From Landgrab to Data Grab
The advisors to King Lobengula were suspicious of the telegraph wires being stretched across their land by the British South Africa Company in the late nineteenth century. They believed the white men’s plan was to use the wires to tie and restrain their king, ruler of the Northern Ndebele people in Matabeleland. Even when the official purpose of the telegraph was explained to them, they were still dismissive. Why would such a thing be needed, they asked, when they already possessed effective means of long-distance communication such as drums and smoke signals?
To many, this might sound like a familiar story: the story of premodern people standing in the way of inevitable progress, or the story of misguided resistance to a technology that eventually paved the way to a better world.
But the advisors to King Lobengula were justified in their suspicions. The British South Africa Company, led by Cecil Rhodes, declared war against the Ndebele in 1893 and continued with the suppression of the Matabeleland and Mashonaland uprisings in 1896. One of the pretexts used to wage war was that the locals were stealing the copper wire to make ornaments and hunting tools. The telegraph was important for other reasons too. From a military perspective, it would prove to be crucial for orchestrating the colonization of southern Africa, including what would become southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). It would have been much more difficult to coordinate troop movements and send alerts without it. As a result of those wars, by 1930 about 50 percent of the country’s land—49 million acres—had been granted to European migrants, who represented only 5 percent of the population.
In other words, it was a landgrab. Colonialism may have proceeded by different methods at different times and different places in history, but in the end it always boiled down to the same thing: a seizing of land (and the riches and labor that went with it) perpetrated by force or deception.
Two things made colonialism distinctive from other asset seizures in history. First, this landgrab was global, reaching truly planetary proportions. From 1800 to 1875, about 83,000 square miles from all over the world were acquired each year by European colonizers. From 1875 to 1914, that figure jumped to 240,000 square miles per year. By the end of that period, Britain had 55 colonies, France 29, Germany 10, Portugal and the Netherlands 8 each, Italy 4, and Belgium 1. Colonialism is a story not only about the Ndebele in Zimbabwe, but also about the Bororo in Brazil and the countless other peoples who witnessed the simultaneous arrival of the telegraph, the rifle, and the cross—or whatever specific combination of colonial technologies, weaponry and beliefs they were colonized with. For none of them did these things bring peace and progress, only dispossession and injustice.
The second point is that colonial stories have long lives. We are not just talking about an isolated war here or the introduction of a technology there. Colonialism is a process that took centuries to unfold, and its repercussions continue to be felt. To put it differently: the historic landgrab may be over (obviously, southern Africa is no longer a colony of the British), but the impacts of the landgrab continue to reverberate. Compare present-day England and Zimbabwe, and you soon realize that, overall, the benefits have continued to accrue to the colonizer nation in the form of accumulated wealth, while the burdens have continued to accrue to the colonized in the form of poverty, violence, and lack of opportunity. We are increasingly sensing an urgent need to reinterpret our past and present in the light of that colonial landgrab.
But something else today is amiss that goes beyond this necessary reckoning with the past. Colonialism lives on in another way, through a new kind of landgrab. It is still new, but we can already sense how it could reshape our present and our future just as significantly as the old one.
This latest seizure entails not the grabbing of land, but the grabbing of data—data that is potentially as valuable as land, because it provides access to a priceless resource: the intimacy of our daily lives, as a new source of value. Is the exploitation of human life an entirely new phenomenon? Of course not. But this new resource grab should concern us because it exhibits some very colonial characteristics. It is global: nowhere is human life safe from this form of exploitation. It is very large-scale: the worldwide users of Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, and Instagram each exceed the individual populations of China and India, the world’s largest countries, with the Chinese platforms WeChat and TikTok not coming far behind. It is creating unprecedented wealth based on extraction: Big Tech companies are among the wealthiest in the world (for instance, with its stock market value of US $2.9 trillion, Apple is bigger than the entire stock market of any country in the world except the US and Japan). It is shaping the very structure of the world’s communications, with experts worried that the world’s two largest data powers, the US and China, are increasingly associated with exclusive networks of undersea communications cables. And most importantly, it continues the legacy of dispossession and injustice started by colonialism.
This book is the story of this data grab, and why it represents a reshaping of the world’s resources that is worthy of comparison to historical colonialism’s landgrab. It is the story, in other words, of a data colonialism that superimposes a data grab over the historical landgrab. We already know how the colonial story develops. To get a preview of the kinds of long-term impacts data colonialism will likely have, we don’t need to engage in hypotheticals. We need only to look at the historical record. Our present and not just our past is irredeemably colonial, and the new data colonialism is a core part of that.
The Four X’s of Colonialism
Today, you are the King of England. But just as easily you could have ruled over colonial Spain, France or the Netherlands. Regardless of your choice, the task ahead of you is essentially the same: there are territories to be settled, resources to be traded, cities to be built, and native populations to be pacified. A fair amount of ambition and greed seems to be a requirement for the job.
Explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate—the tools of your trade. With a few clicks, you apply these strategies in succession as you establish your empire. Then you apply them again. And again. And if your empire should fall, throttled by the competition or vanquished in a war, that’s not a problem. You can simply start anew, because this is only a videogame: Sid Meier’s Colonization, a turn-based strategy game released in 1994 (reissued in 2008).
Explore. Expand. Exploit. Exterminate. This is the time-tested “Four-X” formula for playing strategy video games. But it is also a fair summary of the formula applied by European colonizers to create vast fortunes for themselves, vast misery for everyone else, and in the process reshape completely the organization of the world’s resources.
Colonialism was a complicated project that required complicated enterprises. We’ve mentioned the British South Africa Company already, and there was of course the East India Company as well. The Spanish had the Casa de la Contratación de las Indias, while the Portuguese founded the Companhia do Commércio da Índia. The Dutch had their own Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, which during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries employed over a million Europeans to work in Asia, exporting 2.5 million tons of goods, and which was legally sanctioned to declare war, engage in piracy, establish colonies and coin money. All of these companies had close links with their respective nation’s rulers, and complex bureaucracies emerged around them.
In their operations, they neatly followed the Four-X model. They explored the world by launching missions to “discover” new places they could control through military and technological means; they expanded their dominions by establishing colonies where native labor and resources could be appropriated by force; they exploited those colonies by setting up a global system of trade where those resources could be converted into wealth, always to the advantage of the colonizer; and they exterminated any opposition by the colonized, in the process eliminating their ways of being in the world. From 1492 to about the middle of the twentieth century, that’s the story of colonialism in a nutshell. By applying the Four-X model, European colonizers managed to control over 84 percent of the globe, even though Europe represents only 8 percent of the planet’s landmass.
Let’s see how this matches the actions of Big Tech corporations.
Today, Big Tech’s efforts to explore and expand don’t involve continental land, but the virtual territories of our datafied lives: our shopping habits, for sure, but also our interactions with family, friends, lovers, and coworkers, the space of our homes, the space of our towns, our hobbies and entertainment, our workouts, our political discussions, our health records, our commutes, our studies, and on and on. There is hardly a territory or activity that is beyond this kind of colonization, and there is hardly a corner of the world that remains untouched by its technologies and platforms.
But, as with historical colonialism, that territorial capture is just the start. Once colonies were established, a system was put in place for the continuous extraction of resources from these territories, and for the transformation of these resources into riches. Big Tech has achieved a similar feat of exploitation by setting up business models that convert “our” data—that is, data resulting from tracking our lives and those of others—into wealth and power for them (but not for us). At the micro level, this means that our data is used to target us individually through advertising or profiling. At the macro level, this means that our data is aggregated and used to make decisions or predictions impacting large groups of people, such as the training of an algorithm to discriminate based on race, gender, economic status, or medical condition. This is possible thanks to a rearrangement of many aspects of our daily life in such a way that ensures we are continuously generating data.
Which brings us to the fourth “X,” where the picture is more complex. In history, colonial extermination took many forms. Principally, there were deaths caused by war, mass suicide, disease, starvation, and other forms of violence: 175 million Indigenous people in the Americas at the hands of the Spanish, Portuguese, British, and US; 100 million in India at the hands of the British; 36 million Africans who perished in transit during the transatlantic slave trade (in addition to those who perished as slaves once they arrived); one million in Algeria killed by the French; hundreds of thousands in Indonesia killed by the Dutch; and millions more who cannot be easily counted.
But brutal physical violence was not the only option. Early on, colonizers realized they needed to be able to deploy other forms of extermination that eliminated not just individual lives, but also the economic and social alternatives to colonialism (which in itself entailed the extermination of life, but at a slower rate). One strategy was the imposition of agricultural monocultures that were highly profitable for the colonizer but destroyed the ability of the colonized to feed themselves. Think of the Dutch investment in coffee production in the East Indies, which went from a harvest of one hundred pounds (45 kilograms) in 1711 to twelve million pounds (5.4 million kilograms) in 1723. Or think of the colonial sugar trade, which created great poverty and misery in the Caribbean while contributing a significant 5 percent to the British gross domestic product at its peak during the eighteenth century (without slavery, sugar would just have been too expensive for most British people to consume).
Another strategy of (economic) extermination was the throttling of business opportunities through the flooding of markets with cheap goods that eliminated homegrown industries. An example of this is the British cotton trade, which inundated global markets with cheap machine-made textiles that destroyed the lifestyles and livelihoods of domestic cultivators, spinners, and weavers in colonies such as India, not to mention the devastating human cost paid by plantation slaves in America. Throughout the colonial world, instructions like the following (sent from London to the governor of Quebec in 1763) were issued with the goal of retarding local industry: “it is Our Express Will and Pleasure, that you do not, upon any Pretence whatever . . . give your Assent to any Law or Laws for setting up any Manufactures . . . which are hurtful and prejudicial to this Kingdom.”
The monopolistic and anti-competitive practices of Big Tech are also having disruptive effects. The scale on which they operate cannot be ignored: if as late as 1945 one in three people on the planet was living under colonial rule, today, around one in three people on the planet has a Facebook account, and almost everyone uses search engines of some sort. The contexts and impacts are obviously different, but this resemblance in scale means that companies like Meta—which now owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp—or OpenAI have a lot of power over the lives of a lot of people. Meta’s power, many have argued, has contributed to the spread of misinformation and hate amidst genocidal violence (like in Myanmar), health crises (anti-vaccine disinformation), and political interference (the Cambridge Analytica scandal). Meanwhile, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, believes that the opportunity to solve humanity’s problems with Artificial Intelligence is so appealing that it is worth the risk of destroying the world as we know it. In other words, if AI ends up massively disrupting social values and institutions, as many experts claim could happen, Altman thinks it will be worth paying this price because of the problems AI will solve in the process. But others are not so sure this is a good bargain, which is why they are asking questions about where Big Tech’s new power to determine what is relevant, normal, acceptable, or true is heading.
