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A critical examination of the figure of the neural network as it mediates neuroscientific and computational discourses and technical practices

Neural Networks proposes to reconstruct situated practices, social histories, mediating techniques, and ontological assumptions that inform the computational project of the same name. If so-called machine learning comprises a statistical approach to pattern extraction, then neural networks can be defined as a biologically inspired model that relies on probabilistically weighted neuron-like units to identify such patterns. Far from signaling the ultimate convergence of human and machine intelligence, however, neural networks highlight the technologization of neurophysiology that characterizes virtually all strands of neuroscientific and AI research of the past century. Taking this traffic as its starting point, this volume explores how cognition came to be constructed as essentially computational in nature, to the point of underwriting a technologized view of human biology, psychology, and sociability, and how countermovements provide resources for thinking otherwise.

A fascinating look at the United States’ conflicted relationship with news and the media, through the lens of the newsreel

When weekly newsreels launched in the early twentieth century, they offered the U.S. public the first weekly record of events that symbolized “indisputable evidence” of the news. In News Parade, Joseph Clark examines the history of the newsreel and how it changed the way Americans saw the world. He combines an examination of the newsreel’s methods of production, distribution, and reception with an analysis of its representational strategies to understand the newsreel’s place in the history of twentieth-century American culture and film history.

Clark focuses on the sound newsreel of the 1930s and 1940s, arguing that it represents a crucial moment in the development of a spectacular society where media representations of reality became more fully integrated into commodity culture. Using several case studies, including the newsreel’s coverage of Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight and the Sino–Japanese War, News Parade shows how news film transformed the relationship between its audience and current events, as well as the social and political consequences of these changes. It pays particular attention to how discourses of race and gender worked together with the rhetoric of speed, mobility, and authority to establish the power and privilege of newsreel spectatorship.

In the age of fake news and the profound changes to journalism brought on by the internet, News Parade demonstrates how new technologies and media reshaped the American public’s relationship with the news in the 1930s—a history that can help us to better understand the transformations happening today.

Unmasks the long-forgotten story of how a flying, superhuman vigilante played a pivotal role in the founding of the American labor movement.

On July 5, 1828, more than a century before Superman arrived on Earth, a superhero took flight in Philadelphia’s night sky. Buried on page three of a small local newspaper, the announcement of his arrival appeared under the title “The Night-Hawk, No. 1” with a cryptic epigraph from Romeo and Juliet: “I’ll be a candleholder and look on.” Who and what was the Night Hawk? As Matthew Warner Osborn reveals, this was the sobriquet of a mysterious columnist for the weekly Mechanics’ Free Press, the first radical socialist newspaper in America. Dressed in a mysterious cloak, the Night Hawk soared over Philadelphia, revealing the evil crimes of prominent gentlemen, fighting murderous criminals, and calling out fraudulent moral authorities. 

The Night Hawk was the ingenious invention of an impoverished actor, Cornelius A. Logan, who created the character as a public champion of Philadelphia’s Working Men’s movement, the first successful American labor party. The Night Hawk’s nocturnal adventures transformed their socialist ideology into an entertaining fantasy that dramatized the struggle against industrial exploitation and the degradation of working people. The success of the character made Logan into a celebrity, and he went on to become a popular and innovative comedian on the antebellum stage.

A harbinger of the superheroes we know today, the Night Hawk promises to illuminate dark secrets from the past, but he can also shed light on our present. He ignites our need to see corrupt elites unmasked and held accountable for their actions, all while protecting the innocent and oppressed. Americans have always loved to fantasize about powerful superheroes who hide behind masks while chasing bad guys, and Osborn shows in this entertaining history how the Night Hawk was perhaps the first standard bearer for that enduring mystique. 

The book opens with key themes that will help students and scholars understand the century, such as the civilization and barbarism binary, urbanism, the divide between conservatives and liberals, and transculturation. In the chapters that follow, Conway weaves transnational trends together with brief case studies and compelling snapshots that help us understand the period. How much did books and photographs cost in the nineteenth century? What was the dominant style in painting? What kinds of ballroom dancing were popular? Richly illustrated with striking photographs and lithographs, this is a book that invites the reader to rediscover a past age that is not quite past, still resonating into the present.

Recent anthropological scholarship on “new midwifery” centers on how professional midwives in various countries are helping women reconnect with “nature,” teaching them to trust in their bodies, respecting women’s “choices,” and fighting for women’s right to birth as naturally as possible. In No Alternative, Rosalynn A. Vega uses ethnographic accounts of natural birth practices in Mexico to complicate these narratives about new midwifery and illuminate larger questions of female empowerment, citizenship, and the commodification of indigenous culture, by showing how alternative birth actually reinscribes traditional racial and gender hierarchies.

Vega contrasts the vastly different birthing experiences of upper-class and indigenous Mexican women. Upper-class women often travel to birthing centers to be delivered by professional midwives whose methods are adopted from and represented as indigenous culture, while indigenous women from those same cultures are often forced by lack of resources to use government hospitals regardless of their preferred birthing method. Vega demonstrates that women’s empowerment, having a “choice,” is a privilege of those capable of paying for private medical services—albeit a dubious privilege, as it puts the burden of correctly producing future members of society on women’s shoulders. Vega’s research thus also reveals the limits of citizenship in a neoliberal world, as indigeneity becomes an object of consumption within a transnational racialized economy.

Some maps help us find our way; others restrict where we go and what we do. These maps control behavior, regulating activities from flying to fishing, prohibiting students from one part of town from being schooled on the other, and banishing certain individuals and industries to the periphery. This restrictive cartography has boomed in recent decades as governments seek regulate activities as diverse as hiking, building a residence, opening a store, locating a chemical plant, or painting your house anything but regulation colors. It is this aspect of mapping—its power to prohibit—that celebrated geographer Mark Monmonier tackles in No Dig, No Fly, No Go.

Rooted in ancient Egypt’s need to reestablish property boundaries following the annual retreat of the Nile’s floodwaters, restrictive mapping has been indispensable in settling the American West, claiming slices of Antarctica, protecting fragile ocean fisheries, and keeping sex offenders away from playgrounds. But it has also been used for opprobrium: during one of the darkest moments in American history, cartographic exclusion orders helped send thousands of Japanese Americans to remote detention camps. Tracing the power of prohibitive mapping at multiple levels—from regional to international—and multiple dimensions—from property to cyberspace—Monmonier demonstrates how much boundaries influence our experience—from homeownership and voting to taxation and airline travel. A worthy successor to his critically acclaimed How to Lie with Maps, the book is replete with all of the hallmarks of a Monmonier classic, including the wry observations and witty humor.

In the end, Monmonier looks far beyond the lines on the page to observe that mapped boundaries, however persuasive their appearance, are not always as permanent and impermeable as their cartographic lines might suggest. Written for anyone who votes, owns a home, or aspires to be an informed citizen, No Dig, No Fly. No Go will change the way we look at maps forever.

Counters common and harmful myths about manhood today and offers recommendations for what young men really need as they mature.

From the “manosphere” and LooksMaxxers to Proud Boys, it increasingly feels these days like the kids—particularly the boys—are not all right. Social expectations around what masculinity means are in flux, while algorithms push out misogynist content with no regard for its radicalizing effects. In 2023 and again in 2025, a representative survey of 2,000 American men aged 18-23 found that over two-thirds agreed with the statement: “No one really knows me.” This dramatic finding revealed the failure of American boyhood to account for young men’s full humanity and equip them with the skills, relationships, and support needed for success in these modern times. 

In No One Really Knows Me, psychologists Michael C. Reichert and Gary Barker seek to uncover the root causes of and solutions to our contemporary crisis of masculinity. Based on single and group interviews and a wealth of survey data, including their own national survey of 2,000 men ages 18 to 45 from a broad range of economic, racial, and social backgrounds, their findings were clear: across the board, men are struggling to build the social networks they desperately need for health and success. Underlying this failure is a set of historic, pernicious myths that continue to dominate boyhood and shape the imaginations of boys in families, schools, and relationships. Reichert and Barker use each chapter to highlight one myth of masculinity, offer data from their own research and practice to debunk it, and then present life-changing, evidence-based alternatives. 

Young men today are in quite a different position than they were a generation ago. As he emerges from boyhood on his way to manhood, each young man needs to be grounded in emotionally open connections, deep relationships with people who have his back, and opportunities to engage with purpose. This book shows us how we can provide young men with surer footing for their passage to adulthood. 

A timely rethinking of the archetypal story of Noah, the great flood, and who was left behind as the waters rose

Most people know the story of Noah from a children’s bible or a play set with a colorful ship, bearded Noah, pairs of animals, and an uncomplicated vision of survival. Noah’s ark, however, will forever be haunted by what it leaves to the rising waters so that the world can begin again.

In Noah’s Arkive, Jeffrey J. Cohen and Julian Yates examine the long history of imagining endurance against climate catastrophe—as well as alternative ways of creating refuge. They trace how the elements of the flood narrative were elaborated in medieval and early modern art, text, and music, and now shape writing and thinking during the current age of anthropogenic climate change. Arguing that the biblical ark may well be the worst possible exemplar of human behavior, the chapters draw on a range of sources, from the Epic of Gilgamesh and Ovid’s tale of Deucalion and Pyrrah, to speculative fiction, climate fiction, and stories and art dwelling with environmental catastrophe. Noah’s Arkive uncovers the startling afterlife of the Genesis narrative written from the perspective of Noah’s wife and family, the animals on the ark, and those excluded and so left behind to die. This book of recovered stories speaks eloquently to the ethical and political burdens of living through the Anthropocene.

Following a climate change narrative across the millennia, Noah’s Arkive surveys the long history of dwelling with the consequences of choosing only a few to survive in order to start the world over. It is an intriguing meditation on how the story of the ark can frame how we think about environmental catastrophe and refuge, conservation and exclusion, offering hope for a better future by heeding what we know from the past.

An analysis of the growing visibility of nonreligion in Egypt.

Egypt's 2011 Uprising, while often perceived as a failed revolution, nonetheless nonetheless had durable social effects. Among these has been a rise in expressing atheism and agnosticism, especially among educated and affluent youth—the country’s future leaders.

An intimate ethnography, Nonreligious Lifeworlds in Egypt explores the intellectual and emotional transformations of atheists and agnostics inspired by the aspirational freedom-seeking of the Arab Spring. Rejecting both of Egypt’s dominant religious traditions, Islam and Coptic Christianity, nonreligious people are widely viewed as agents of moral outrage. Amid media-driven panics, their sanity is often questioned by their own families as they experiment with new ways of living and relating. Drawing from in-depth fieldwork, interviews, and social media analysis, Karin van Nieuwkerk reveals her interlocutors’ changing perspectives on sex and gender, eating and drinking, and life and death. Above all, she emphasizes the affective experiences of renouncing religion, marked by anxiety and regret—but also liberation and relief. With rigor and compassion, Van Nieuwkerk opens our minds to the arduous process of exchanging established norms for self-determination.

Recent polls suggest that fewer than 40 percent of Americans believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution, despite it being one of science’s best-established findings. More and more parents are refusing to vaccinate their children for fear it causes autism, though this link can been consistently disproved. And about 40 percent of Americans believe that the threat of global warming is exaggerated, despite near consensus in the scientific community that manmade climate change is real.

Why do people believe bunk? And what causes them to embrace such pseudoscientific beliefs and practices? Noted skeptic Massimo Pigliucci sets out to separate the fact from the fantasy in this entertaining exploration of the nature of science, the borderlands of fringe science, and—borrowing a famous phrase from philosopher Jeremy Bentham—the nonsense on stilts. Presenting case studies on a number of controversial topics, Pigliucci cuts through the ambiguity surrounding science to look more closely at how science is conducted, how it is disseminated, how it is interpreted, and what it means to our society. The result is in many ways a “taxonomy of bunk” that explores the intersection of science and culture at large.

No one—not the public intellectuals in the culture wars between defenders and detractors of science nor the believers of pseudoscience themselves—is spared Pigliucci’s incisive analysis. In the end, Nonsense on Stilts is a timely reminder of the need to maintain a line between expertise and assumption. Broad in scope and implication, it is also ultimately a captivating guide for the intelligent citizen who wishes to make up her own mind while navigating the perilous debates that will affect the future of our planet.

Winner of the 2016 Eliza Atkins Gleason Book Award and the 2016 Lillian Smith Book Award
Americans tend to imagine their public libraries as time-honored advocates of equitable access to information for all. Through much of the twentieth century, however, many black Americans were denied access to public libraries or allowed admittance only to separate and smaller buildings and collections. While scholars have examined and continue to uncover the history of school segregation, there has been much less research published on the segregation of public libraries in the Jim Crow South. In fact, much of the writing on public library history has failed to note these racial exclusions.

In Not Free, Not for All, Cheryl Knott traces the establishment, growth, and eventual demise of separate public libraries for African Americans in the South, disrupting the popular image of the American public library as historically welcoming readers from all walks of life. Using institutional records, contemporaneous newspaper and magazine articles, and other primary sources together with scholarly work in the fields of print culture and civil rights history, Knott reconstructs a complex story involving both animosity and cooperation among whites and blacks who valued what libraries had to offer. African American library advocates, staff, and users emerge as the creators of their own separate collections and services with both symbolic and material importance, even as they worked toward dismantling those very institutions during the era of desegregation.