like the same thing happened in bonobos. Being much more friendly and tolerant than our other closest living relatives, chimpanzees, has also given bonobos a special intelligence – they are better able to solve a range of cooperative tasks.

This has implications for human evolution. We often assume that smarter humans produced smarter humans. But what if, like dogs and bonobos, we became friendlier first, and then got smarter by accident?

We often think of survival of the fittest as being the survival of the meanest. But in the case of dogs, bonobos, and maybe even humans, it looks like a case of survival of the friendliest.

Learn more about The Genius of Dogs at the publisher's website.

Visit Brian Hare's website and Vanessa Woods's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ernest Freeberg's "The Age of Edison"

Ernest Freeberg is a Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of Tennessee.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America, and reported the following:

One goal of The Age of Edison is to make electric light visible. We travel from one place to another physically guided and mentally massaged by carefully engineered artificial light, something inconceivable for all but the last century of human history—and yet the technology is so ubiquitous that we hardly notice. Going back to those first decades when electric light left Edison’s laboratory and spread through the culture, I aim to recover how pervasive, and transformative, the light has become. 19th century Americans found ways to illuminate every corner of their lives, a process I’ve called the “social invention” of the light bulb, and the book follows the development of light’s role in everything from surgery to shopping to spelunking. Light turns out to be a powerful tool and an addictive stimulant, as good at conjuring illusive fantasies as it is in revealing what’s hiding in the dark.

Page 99 concerns one fundamental way that electric light helped to “invent modern America,” the creation of our round-the-clock transportation system. Before the age of strong artificial light, trains could only move slowly after dark and passengers avoided the dangers of night travel; ships had no choice but to sail through the night, but in crowded seas oil lamps and sailors’ whistles did little to prevent terrible accidents, with thousands drowning at sea each year. On this page I explore the way Mississippi riverboat pilots learned to use electric spotlights to pick their way through the river’s hazards. While tradition-bound captains used the light sparingly, the passengers loved to watch the spotlight sweep the riverbank, adding a vivid theatricality to all it touched, turning the mundane Mississippi shoreline into a “real-life lantern show.”

Mark Twain, who loved inventions even as he wrote nostalgically about his early days as a steamboat pilot, declared the electric spotlight a marvelous improvement. “You flash out your electric light,” as he put it, ”transform night into day in the twinkling of an eye, and your perils and anxieties are at an end.” When he concluded an 1882 riverboat trip in New Orleans, Twain found the levee at night, bustling with activity under the glow of electric lights, to be “a wonderful sight, and very beautiful.”

Learn more about The Age of Edison at The Penguin Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Cook-Martín's "The Scramble for Citizens"

David Cook-Martín is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Grinnell College. His work as a political sociologist focuses on race, ethnicity, law, and citizenship. Cook-Martín recently completed a manuscript with David FitzGerald that examines the rise and fall of formal ethnic distinctions in immigration and nationality policies of the Americas since 1790 (Culling the Masses: The Democratic Origins of Racist Immigration Policy in the Americas). He’ll pay special attention to where p. 99 of that book falls in the final proofs.

Cook-Martín applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Scramble for Citizens: Dual Nationality and State Competition for Immigrants, and reported the following:

A century ago people understood dual nationality as so disloyal to an individual’s nation that that legal scholars compared it to bigamy. Today, an estimated 2.5 billion people live in countries that allow dual nationality. The number has quintupled since 1960. Having two passports is especially common in Europe, but is becoming more so in the Americas and in Asia. How did this shift happen? Why does dual nationality exist and what does it mean for citizenship today? The first two chapters of The Scramble for Citizens explore how the competition between three countries for the same immigrants over a hundred year period resulted in policies that in law or practice allow for dual nationality today.