Forms of economic and cultural extermination will, necessarily, take time to unfold, but they are the potential consequences of a change we can already see: a major shift in power relations that flows from the capture of virtual territories. Meanwhile, a very different story is being told about data, told with a much more positive twist. And here too there is a historical parallel. Colonialism has always required a strong civilizing mission, an imposed worldview that dismissed all alternatives and rendered invisible all contributions emanating from the colonized. This worldview allowed the colonizers to control not just bodies, but hearts and minds as well. In the past, Christianity and Western science were the cornerstones of this civilizing mission. They delineated the path towards the salvation of colonized souls and promised them a share in humanity’s scientific progress, provided they remained within their assigned roles.
Big Tech too has a civilizing mission that is mixed up with its technologies and business goals. Part of this civilizing mission continues to revolve around Western science: network science, data science, computer science, and so on. The other part no longer revolves around Christianity, but around parallel sublime notions like the convenience that will supposedly make all our lives easier, the connectivity that apparently will bring new forms of community, and the new forms of science and Artificial Intelligence associated with machines that purportedly can solve problems better than humans. It’s not as if some of these dreams are not becoming real for a select few; it’s just that they risk becoming nightmares for everyone else in the form of lost livelihoods, new forms of exploited labor, and the loss of control over vital personal data.
Civilizing missions, economic motives, the exercise of power, and the introduction of specific technologies have been deeply intermingled throughout the history of colonialism, but always with an uneven impact that favors some but not others. Take the introduction of the electrical grid to India throughout the Madras Presidency in the early twentieth century. Electricity was considered a triumph of Western science over the “devil of darkness,” and while it was initially used exclusively to improve the lives of white people as a display of cultural superiority, its application was eventually extended to the rest of the population as a kind of advertisement for the supposed benefits of colonialism. It powered cinemas, illuminated public spaces, propelled tramcars, and provided energy to places like hospitals—all while generating income for British companies. But beyond these comforts, amusements, and public services, electricity also served to run the lighthouses that guided ships carrying colonial goods, powered weapon factories, and electrified prison barbed fences that kept the population in check, extended the operating hours of offices and printing presses carrying out the colonizer’s administrative work, increased revenue by accelerating industrial and agricultural production, and provided the backbone for communication and transportation networks that guaranteed the smooth functioning of the empire.
Replace “electricity” with “data” and, while the specifics are different, some elements of the story remain eerily similar. Ways of processing data are also heralded as scientific achievements, a gift that promises convenience, connectivity, and new forms of intelligence. But look under the surface of this civilizing gift, and you will find that it also brings new forms of surveillance (through facial recognition or workplace monitoring), discrimination (when algorithms deny or control access to services based on people’s profiles), and exploitation (when gig workers’ wages are continuously adjusted downwards, for instance).
A discussion of the colonial legacy of Western science will be a recurring theme throughout the book, and this is a touchy subject. To point out the ways in which Western science has been used to justify social and environmental harms might come across as a wholesale dismissal of the benefits and contributions of science, which are many (not least to monitor and model the harms that humanity is currently doing to our environment and, if we can find them, monitor potential solutions). In no way is our argument anti-science, nor do we wish to fan the flames of science denialism. But that doesn’t exempt us from facing head-on the important critiques that colonized peoples have made of the ways in which Western science was used during and after colonialism to control and exploit the natural and social realms. In fact, it is only by looking at contemporary science through this colonial lens that we see these continuities, which go back to the origins of modernity generally and of modern science. That is all the more vital when this problematic legacy continues to shape developments like data science and AI, which have huge impacts on our present and our future. It is exactly as the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe has said: “Our era is attempting to bring back into fashion the old myth that the West alone has a monopoly on the future.”
Raw Materials
The dispossession of our data proceeds largely unabated. While it is the Big Tech companies that get the critical headlines, the data grab is not just down to a few rogue companies: it is happening at every scale, sometimes in dark corners and sometimes in plain sight.
Take for example Lasso, a leading marketer in the US health sector who you almost certainly have never heard of. Personal health data is widely assumed to be legally protected, but Lasso has found a way to offer a number of products for marketers who want to reach customers interested in healthcare, including Blueprint, Connect, and Triggers. While Lasso, as one would expect, says it is compliant with US health data regulations, its ambitions for Blueprint are striking. To quote from its webpages:
Lasso Blueprint enables marketers to create high-value audiences composed of health providers and consumers based on diagnoses, medications, procedures, insurance data, demographic information, and much more. The product provides audience counts in real-time . . . audiences can also be dynamically refreshed on a weekly basis with the latest real-world data to ensure you [the marketer] never miss an opportunity to engage with your targets.
So, even if your health data remains strictly anonymized, it is collected in bundles which are then used to uniquely target you as a consumer with a particular medical history. It hardly matters whether your name is on the data package. All this relies on sophisticated data processing by Xandr, a company that was acquired for US $1 billion by Microsoft in 2022, and operates far from news headlines.
Data capture through surveillance for the purpose of marketing or algorithmic profiling was the biggest problem we had to worry about until recently. But the vertiginous evolution of AI in the last few years has proven that data colonialism is unleashing effects that may transform how we think or create—or, more specifically, how we allow machines to do thinking or creating for us. Consider what is happening in the art, culture, and media sectors with the arrival of natural language generation and generative AI tools. These programs are mimicking our creative endeavors using Artificial Intelligence algorithms, with increasing degrees of authenticity. Given a few text instructions, AI tools like ChatGPT, DALL-E , DeepDream, or DeepMind (the first two owned by OpenAI, the other two by Google) can generate text, images, sound or human speech that not only seem like they were generated by a human, but can imitate a specific author like Jane Austen, a painter like Salvador Dalí, or a musician like Fela Kuti.
For all this to be possible—for the AI to copy what Austen, Dalí, or Kuti read, paint, or sound like—it needs to learn what other artists, or indeed all of us, read, paint, or sound like. In other words, it needs to analyze not only Austen’s novels, but other novelists’ works too, as well as what you have written; it needs to analyze not only Kuti’s voice, but your voice too. It can fetch them from repositories that may contain the videos we upload to social media platforms or the voice messages we leave on our friends’ phones.
Some people may not think the AI generation of derivatives that mimic someone famous or unfamous are that big a deal. They can be seen as an entertaining gimmick, or perhaps a useful work tool (imagine being able to edit a voice or video message without having to re-record it). But questions about authenticity, about the value of original work, about our ability to recognize altered records, and about who controls the power to perform these feats are worthy of our consideration in these early days of Generative AI.
And there’s a bigger point too: that our collective cultural and social products now serve as the extracted raw material on which AI relies. For example, Google’s MusicLM software, which can generate melodies based on instructions like “Meditative song, calming and soothing, with flutes and guitars,” was trained on 280,000 hours of music. Did Google pay to license all of the music it used for this purpose? Not likely. This is probably the reason why it decided to delay the release of this tool for a while. If the generated music were to sound too much like the source material from which it derived, this would open the door to potential lawsuits. But eventually Google released the program free of charge, like most of its products. In its final form, the AI will not comply with requests to copy specific artists or vocals, allowing Google to avoid potential charges of copyright infringement. But there is still a corporation expropriating our cultural production as source material to train a machine to do the work of humans, because machines will be able to do the work more quickly and cheaply.
From internet searches to cloud services to generative AI, Google doesn’t need to charge us to use its products, because we are the source material for its products. Allowing the public to use its tools for free (as a way to “empower the creative process,” in the case of MusicLM) cannot conceal the nature and scale of this data “heist,” as Naomi Klein has called it.
Whether hidden in dark corners or not, these are extensive acts of appropriation. We are talking about the capturing and monetization, through data, of our collective activities, our interactions with each other across time and space, our shared resources. The “cool” factor of “generative AI” is basically a device to distract from this.
Welcome to data colonialism. It is happening everywhere. It is an appropriation of resources on a truly colonial scale. A data grab that will change the course of history, just as the original colonial landgrab did five centuries ago.
Adapted and excerpted from Data Grab by Ulises A. Mejias and Nick Couldry. © 2024 by Ulises A. Mejias and Nick Couldry. All rights reserved.
Ulises A. Mejias is professor of communication studies at the State University of New York at Oswego. Nick Couldry is professor of media, communications, and social theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science and faculty associate at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. Together, they are the authors of The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism.
Data Grab is available now from our website or your favorite bookseller.
]]>Enjoy an exclusive 30% discount through March with code WHMHEALTH at checkout on our website.
Looking through the Speculum: Examining the Women’s Health Movement
By Judith A. Houck
“At a moment when reproductive and bodily autonomy are under threat more than ever, Houck tells a timely story of women’s health movement activists who demystified and transformed reproductive medicine to establish liberatory health practices and institutions. Houck’s protagonists also grappled with intersectional marginalization, leading many to demand healthcare that embraced the particular needs and demands of lesbians, trans people, and women of color.”—Jennifer Nelson, University of Redlands
Sexualizing Cancer: HPV and the Politics of Cancer Prevention
By Laura Mamo
“An engaging, informative, and exceptionally erudite effort to explicate and analyze the complex, decades-long intertwining of HPV, cancer, gender, and sexuality. Sexualizing Cancer will be a welcome resource for scholars, clinicians, and policymakers.”—Laura M. Carpenter, Vanderbilt University
Birth Figures: Early Modern Prints and the Pregnant Body
By Rebecca Whiteley
“Whiteley’s work, at the intersection of medical and art history, beautifully illuminates the multiple meanings of images of unborn children in early modern Europe. She offers fresh, sophisticated, and nuanced interpretations of images that have puzzled me for years!”—Mary E. Fissell, Johns Hopkins University
Dr. Nurse: Science, Politics, and the Transformation of American Nursing
By Dominique A. Tobbell
“No other volume comes close to Dr. Nurse in describing and analyzing the journey of American nurses to establish nursing as an academic discipline and nurses as valued researchers in the decades after World War II. Tobbell’s book is a critical addition to the current scholarship and will be welcomed by nursing PhD programs and by students and scholars of women’s studies and education and policy history.”—Julie A. Fairman, University of Pennsylvania
The Maternal Imprint: The Contested Science of Maternal-Fetal Effects
By Sarah S. Richardson Publication
Supported by the Susan Elizabeth Abrams Fund in History of Science
“An outstanding depiction of the mutual constitution of science and society. Cleverly unpacking the complex history of scientific debates on so-called ‘maternal impressions’ (later, ‘maternal effects’) on offspring and future generations, author Sarah Richardson unveils the epistemological origins of concepts we take for granted today. . . . The book is an epistemological provocation, a reminder that science is a political enterprise, and an invitation to produce knowledge that empowers women instead of knowledge that makes them solely responsible for our collective future.”—Science
Tangled Diagnoses: Prenatal Testing, Women, and Risk
By Ilana Löwy
“Löwy gives us a masterful analysis that will be troubling to some, eye-opening to others, and thoroughly useful to all who read it. Tangled Diagnoses will interest not only historians, sociologists, and anthropologists of medicine and reproductive technology, but also advocates and policy-interested constituencies in the fields of disability, public health, and gender studies.”-“Löwy gives us a masterful analysis that will be troubling to some, eye-opening to others, and thoroughly useful to all who read it. Tangled Diagnoses will interest not only historians, sociologists, and anthropologists of medicine and reproductive technology, but also advocates and policy-interested constituencies in the fields of disability, public health, and gender studies.”—Rayna Rapp, New York University
Reconfiguring Reproduction: Feminist Health Perspectives on Assisted Reproductive Technologies
Edited by Sarojini N. and Vrinda Marwah
Examines the Assisted Reproductive Technology industry by bringing a feminist health lens to bear on the experiences of women in countries such as Korea, Canada, the United States, Israel, Australia, India, and others.
