Bronwen and Francis Percival's "Reinventing the Wheel"

Bronwen Percival is the cheese buyer at Neal’s Yard Dairy in London. She initiated the biennial Science of Artisan Cheese Conference and is cofounder of the website microbialfoods.org. In addition to serving on the editorial board of the Oxford Companion to Cheese, she recently edited an English translation of the leading French textbook on raw-milk microbiology for cheesemakers.

Francis Percival writes on food and wine for The World of Fine Wine and was named Louis Roederer International Wine Columnist of the Year in 2013 and Pio Cesare Wine and Food Writer of the Year 2015. His work has also appeared in Culture, Decanter, Saveur, and the Financial Times. Together with Bronwen, he cofounded the London Gastronomy Seminars.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Reinventing the Wheel: Milk, Microbes, and the Fight for Real Cheese, and reported the following:

While Reinventing the Wheel is at face value a story about “the fight for real cheese,” it also grapples with how agriculture and the food that we eat has changed over the last hundred and fifty years and the unintended consequences of systems designed with only partial understanding.

Page 99 is a perfect distillation of these themes, and finds us exploring milk microbiology, and how the liquid milk market has driven cheesemakers to adopt a quality standard that is particularly maladapted to the quality and safety of raw milk cheese. In a world where bacteria are conflated with dirt and disease, milk production standards have followed suit, rewarding low total bacterial counts as a quality mark:

Milk with depleted microbial biodiversity and a low total bacterial count, made up of a large proportion of spoilage bacteria and a minute number of pathogens, will perform brilliantly on analyses designed to measure suitability for pasteurization and potential shelf life. For a raw-milk cheesemaker, however, this milk would be the first ingredient in a recipe for disaster.

With recent advances in understanding the role of microbes within complex systems, we have begun to realize that health (whether we are referring to the soil, the gut microbiome, or to raw milk for cheese) is intimately linked to the proper makeup and balance of microbial communities rather than their absence. This is one of the fundamental paradigm shifts of the early twenty-first century, and promises to transform not just agriculture and food production, but medicine as well. But these are powerful forces that are not yet completely understood:

It is important to note that this is not a call for the revalorization of filth, for an anything-goes microbial philosophy where a bit more shit in the milk just adds to the flavor.

Microbiologists and raw-milk cheesefarmers are at the forefront of this revolution, working together to find ways to produce milk with a healthy community of microbes while shutting the door against pathogens.

But Reinventing the Wheel is not just about microbiology and the microbiome. On a broader level, it is about how ecologies on multiple levels, from breed and feed to healthy and diverse communities of cheesemakers and cheesemongers themselves, have been disrupted by a pervasive single-variable, yield-centric view of the world. The advent of highly-inbred cattle breeds and loss of field and crop biodiversity are problems that impact not just small-scale farmers and environmentalists, but pose a significant threat to the future of intensive agriculture as well. Rather than a book about marginal food production systems, it is an exploration of the modern world and the food that we all eat, every day.

Learn more about the book and authors.

--Marshal Zeringue

María Cristina García's "The Refugee Challenge in Post-Cold War America"

María Cristina García is the Howard A. Newman Professor of American Studies in the Department of History at Cornell University. She is a 2016 Andrew Carnegie Fellow. She writes about refugee and immigration history and policy.

García applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Refugee Challenge in Post-Cold War America, and reported the following:

The Refugee Challenge in Post-Cold War America examines refugee and asylum policy in the United States since 1989. For over forty years, from the end of World War II to the fall of the Berlin wall, the Cold War provided the ideological lens through which the United States defined who a refugee was. In the post-Cold War era, a number of actors and geopolitical and domestic interests have influenced the crafting of refugee policy.

Page 99 falls in the middle of Chapter 2, which examines the U.S. responses to genocide. Since 1989, millions have crossed international borders in response to genocide, creating humanitarian crises for the societies that have received them, politically destabilizing fragile democracies, and putting enormous pressure on refugee and asylum programs worldwide. The case studies in this chapter—the Kurds in Iraq, Bosnians and Kosovar Albanians in the former Yugoslavia, and the Tutsi in Rwanda—were chosen for what they illustrate about U.S. responses to survivors. On page 99, I discuss the historical context for the Rwandan genocide of 1994. In signing the Genocide Convention, the United States committed itself to fight genocide wherever it might occur, but in Rwanda—and elsewhere—it failed to heed warnings from intelligence sources and failed to prevent the genocidaires from carrying out their destruction. The number of Rwandan refugees admitted to the United States in the aftermath of the massacre was also surprisingly small, in part because of the difficulties of distinguishing the victims of violence from the perpetrators.