Page 99 passes the Ford Madox Ford test because it reveals the critical question of the book: what does dual nationality means for citizenship today? In a nutshell, it depends who you ask. Legal scholars tell us that citizenship in another country is more valuable than ever in a world of growing socioeconomic and political inequalities because it is a mechanism of wealth transmission, and passport into the halls of plenty. A counterpoint is that from the perspective of wealthy countries like the United States, everyone’s citizenship has become devalued because more people have access to it or to statuses like permanent residence, which has similar benefits to full citizenship. Beginning on page 99, I argue for a grounded response to the question of citizenship’s meaning as a way to extend studies far removed from the experience of key actors:

In this chapter, I rely on the perspectives of aspiring and actual dual nationals to study how they assess the value of citizenship in word and deed. My analysis here centers on what happens at the level of nationality law on the ground, or what sociologist Kitty Calavita (2010, 3, 113) has called “real law.” In this sense it is distinct from the work of other experts on citizenship, who generally focus on the level of formal laws. The case of Argentines with a second nationality option is especially apt because it captures in a single trajectory privileged and less privileged perspectives on citizenship…

The granular approach to how nationality law and procedures work shows the variable worth of citizenship or why it can be judged as both critical to people’s lives and as less valuable, even in an individual’s life course.

Learn more about The Scramble for Citizens at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Paul A. Gilje's "Free Trade and Sailors' Rights in the War of 1812"

Paul A. Gilje is a Professor in the Department of History at the University of Oklahoma.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Free Trade and Sailors' Rights in the War of 1812, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights in the War of 1812 opens Chapter 7, “Impressment,” and begins with the following two sentences: “Nothing threatened the common American sailor more than being compelled to serve in the British navy. Impressment challenged the rights of American citizens at sea and therefore challenged the American national identity.” These two sentences point to the very heart of the book – an exploration of the meaning of the War of 1812 as it was reflected in the phrase “free trade and sailors’ rights,” the most important political slogan in the War of 1812. Focusing on free trade and sailors’ rights provides meaning to what has been considered a meaningless war. The phrase itself combines two crucial ideas derived from the American Revolution. Free trade refers to a complex of ideas whereby the revolutionaries hoped to change world diplomacy by setting up a system of commerce unfettered by imperial constraints which historians call mercantilism. Sailors’ rights, too, harked back to the American Revolution and the belief that all men were created equal and that each man, even the humble sailor, had rights. As page 99 and chapter 7 demonstrate, those rights were threatened by the British practice of impressment (the forced recruitment of sailors from American ships into the British navy) and became central to how Americans explained the War of 1812. My book therefore explores the origins of the war, reaching back into the eighteenth century, details the role of the slogan “free trade and sailors’ rights” during that conflict, and then traces the motto in the decades after the war to demonstrate the importance of our second war with Great Britain in American memory up until the eve of the Civil War.

Read an excerpt from Free Trade and Sailors' Rights in the War of 1812, and learn more about the book at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Philip Scranton & Patrick Fridenson's "Reimagining Business History"

Philip Scranton is University Board of Governors Professor, History of Industry and Technology, at Rutgers University, Camden, and editor-in-chief of the journal Enterprise and Society. Patrick Fridenson is emeritus professor of international business history at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and founding editor of Entreprises et Histoire. Both are former presidents of the Business History Conference.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Reimagining Business History, and reported the following:

Reimagining Business History is a set of 43 quite short essays (or aperçus) drafted by two old-timers (one French, one American), in an effort to promote creative research initiatives in the field. The entries are grouped in four clusters: ‘practices to avoid,’ ‘opportunities worth exploring,’ ‘prospects now emerging,’ and ‘key concepts and frameworks.’ Page 99 appears in the second cluster, where we discuss ‘reflexivity,’ a fundamental concern in contemporary social theory with rich potential for business historical studies and for businesses.