By Steven Epstein Publication
“An erudite, groundbreaking book.”-Choice
Back to the Breast: Natural Motherhood and Breastfeeding in America
By Jessica Martucci
“Back to the Breast is a fascinating, skillful weaving of the histories of technology and medicine, women’s lived experiences, and feminist analysis. . . . Martucci’s study reminds us that even the most basic biological functions are not immune to the effects of culture and society. This book will be of interest to historians of technology and medicine, as well as women’s studies scholars and those interested in social and cultural movements that have shaped our century.”-Technology and Culture
]]>What it’s like on the other side of the hiring desk
Olivia is tired. So tired. Her voicemail is full, and the number of unread emails in her inbox is five digits. She’s up against a deadline, and because she’s down a staff member, she has to do both her job and that person’s job. Her boss is out of town, so she has to schedule and run meetings. Plus, her partner just had a baby so no one in the house is sleeping.
The staff member who’d been her assistant was super competent, so Olivia promoted them to another role. Olivia cares about the people she hires, and she goes out of her way to help folks advance in their careers, within her organization or elsewhere. She loves mentoring young people, and they appreciate how much they learn from her. Her most recent assistant helped write the job description so the new person would have the necessary skills to make Olivia’s life easier. But without that person? Olivia is drowning in work.
And she’s drowning in resumes. A listing on LinkedIn has netted more than two hundred resumes a week. Though the job ad said a cover letter was optional, Olivia prefers applicants who take the time to write one. Those letters help her understand the applicants’ personalities and decide if she wants to meet them. So she skims the letters first. She’s been doing this work for days now, and (Did I mention?) she’s tired.
Olivia doesn’t bother to read anything longer than one page. If she spots more than a few typos or spelling errors, into the trash the letter goes. Letters from applicants who say they are applying for a job at a different organization (oops) or don’t mention the specific job she listed—into the trash.
Each time she sees “I am the most qualified applicant for this job,” she snorts and puts the letter aside. No, you’re not, she thinks. You have no idea how strong the pool is.
When she reads how this job would be a good stepping-stone toward an applicant’s future plans, her colleague down the hall hears her exclaim, “No kidding! I know exactly why this job is good for you. Tell me why you’re good for this position. I need someone to help me get through this big honking pile of work!”
Her eyes glaze when she sees the same meaningless words and phrases: passionate, committed, hardworking, detail-oriented, driven. What on earth does that look like in the experiences you’ve had? And why didn’t you apply some of that passion to proofreading your materials, or ask a truly detail-oriented person for help?
These reactions may seem harsh. And to a degree they are. But if your application materials represent your best effort when you have loads of time to think about how you present yourself and could have taken advantage of opportunities to get help, mistakes in grammar and punctuation and spelling should not happen. If you can’t impress under these tame circumstances, how will you perform under pressure, on deadline, and when the organization’s reputation is on the line?
As with the cover letters, Olivia doesn’t read resumes longer than one page. If they don’t include contact info, or if it’s hard to find? Into the trash. If she can’t figure out how a candidate’s experience sets them up to do the job? Trash. She doesn’t try to decipher anything with fancy typefaces or lines of information that crawl vertically up the page. The trash bin is getting full.
If someone attended seven colleges before finally graduating? Well, Olivia understands life can get in the way of school. But if they’ve offered no explanation? Trash. If a candidate describes simple tasks with overblown language (“Escorted canines to relief stations”), she laughs and shows the document to the colleague down the hall, who will also find it hilarious. The resume goes into the trash, but Olivia knows they’ll mention “canine relief” to each other for years to come, whenever they see anyone walking a dog.
For those who take up valuable real estate on their resumes with lists of references, she feels sad and thinks, Why? We’re not at that stage yet! She also wonders about too much blank space. Surely a person did something—worked in a warehouse, operated a cash register, babysat a younger sibling. Those experiences could tell her a lot, especially if the candidate makes clear what they learned. Why wouldn’t those be listed?
If hobbies include riding dressage or earning a private pilot’s license or acquiring a PADI scuba certification, but the applicant lists no work experience or internships, Olivia figures the resume has come from a child of privilege who’s gotten everything they ever wanted and probably doesn’t need to work. She knows that’s her personal prejudice and knows, too, that other managers may see those hobbies and think, Hey, this person is just like me! She’s been in the business world long enough to know most people like applicants who remind them of themselves in some way. And she’s lived long enough to know that life isn’t fair.
Olivia’s job list includes “must haves” and “nice to haves.” She skims for the qualifications she knows she needs. If someone says they know Microsoft Excel or Adobe Illustrator, she wonders how proficient they are and why they haven’t listed experience to back up those claims. She gives a little cheer for applicants who’ve earned industry-recognized certifications.
When she’s winnowed the pile to a bunch of promising applicants, she gives up, turns off her computer, and leaves the office. She started out tired. Now she’s exhausted and, to be honest, kind of pissed off. As she walks to her car, she feels annoyed that so many recent college grads wrote only about what they wanted from the job. Few of them had done real research into her organization or even addressed their letters to her personally. How could you know you’re the right match or the “ideal candidate” and want to work here if you seem to know nothing about this job or company or the skills we painstakingly listed in the job description?
How did they get to be so self-centered? And cocky? Confidence is fine. It can be essential in many jobs, especially sales. But most of these applicants came off as downright arrogant. Who wants to work with someone who thinks they’re all that? Not Olivia. It’s not about you, she thinks before she drags herself to bed. I don’t care about you and what you want.
Yet. True, Olivia doesn’t give a hoot about applicants she will never meet. But she will come to care for the person she eventually hires. She always does. She works hard to find a good match, someone who shares the values of her organization and would be an asset. She knows they will come in without specific skills, and she’ll have to make an investment in teaching them before they can truly contribute. She values employees who ask lots of questions; those people she would mentor and promote.
Maybe, she thought as she lay awake, stressed because she needed to hire someone as soon as possible, these recent grads just don’t know what they don’t know when it comes to applying for jobs. Maybe no one taught them how to approach the process, how to be professional.
The next day, eager to give applicants the benefit of the doubt, and with the understanding that writing resumes and cover letters is hard for everyone (and realizing the ones who made it to the top of her pile had probably been smart enough to seek help), Olivia was excited to start talking to candidates. Normally she would send an email inviting an applicant to set up a time to talk, but she was desperate to get someone in place and, in any case, the job sometimes required cold-calling clients, so she skipped that step.
The first person’s phone rang and rang and finally went to voicemail. The outgoing message sounded as if it was recorded at a party. Olivia ended the call. She tried the next person and got no answer until an automated message informed her the voicemail was full. She finally got through to the fifth person on her list, who answered with “Yo!”
Once Olivia explained who she was and why she was calling, the applicant quickly changed tone. She asked, “So, why do you want to come work for us?” The answer: “Well, I need a job.” Thanks, but no thanks.
The next candidate seemed more promising, and they had a good chat—until Olivia asked if they had any questions and they said, “Can you tell me about your company?” Olivia thought, Seriously? as she ended the call.
The next person had a lot to say. So much, in fact, he interrupted and talked over her. Out.
She did get a panicked phone call asking if all the materials had been submitted and how they looked. That would have been fine if the caller had been the applicant. It wasn’t. The applicant’s mother was calling to check up on her son. Olivia wondered if Mom was planning to come to work with him too.
The series of ten-minute phone calls had given her a headache. After a few days Olivia had found some people she thought highly enough of to invite for interviews with her and a few members of her team.
The first person never showed. I’ve been ghosted, Olivia thought. No. Couldn’t be. When she called to see if he was okay, he said, “Oh, I got a better offer.” She made a note in her files in case he ever applied for another job at her organization.
The next person came in and impressed Olivia and her colleagues with her professionalism and the way she spoke about her experience. Before the interview, she had asked for a list of the people who would be questioning her, which Olivia was happy to provide. The poised young woman had clearly done research on each of them and asked smart and appropriate questions that led to a terrific conversation. But when Olivia asked the receptionist for her input, the longtime employee and valued team member said the applicant had failed to hold the door for someone coming in behind her with an armful of packages. Then she talked loudly on her phone while waiting for the interview. When the receptionist asked her to lower her voice, she was rude. Out.
Another person, even more qualified, gave a wowser of an interview. She spoke with excitement and dedication about what she wanted to do in her career and the mission that drove her. Unfortunately, none of what that candidate talked about had anything to do with the work at Olivia’s organization.
The next applicant was so anxious he sweated through his shirt. Everyone on the interview team told him it was fine to be nervous, completely understandable, and he could stop and take a breath. When he finally calmed down and was asked about the work-study job he had in college, he talked about how demanding his boss was and how unfairly he’d been treated. He said he’d hated every minute of working for that supervisor. Out.
A candidate whose resume listed an impressive achievement, when asked to explain what he’d contributed to the results, was forced to admit he’d been just one of a dozen team members, and it soon became clear he hadn’t actually understood the project. Out.
For another candidate, a quick reference check revealed they hadn’t even worked in the position listed on the resume.
One kept mentioning “our beach house in Cabo” and “our ski condo in Aspen.” By “our” they meant their parents’. Privilege is fine, Olivia thought. Entitlement isn’t.
Eventually the team narrowed the field to two promising candidates. In the final round of interviews, one said, “Just for funsies, when could I expect to be promoted?” Out.
The other finalist, whom they hired, showed up on the first day of work and said, “You know, I accepted the job, but I don’t think I’m being paid what I’m worth. I think I should be making a higher salary.” When they showed up the next day, Olivia told them it wasn’t going to work out.
And then the cute little robot had to start screening resumes all over again.
Rachel Toor, professor of creative writing at Eastern Washington University in Spokane is the author of six books of nonfiction, including Write Your Way In: Crafting an Unforgettable Admissions Essay, Admissions Confidential: An Insider’s Account of the Elite College Selection Process, and a young adult novel. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Runner’s World, Glamour, and many other publications.
Why You, Why Me, Why Now is available now on our website or from your favorite bookseller.
]]>Vector: A Surprising Story of Space, Time, and Mathematical Transformation
Robyn Arianrhod
“Everyone understands what it means to move at some particular speed in some particular direction. But it took a long time to start thinking of such behavior in terms of a single clarifying concept, the vector. Arianrhod’s lively and detailed chronicle explains why vectors and tensors are at the heart of our best ways to think about the universe.”—Sean Carroll, author of The Biggest Ideas in the Universe
Einstein and the Quantum Revolutions
Alain Aspect, With a Foreword by David Kaiser
“Aspect’s beautiful experiment, completed in 1982, had a catalyzing effect on the scientific community. . . . The tiny spark of the second quantum revolution began to grow.”—David Kaiser, from the foreword
Frog Day: A Story of 24 Hours and 24 Amphibian Lives
Marty Crump, Illustrated by Tony Angell
With a text by celebrated herpetologist Marty Crump and artwork by the great natural history illustrator Tony Angell, this second installment in Chicago’s new Earth Day series is an hourly guide that follows twenty-four frog species as they eat, find mates, care for their young, and survive harsh environments.
Simulating the Cosmos: Why the Universe Looks the Way It Does
Romeel Davé
From Reaktion Books’ Universe series
“Davé starts his concise and well-written book by explaining the fundamental limitations of observational astronomy: even with the best telescopes imaginable we will never be able to watch individual galaxies form and evolve because of the cosmic timescales involved . . . but what we can do is model these distant targets on computers, and in Simulating the Cosmos cosmologist Davé takes us through the A-Z of these simulations. . . . This is an enthralling read that is highly recommended to readers, including prospective astrophysicists, keen to understand more about how modern cosmology is actually accomplished.”―BBC Sky at Night
Phenomena: Doppelmayr’s Celestial Atlas
Giles Sparrow, With a Foreword by Martin Rees
“It seems something of a disservice to a work of this seriousness to say how beautiful it is, but that is what will first strike the reader. . . . This is a book ultimately as accessible to the non-scientist as it is to the specialist. Doppelmayr’s mathematical notations of the motions of the planets, the charts of loops, parabolas and ellipses might at first seem a baffling panorama of unknowing. With Sparrow’s help, however, they give up a story of increasing fascination.”―Spectator
The Book of Frogs: A Life-Size Guide to Six Hundred Species from around the World
Tim Halliday
“If you are a serious (and I mean serious) fan of the frog, you are in for a real treat. From poisonous frogs to tiny toenail-sized frogs, whistlers, ‘explosive breeders,’ endangered frogs, and recently discovered frogs, author and one of the world’s leading frog experts Halliday covers an exhaustive gamut of frog species from around the planet. A wonderful source for anyone trying to decipher and learn about frogs they find in nature.”―Boing Boing
What’s Eating the Universe? And Other Cosmic Questions
Paul Davies
“A whirlwind tour through the vastness of space and the innermost recesses of subatomic matter. . . . A long career in cosmology, astrobiology, and quantum mechanics gives Davies a keen insight into the realities of research. . . . Like the immense void that gapes across the sky in the direction of the constellation Eridanus, a yawning emptiness that some have suggested may be the sign of another universe set to gobble up our own, the mysteries of space are so vast and so strange that we cannot but be amazed.”―Wall Street Journal
Quantum Legacies: Dispatches from an Uncertain World
David Kaiser, With a Foreword by Alan Lightman
“Quantum Legacies does not disappoint. . . . It is a breath of fresh air to see physics writing like this: lucid and friendly, sober and thoughtful, and willing to trust the reader’s engagement and intelligence rather than demanding the former and underestimating the latter. . . . Superb popular science. . . . It is hard for me to imagine any physicist who wouldn’t enjoy the fine cloth from which it is cut, nor the pleasing effect it makes.”―Physics World
Marty Crump
“Eye of Newt brings thousands of years of lore into the fight against extinction. Read a chapter here and there, and look up your favorite creepy crawly in the index. Or, look up one you loathe. You’ll see it in a new light and find a respect for it that you didn’t know you had.”―Sierra
Cosmos: The Art and Science of the Universe
Roberta J. M. Olson and Jay M. Pasachoff
From Reaktion Books
“Featuring hundreds of beautiful illustrations, paintings, prints, and photographs, Cosmos explores astronomical phenomena and humans’ fascination with them throughout history, as evidenced by depictions in works of art. The book is the result of a collaboration between astronomer Pasachoff and art historian Olson, who spent the past three decades collecting the images that would feature in this interdisciplinary study. Complementing the imagery is a narrative that chronicles developments in both astronomy and art over the past several millennia.”―Physics Today
Beyond Weird: Why Everything You Thought You Knew about Quantum Physics Is Different
Philip Ball
“Ball’s gorgeously lucid text takes us to the edge of contemporary theorizing about the foundations of quantum mechanics. Beyond Weird is easily the best book I’ve read on the subject.”—Washington Post
Charlotte Sleigh
From Reaktion Books’ Animal series
“Sleigh does a great job of condensing the extensive cultural and scientific literature on frogs into a stream of absorbing facts and stories through which the reader can easily hop. Frog is further brought to life through its collection of thought-provoking and high-quality illustrations. . . . For those readers interested in a rich yet concise account of the biology of frogs and their place in culture, this book is an excellent choice.”—Natterchat Magazine
Five Photons: Remarkable Journeys of Light Across Space and Time
James Geach
From Reaktion Books
“There are a thousand-and-one tales to be told by the photons from space, and Geach treats us to five of the most fascinating. . . . Geach’s tour-de-force in explaining complex science is making light work (pun intended!) of explaining the Sachs-Wolfe effect. If that’s intriguing you . . . buy a copy of this excellent book!”―Popular Astronomy
Bill Leatherbarrow
From Reaktion Books’ Kosmos series
“The more astronomy has learned about our solar system, the more fascinating these lifeless worlds have become. This is certainly true of Earth’s nearest neighbor and very nearly sister planet, the moon. It’s in every way the most familiar of all our celestial neighbors, and yet, as Leatherbarrow’s beautifully illustrated new book makes clear, the moon still holds surprises. Wonderfully produced by Reaktion Books, The Moon takes readers through the various stages of humanity’s curiosity about the moon, including the first rudimentary attempts to understand what this luminous object in the sky actually was. Leatherbarrow’s energetic narrative tells the familiar story of the leaps science has made in seeing this next-door neighbor clearly.”―Christian Science Monitor
Hunting for Frogs on Elston, and Other Tales from Field & Street
Jerry Sullivan
“Sullivan had a unique passion for urban ecology and his writings bring out the naturalist in all of us. A master of the short essay (each is 1000 to 1500 words), the author captivated his audience by skillfully blending ecological theory, natural history, and humor. . . . An excellent resource for any urban dweller with an interest in natural history. . . . The essays can be enjoyed equally by scientists and nonscientists, whether or not they have ever been to or lived in Chicago. This book is also a ‘must read’ for any high school or college environmental science class, especially [in] the growing field of urban ecology.”―Quarterly Review of Biology
Leon Golub and Jay M. Pasachoff
From Reaktion Books’ Kosmos series
“Our Solar System’s own yellow dwarf star has been variously worshiped and taken for granted by the humans who depend on it. All the while, our scientific understanding of the Sun has increased exponentially, and Smithsonian astrophysicist Golub and Williams College astronomer Pasachoff fill readers in on what we know and how we came to know it. From the spots on its surface to the physics at its core, this tour of the Sun is intriguing, accessible, and technically detailed.”―American Scientist
Gravity’s Ghost and Big Dog: Scientific Discovery and Social Analysis in the Twenty-First Century
Harry Collins
“In part an account of sociological fieldwork among scientists in the field and part astronomy-history mystery, Collins’s book is a terrific read informed by almost forty years of research.”―Nature
The Ecology and Behavior of Amphibians
Kentwood D. Wells
“A monumental work on salamander, frog, and caecilian ecology, physiology, and behavior. . . . As a single source reference on amphibians, this book has no competitors. It can easily be read and assimilated by amateur naturalists, and it will be an invaluable encyclopedic source for conservationists, field biologists, and amphibian specialists for years to come. An outstanding resource for museum, municipal, college, and university libraries. Essential.”—Choice
James Geach
From Reaktion Books
“Astrophysicist Geach goes an order of magnitude further than the usual popular astronomy title—those full of breathtaking images, but little in the way of context—by giving readers the fascinating stories revealed by those images: how galaxies are created, how they evolve, and what they tell us about our universe. The sheer variety is stunning. . . . Gorgeous color photos, coupled with clear and engaging explanations of the science behind them, make this book a winner on every level.”―Publishers Weekly
Time Travel and Warp Drives: A Scientific Guide to Shortcuts through Time and Space
Allen Everett and Thomas Roman
“Einstein meets Captain Kirk in this improbable foray into the frontiers of theoretical physics, where readers survey the exciting possibilities for traveling through time and between galaxies. . . . Relying only minimally on technical jargon and formulas, the authors open to view the exciting conceptual prospects for designing a time machine capable of slipping backward through the centuries and of riding fast-than-light warp bubbles through the cosmos. . . . Armchair scientists share the thrill of peeking into the universe’s deepest secrets. Penetrating science illuminates humankind’s most audacious dreams.”―Booklist (starred review)
The Amphibians and Reptiles of Costa Rica: A Herpetofauna between Two Continents, between Two Seas
Jay M. Savage, With Photographs by Michael Fogden and Patricia Fodgen
“Magnificent. . . . The Amphibians and Reptiles of Costa Rica reveals how much knowledge has been acquired since naturalists first began documenting the wonders of the Costa Rican herpetofauna. But, as Savage points out, large gaps in our knowledge remain, notably in anuran calls, larval life stages, and behavioral ecology. The author has set a solid stage, and this book will certainly serve as the foundation for decades of ecological, behavioral, and phylogenetic work to come.”―Quarterly Review of Biology
How We See the Sky: A Naked-Eye Tour of Day and Night
Thomas Hockey
“[Hockey] gives us descriptions of the motions of the sun, the moon, the stars, and the planets over a night, over a month, over a year, even over millennia. If you’ve ever wondered about the phases of the moon or the movements of the planets, or wondered why Polaris—the North Star—appears stationary, you can find that information and much more packed in here.”—Wall Street Journal
Our Magnetic Earth: The Science of Geomagnetism
Ronald T. Merrill
“If [you’re looking for a gift for] a self-described geek drawn to science books like an iron filing to a magnet, then consider Our Magnetic Earth, a fascinating explanation of that mysterious force.”―Chicago Tribune
Marty Crump
“Incorporating her fieldwork journals, Crump has written an excellent account of her thirty years as a field biologist in Central and South America. . . . Crump’s sympathetic observations of the local people, their history, and some of their problems with large oil companies, political changes, and habitat destruction to facilitate grazing add an extra dimension. Crump effectively documents the worldwide decline of amphibian populations, including that of Costa Rica’s famous golden frog, stressing that this trend should warn us of problems with our environment. A combination travelog, field guide, and history book, Crump’s book is an excellent addition to any public or academic library.”―Library Journal
Secrets of the Universe: How We Discovered the Cosmos
Paul Murdin
“If your interest in astronomy has been flagging, this is the book to reignite your sense of wonder. . . . This is a marvelous overview of astronomy, from its colorful history to today’s hottest topics. . . . This is a storyteller’s history of astronomy, constructed like a collection of short stories that invites readers to delve in at any point. Murdin approaches each subject with passion, insight, and explanations that make the most complex topics—relativity, gravitation, cosmology—not just accessible, but completely absorbing.”―Ad Astra
The Age of Everything: How Science Explores the Past
Matthew Hedman
“Ever wonder how we know with any certainty that the first humans arrived in the Americas about 11,000 years ago? Or that dinosaurs died out about 65 million years ago? Or that the solar system is about 4.5 billion years old? . . . Hedman is worth reading because he is careful to present both the power and peril of trying to extract precise chronological data. These are all very active areas of study, and as you read Hedman you begin to see how researchers have to be both very careful and incredibly audacious, and how much of our understanding of ourselves—through history, through paleontology, through astronomy—depends on determining the age of everything.”―Boston Globe
Tadpoles: The Biology of Anuran Larvae
Edited by Roy W. McDiarmid and Ronald Altig
“Here, at last, is a specialist publication, written by a team of fourteen international experts, that both provides a review of basic information, and indicates directions requiring further attention. The book radiates the humor and easy-going nature of the editors, while remaining an accurate scientific publication. It is divided into twelve chapters, a useful glossary, 69 pages of literature cited, and indices of authors, subjects, and taxonomy. Each chapter is complete and could serve as a core text in a course on amphibian larvae, and will no doubt become required reading for these and related vertebrate biology courses.”―Herpetological Review
Three Steps to the Universe: From the Sun to Black Holes to the Mystery of Dark Matter
David Garfinkle and Richard Garfinkle
“Meshing their complementary skill sets, physicist David and his brother, science fiction writer Richard, explore some of the knottiest problems facing modern cosmologists. . . . Aside from revealing the science behind the sun, black holes, and dark matter, the Garfinkles demonstrate how science develops. . . . The Garfinkles aren’t afraid to get technical, but this smart, rewarding read is helped by a welcome voice, a feel for narrative, and a useful glossary.”―Publishers Weekly
Environmental Physiology of the Amphibians
Edited by Martin E. Feder and Warren W. Burggren
“A most interesting and comprehensive review (with over 4000 references) of the physiology of this vertebrate class.”―Science
All of these Leap Year books are available from our website or from your favorite bookseller.
]]>In the following excerpt, Cheng visits an outdoor barbeque hosted by a youth empowerment organization where the organizers struggle to secure electricity for the DJ’s sound system. Cheng’s experience at this event, in contrast to the ease with which other groups access electricity with police assistance, demonstrates how public resources distributed through officers’ hands become part of the project of naturalizing police power.
James Jones, the thirty-six-year-old African American activist I met at a Build the Block meeting, invited me to his youth empowerment organization’s Summer Kick-Off event: an outdoor barbeque in a neighborhood park that featured a talent show, a dance competition, and other activities for young people in the community (field note, April 2018). As introduced in chapter 2, James had been previously elected but then dismissed as sergeant at arms of his community council, given that the nonprofit he founded was interested in starting a cop watch patrol. Still, he believed that officers could and should have positive relationships with neighborhood youth, so each year he has continued to invite the police precinct to attend the Summer Kick-Off . As we stood talking in the park, he noted that the officers had yet to arrive. I suggested that perhaps they never actually received the invitation, but he explained that since he was required to apply for an amplified sound permit and the precinct had to sign off on that, “they had to know it was going on” (James Jones, interview, July 17, 2018). Frustrated, he returned to his preparations.
I spent the morning helping James set up: unfolding tables and chairs, arranging balloons, and using a laundry basket to move frozen food from his aunt’s apartment to the park. The most memorable task we had was securing electricity, a key resource for the outdoor event’s DJ equipment, microphone, and sound system. A seemingly trivial undertaking, the logistics involved had actually taken days to coordinate (field note, July 17, 2018). First, James had to persuade a family friend to power the Summer Kick-Off with electricity from their third-floor apartment. Then, he needed a series of extension cords and some dedicated helpers. From the apartment window, a “tosser” had to throw the extension cords down to “catchers” waiting inside the park. But it wasn’t that easy. The window was barred, forcing the tosser to stick his hand through a narrow opening; the park was perpendicular to the building, so the tosser had to throw the cord about twenty feet to his left; and the cord had to clear the fence surrounding the park, which prevented the catchers from coming any closer.
The first try at electrification failed. The cord slapped the ground and did not clear the fence. Painstakingly, the tosser reeled the cord hand over hand, pulling it back up to the third floor.
The second toss also failed. The tosser retracted the cord once more as catchers began congregating around the fence and yelling out chaotic directions. “You gotta lasso it. Make it into a ring,” they shouted while using gestures to accentuate their ideas. It was unclear whether the tosser saw or heard them, given the distance and the background din of the city.
The third try failed too, but finally, after several more attempts, the lasso technique worked. After days of coordination, we had power. We rushed to finish the remaining tasks.
In contrast to these challenges, I asked Mr. Holloway, the Eightieth Precinct Community Council president, how the council gets electricity for its events. He replied, “We can go to one of the officers, and they’ll come out and help us get electricity from the light pole” (Holloway, interview, July 10, 2018). Because police departments are a city agency that can provide access to public utilities like streetlights, obtaining electricity for community council events is as easy as asking an officer to plug the extension cord into the nearest light pole. In the aggregate, such assistance eases the execution of public events for certain organizations. Based on how police exercise their discretion, their help can enable community organizations to avoid logistical hurdles and resource burdens to focus more on the substantive goals of their events. This chapter explains how police departments selectively distribute public resources, regulatory leniency, and coercive force— and how their doing so is fundamental to the strategic relationship-building that undergirds the Policing Machine.
Adapted and excerpted from The Policing Machine by Tony Cheng, published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2024 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
Tony Cheng is assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Duke University.
The Policing Machine is available now from our website or your favorite bookseller.
]]>In 1988, sportswriters Bob Carroll, Pete Palmer, and John Thorn proposed just this style of play in The Hidden Game of Football, but at the time baffled readers scoffed at such a heartless approach to the game. Football was the ultimate team sport and unlike baseball could not be reduced to pure probabilities. Nevertheless, the book developed a cult following among analysts who, inspired by its unorthodox methods, went on to develop the core metrics of football analytics used today: win probability, expected points, QBR, and more.
In the foreword to our new edition of The Hidden Game of Football, Football Outsider’s Aaron Schatz celebrates the significance of this book to the ongoing data analytics revolution.
It started for me in 1999, in a bookstore in New Jersey, which is strange because I don’t live in New Jersey. I was visiting a friend from college. I don’t remember why, but for some reason, we found ourselves in a local bookstore. Browsing through the sports section, I found a book called The Hidden Game of Football. I had no idea that book would change my life and eventually build my career. I grew up as a fan of baseball analytics. I read the Bill James Baseball Abstract every year, not to mention the book that preceded this one, The Hidden Game of Baseball. But by this time baseball wasn’t my favorite sport anymore— football was. Like a lot of fans in the Boston area, I had finally taken notice of the New England Patriots when Bill Parcells and Drew Bledsoe arrived in 1993 and made the team stand out in the Boston sports landscape for the first time. (Some people will tell you that Bostonians were fair-weather football fans until Bill Belichick and Tom Brady showed up, but it was Parcells and Bledsoe who really made the Patriots popular.)
However, I wasn’t looking for a book about football statistics, because I wouldn’t even have thought to look for one. All I knew were yards and touchdowns, the basic football statistics featured on national broadcasts. I didn’t know about The Hidden Game of Football, which was originally published in 1988 and then rereleased in 1998. I paged through it a bit, and it looked interesting enough. It’s not like football statistics were something that fans talked about much. But hey, I liked sabermetrics, I thought; I would probably like this.
I liked the book a lot. It changed how I watched the game of football and brought up all kinds of questions about how the NFL was covered in the early 2000s. In 2003, because I couldn’t get answers to those questions anywhere else, I launched a website called Football Outsiders. It was based primarily on the ideas I gleaned from reading The Hidden Game of Football. I still run that website twenty years later, and our main advanced metrics are still built around the ideas from Hidden Game.
The Hidden Game of Football was the first book to introduce the idea of situational football statistics to the public. The idea is so basic it seems self-evident. Of course, the definition of what makes for a successful play will change based on the down and distance—not to mention where the team is on the field. Coaches talked about football in terms of field position and “moving the sticks,” but football stats were just yardage totals and averages. There had to be a way to account for the fact that a 6-yard completion on third-and-5 was a better play than an 8-yard completion on third-and-10.
This book presented a number of ways to do that, methods that are still at the heart of football analytics today. Hidden Game introduced the idea of success rate, judging plays not just by yardage but also by down and distance. (Success rate compared to a league-average baseline eventually became Defense-adjusted Value Over Average [DVOA], the main metric at Football Outsiders.) Hidden Game featured the first public discussion of win probability analysis based on the current score, time remaining, and field position. And it was the first book to measure expected points added in the NFL, noting that each location on the field had a particular value depending on which team scored next. When Hidden Game showed that the defense, not the offense, was more likely to score next if the offense was backed up behind its own 25-yard line, it provided a mind-blowing new way to think about the game . . . but one that was also totally obvious once you read the explanation.