Two decades after the Rwandan genocide, millions continue to be at risk—in Syria, Burundi, Somalia, the Central African Republic and Myanmar—to name just a few countries. Widespread and horrific violence does not guarantee that people at-risk will receive refuge in the United States, however, as the Rwandan case demonstrates. News of genocide might trouble American readers, but their unfamiliarity with certain regions of the world (and their suspicion of racial and cultural difference) makes them unlikely to call for the admission of large numbers of refugees. In such cases, advocacy becomes all the more important to changing public opinion and creating opportunities for refuge.

Learn more about The Refugee Challenge in Post-Cold War America at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jessica L. Adler's "Burdens of War"

Jessica L. Adler is Assistant Professor in the Departments of History and Health Policy and Management at Florida International University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her book, Burdens of War: Creating the United States Veterans Health System, and reported the following:

Burdens of War is about the beginnings of the United States veterans’ health system. The excerpt on Page 99 describes congressional hearings that took place in December 1919, approximately one year after the Armistice of World War I. It features testimony of Rupert Blue, the Surgeon General of the Public Health Service. Blue was deeply concerned that his agency’s facilities were “overflowing” with recently discharged service members, whose care was funded by another federal entity, the Bureau of War Risk Insurance:

As he reported that the Public Health Service and Bureau of War Risk Insurance were lacking in resources, the surgeon general also argued for legislation supporting “care for all discharged soldiers and sailors”… Blue offered an economic rationale as justification for providing care to all veterans. Expanding access, he said, will “operate to save the government millions of dollars in preventing or deferring the payment of compensation and insurance claims.” It would also, he maintained, foster industrial productivity; it made good business sense to provide “medical supervision for such a large portion of the population at the greatest productive age period.”

Throughout Burdens of War, I connect policy debates and decisions with real life experiences of military veterans. Page 99 is heavy on the policy debate angle. That said, Blue’s statements hint at a central point of the book: the veterans’ health system was established, not simply because there was a consensus that former service members deserved publicly sponsored care, but because advocates made strategic, practical, and historically contingent arguments about why it was necessary.

Like many Progressive Era public health advocates, Blue believed that the government should play a role in enhancing citizens’ well-being. The proposal that publicly sponsored facilities provide care to “all” honorably discharged veterans – many of them unable to afford treatment otherwise – was, to him, perfectly logical.

But plenty of legislators disagreed. It was fiscally reckless and dangerously socialistic, they maintained, to provide federally funded health services to millions of veterans, including a great number who had never seen battle.

Blue’s pragmatic justifications for expanding access were intended to undercut the arguments of skeptics. Echoed throughout the interwar years by veterans’ advocates, they helped form a sturdy ideological foundation for the establishment of a vast, federally sponsored health care system tailored to the needs of former service members.

Learn more about Burdens of War at the Johns Hopkins University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Zack McDermott's "Gorilla and the Bird"

Zack McDermott has worked as a public defender for The Legal Aid Society of New York. His work has appeared on This American Life, Morning Edition, Gawker, and Deadspin, among others.

McDermott applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Gorilla and the Bird: A Memoir of Madness and a Mother's Love, and reported the following:

I like this test. And, yes, I think it’s fairly representative of what readers can expect from Gorilla and the Bird. It’s kind of a funny scene – and it has one of my favorite descriptors of a character in the book: “He looked like he was no stranger to a Mountain Dew for breakfast.” This is at a psych clinic in Kansas shortly after I’ve been released from the locked psychiatric ward. Admittedly, the passage may come off as a bit judgmental, but I try not to hide my flaws and being too judgmental is definitely one of them. The person I’m really judging in the scene though is myself. I had yet to accept my diagnosis of bipolar disorder and, at that time, it didn’t feel bad to be struck with a severe mental illness, it felt like a moral failing – like I was damaged goods, a person to be avoided. Today I’m proud of being mentally ill and I’m proud about how open I am with my condition. Mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of, but it will remain a source of shame until people are able to openly and without fear of ostracism reveal that they have a DSM-V diagnosis.