Reflexivity, defined as “active learning amid the ongoing flux of change,” at bottom describes how humans reflectively self-monitor actions in which they are engaged. It can also be viewed as the feedback loops that, in organizations, recycle information about situations and outcomes to actors involved in decisions and projects. Crucially, individuals and groups, moving forward in time, use reflexivity (often continuously, as in a football match) to alter their strategies and the bases for their initiatives. This means, first, that practice is inherently improvisational and second, that reflexivity is inherently non-linear.

No matter how many habits and responses we may have learned, we cannot have complete knowledge of the situations in which we take actions. Nor do we have wholly reliable, consistent means for interpreting what’s happening in the flux around us. One consequence is that, especially in ambiguous or crisis situations, we genuinely do not know what’s going on or where it’s leading. (Think about first dates.) Hence, we constantly improvise actions that flow into our social and economic interchanges; and we simultaneously monitor what, if any, effects our efforts have.

This dynamic anchors the core of investment or negotiation – situated interactions in which outcomes cannot be read off, or calculated from, the participants’ starting positions. Such indeterminacy is frightening, but it also animates our search for compromises and practical ‘ways of going on’ (Wittgenstein). Understanding historically how business actors managed such uncertainties has potential value for business actors today, because feedback loops can trigger the reflexive re-designing on ongoing strategies. Surely, the indeterminacies of business outcomes affect present-day managers and entrepreneurs no less than they haunted their forebears in earlier generations.

Ideas like page 99’s ‘reflexivity’ are the heart of our book. We think they have value both for historians and for businesspeople today. Adding that value is what ‘reimagining’ is all about.

Learn more about Reimagining Business History at The Johns Hopkins University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ian Roulstone & John Norbury's "Invisible in the Storm"

Ian Roulstone is professor of mathematics at the University of Surrey. John Norbury is a fellow in applied mathematics at Lincoln College, University of Oxford. They are the coeditors of Large-Scale Atmosphere-Ocean Dynamics.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Invisible in the Storm: The Role of Mathematics in Understanding Weather, and reported the following:

On page 99 we announce the result of the first weather forecast to be produced using arithmetic and the laws of physics. The calculation had taken Lewis Fry Richardson, one of the most enigmatic of British scientists, over two years to complete during the First World War, and the answer was disastrously wrong. But Richardson made at least two major breakthroughs, as we recount later in the chapter. First, his method for converting the laws of physics, which are usually expressed in terms of calculus and are essentially impossible to solve using pencil and paper, into a form that facilitates explicit computation, lies at the heart of modern weather and climate prediction models. Second, Richardson went on to diagnose the problem with his calculation and showed us that we need more than just data, the laws of physics, and a machine (human or electronic) for number-crunching our way to predicting the weather for tomorrow: we need mathematics. Today, if all we did was to feed millions of observations from around the world into our supercomputer-based forecasting systems, the result would be rubbish. We actually need math to understand what orchestrates the myriad of local interactions between water, air, heat and wind, to produce coherent swirling cyclones, or even superstorms such as Hurricane Sandy.

State-of-the-art mathematics helps us to sort out the predictable from the unpredictable aspects of weather, and this means we can produce forecasts that are useful for almost everything – from deciding whether to wear a raincoat, to working out what flood defences are needed to protect communities in decades to come.

Learn more about Invisible in the Storm at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Zoltan J. Acs's "Why Philanthropy Matters"

Zoltan J. Acs is University Professor and director of the Center for Entrepreneurship and Public Policy in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University. He is the coauthor of Entrepreneurship, Geography, and American Economic Growth.

Acs applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Why Philanthropy Matters: How the Wealthy Give, and What It Means for Our Economic Well-Being, and reported the following:

Philanthropy has long been a distinctive feature of American culture, but its crucial role in the economic well-being of the nation has remained largely unexplored. Why Philanthropy Matters takes an in-depth look at philanthropy as an underappreciated force in capitalism, measures its critical influence on the free-market system, and demonstrates how American philanthropy could serve as a model for other countries. Philanthropy has helped address America's problem of wealth by serving two basic functions. It releases the concentration of wealth at the top of society while building institutions that support opportunity for future Americans.