Critics have often written off statistical analysis in sports as just being about “fantasy numbers.” Reading Hidden Game, it was obvious that the authors’ interest in football went far beyond the yardage and touchdown totals of “skill players.” This book focused on what actually made teams win and lose ballgames. There was a chapter on offensive lines and an entire section on special teams. The authors also explored the history of football beyond the 1986 season covered in the book. They wrote about the development of the game and how football stats came to be so limited, they explained the history behind the quarterback passer rating, and they included an entire chapter on the Hall of Fame.
Going back over Hidden Game, it’s remarkable how many of the basic ideas of football analytics were already apparent to the authors. They suggested that teams go for it on fourth down instead of kicking field goals near the goal line and recommended adding sacks and sack yardage to passer rating so quarterback play would be measured more accurately. They also proposed moving the extra point back to make the game more interesting, which the NFL eventually did in 2015.
And years before I launched Football Outsiders with the same analysis, they showed why the cliché “when player X rushes for 100 yards, his team wins Y% of its games” is so wrong: teams that are losing late have to pass, while teams that are winning late run the ball to chew clock.
Not many people bought The Hidden Game of Football when it came out. It took a lot longer for advanced statistics to circulate in football than in baseball. The ideas really didn’t take hold at all until the internet. Football Outsiders started in 2003. Pro Football Focus began charting games in 2004. Brian Burke’s Advanced Football Analytics launched in 2007. And it’s only in the last few years that advanced analytics have really spread into front offices and onto NFL broadcasts.
But the conversation about football analytics has exploded in recent years. Now you can find all kinds of advanced analysis on Twitter thanks to nflfastR, a publicly available database of play-by-play that goes back to 1999. Want to know whether your team should have punted or gone for it on that fourth down? There’s a bot that updates numbers in real-time for every fourth down during every game on Sunday.
All thirty-two NFL teams now employ at least one analytics staff er, with some teams having up to eight or nine. In 2021, NFL coaches went for it on fourth downs nearly twice as often as historical averages based on situation. Over the last decade contracts have moved toward an analytical understanding of positional value, with running backs making less money and players involved in the passing game (quarterbacks, wide receivers, cornerbacks, and edge rushers) making more.
Meanwhile, the league does its own advanced stats with the Next Gen Stats project, which began tracking players using chips in their pads in 2016. This led to the Big Data Bowl competition, which introduced advanced metrics such as “rushing yardage over expected,” based on the location of all blockers and defenders at the time of the handoff. Rather than being hidden away on some rarely used website, these Next Gen Stats metrics are featured on broadcasts and in a big Amazon Web Services ad campaign. On some networks, you’ll even see win expectancy numbers on screen when there’s a big fourth-down decision to be made.
More than thirty years after it was first released, The Hidden Game of Football remains a solid introduction to the concepts of football analytics. The prose is readable and interesting, and the authors show a clear love for the game and its history. The math is laid out in a simple fashion and isn’t complicated. If more people had read the original Hidden Game, perhaps the football analytics revolution would have started much, much earlier. Instead, this book is a time capsule by three men who were thinking way ahead of everybody else about how to measure the quality of teams and players in the NFL— and how to use those improved measurements to win more games.
They say that not many people bought the first Velvet Underground record, but everyone who did started a band. Well, not many people bought The Hidden Game of Football, and none of those who did started a website since it was 1988 and they didn’t have the internet. But eventually the book found its way into my hands, and by that point it wasn’t difficult to start a website and gather a following writing about the NFL. Plenty of people who followed me got their start in football analytics because they read Football Outsiders. My eternal gratitude goes out to John Thorn, Pete Palmer, and Bob Carroll for being my Lou Reed and John Cale. You get to decide which one of you is Nico.
Aaron Schatz is editor-in-chief of Football Outsiders. He created many original statistical methods for NFL analysis such as DVOA and DYAR. The lead writer and editor on Football Outsiders Almanac, Aaron also writes for ESPN.com and ESPN+, and appears weekly during the NFL season on the Off The Charts podcast. He has written on sports, politics, and taxes for a number of publications including The New Republic, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Slate, The American Prospect, and the Boston Phoenix.
The Hidden Game of Football is available now on our website or wherever good books are sold.
]]>Take 30% off these books through February with the code EX57544 on our website.
From The University of Chicago Press
By Asiya Wadud
“Wadud’s astounding new poems—many of them ekphrastic, all of them rigorously intricate, supersaturated—come across to me as both hard-edged and liminal. Enacting the dynamic relationship between figure and ground, center and edge, they frame the constant unfolding of meaning’s dimensions, its reverberations.”—Mónica de la Torre, author of Repetition Nineteen
By C. S. Giscombe
“Haunted by the memory of a ‘colossal’ Black man who died on Negro Mountain, Giscombe’s text returns to the eponymous landmark of an obscure historical figure. Giscombe’s itinerant poetic speakers, in their restless incarnations, have mapped territories, ridden the rails, and followed foxes. In Negro Mountain, they walk with wolves, crossing boundaries, escaping enclosure, always shape-shifting as they guide the reader through passages where the self is also the mythic other.”—Harryette Mullen, author of Urban Tumbleweed
From Autumn House Press
By Richard Hamilton
“The poems of Discordant will haunt you—like a tune that orients your ear to what you weren’t attuned to, like a cut that slices through the noisy distractions of the day. Hamilton is chopping up language, rewriting the score on poetic forms, and dissecting our racist-capitalist society at the same time, mixing and mingling the discourses of philosophy, culture, politics, healthcare, labor, and love, until we remember they all occupy and describe the same world. I’m grateful for this piercing, necessary voice.”—Evie Shockley, author of suddenly we
By Cameron Barnett
From Autumn House Press
“Murmur is in fact a glorious shout. These poems shake up histories, both intimate and political. They stir and disturb the ways we look at love, at race, at our people and ourselves. A bold, beautiful, and brilliant collection!”—Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
From CavanKerry Press
By January Gill O’Neil
“The alluring poems in Glitter Road delve into past heartbreaks and the exquisite joy of family and new found love in a constantly changing world. In sure and talented hands like O’Neil’s, vibrant landscapes whirl, take root, and break bread with ghosts. It’s clear these heart-filled poems will have a full and magnificent life of their own.”—Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of Oceanic
By Angelique Zobitz (With a Foreword by Grisel Y. Acosta)
“Angelique Zobitz’s Seraphim radiates with flames and fierceness. Steeped in survival and salvation, devastation and affirmation, incantation and citation, Seraphim is a tribute to revolutions, delivering homage to an array of Black women including bell hooks, Roberta Flack, Megan Thee Stallion, and “Black Barbies backlit by gas station fluorescence / stunning—singing holy, holy, holy.” In Seraphim’s choral and volcanic world, Zobitz alchemizes terror into courage. In doing so, she “expose[s] what’s damaged to scrutiny and light,” inviting the reader toward their own revolution and revelation as she reminds us to “let sing, every word.”—Simone Muench, author of Hex & Howl
From Omnidawn Publishing, Inc.
By Ruth Ellen Kocher
“Kocher’s devastating collection of poems, godhouse, prefigures grief in its emergence from ‘blunder’ and ‘nothing.’ Like Ralph Ellison’s ‘Invisible Man,’ the speaker in Kocher’s godhouse holds a knife in her teeth against a shadow world of hunter and hunted in which survival is necessarily mystical. Unnerved and unnerving these poems are a barbiturate gaze’s disinhibition through the tattered dystopia of an American life. Heady, emotional, and meticulously crafted, godhouse leaves no room for delusion in its blade, pointed right at whomever might pose a threat.”—Dawn Lundy Martin, author of Good Stock Strange Blood
By D.S. Marriott
“Marriot’s Letters From The Black Ark remains alive as sonority by resistance, by magnetic vernacular flaming, ‘balancing a blade on one’s shoulders’ as insouciance, as living cellular presence, flairing as it does from a temperature of mazes.”—Will Alexander, author of Divine Blue Light (for John Coltrane)
By Kimberly Reyes
“Kimberly Reyes has written an innovative and magnetic book. Each poem spirals beautifully by itself but when I finished reading, I realized I had encountered and entered new architecture. Here, thinking radiates to illuminate the ‘absorbing ghosts’ of the self and the familial and the ‘living shadows’ of oppressive historical forces. Here, the language is lyrical, layered, and spectral. Here, the ‘hyphen is a rejection of negative space.’ Reyes is an astonishingly gifted poet and this book enlarges and complicates what the page can hold back, reveal.”—Eduardo Corral, author of Guillotine
From Seagull Books
By Julien Delmaire (Translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan)
A moving ode to the Mississippi delta inspired by magical realism and written in vibrant and poetic prose.
By Ngugi wa Thiong’o
With clear, conversational prose, this is the first book dedicated entirely to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s writings on translation.
By Wanjiku Wa Ngugi
“Part fairy tale, part political parable, Seasons in Hippoland is a powerful novel whose women are resilient and creative in the face of oppression.”—Foreword Reviews
By Léonora Miano (Translated by Gila Walker)
“Ms. Miano’s essential premise is that a profound ‘subterranean wound’ was inflicted by colonialism, and that collective injury has continued through falsely enforced social hierarchies and self-immolating psychic resentments . . . The incantatory quality of the writing conjures this heightened, almost religiously attentive feeling, creating a sense of mystical potential even as the story itself dwells in suffering.”—The Wall Street Journal
]]>Enjoy an exclusive 30% off on these print and e-books throughout February. Use code BLACKHISTORY30 at checkout on our website.
From The University of Chicago Press
Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit
By Robin Bernstein
“Rigorously researched and powerfully told, Freeman’s Challenge reimagines a life shaped in the crucible of America’s first great industrial prison. Along the way, Bernstein shines a light on the foundations of the system that ensnares so many thousands of lives today. This is a story about race and violence, but it is no less about land, labor, and money on a massive scale. Read this book if you want to understand the real history of crime and punishment in the United States.”—Caleb Smith, editor of The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict
The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America
By Andrew W. Kahrl
“It is impossible to overstate the significance of The Black Tax. It is quite clearly one of the most important books of our time, bringing out into the open the shocking story of how the tax system has functioned in the past and continues today to be a key generator of racial injustice and inequality.”—George Lipsitz, author of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness
The Black Ceiling: How Race Still Matters in the Elite Workplace
By Kevin Woodson
“The Black Ceiling is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding barriers to success for Black professionals working at predominantly White firms in law, consulting, and finance. Woodson shows how racial discomfort sometimes shadows Black professionals’ experiences, through social alienation and stigma anxiety. In doing so, Woodson goes beyond explanations that rely solely on instances of racial discrimination to explain how social, cultural, and psychological processes also shape work experiences. Woodson also identifies the route to more positive experiences at work for Black professionals. The book is a compelling read and is sure to become an instant classic!”—Natasha Warikoo, author of Race at the Top: Asian Americans and Whites in Pursuit of the American Dream in Suburban Schools
Sound Experiments: The Music of the AACM
By Paul Steinbeck
“Musical analysis dominates the text, but Steinbeck’s thoughtful writing makes the descriptions work on several levels: for a student, or anyone interested in learning about how the music works; for a non-musician who may breeze past the score excerpts but dig into the plain-speak breakdowns; or the attentive fan who can relate the structures discussed to stage dynamics they have witnessed.”—New York City Jazz Record
Black Scare / Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States
By Charisse Burden-Stelly
“Burden-Stelly is one of our most brilliant radical thinkers and scholars. In Black Scare / Red Scare she recounts, reassesses, and reframes the historical relationship between white supremacy and anti-communism. In light of growing racist authoritarian movements today, the book could not be more timely. Powerful and powerfully relevant.”—Barbara Ransby, historian, activist, and author of the award-winning Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement
In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863
By Leslie M. Harris
“A splendid addition to historical writing about blacks in the North and, more generally, the institution of slavery itself. Well crafted and assiduously researched, In the Shadow of Slavery sparkles with fresh insights about what it meant to be an African New Yorker during more than two centuries of the city’s turbulent history.”—Shane White, author of Stories of Freedom in Black New York
Metaracial: Hegel, Antiblackness, and Political Identity
By Rei Terada
“Behind the ‘subject slave,’ universally human by virtue of the dialectic, there is a second slave hiding, the Black slave. Deconstructing this trope in Hegel, Terada reveals the philosophical sources of an embarrassing paradox—antiblack antiracism—which continuously affects political radicalism. An elucidation which is demanding but also fascinating and hugely clarifying!”—Étienne Balibar, author of Citizen Subject: Foundations for Philosophical Anthropology
Banking on Slavery: Financing Southern Expansion in the Antebellum United States
By Sharon Ann Murphy
“In a pathbreaking account of the way Americans financed slavery, Murphy connects the vast sweep of that tragedy to the banking that made it possible. Detail by dollar detail, she exposes the structures that transmuted enslaved people into assets and collateral, building white wealth all the while. A powerful–and chilling–book.”—Christine Desan, author of Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism
Black in White Space: The Enduring Impact of Color in Everyday Life
By Elijah Anderson
“Black in White Space is an elegantly composed, brilliant, and intimate look at how Black people are seen in and navigate through predominantly white spaces. This will be an extremely useful text—particularly as we grapple with what diversity means in its substance as an aspiration.”—Imani Perry, Princeton University
Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time
By Teju Cole
“A collection of essays that bursts with unrestrained humanity. . . . Cole’s eighth book is technically excellent, and more importantly, it blazes a wholesome style to living and being alive. It holds many truths, some conflicting, because this is what humanity is.”—Open Country
A Thousand Steps to Parliament: Constructing Electable Women in Mongolia
By Manduhai Buyandelger
“A Thousand Steps to Parliament is exemplary of political anthropology at its best. Using fine-grained ethnography, detailed historiography, and compelling prose, Buyandelger demonstrates the ways in which elections are so much more than technical exercises. The result is a wholly original and completely convincing analysis of electoral politics and the making of women’s electable selves. Buyandelger gifts us a set of concepts and methods for understanding postsocialist democracy that couldn’t be more timely.”—Jessica Greenberg, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Undesirable: Passionate Mobility and Women’s Defiance of French Colonial Policing, 1919–1952
By Jennifer Anne Boittin
“Innovative and engrossing, Undesirable contains cutting-edge scholarship on sex and gender in the French Empire. Boittin provides a vivid and powerful set of images of white and Indigenous women’s encounters with the French state, showing how women engaged the colonial bureaucracy, police, and judiciary.”—Leora Auslander, University of Chicago
The Education of Betsey Stockton: An Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom
By Gregory Nobles
“At last, Betsey Stockton receives the full biography she deserves. Working with the scant records of Stockton’s life, and brilliantly situating her experiences amidst broader social and political debates, Nobles reveals Stockton as a woman of bravery and persistence, intellect and faith. Long a figure of local renown, she here claims her place in the broader story of remarkable women who emerged from enslavement to become civic leaders who reshaped Black community life.”—Martha A. Sandweiss, founding director of The Princeton & Slavery Project
Phenomenal Blackness: Black Power, Philosophy, and Theory
Mark Christian Thompson
“Mark Christian Thompson’s Phenomenal Blackness: Black Power, Philosophy, and Theory is a powerful exploration of the development of a critical literary theory that is able to properly theorize Blackness in the middle decades of the twentieth century.”—Critical Inquiry
Being Somebody and Black Besides: An Untold Memoir of Midcentury Black Life
By George B. Nesbitt (Edited by Prexy Nesbitt and Zeb Larson; With Forewords by Imani Perry and St. Clair Drake)
“This is a searing portrait of an ordinary, yet extraordinary, middle-class Black man forced to endure the indignity of having to fight for fair play from people far less ‘civilized’ than he. A keen observer of the ‘ways of white folks,’ Nesbitt was a brilliant, sarcastic, insightful analyst of the color line, even as he willed himself to believe in his country and its ideals. This memoir reminds us how much we owe the early fighters for civil rights, who endured so many insults and injuries as they fought to widen opportunities for Black people and dismantle northern style Jim Crow. Nesbitt’s accounts of racism are unforgettable in their detail, anger, sheer absurdity, and casual cruelty.”—Martha Biondi, Northwestern University
The Blues Dream of Billy Boy Arnold
By Billy Boy Arnold with Kim Field
“A lively, illuminating memoir. . . Arnold’s heartfelt, honest, insider’s view of Chicago blues from the 1940s onward will be essential to anyone interested in blues and the origins of rock and roll.”—Library Journal
No Longer Outsiders: Black and Latino Interest Group Advocacy on Capitol Hill
By Michael D. Minta
“Beautifully written and eloquently argued, No Longer Outsiders demonstrates that, contrary to accepted wisdom about minority representation in Congress, the relationship between advocacy organizations and congressional members is the key to each other’s success. The book is a must-read for any student of Congress, minority representation, or race and politics.”—Lisa García Bedolla, University of California, Berkeley
African American Political Thought: A Collected History
Edited by Melvin L. Rogers and Jack Turner
“African American Political Thought should become an instant classic. So much to mine here. So many lines of inquiry to follow. Rogers and Turner have masterfully curated a collection of essays that will guide the field of African American political thought for generations. The study of American political thought will never be the same.”—Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Princeton University
By Dave Tell
“A 2019 Book of the Year. . . A fine history of racism, poverty and memory in the Mississippi Delta told through the lynching of Emmett Till, a black 14-year-old from Chicago whose murder in 1955—and his mother’s determination to display his mutilated features in an open coffin—made him an early martyr of the civil-rights movement.”—The Economist
Sun Ra’s Chicago: Afrofuturism and the City
By William Sites
”One of the ten best Chicago books of 2020. Plenty of books have been written about Afrofuturist pioneer Sun Ra and his Arkestra, but Sites is the first to make Chicago his co-protagonist. . . . Sites provides crucial context on how Chicago’s Afrocentrist philosophy, religion, and jazz scenes helped turn Blount into Sun Ra.”—Chicago Reader
The Lost Black Scholar: Resurrecting Allison Davis in American Social Thought
By David A. Varel
“Meticulous and comprehensive. . . The Lost Black Scholar is an exciting and innovative intellectual biography of Allison Davis, easily one of the most brilliant and accomplished academics of the twentieth century. . . This well-written and exquisitely researched book may be a generation late in the making, however, it compensates for the time lost. Varel’s excellent award-caliber treatise on the life and career of Allison Davis is a major contribution to the historiography on Black scholars in the academy and, because of it, Davis’ legacy will only expand. It cannot be read without profit.”—Journal of Negro Education
Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (second edition)
By Ida B. Wells (Edited by Alfreda M. Duster; With a New Foreword by Eve L. Ewing and a New Afterword by Michelle Duster)
“It’s a classic that should be read just as often as the works of her contemporaries Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois.”—Book Riot
Murder in New Orleans: The Creation of Jim Crow Policing
By Jeffrey S. Adler
“This most interesting book is a brilliant companion to an understanding of many elements of crime and the response to crime, not simply in interwar New Orleans but also more generally in America in this period.”—The Critic
From Brandeis University Press
Black Women’s Intellectual Traditions: Speaking Their Minds
Edited by Kristin Waters and Carol B. Conaway (With a New Preface)
A new edition of a landmark work on Black women’s intellectual traditions.
From Hirmer Publishers
Edited by Gerry Beegan and Donna Gustafson
“The book is both a piece of history and a piece of art.”—Pendarvis Harshaw, KQED
Edited by Ginger Shulick Porcella and Creative Growth Art Center; With Essays by Philip March Jones and Cheryl Dunn
Images from John Martin’s collection of interpretations of found objects.
Sonya Clark: We Are Each Other
Edited by Elissa Auther, Laura Mott, and Monica Obniski; With Essays by Renée Ater, Leslie King-Hammond, and Lowery Stokes Sims
Large-scale textile works from a leading contemporary Afro-Caribbean American artist.
From Intellect Ltd
Hip-Hop Archives: The Politics and Poetics of Knowledge Production
Edited by Mark V. Campbell and Murray Forman
A collection of essays on archiving the history of hip-hop, featuring a range of official, unofficial, DIY, and community archives.
From Paul Holberton Publishing
Harmonia Rosales: Master Narrative
By Patricia Lee Daigle (Edited by Rosamund Garrett; With Contributions by Efeoghene Igor Coleman, Sophia Quach McCabe, Natalie McCann, and Helen Morales)
“The first scholarly collection of Rosales’ work, the new catalog features over 20 paintings and a sculptural installation. The illustrated catalog also includes a biography of the artist and several scholarly essays exploring themes ranging from storytelling to depictions of beauty, race and diaspora.”—The Current
From Reaktion Books
By Cheryl R. Hopson
The life, work, and legacy of one of the twentieth century’s most published African American women.
From Seagull Books
Afropea: A Post-Western and Post-Racist Utopia
By Léonora Miano (Translated by Gila Walker)
Challenging conventional notions of racial and regional identity, Léonora Miano provides a fresh perspective on the complexities of self-perception.
From the University of London Press
Freedom Seekers: Escaping from Slavery in Restoration London
By Simon P. Newman
“Newman’s painstaking research and luminous interpretation reveal a community of enslaved Black people in Restoration England, yearning to escape. Evocative prose and interactive illustrations enable us to imagine their flights on the streets of London, and also to perceive the arterial network of enslavers, merchants, investors, ship captains, and printers, who devised a novel way to repossess them: the runaway slave advertisement.”—Vincent Brown, author of Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War
The Monetarists: The Making of the Chicago Monetary Tradition, 1927–1960
by George S. Tavlas
An essential origin story of modern society’s most influential economic doctrine.
The Chicago School of economic thought has been subject to endless generalizations in contemporary debate. As its lore has grown, so too have the mischaracterizations that’s followed its storied history. The Monetarists is a deeply researched history of the monetary policies—and personalities—that shaped the Chicago School of monetary thought, unveiling the true breadth of research, theory, and intellectualism brought forth by a crucible of minds and debates throughout campus. Through unprecedented mining of archival material, economist George Tavlas constructs the first complete history of one of the twentieth century’s most formative intellectual periods and places.
Welfare for Markets: A Global History of Basic Income
by Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora Vargas
A sweeping intellectual history of the welfare state’s policy-in-waiting.
The idea of a government paying its citizens to keep them out of poverty—now known as basic income—is hardly new. Yet despite being one of today’s most controversial proposals, it draws supporters from across the political spectrum. In this eye-opening work, Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora Vargas chronicle how the idea first arose in the United States and Europe as a market-friendly alternative to the postwar welfare state and how interest in the policy has grown in the wake of the 2008 credit crisis and COVID-19 crash. An incisive, comprehensive history, Welfare for Markets tells the story of how a fringe idea conceived in economics seminars went global.
The Ends of Freedom: Reclaiming America’s Lost Promise of Economic Rights
by Mark Paul
An urgent and galvanizing argument for an Economic Bill of Rights—and its potential to confer true freedom on all Americans.
Since the Founding, Americans have debated the true meaning of freedom. For some, freedom meant the civil and political rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights and unfettered access to the marketplace. As Mark Paul explains, this interpretation has all but won out among policymakers, with dire repercussions for American society: rampant inequality, endemic poverty, and an economy built to benefit the few at the expense of the many. Replete with discussions of today’s most influential policy ideas, The Ends of Freedom is a timely urgent call to reclaim the idea of freedom and carve a path toward a more economically dynamic and equitable nation.
The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind
by Melissa S. Kearney
The surprising story of how declining marriage rates are driving many of the country’s biggest economic problems.
The Two-Parent Privilege makes a provocative, data-driven case for marriage by showing how the institution’s decline has led to a host of economic woes. Eschewing the religious and values-based arguments that have long dominated this conversation, Kearney shows how the greatest impacts of marriage are, in fact, economic: when two adults marry, their economic and household lives improve, offering a host of benefits not only for the married adults but for their children. Based on more than a decade of economic research, Kearney examines the underlying causes of the marriage decline in the US and draws lessons for how the US can reverse this trend to ensure the country’s future prosperity.
The Continental Dollar: How the American Revolution Was Financed with Paper Money
by Farley Grubb
An illuminating history of America’s original credit market.
The Continental Dollar is a revelatory history of how the fledgling United States paid for its first war. Farley Grubb upends the common telling of this story, in which the United States printed cross-colony money, called Continentals, to serve as an early fiat currency—a currency that is not tied to a commodity like gold, but rather to a legal authority. As Grubb details, the Continental was not a fiat currency, but a “zero-coupon bond”—a wholly different species of money. Drawing on decades of exhaustive mining of eighteenth-century records, The Continental Dollar is an essential origin story of the early American monetary system, promising to serve as the benchmark for critical work for decades to come.
The Economic Approach: Unpublished Writings of Gary S. Becker
edited by Julio J. Elias, Casey B. Mulligan, and Kevin M. Murphy
A revealing collection from the intellectual titan whose work shaped the modern world.
As an economist and public intellectual, Gary S. Becker was a giant. The recipient of a Nobel Prize, a John Bates Clark Medal, and a Presidential Medal of Freedom, Becker is widely regarded as the greatest microeconomist in history. After forty years at the University of Chicago, Becker left a slew of unpublished writings that used an economic approach to human behavior, analyzing such topics as preference formation, rational indoctrination, income inequality, drugs and addiction, and the economics of family. The Economic Approach examines these extant works as a capstone to the Becker oeuvre.
Liberalism’s Last Man: Hayek in the Age of Political Capitalism
by Vikash Yadav
A modern reframing of Friedrich Hayek’s most famous work for the 21st century.
Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom was both an intellectual milestone and a source of political division, spurring fiery debates around capitalism and its discontents. In the ensuing discord, Hayek’s true message was lost: liberalism is a thing to be protected above all else, and its alternatives are perilous. In Liberalism’s Last Man, Vikash Yadav revives the core of Hayek’s famed work to map today’s primary political anxiety: the tenuous state of liberal meritocratic capitalism—particularly in North America, Europe, and Asia—in the face of strengthening political-capitalist powers like China, Vietnam, and Singapore. Within Liberalism’s Last Man, Yadav channels Hayek to articulate how liberalism’s moral backbone is its greatest defense against repressive social structures.
by Jeremy G. Weber
A long-overdue guide on how to use statistics to bring clarity, not confusion, to policy work.
Statistics are an essential tool for making, evaluating, and improving public policy. Statistics for Public Policy is a crash course in wielding these unruly tools to bring maximum clarity to policy work. Former White House economist Jeremy G. Weber offers an accessible voice of experience for the challenges of this work, dispensing with the opaque technical language that have long made this space impenetrable. Instead, Weber offers an essential resource for all students and professionals working at the intersections of data and policy interventions.
Work, Retire, Repeat: The Uncertainty of Retirement in the New Economy
by Teresa Ghilarducci
A damning portrait of the dire realities of retirement in the United States—and how we can fix it.
While the French went on strike in 2023 to protest the increase in the national retirement age, workers in the United States have all but given up on the notion of dignified retirement for all. Instead, American elders face the highest risk of poverty compared to workers in peer nations. Many argue that the solution to the financial straits of American retirement is simple: people need to just work longer. In Work, Retire, Repeat, Teresa Ghilarducci tells the stories of elders locked into jobs—and shows how relatively low-cost changes to how we finance and manage retirement will allow people to truly choose how they spend their golden years.
Shock Values: Prices and Inflation in American Democracy
by Carola Binder
How inflation and deflation fears shape American democracy.
Many foundational moments in American economic history—the establishment of paper money, wartime price controls, the rise of the modern Federal Reserve—occurred during financial panics as prices either inflated or deflated sharply. The government’s decisions in these moments, intended to control price fluctuations, have produced both lasting effects and some of the most contentious debates in the nation’s history. A sweeping history of the United States’ economy and politics, Shock Values reveals how the American state has been shaped by a massive, ever-evolving effort to insulate its economy from the real and perceived dangers of price fluctuations.
Find all of these books on our website or through your favorite bookseller.
]]>In his new book, Botanical Icons: Critical Practices of Illustration in the Premodern Mediterranean, Andrew Griebeler traces the history of botanical illustration in the Mediterranean from antiquity to the early modern period. By examining Greek, Latin, and Arabic botanical inquiry in this early era, Griebeler shows how diverse and sophisticated modes of plant depiction emerged and ultimately gave rise to practices now recognized as central to modern botanical illustration. He reveals that many of the critical practices characteristic of modern botanical illustrations began in premodern manuscript culture.
The images below, which appear in this lavishly illustrated book, offer a look at the evolving ways that plants were portrayed throughout the premodern Mediterranean, as well as the rich documentation Griebeler draws together.
The ancient pharmacologist Dioscorides and the “Discovery” (heuresis) of the mandrake root from the earliest (mostly) complete illustrated book on medical botany. Vienna Dioscorides, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, cod. med. Gr. 1, fol. 4v, sixth century CE. Courtesy of Österreichische Nationalbibliothek.
Fragment f of the Tebtunis Roll, a piece of the earliest surviving fragment of an illustrated book on medical botany. University of California, Berkeley, Tebtunis Center, P. Tebt. II 679, second century CE. Courtesy of Tebtunis Center, Berkeley.
Illustration of a comfrey on a fragment of the Antinoopolis Codex, the “Johnson Papyrus,” recto/Side A. London, Wellcome Collection, MS 5753, fifth century CE. Courtesy of Wellcome Images.
Illustration of a blackberry showing many parts of the plant at varying stages of development. Vienna Dioscorides, fol. 83r. Courtesy of Österreichische Nationalbibliothek.
Illustration of a “mouse ear” plant, and an unknown plant, possibly dock, labeled as “woad.” The figure beside the “mouse ear” plant illustrates its medical use. Old Paris Dioscorides, fol. 5r. Photo: Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Illustrations of fruit trees with Greek marginalia in a copy of al-Nātilī’s rectification of Iṣṭifan’s Arabic translation of Dioscorides. Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek, MS Or. 289, colophon dated 1038, fols. 46v–47r. Courtesy of Universiteitsbibliotheek Leiden.
Illustration of ṭragos and oat. The original meaning of tragos as a spelt product was lost, so later illustrators assumed it to be a grain. The Greek name comes from the word for a billy goat, hence the illustration of a plant with goat heads. Some illustrated Arabic herbals retain this error in transmission. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS ar. 4947 (the “Parchment Arabic Dioscorides”), twelfth century, fol. 23v. Photo: Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Illustration of a lupine. Vienna Dioscorides, fol. 135r. Courtesy of Österreichische Nationalbibliothek.
A depiction of Spanish broom from the sixth-century Vienna Dioscorides alongside a fourteenth-century sketch of the plant with additional details including flowers and seedpods. Vienna Dioscorides, fols. 327v–28r. Courtesy of Österreichische Nationalbibliothek.
A violet (viola purpurea) with later additions from Leonhart Fuchs, De historia stirpium (Basel: Isingrin, 1542), p. 311. Scholars and physicians continued to modify illustrations in later printed herbals, thus following earlier patterns of use. University of Minnesota Libraries, Owen H. Wangensteen Historical Library of Biology and Medicine, Folio 580.01 F95.
Botanical Icons by Andrew Griebeler is available from our website or your favorite bookseller.
]]>