The Chicago Blog

An interesting piece on David Grazian's new book On the Make: The Hustle of Urban Nightlife is running as the cover story in the current edition of the independent Philadelphia weekly City Paper. A.D. Amorosi's article begins by comparing Grazian's sociological study of Philly's nightlife to Damon Grunyon's scabrous tales of prohibition era New York:

When David Grazian started working on his most recent book, he wanted to find the skin and bones of Philly's latest nightlife renaissance. Now that it's finished, On the Make: The Hustle of Urban Nightlife paints the scene like something out of a Damon Runyon novel, full of schemers and suckers born every minute.

Flirty waitresses, winking hostesses and grinning bouncers make appearances in On the Make. So do PR consultants, drinking wing men, snobby DJs, event planners and paid partiers—the mod equivalent of Runyon's bookies and mooches. (No one in On the Make is named "Nathan Detroit" or "Sky Masterson," but a name like "Nicole Cashman" does the trick.) You can't help but expect a chorus of "Luck Be a Lady" to come swinging through the text.

Both entertaining and illuminating On the Make offers a riveting look at the various gambles, hustles, and put-ons that drive Philadelphia's bustling nightlife scene.

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Anthropology | Psychology | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last Wednesday David Grazian, author of On the Make: The Hustle of Urban Nightlife was featured on BBC Radio 4's Thinking Allowed with host Laurie Taylor. In the show Taylor and Grazian engage in a fascinating discussion about the various schemes and scams that the nightlife industry employs in order to separate customers from their money, as well as the scams perpetuated by the clientele themselves in their relentless search for sex, self-esteem, and status.

Listen to archived audio from the show on the BBC Radio 4 website.

Also, read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Psychology | Sociology
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David Grazian's entertaining exploration of the bars of Philadelphia in On the Make: The Hustle of Urban Nightlife, continues to attract attention. Two new articles have recently been published featuring Grazian's new book—the first appeared in the January 18 Chronicle Review and includes some great praise for the book's revealing look at inner city nightlife:

Grazian's new book is, among other things, a long catalog of confidence games. Nightclub managers strain to persuade the world that their typical patrons are younger, less suburban, and more female than they actually are. For a secret payment of $500 per week, one Philadelphia publicist… will bring four attractive, well-connected friends to a club…

There are also the more-familiar kinds of interpersonal fraud: In bars like Tangerine, people sometimes lie about their ages, their names, their jobs, and their marital statuses. Women give out fake phone numbers to shake off obnoxious suitors. People feign a sexual interest in others in order to score free drinks, to make their lovers jealous, or simply to make the evening less boring.

"What's skillful about the book is that these are settings that people are familiar with, but often don't think very hard about," says Joshua Gamson, a professor of sociology at the University of San Francisco who specializes in commercial culture. "Grazian manages to make them seem new, without trying to oversell his analysis. The book has an appropriate level of seriousness and an appropriate amount of pleasure."

A lengthy review also appeared in the January 20 Toronto Star. Geoff Pevere writes for the Star:

Plunging into clubs, bars, strip-joints and restaurants, [Grazian] collects first-person testimonies from hustlers, horndogs, would-be makeout artists and dozens of variously candid members of Philadelphia's burgeoning night-life industry. While this serves the highly reader-friendly function of leavening his occasionally concrete prose with regular bursts of profane, party-down plain-spokenness, it also brings a welcome humanity to what might otherwise have been a clinical case study in the overall decline of contemporary civilization. And make no mistake: what happens in Philadelphia doesn't stay in Philadelphia. If there's one thing about the book which makes it resonate beyond those city limits, it's that the city he describes is any city where there's an "entertainment district" catering to the largely false promise of sex in the city.

Read an excerpt from the first chapter.

Archived in Anthropology | Books for the News | Psychology | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 02:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Today's New York Times is running an article titled "Political Animals," comparing the current presidential candidates election politics to the complex social dynamics found in other species like elephants, whales, and rhesus macaques—the latter of which are the subject of Dario Maestripieri's new book Macachiavellian Intelligence: How Rhesus Macaques and Humans Have Conquered the World. In the article, the NYT's Natalie Angier cites Maestripieri's book as she compares the political behavior of these prolific primates to our own:

As the candidates have shown us in the succulent telenovela that is the 2008 presidential race, there are many ways to parry for political power.… [And] just as there are myriad strategies open to the human political animal with White House ambitions, so there are a number of nonhuman animals that behave like textbook politicians.…

As Dr. Maestripieri sees it, rhesus monkeys embody the concept "Machiavellian" (and he accordingly named his recent popular book about the macaques Macachiavellian Intelligence).

"Individuals don't fight for food, space or resources," Dr. Maestripieri explained. "They fight for power." With power and status, he added, "they'll have control over everything else.…"

"Rhesus males are quintessential opportunists," Dr. Maestripieri said. "They pretend they're helping others, but they only help adults, not infants. They only help those who are higher in rank than they are, not lower. They intervene in fights where they know they're going to win anyway and where the risk of being injured is small."

We may not know whence humans are descended but as for politicians it's pretty clear, read the rest of the article here.

Archived in Anthropology | Biology | Psychology | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sunday's Toronto Star ran an interesting article on sociologist David Grazian's revealing portrait of Philadelphia's thriving club scene in On the Make: The Hustle of Urban Nightlife. Summarizing the book the Star's Ryan Bigge writes:

Although Grazian discusses the sophisticated public relations matrix that helps bring in customers, he's more interested in exploring the paradox that club goers allow themselves to be willingly hustled. Making a comparison to movies filled with computer-generated effects, Grazian suggests, "People are willing to suspend their disbelief in order to enjoy a thrilling lie."

Which means the tens of thousands of club goers—the actual number is the subject of considerable contention, but even the lowest two-night estimate is 40,000—that cram Toronto's entertainment district on Friday and Saturday nights, spending millions of dollars per year on drinks, are marks of their own making. Of course, just because the game is rigged, doesn't mean you can't enjoy yourself, as the eternal popularity of Las Vegas demonstrates.

Read the rest of the article on the Toronto Star website or read this excerpt from the first chapter of the book. The press's website also features an interview with Grazian about his previous book on a similar topic, Blue Chicago: The Search for Authenticity in Urban Blues Clubs.

Archived in Anthropology | Books for the News | Politics and Current Events | Psychology | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Chronicle of Higher Education is currently running a great article on Stephen E. Braude and his new book, The Gold Leaf Lady and Other Parapsychological Investigations—a fascinating not to mention entertaining exploration of the paranormal from an academic's point of view. Scott Carlson writes for the Chronicle:

A professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, Braude is a past president of the Parapsychological Association, an organization that gathers academics and others interested in phenomena like ESP and psychokinesis, and he has published a series of books with well-known academic presses on such topics.

His latest, The Gold Leaf Lady and Other Parapsychological Investigations, is sort of a summing up of his career, filled with stories of people who claimed to have otherworldly abilities. The writing is so fluid that the book at times seems made for a screen adaptation. (In fact, Chris Carter, creator of The X-Files, contributes a blurb to the back of the book. Braude advised Carter on a screenplay he is writing.) But Braude also includes some dense philosophical arguments—especially in a chapter about synchronicity, in which he ponders whether humans can orchestrate unlikely coincidences through psychokinesis, the ability to move or influence objects with the mind.

Read the rest of the piece online at the Chronicle website. Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Philosophy | Psychology | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 02:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tell someone unfamiliar with the business of book publishing (and this of course describes almost everyone you meet) that you work at a university press, and you almost inevitably hear: "Oh, you publish textbooks then?" Well, no, we don't—our scholarly publishing mandate is to publish new research, which rarely describes the contents of a textbook.

Except sometimes. One of those times was in 1958 when we published a textbook called Managerial Psychology by a youngish professor at Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. The book brought the field of organizational behavior into the business school curriculum, a revolutionary idea at the time. New enough at any rate, that the book was turned down by the typical publishers of business school textbooks. But business and industry was changing rapidly in 1958 and Managerial Psychology quickly found a market.

The author of that book was Harold J. Leavitt, who died on December 8 in Pasadena, California. He was the Walter Kenneth Kilpatrick Professor of Organizational Behavior, Emeritus, at the Stanford Graduate School of Business at the time of his death. His work changed what business schools taught and how business and industry motivate and evaluate their personnel.

We published the fifth and last edition of Leavitt's textbook in 1988. We also published several editions of a companion volume, Reading in Managerial Psychology.

The Los Angeles Times ran an obituary a few days ago.

Archived in Economics | Psychology
Posted by DB at 08:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The City Room blog on the New York Times website ran a guide to holiday tipping yesterday that draws much of its advice from Peter Bearman's Doormen—a book the NYT's Sewell Chan says contains one of "the most sophisticated discussion of holiday tipping City Room has encountered." Chan's article continues:

[Holiday tips and bonuses are] fraught with meaning. [The gesture] "is both a gift, a way of saying thanks, an obligation, and yet also a sign of expected reciprocal attention and an expression of social power," Professor Bearman writes. "These contradictory meanings make the bonus difficult to talk about, and tenants often squirm in their seats (or cognitively) as they try to describe just what it means."

Professor Bearman writes that the holiday bonus is most often construed in one of two ways. "On the one hand, the Christmas bonus is often represented as the acknowledgment of all of the assistance received during the past year," he notes, adding later, "On the other hand, the Christmas bonus is often represented as a pre-payment or down payment for the next year, an advance on the services to be received."

He distinguishes the bonus from a mere tip, a payment for services rendered. "Whereas tipping encodes the relationship too starkly as a service relationship, because the number of small favors is endless, the Christmas bonus symbolizes the value of all the little services over the past year." But it is also "a hedge for service in the coming year."

Our excerpt from the book discusses the Christmas bonus.

Update: Based on the large number of responses the NYT's City Room blog got from it's last article about holiday tipping they also published this follow-up based on their reader's comments.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics | Psychology | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 02:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Power. Sex. Status. That's pretty much what human life boils down to: a vicious, grasping struggle to get ahead and stay there. We look out for number one, claw for every advantage, and aren't above using—and even betraying—friends and family to get what we want. So just what is it that separates us from the higher primates? Dario Maestripieri would argue that it's less than you may think, and with Macachiavellian Intelligence he draws readers deep into the social life of the world's most common monkey, the rhesus macaque, to show just how much we can learn from them about human life.

Writing with a biting, sardonic wit, Maestripieri draws on primatology, evolutionary biology, economics, politics, and literature to present a wry, rational, and wholly surprising view of our humanity as seen through the monkey in the mirror.

Read the press release.

Archived in Anthropology | Biology | Press Releases | Psychology
Posted by TXM at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In a recent edition of the Wall Street Journal, reviewer John Desio delivers an interesting critique of Stephen E. Braude's new book The Gold Leaf Lady and Other Parapsychological Investigations. While Desio, like most, might remain skeptical about the existence of the paranormal he applauds Braude's book for its open minded approach to the subject as it works both to confirm as well as debunk a variety of extraordinary parapsychological phenomena. Desio writes:

The world of the paranormal is such a magnet for hustlers and charlatans that any book on the subject might seem at first like just another attempt to separate the curious or the desperate from their cash. But The Gold Leaf Lady and Other Parapsychological Investigations is not a memoir from "Miss Cleo" of 900-number fame or advice from "cold reading" specialist John Edward on how best to contact your late Aunt Sophie. It is a strange work by Stephen E. Braude, a philosophy professor at the University of Maryland who believes in the existence of paranormal abilities in human beings—but who also, thank goodness, goes out of his way to address the concerns of skeptics and to shoot down fakers who populate the field.

The paranormal, for Mr. Braude, includes the possibility of "postmortem communications" and extrasensory perception, but he is primarily interested in psychokinesis, he writes, because examples of the mind's power over matter is "observable" and "at least potentially easier to document"—and, presumably, to debunk. Mr. Braude does some of both in considering the five case studies that form the heart of The Gold Leaf Lady.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Philosophy | Psychology | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Times Higher Education Supplement recently ran a positive review of Dario Maestripieri's new book, Macachiavellian Intelligence: How Rhesus Macaques and Humans Have Conquered the World. A detailed examination of how rhesus macaques have come to claim the title of the world's most prolific primates (after homo-sapiens, of course) Macachiavellian Intelligence delivers an insightful exploration of macaque social organization—revealing relationships perpetually subject to the cruel laws of the markets and power struggles that would impress Machiavelli himself.

Alison Jolly's review for the THES begins:

If this review were written by a rhesus monkey, the author would get an O mouth threat and a clear chance of being bitten. Unless, of course, the author were dominant to the reviewer, in which case it would be a sycophantic fear grin in hopes of payoff—either promotion or sex. The only actual altruists in rhesus society are mothers, but The Times Higher doesn't ask authors' mothers to review books.…

The review continues:

Maestripieri tells [his] story with incisive prose, sharp wit and admirable brevity, and the book should appeal to a wide audience from cynical teenagers to economists who believe that the "invisible hand" of competition underlies all human society. He also has perfect timing. The idea that our human brains evolved largely to deal with the demands of society is very much in fashion.…

Rhesus range from India to China, through Himalayan snows, tropical swamps, temples, bazaars and railway stations. Humans, of course, range everywhere. The sweeter-natured primates… have more restricted ranges than nastier ones. Does this mean that there is a correlation between aggression and success in the world? Maestripieri thinks so. He compares rhesus society to the army—organized to conquer people and occupy lands.

N.B. See the press's translations of Machiavelli's works including Art of War and The Prince.

Archived in Anthropology | Biology | Psychology | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Stephen Braude is no stranger to controversy. Braude is a professor of philosophy who has investigated paranormal phenomena for over thirty years. In the preface to his new book, The Gold Leaf Lady and Other Parapsychological Investigations, he relates what happens when a philosopher who has previously limited his research to language, time, and logic turns to investigating parapsychology:

Some philosophers I expected to be open-minded and intellectually honest instead behaved with surprising rigidity and cowardice. I clearly knew the evidence and issues much better than they did, but they condescendingly pretended to know this material well enough to ridicule my interest in it.… I had really thought that as philosophers—as people presumably devoted to the pursuit of wisdom and truth—my colleagues would actually be willing to admit their ignorance and be curious to learn more. I genuinely believed they'd be excited to discover that certain relevant bits of received wisdom might be mistaken.

Fortunately, at least some revelations were more encouraging. Several philosophers whom I thought would be inflexible or disinterested surprised me with their honesty, courage, and open-mindedness. And some reactions I've never fully understood. One famous philosopher (I won't say who) said to me, "Well if someone has to do this I'm glad it's you." I think that was meant as a compliment, but it's obviously open to multiple interpretations.

We posted an excerpt from Braude's book at the beginning of the month and it's been interesting to see those same kinds of reactions played out in the blogosphere:

Jason Kuznicki at Positive Liberty took us to task, opining that "university presses … have certain responsibilities, including above all scientific rigor." (Gosh, thanks for the reminder.) To his credit, though, he engaged with his critics and has perhaps gained a more complete sense of what rigor requires.

One of those critics was Michael Prescott, who posted a defense of the book on his self-named blog. Taking the other side of the issue is biologist P.Z. Myers, blogging on Pharyngula, who for some reason mixes in a discussion of bottled water with his shoot-from-the-hip criticism.

Reading the excerpt from The Gold Leaf Lady and Other Parapsychological Investigations is no substitute for reading the whole book, but it's a place to start. Just don't make up your mind too fast. Braude brings skepticism to his observations of phenomena purported to be paranormal, but he also brings a willingness to put his fundamental scientific beliefs to the test.

Archived in Commentary | Philosophy | Psychology
Posted by DB at 07:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In his new book, The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle's Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science author Daniel Gross embarks on an intellectual voyage to examine the history of emotions in western culture. Writing for the Times Literary Supplement reviewer Stephen Pender praises Gross's newest work for delivering a fascinating counterpoint to the way we generally understand emotions today. Pender writes:

One way to prise open the emotional sphere is to situate the passions socially, to investigate their exigencies with an eye on the polis. And we have a fine guide in Daniel Gross, the author of The Secret History of Emotion. To recognize the social in the passionate, Gross urges a turn to Aristotelian traditions, and in particular to the Rhetoric, which offers "a pragmatic phenomenology of the passions." In opposition to "current platitudes of emotion," Gross offers a bold, compelling and occasionally rebarbative argument about the turn from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political rhetoric, which articulated the social and the particular in the passionate, to a hopelessly insular psychology, marked by disingenuous universalizing and specious materialism.… Gross's deft and remarkable book should be required reading for neurobiologists and, of course, for humanists of every school.

Archived in Classics | History | Psychology | Reviews
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Alice A. Kuzinar, author of Melancholia's Dog: Reflections on Our Animal Kinship, was recently interviewed by Deborah Harper for Psychjourney, her Web site for mental health professionals and consumers. Drawing from her new book, Kuzinar discusses the philosophical and psychological significance of man's best friend and helps to demonstrate why "dog-love can be a precious but melancholy thing." Archived audio from the interview is available in the podcasts section of Harper's site.

An attempt to understand human attachment to the canis familiaris in terms of reciprocity and empathy, Melancholia's Dog tackles such difficult concepts as intimacy and kinship with dogs, the shame associated with identification with their suffering, and the reasons for the profound mourning over their deaths. In addition to philosophy and psychoanalysis, Alice A. Kuzniar turns to the insights and images offered by the literary and visual arts—the short stories of Ivan Turgenev and Franz Kafka, the novels of J. M. Coetzee and Rebecca Brown, the photography of Sally Mann and William Wegman, and the artwork of David Hockney and Sue Coe. Without falling into sentimentality or anthropomorphization, Kuzniar honors and learns from our canine companions, above all attending the silences and sadness brought on by the effort to represent the dog as perfectly and faithfully as it is said to love.

Archived in Literature | Psychology
Posted by TXM at 02:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Although we're generally unconscious of it, strategy is a regular component of daily life. Whether you're planning a dinner party, fighting for a promotion, attempting to lose weight, trying to beat traffic, or occupied by any number of normal activities, you're engaging in strategic thought and action. It's crucial to our success and happiness. It's no wonder then that books on strategy routinely find the bestseller list. Most of these accounts of strategy are brought to us by CEOs, self-help gurus, and military leaders who reduce strategy to straightforward sets of rules or, in the case of game theorists, mathematical equations. But in Getting Your Way: Strategic Dilemmas in the Real World, James M. Jasper reminds us that life's really not so simple. The key to mastering strategy and finding success is to develop a more refined understanding of just how unique and complex any given situation really is.

Read the press release.

Archived in Economics | Psychology | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 01:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Philip Rieff died last Saturday in Philadelphia. Rieff was a sociologist best known for his examination of the social consequences—especially the moral consequences—of the assimilation of the ideas of Freud into modern culture.

In 1989 the University of Chicago Press published a collection of Rieff's essays, The Feeling Intellect: Selected Writings, edited by Jonathan B. Imber. We have also kept in print two of Rieff's most influential works: Freud: The Mind of the Moralist and The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud.

Archived in Psychology | Sociology
Posted by DB at 03:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Not by Genes Alone offers a radical interpretation of human evolution. What makes us human, renowned scholars Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd demonstrate, lies in our psychology—more specifically, our unparalleled ability to adapt. Building their case with such fascinating examples as the Amish rumspringa and the gift exchange system of the !Kung San, Not by Genes Alone throws aside the conventional nature-versus-nurture debate and convincingly argues that culture and biology are inextricably linked. Read the press release.

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Anthropology | Biology | History and Philosophy of Science | Press Releases | Psychology | Sociology
Posted by at 09:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

How Healthy Are We?: A National Study of Well-Being at Midlife, edited by Orville Gilbert Brim, Carol D. Ryff, and Ronald C. Kessler, was recently reviewed by Psychiatric Services: A Journal of the American Psychiatric Association: "It is an impressive and lengthy compendium and a valuable contribution to the epidemiology literature, including valuable insights into a range of psychosocial factors that define and affect middle-aged life in our society."

Archived in Psychology | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by at 10:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)