On page 99, much to my surprise, we find that credit for the American invention of philanthropy should be given to the influential and successful Baltimore investor George Peabody, a descendent of Massachusetts Puritans who was born in 1795.

Despite the mark he made on finance in Baltimore, Peabody's most enduring influence lies in the precedents and policies established by the Peabody Education Fund trustees. This fund innovated the operational patterns of later major foundations, including John D. Rockefeller's Education Board, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Carnegie Foundation. According to Peabody's biographer, Franklin Parker, "George Peabody was in fact the originator of that system of endowed foundations for public purposes which has reached its highest development in the United States.... It is interesting to consider the many ways in which the example set by [George Peabody] has been followed by visioned men of means in the United States.... In a sense the Peabody Fund was not the only monument to George Peabody, for the example he set has been followed by a host of other Americans."

Philanthropy gives an edge to capitalism by promoting vital forces, like university research, necessary for technological innovation, economic equality and economic security.

Learn more about Why Philanthropy Matters at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Barry Siegel's "Manifest Injustice"

Barry Siegel is a Pulitzer Prize winning former national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and he directs the literary journalism program at UC Irvine where he is a professor of English. He is the author of six books, including Shades of Gray and Claim of Privilege.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Manifest Injustice: The True Story of a Convicted Murderer and the Lawyers Who Fought for His Freedom, and reported the following:

My book, Manifest Injustice, chronicles the wrenching, decades-long saga of Bill Macumber, imprisoned 38 years for a double homicide he denies committing. It chronicles as well the ceaseless, quixotic campaign by a dedicated team of lawyers to free him. What drew me to the story was the mystery of it all—a young couple shot to death in a lovers’ lane on an isolated stretch of Arizona desert; the multiple confessions by Ernest Valenzuela, a man whom jurors never learned about; Macumber’s arrest twelve years later, after his estranged wife told deputies he’d confessed to her; a respected judge, haunted by the confessions he’d heard from Valenzuela, trying to get Macumber’s case re-opened. Yet what equally attracted me were the moving personal tales: lawyers at the Arizona Justice Project heeding the siren call of a seemingly impossible obsession; Macumber’s cousin, Jackie Kelley, writing letter after letter from her remote New Mexico ranch, urging the lawyers on; Macumber’s son, Ron, reaching out to a father he hadn’t seen for nearly thirty years. Most of all, there was the story of Bill Macumber himself, who over nearly four decades in the Arizona state prison system became a legendary folk hero of sorts, much revered by guards and inmates for his teachings and leadership.

On page 99 of Manifest Injustice, we see Bill Macumber as he first begins his “career in prison” after being convicted of the double murder. He has lost his final habeas corpus appeal. He has seemingly come to the end of the line. Scared and depressed, he faces life in prison without the possibility of parole. The conditions are awful.

At Florence…the conditions felt like a dungeon to him—dirty, unsanitary, cold in winter, withering heat in summer, rats and roaches everywhere. The first winter…he nearly froze to death…. Prison officials removed half the roof for repairs, but they didn’t replace it until the next June. Snow fell into the cellblock. Reaching out from his cell, Macumber could catch snowflakes…

Soon after, though, the prison warden transfers Macumber to a far more comfortable medium-security annex. His life is about to change.

Macumber was shocked as the guard drove him through the gates leading into the annex. Everything was green, with flowers all over the place. The annex had no cells; the inmates lived in three dorms. The guard stopped the van at Dorm 3, Macumber’s new home…. Macumber dropped his possessions on his bunk…. He began to unpack, keeping a wary eye on the dorm’s inmates. A slender man in his early thirties had the bed next to his. After half an hour, he turned to Bill and introduced himself. He went by the nickname Coyote. “You shouldn’t worry here,” he told Macumber. ”We all make a point of getting along because it’s such a small unit.”

This moment on Page 99 would become a turning point for Bill Macumber. He resigns himself to his fate and throws himself into creating a meaningful life inside of prison. He vows to maintain a cheerful attitude. In his journal, he writes: “I never again want to cast shadows.”

Yes, the mystery and the personal tales—that’s what drew me to this story.

Learn more about the book and author at Barry Siegel’s website.

The Page 99 Test: Claim of Privilege.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jenny White's "Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks"

Jenny White is associate professor of anthropology at Boston University. She is the author of Islamist Mobilization in Turkey and Money Makes Us Relatives: Women's Labor in Urban Turkey.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks, and reported the following:

This is a page that surprised me and upended some assumptions that I'm sure I shared with others observing Turkish society because it shows the surprising political and social conservatism of Turkey's young people. I give some statistics and the results of national polls that show that in 2002 a large majority of young people supported joining the EU, but that this declined over the next few years. However, even in 2002 young people (high school seniors) that supported joining the EU feared it at the same time. What did they fear? Surprisingly, they were afraid that Turkish society would become morally degenerate, that they'd lose Turkish customs and values, most of all that they'd lose their "honor" before the community, a term that seems so archaic in the West, but is bred deep even in the youngest and most urban Turks. They were particularly concerned that the authority of the father in the family would be undermined and that relations between men and women would degenerate, becoming too familiar. And they feared that joining the EU would open the door to foreign interference. This is Turkey's youth -- like their parents, deeply committed to traditional, conservative family values.

Another surprise was that most upper class secularists were against EU membership. This doesn't bear any resemblance to the Turkey represented in the western media -- the fashion-forward artsy Istanbul crowd in clubs, cafes, trendy restaurants and art galleries. Well, that's just the thinnest slice of a thin slice of the Turkish population. It seems there are millions of young people who share their elders' views about morality and properly distant relations between men and women, and suspicion of the West. Actually, they may well be the same young people photographed in the Beyoglu clubs -- after all, they're not yet married and not yet expected to uphold communal norms. They're sowing their oats, and when the time comes to reap, they'll be out there in their inherited moral harness.

Learn more about the book and author at the Princeton University Press website and Jenny White's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Aya Hirata Kimura's "Hidden Hunger"

Aya Hirata Kimura is Assistant Professor of Women's Studies at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Hidden Hunger: Gender and the Politics of Smarter Foods, and reported the following:

Hidden Hunger examines the rise of fortified (vitamin/mineral-added) food as the face of anti-hunger projects in the developing countries since the 1990s. As a sociologist and gender scholar, I was interested in social and historical forces that pushed for such shifts in the prevailing understanding of the “global food problem” from the lack of food (quantity) to the lack of nutritious food (quality), and from hunger to “hidden” hunger (micronutrient deficiencies). This changing understanding of the food problem also shaped the “solutions” in the form of bio/fortification.

You have probably heard of Golden Rice, a genetically modified rice that is supposed to combat Vitamin A deficiency- an example of biofortification. But have you heard about fortified yoghurt by Grameen Bank, a well-known pioneer in microfinance, and a major multinational food producer, Dannon? The book tries to make sense of these things together as a part of the global fascination with hidden hunger under neoliberalism, the privatized notion of food security, and gendered practices of nutrition projects.

Page 99 is in the middle of chapter 5 entitled “building a healthy Indonesia with flour, MSG, and instant noodles” and talks about efforts to combat hidden hunger with fortified MSG (monosodium glutamate) and instant noodles in Indonesia. They did not become a public policy due to industry opposition, but these cases are exemplary of experts’ fascination with what I call charismatic nutrients and nutritional fixes. Why were MSG and instant noodles able to garner expert support as an essential part of citizens’ diet? These projects, along with fortified baby food, fortified wheat flour and Golden Rice that I examine in the book, illuminate what has become obfuscated in a highly reductionist view of the global food problem.

Learn more about Hidden Hunger at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue