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Opinion
A Mind at the End of Its Tether
Whether or not madness seems like the right word for such a state of mind, Barbara K. Lipska's The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery is likely to make a certain impression on the reader approaching middle age or well into it, writes Scott McLemee.
Opinion
The Hunger Project
Scott McLemee reviews Alex de Waal's Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine.
Opinion
Crown of Creation
Scott McLemee reviews Michael Ohl’s The Art of Naming, which explores some of the one million animal species that have been identified.
Opinion
Anchoring an Argument
Scott McLemee considers Leo R. Chavez's Anchor Babies and The Challenge of Birthright Citizenship, which makes clear how little has been added to the stock of anti-immigrant rhetoric over the past century.
Opinion
Theory in Revolt Now Thunders
Reading "Theses on Theory and History" -- a manifesto decrying the state of history as a discipline -- left Scott McLemee feeling, in Yogi Berra's haunting words, "déjà vu all over again."
Opinion
Posterity Applies a Disinfectant
Scott McLemee on a surprising aspect of Amy Werbel's Lust on Trial: Censorship and the Rise of American Obscenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock.
Opinion
Portrait of a Puritanical Knucklehead
The struggle between piety and libido in the age of mechanical reproduction is at the core of Amy Werbel's Lust on Trial: Censorship and the Rise of American Obscenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock, writes Scott McLemee.
Opinion
Pay What You Want
Scott McLemee explores a few -- perhaps somewhat surprising -- new pricing models for books and journals.