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In 1914, a brilliant young political journalist published a book arguing that the United States had entered a period of “drift”—a lack of control over rapidly changing forces in society. He highlighted the tensions between expansion and consolidation, traditionalism and progressivism, and emotion and rationality. He wrote to convince readers that they could balance these tensions: they could be organized, efficient, and functional without sacrificing impulse, choice, or liberty. Mastery over drift is attainable, Walter Lippmann argued, through diligent attention to facts and making active choices. Democracy, Lippman wrote, is “a use of freedom, an embrace of opportunity.”
            Lippman’s Drift and Mastery became one of the most important and influential documents of the Progressive Movement. It remains a valuable text for understanding the political thought of early twentieth-century America and a lucid exploration of timeless themes in American government and politics. Distinguished historian Walter Leuchtenberg’s 1986 introduction and notes are retained in this edition.

Drilled to Write offers a rich account of US Army cadets navigating the unique demands of Army writing at a senior military college. In this longitudinal case study, J. Michael Rifenburg follows one cadet, Logan Blackwell, for four years and traces how he conceptualizes Army writing and Army genres through immersion in military science classes, tactical exercises in the Appalachian Mountains, and specialized programs like Airborne School.

Drawing from research on rhetorical genre studies, writing transfer, and materiality, Drilled to Write speaks to scholars in writing studies committed to capturing how students understand their own writing development. Collectively, these chapters articulate four ways Blackwell leveraged resources through ROTC to become a cadet writer at this military college. Each chapter is dedicated to one year of his undergraduate experience with focus on curricular writing for his business management major and military science classes as well as his extracurricular writing, like his Ballroom Dance Club bylaws and a three-thousand-word short story.

In Drilled to Write, Rifenburg invites readers to see how cadets are positioned between civilian and military life—a curiously liminal space where they develop as writers. Using Army ROTC as an entry into genre theory and larger conversations about the role higher education plays in developing Army officers, he shows how writing students develop genre awareness and flexibility while forging a personal identity.

The Dual Enrollment Kaleidoscope serves as a starting point for elevating the voices of those who do dual enrollment (DE) work—those who historicize, legitimize, scrutinize, critically analyze, align, and assess it—pushing readers beyond unique, singular views of DE first-year composition and positioning DE’s impact on composition instruction as one that shifts dependent upon perspective. Just as kaleidoscopes reconfigure images, DE provides writing studies with reflecting images of what FYC was, is, and could be.
 
DE disrupts long-held beliefs of who should take and who should teach college writing. Giving higher education pause about the place of writing instruction within the academy, DE force those in the field to reflect upon the purposes and value of FYC and its pedagogical approaches. Featuring seventeen chapters written by a wide and diverse range of authors, this collection includes the voices of prominent scholars in rhetoric and composition at two- and four-year public and private institutions, as well as emerging scholars in the field. It also features a variety of methodologies, including archival research, quantitative and qualitative data collection, and autoethnography.

Few texts have been published on dual enrollment writing in rhetoric and composition studies. The Dual Enrollment Kaleidoscope should be mandatory reading for anyone interested in or tasked with doing the work of DE writing instruction, administration, mentoring, or assessment.
 
 
Contributors: Dominic Ashby, Anna Bogen, Tyler Branson, Melanie Burdick, Scott Campbell, Christine R. Farris, David Gehler, Leigh Graziano, Jane Greer, Jennifer Hadley, Jacquelyn Hoermann-Elliott, Joseph Jones, Nancy Knowles, Amy Lueck, Miles McCrimmon, Katie McWain, Annie S. Mendenhall, Keith Miller, Brice Nordquist, Cornelia Paraskevas, Jill Parrot, Shirley K Rose, Barbara Schneider, Erin Scott-Stewart
 

Unmasking the science of deception—and why truth wins by default.

From the advent of fake news to climate-science denial and Bernie Madoff’s appeal to investors, people can be astonishingly gullible. Some people appear authentic and sincere even when the facts discredit them, and many people fall victim to conspiracy theories and economic scams that should be dismissed as obviously ludicrous. This happens because of a near-universal human tendency to operate within a mindset that can be characterized as a “truth-default.” We uncritically accept most of the messages we receive as “honest.” We all are perceptually blind to deception. We are hardwired to be duped. The question is, can anything be done to militate against our vulnerability to deception without further eroding the trust in people and social institutions that we so desperately need in civil society?

Timothy R. Levine’s Duped: Truth-Default Theory and the Social Science of Lying and Deception recounts a decades-long program of empirical research that culminates in a new theory of deception—truth-default theory. This theory holds that the content of incoming communication is typically and uncritically accepted as true, and most of the time, this is good. Truth-default allows humans to function socially. Further, because most deception is enacted by a few prolific liars, the so called “truth-bias” is not really a bias after all. Passive belief makes us right most of the time, but the catch is that it also makes us vulnerable to occasional deceit.

Levine’s research on lie detection and truth-bias has produced many provocative new findings over the years. He has uncovered what makes some people more believable than others and has discovered several ways to improve lie-detection accuracy. In Duped, Levine details where these ideas came from, how they were tested, and how the findings combine to produce a coherent new understanding of human deception and deception detection.
 

Presented in this book is a theory of concept formation and understanding that does not make use of a notion of an innate mental language as a means of concept representation. Instead, experimental concepts are treated semantically as stabilising structuring of growing sets of data, which are sets of experienced satisfaction situations for expressions, and theoretical concepts are based on coherent sets of general sentences held true. There are two kinds of structures to be established: general concepts by means of similarity sets under perspectives and historical concepts. This gives rise to a theory of understanding new situations and expressions by integrating new data into established sets of data salva stability, or by extending the conceptual structure in a metaphorical or metonymical way. The theory provides a way to understand what identity between propositional attitudes amounts to, especially how people can have more or less the same belief.