Visit Zack McDermott's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alejandro Nava's "In Search of Soul"

Alejandro Nava is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Arizona and author of Wonder and Exile in the New World and The Mystical and Prophetic Thought of Simone Weil and Gustavo Gutierrez.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, In Search of Soul: Hip-Hop, Literature, and Religion, and reported the following:

By some nice coincidence, page 99 hits on a key theme in my book, namely, the affinity between the harassed and ghetto life of Jesus, and contemporary hip hop. Just before the page begins, I had entertained Garry Will’s analogy of the life of Jesus: He compares his fate to the “scurrying agitato that opens Khachaturian’s violin concerto.” Though I don’t question the usefulness of the analogy, I suggest that hip hop images are more suggestive of the life of Jesus:

I prefer the analogy of the blues or hip hop for Jesus’s passage in the world: the desperate flights and departures of Robert Johnson; the apocalyptic urgency of Chuck D; the staccato barks of DMX; the looming threat of death and dying in Tupac; the frenetic, plaintive raps of Bone Thugs-n-Harmony; the spiritually minded lyrics of KRS-One, Kendrick Lamar, and Chance the Rapper.

In essence, my book, In Search of Soul: Hip Hop, Literature and Religion follows the lead of Lauryn Hill when she remarks that we need to “change the focus from the richest to the brokest,” Kendrick Lamar in his cautionary tales of the soul’s fate in the face of materialistic temptations, and of course the famous adage of Jesus, “What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?” The book is a response to the crisis of the soul in our age. More specifically, it explores the different nuances in the meaning of soul, from religious interpretations to profane and musical accounts. Part I of the book defends the basic values associated with the soul in the Jewish and Christian traditions: contemplation, compassion, spiritual depth, and fundamental human rights. Part II, then, moves to a cultural, artistic, and musical exploration of “soul” in African American and Hispanic traditions.

By weaving together these different strands of “soul,” the book draws not only from my experiences in the classroom at the University of Chicago (where I studied religion), or at University of Arizona (where I’ve been teaching courses on religion and hip hop); it is also a product of my schooling outside the walls of the university. In learning from the street scribes of hip hop, I have come to realize that whaling can be one’s Harvard and Yale (Melville), that the slums and tenements of New York can be the finest tutors (Stephen Crane), and that “beyond the walls of intelligence, life is found” (Nas).

Learn more about In Search of Soul at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sujatha Fernandes's "Curated Stories"

Sujatha Fernandes is a Professor of Political Economy and Sociology at the University of Sydney. She taught at the City University of New York for a decade and holds a visiting position at the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Her research combines social theory and political economy with in-depth, engaged ethnography of global social and labor movements. Her first book, Cuba Represent! looks at the forms of cultural struggle that arose in post-Soviet Cuban society. Her second book, Who Can Stop the Drums? explores the spaces for political agency opened up for barrio-based social movements by a hybrid post-neoliberal state under radical left wing leader Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. In her third book Close to the Edge, she explores whether the musical subculture of hip hop could create and sustain a new global cultural movement.

Fernandes applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, Curated Stories: The Uses and Misuses of Storytelling, and reported the following:

On page 99 I’m talking about the ways in which a national domestic workers organization used a controversial Hollywood film, The Help, in order to raise the profile of domestic workers, and how this strategy received pushback from some domestic workers themselves. The Help had been criticized for resurrecting a mythical “mammy” stereotype, for its comic treatment of the abuses faced by domestic workers, and for centering the plot on the triumphs of a young white benefactor who writes the women’s stories.

One of the domestic workers from the local New York-based organization Domestic Workers United (DWU) noted that the hype of the film created a frenzy of reporters and writers wanting to speak with contemporary domestic workers and get their story: “We’re so in vogue now. Everyone wants our story, everyone wants a DWU story, so they come and put a microphone in your face. And these were the same stories that the women couldn’t speak about back in the sixties, who were still in the backwaters of Mississippi or Alabama.” Just like it was a white woman in The Help who wrote down the stories of the domestic workers, this worker says that it is the same with contemporary domestic workers who have somebody else come in to “take our story and twist it and turn it and tell the story.”

My book Curated Stories argues that in the contemporary period, advocacy organizations, non-profits, and foundations have turned to the use of such curated stories to humanize their issues and gain the attention of the public. I explore how domestic workers used a storytelling advocacy approach to push for legislation that would protect their rights. They told their stories at the New York State legislature, to the media, and in rallies. But they found that the kinds of stories they could tell were highly circumscribed by legal and media venues, and they questioned whether telling their stories of horrific abuse and mistreatment actually brought them any benefits in the end. The book cautions us to be wary of the claim that storytelling may be a universal panacea for marginalized groups, and that while films like The Help may bring coveted modes of mainstream recognition for domestic workers, this may be at the cost of reproducing stereotypes about these groups.

The Page 99 Test: Who Can Stop the Drums?.

Visit Sujatha Fernandes's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jeremi Suri's "The Impossible Presidency"

Jeremi Suri is a professor of history and holds the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs at the University of Texas.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Impossible Presidency: The Rise and Fall of America's Highest Office, and reported the following:

From page 99:

George Washington would have recognized the unifying vision of Abraham Lincoln, but Lincoln’s transformative ambitions would have astounded the first president.

