Oreskes
and Conway have been heroes of mine ever since their masterful Merchants of Doubt. They are now doing
for free-market fundamentalism what they previously did for climate change
denialism: showing how con artists have tricked Americans into believing it.
I teach a lot of conservative students, and it can be hard to get past their
distrust and defensiveness. Revealing the “magic trick” of how they have been
manipulated is one of the few things that work.
"A carefully researched work of intellectual history, and an urgently needed political analysis." --Jane Mayer
“[A] scorching indictment of free market fundamentalism … and how we can change, before it's too late.”-Esquire, Best Books of Winter 2023
The bestselling authors of Merchants of Doubt offer a profound, startling history of one of America's most tenacious--and destructive--false ideas: the myth of the "free market."
In their bestselling book Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway revealed the origins of climate change denial. Now, they unfold the truth about another disastrous dogma: the “magic of the marketplace.”
Krueger
plunges into a fascinating paradox: nineteenth-century French literature was
famous for its evocation of scent, even as the writers, doctors, and scientists
of the day fretted over how anyone could describe something as fleeting and
unique as an odor.
She bridges the gap with the concept of sillage—the lingering hint of perfume left in the wake of someone
who has passed by—which becomes both a literal and literary way of detecting
the ephemeral. I particularly like her use of the “male sniff” as an olfactory
component of the “male gaze.”
Despite long-standing assertions that languages, including French and English, cannot sufficiently communicate the experience of smell, much of France's nineteenth-century literature has gained praise for its memorable evocation of odours. As French perfume was industrialized, democratized, cosmeticized, and feminized in the nineteenth century, stories of fragrant scent trails aligned perfume with toxic behaviour and viewed a woman's scent as something alluring, but also something to be controlled.
Drawing on a wealth of resources, Perfume on the Page in Nineteenth-Century France explores how fiction and related writing on olfaction meet, permeate, and illuminate one another. The book examines medical tracts, letters,…
As
a historian of science, I was fascinated to see how science could be used,
abused, and hijacked by regimes of power.
As a Mississippian, I was appalled
at how persistent and insidious the problem of racial injustice remains in my
state’s legal system. This is an eye-opening book that also reads like a true-crime
page-turner.
At the heart of the first is Dr. Steven Hayne, a doctor the State of Mississippi employed as its de facto medical examiner for two decades. Beginning in the late 1980s, he performed anywhere from 1,200 to 1,800 autopsies per year, five times more than is recommended, all at night, in the basement of a local morgue and flower shop. Autopsy reports claimed organs had been observed and weighed when, in reality, they had been surgically removed from the body years before. But Hayne was the only game in town. He also often…
A story of alchemy in Bohemian Paris, where two scientific outcasts discovered a fundamental distinction between natural and synthetic chemicals that inaugurated an enduring scientific mystery.
For centuries, scientists believed that living matter possessed a unique quality—a spirit or essence that differentiated it from nonliving matter. By the nineteenth century, the scientific consensus was that the building blocks of one were identical to the building blocks of the other. Elixir tells the story of two young chemists who were not convinced and how their work rewrote the boundary between life and nonlife.
Rich in sparks and smells, brimming with eccentric characters, experimental daring, and the romance of the Bohemian salon, Elixir is a fascinating cultural and scientific history.
