Our third excerpt to celebrate Black History Month comes from Vincent Brown’s award-winning Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War, which Cornel West calls “brilliant” and “groundbreaking.” This gripping account of the largest slave revolt in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world, an uprising that laid bare the interconnectedness…

All this month we are celebrating Black History Month with excerpts from some of our recent books. In Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance, a New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2021 and a book that Ibram X. Kendi calls “extraordinary,” Mia Bay provides a riveting, character-rich…

To celebrate Black History Month, we’ve chosen excerpts from our books that reflect varied aspects of the Black experience. Fittingly, our first excerpt comes from a book about historian and educator Carter Woodson, the founder of Black History Month. The Los Angeles Review of Books praised Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G…

As we saw with the Ebola outbreak — and the disastrous early handling of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic — a lack of preparedness, delays, and system-wide problems with the distribution of critical medical supplies can have deadly consequences. Yet after every outbreak, the systems put in place to coordinate emergency…

How is it that we can walk unfamiliar streets while maintaining a sense of direction? Come up with shortcuts on the fly, in places we’ve never traveled? The answer is the complex mental map in our brains. This feature of our cognition is easily taken for granted, but it’s also…

In awarding Bruno Latour the 2021 Kyoto Prize for arts and philosophy, the Inamori Foundation said he has “revolutionized the conventional view of science” and “his philosophy re-examines ‘modernity’ based on the dualism of nature and society.” Below is an excerpt from An Inquiry into Modes of Existence. For…

Congratulations to Bruno Latour for being named the 2021 Kyoto Prize laureate for arts and philosophy. To celebrate, here’s an excerpt from We Have Never Been Modern. By claiming that the modern Constitution does not permit itself to be understood, by proposing to reveal the practices that allow it to…

To celebrate Pride Month, we are highlighting excerpts from books that explore the lives and experiences of the LGBT+ community. This second excerpt comes from How To Be Gay, a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, in which David M. Halperin, a pioneer of LGBTQ studies, dares to suggest that…

To celebrate Pride Month, we are highlighting excerpts from books that explore the lives and experiences of the LGBT+ community. Nathaniel Frank’s Awakening: How Gays and Lesbians Brought Marriage Equality to America tells the dramatic story of the struggle for same-sex couples to legally marry, something that is now taken…