“The war came,” Lincoln wrote; the president acted to help the people find their way through to a better future. He was an active visionary and a collective redeemer, as never before. His beautiful words made him a new kind of leader for a new kind of nation, searching for the “better angels” of its originally sinful nature.

Lincoln’s assassination, one month after his Second Inaugural Address, gives the speech a “farewell address” quality. Lincoln delivered another more informal speech on 11 April 1865, just a few days before his murder, but the Second Inaugural reflects his deepest thinking about the role of the American president. It also shows the fundamental transformation in the presidency from the troubled beginning of his time in office to his sudden and shocking death.

Over two centuries the power of the American presidency has risen, but the effectiveness of the office has declined. I wrote The Impossible Presidency to understand this contradictory phenomenon. Many Americans are frustrated with their leaders, and many are seeking to “blow up” the system. My book seeks to get beyond the name-calling and partisanship, to understand how the presidency has evolved to our current moment, and how we can make the office better for the future. Studying history gives us the broader view that we so desperately need in a time of deep division.

Abraham Lincoln is one of the inspiring figures I examine. He was not a genius, and he was not always effective as president. But he understood the crucial unifying role of the president in times of conflict, and he found the words to define a new America for diverse citizens. Lincoln made the president into a nation-builder, and he left an enduring legacy for his successors. Although few presidents have reached Lincolnian heights, all aspiring leaders should learn from studying his example, and others.

Visit Jeremi Suri's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Katja Maria Vogt's "Desiring the Good"

Katja Maria Vogt is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, New York City. In her books and papers, she focuses on questions that figure both in ancient and contemporary discussions: What are values? What kind of values are knowledge and truth? What does it mean to want one’s life to go well?

Vogt applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Desiring the Good: Ancient Proposals and Contemporary Theory, and reported the following:

Yes, you can get a sense of what Desiring the Good is about by reading page 99. On this page, I address Aristotle’s dictum that the good is different for human beings and for fish. What this really refers to is a way of doing ethics. In ethics, the thought goes, we ask what is good for human beings. This is not a weird kind of species egoism; it is, rather, the question of how we, as human beings, should live. This may well include that we ask what is good for fish as well as other non-human animals and take this into account in our actions. But we don’t ask how fish should arrange their lives: we ask how we should live.

Desiring the Good offers a new version of ancient-inspired ethics, one that considers ordinary motivations as an inroad to ethical theory. On the view I defend, human motivation is guided by the agent’s conception of a good human life. I distinguish among the motivation for small-scale actions like having a cup of tea, for mid-scale actions or pursuits such as moving to London, and the largest-scale motivation to have one’s life go well. One of my projects throughout the book is to explore the relation between these three levels.

On my account, ordinary action is already en route toward the good. We all have a conception of a good human life, even if much of it is implicit, confused, and a work in progress. We all are aiming at what is, by our own lights, a good human life, yet this conception may be muddled and flawed. If so, then ethics has its job cut out for it. If we operate with some such conception anyway, we better get clear about it—in the hopes that what guides our everyday motivations and larger-scale decisions is on target.

Visit Katja Maria Vogt's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mara Einstein's "Advertising: What Everyone Needs to Know"

Mara Einstein is a Professor of Media Studies at Queens College, City University of New York. She brings more than twenty-five years of marketing and advertising experience to this work. She has worked as a senior marketing executive in both broadcast (NBC) and cable (MTV Networks) television as well as at major advertising agencies working on such accounts as Miller Lite, Uncle Ben's, and Dole Foods. Einstein's books include Compassion, Inc.: How Corporate America Blurs the Line between What We Buy, Who We Are, and Those We Help.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Advertising: What Everyone Needs to Know, and reported the following:

Page 99 gets to the fundamentals of how advertising is created. Who creates advertising, how do marketers decide what to say, and how does the creative team put the ad together.

Who is responsible for creating advertising?

Advertising is created by teams of two made up of a copywriter and an art director. Based on a strategy statement or creative platform, they will generate a number of creative concepts. These concepts must then pass through the gauntlet of the creative director (who oversees all campaigns within an account), the account team, and finally the client. Along the way, the concept may be shown to a focus group of prospective consumers.

How do marketers decide what to put in an ad?

Using a combination of market research (what is going on in the business environment) and marketing research (everything the company has learned about the target consumer), advertisers will develop a message that they hope will resonate with their target audience. This information is synthesized into a short document called a creative brief. The information in this document is what the creative team uses to come up with the advertising.

