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From disappearing coral reefs and ocean acidification to floating great garbage patches, the Pacific Ocean is an ever-present reminder of the Anthropocene. In Oceanic Becoming, Rob Wilson demonstrates that in the midst of the planetary crises the Pacific now faces, it must be understood as interconnected to the other oceans. Wilson frames this interconnection as “Oceania,” reconceiving the world oceans as tied to sites of urban dwelling and life sustenance—from Boston to Brisbane—that are increasingly threatened by late capitalism. Confronting these threats, Wilson argues, requires a project he theorizes as “worlding”—a process of world-making and world-remaking across Oceania that would create new forms of belonging and connection at local, regional, and transnational levels. Wilson shows how Oceania is not just a site of peril but one charged with emergent literary and social formations that can provide the basis for new solidarities, futures, and ecologies.

Olmec Lithic Economy at San Lorenzo examines the specialized craft production, manufacturing, adoption, and spread of obsidian cutting tools at San Lorenzo, Mexico, the first major Olmec center to develop in the southern Gulf Coast region of Mesoamerica. Through the systematic analysis of this single commodity, Kenneth Hirth and Ann Cyphers reconstruct the importation of raw material and the on-site production and distribution of finished goods from a specialized workshop engaged in the manufacture of obsidian blades.
 
The obsidian blade was the cutting tool of choice across Mesoamerica and used in a wide range of activities, from domestic food preparation to institutional ritual activities. Hirth and Cyphers conducted a three-decade investigation of obsidian artifacts recovered at Puerto Malpica, the earliest known workshop, and seventy-six other sites on San Lorenzo Island, where these tools were manufactured for local and regional distribution. Evidence recovered from these excavations provides some of the first information on how early craft specialists operated and how the specialized technology used to manufacture obsidian blades spread across Mesoamerica. The authors use geochemical analyses to identify thirteen different sources for obsidian during San Lorenzo’s occupation. This volcanic glass, not locally available, was transported over great distances, arriving in nodular and finished blade form.
 
Olmec Lithic Economy at San Lorenzo offers a new way to analyze the Preclassic lithic economy—the procurement, production, distribution, and consumption of flaked stone tools—and shows how the study of lithics aids in developing a comprehensive picture of the internal structure and operation of Olmec economy. The book will be significant for Mesoamericanists as well as students and scholars interested in economy, lithic technology, and early complex societies.
 

Each year, millions of high school students consider whether to continue their schooling and attend and complete college. Despite evidence showing that a college degree yields far-reaching benefits, critics of higher education increasingly argue that college “does not pay off” and some students - namely, disadvantaged prospective college goers - would be better served by forgoing higher education. But debates about the value of college often fail to carefully consider what is required to speak knowledgeably about the benefits –what a person’s life might look like had they not completed college, or their college counterfactual. In Overcoming the Odds sociologist Jennie E. Brand reveals the benefits of completing college by comparing life outcomes of college graduates with their college counterfactuals.  
 
Drawing on two cohorts of nationally representative data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics National Longitudinal Surveys program, Brand uses matching and machine learning methods to estimate the effects of college completion across students with varying likelihoods of completing four-year degrees. To illustrate her findings, Brand describes outcomes using matched vignettes of college and non-college graduates. Brand shows that four-year college completion enables graduates to increase wages and household income, while also circumventing unemployment, low-wage work, job instability, poverty, and social assistance. Completing college also increases civic engagement. Most of these benefits are larger for disadvantaged than for more advantaged students, rendering arguments that college has limited benefits for unlikely graduates as flawed. Brand concludes that greater long-term earnings, and less job instability and unemployment, and thus more tax revenue, less reliance on public assistance, and high levels of volunteering indicate that public investment in higher education for students from disadvantaged backgrounds yields far-reaching collective benefits. She asserts that it is better for our society when more people complete college.
 
Overcoming the Odds is an innovative and enlightening exploration of how college can transform lives.