What exactly is contained in a creative brief?

A creative brief, sometimes called a creative platform or a strategy statement, provides a distillation of consumer research and defines the elements that need to be included in the advertising for the creative team. There are variations in the format, but it will always include an objective, a definition of the target audience, a detailed product description and how consumers relate to the product, a one- line promise or consumer benefit, an accompanying one- or two- line support statement, and either a description of the brand personality or a definition of what the tone and manner should be— that is, should the commercial be serious, funny, or irreverent. Other elements that may be included are competition and known problems that inhibit usage. Bottom line: the creative platform defines who the advertising is talking to and what the advertising should make consumers think, feel, or do after having seen it.

Advertising: What Everyone Needs to Know provides an overview of the advertising and marketing industries as well as tools to help readers understand advertising’s subtle, and not so subtle, impact on their life.

The prevailing wisdom is that Americans see upwards of 3000 advertising and marketing messages per day. And, while we may not be conscious of all these commercial messages as we walk the aisles of the supermarket or scan our Facebook feeds, they influence our product purchases—from cars to clothes to coffee. People’s preference for Starbucks over Dunkin Donuts, for example, has as much to do with the brand mythology created through marketing as it does with the flavor of the java. Our product usage has become building blocks for our personalities; as the commercial says, “I’m a Mac.”

Advertising is rarely based on product attributes. Coke doesn’t say it is a syrupy fizzy water, it sells the idea of happiness and friendship. Using emotion to sell products is a strategy that began over a hundred years ago and has been exacerbated by the use of technologies that rely on consumers to proliferate advertising messages via social media. The more angry or happy or awestruck we are, the more likely we will be to forward the advertising to our friends and family. Good examples here are Red Bull’s space jump or Dove’s “Sketch Artist.”

The more we use mobile devices—and we are using them at an increasing rate—the more we are faced with someone trying to sell us something. Ad blockers help to reduce the commercial assault, but as consumers got better at avoiding ads advertisers got better at hiding them. Confusion has gotten so bad that it is difficult to discern the difference between an ad and a news article, a legitimate recommendation or a paid Influencer tweet.

And while we surf and scan, advertisers scoop up our personal information, watch our every online move, connect that to our offline purchases, and then use all that data to sell us more stuff. The Internet is first and foremost an advertising platform—an idea many forget while watching the latest YouTube video or reading about the president’s latest tweet storm.

Learn more about Advertising: What Everyone Needs to Know at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Compassion, Inc.

--Marshal Zeringue

Anna Alexandrova's "A Philosophy for the Science of Well-Being"

Anna Alexandrova is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy of Science at University of Cambridge and a Fellow of King's College, having previously taught at the University of Missouri St Louis. She writes on philosophy of social sciences, especially economic modelling, explanation, and the sciences of well-being.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, A Philosophy for the Science of Well-Being, and reported the following:

If only I had known about Ford Madox Ford and his page 99 test... As I didn’t, my page 99 does two things that are probably as uninteresting to most readers as they are obligatory to academics: signposting where the argument is going and bowing to relevant literature. It also has lots of empty space, which is about as informative. Please don’t judge my book by its 99th page.

But the idea I am servicing with all these accoutrements is good and right. The fundamental problem that animates this book is that today social and medical sciences are asked to speak on well-being, quality of life, and happiness – phenomena whose definitions are a matter of values – and science must speak on them while adhering to the ideals of precision and objectivity. The collision of these two ambitions – to advise on what is good for us and to do so scientifically – forces all sorts of new and distinctive compromises. As a scientific object well-being needs to have a clear and unambiguous definition (which it doesn’t normally), a precise measurement scale (which it doesn’t normally), a measurable connection to behaviours and material goods (also elusive). I have found that scientists resolve these tensions by modifying both the object of research, i.e. well-being, and the norms by which they study it. As a result of such, often sneaky, dovetailing ‘well-being’ ends up meaning something a little different and the traditional scientific ideals are also not what they used to be.

This is not in the least a criticism. There are no immutable meanings of words, nor rules of science written in the sky. One scientific norm this field has already redefined and rightly so is objectivity, which is what my page 99 is all about. If objectivity means detachment from value judgments and commitment to facts and nothing but the facts, there could be no science of well-being. It couldn’t even get off the ground in its initial act of delineating its subject matter. A better ideal of objectivity for this field is to embrace value-ladenness but set up public and explicit rules for how value judgments should be justified to the individuals and communities about and for whom this research exists. It can be done and it has to be done because good life is too important not to know about.

In a sense the science of well-being is too big to fail.

Learn more about A Philosophy for the Science of Well-Being at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue