By Richard Pildes/The Conversation

With Rudy Giuliani flailing through a series of failed election challenges for the Trump campaign, a superb new political biography provides fresh evidence of just how stark the contrast is between the head of Trump’s legal team and George W. Bush’s hyperprepared, efficient and savvy commander-in-chief for the 2000 election political and legal fight, James Baker.
The biography The Man Who Ran Washington, by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, provides at least three new major revelations, even for those of us election law experts steeped in that 2000 saga, which culminated in the U.S. Supreme Court’s Bush v. Gore decision and Bush’s consequent victory.

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Posted on December 4, 2020

By Rusty Blazenhoff/Boing Boing

Known for his distinctive ink-spatter style and contributions to “gonzo journalism,” counterculture cartoonist Ralph Steadman’s career is examined in a new 368-page hardcover book. Ralph Steadman: A Life in Ink ($60) is available now.

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Posted on November 30, 2020

By Elizabeth Svoboda/Undark

In 2015, Megan Rosenbloom traveled to Harvard University’s Houghton Library in search of a book called Des destinées de l’âme (“Destinies of the Soul”) by the French author Arsène Houssaye. This copy of Houssaye’s masterwork had a singular distinction: At the time, it was the only book on the planet proven to be bound in human skin.
For Rosenbloom, a librarian at UCLA, the trip served as her entrée into a field she’d studied for years: “anthropodermic bibliopegy,” the practice of binding books in human epidermis.
It’s easy to assume this topic is too restricted or too gruesome for a book of its own, but Dark Archives: A Librarian’s Investigation Into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin proves that assumption wrong. As Rosenbloom crisscrosses the globe to confirm the purported origins of skin-bound books – a cracking detective story in itself – her journey offers unusual insight into what defines informed consent, what separates homage from exploitation, and how power disparities can breed casual inhumanity.

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Posted on November 22, 2020

By W. Joseph Campbell/The Conversation

Polling is hardly a flamboyant field that attracts a lot of colorful characters. It is a rather reserved profession that now finds itself under siege in the aftermath of yet another polling surprise in a national election.
The field is buffeted by intense criticism – by even extreme claims that it may be doomed – following mischaracterizations in national polls that Joe Biden was bound for a blowout victory.
Many pre-election polls suggested it was to be a “blue wave” election in which Biden would easily take over the White House, while fellow Democrats would sweep to control in the Senate and fortify their majority in the House of Representatives.
The 2020 election was closer and more complex than most national polls indicated, and it marked the second successive polling surprise in a U.S. presidential election. In 2016, polls in key Great Lakes states underestimated support for Donald Trump, states that were crucial to his winning the White House.
In its troubled hour, polling could use a prominent, outspoken and irreverent character who knows the profession’s intricacies and whose default isn’t to defensiveness. Such a figure could place polling’s latest misstep in useful and plausible perspective, and do so candidly, without seeming too haughty or arcane about it.

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Posted on November 17, 2020

By Wikipedia

When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World is a classic work of social psychology by Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter published in 1956, which studied a small UFO religion in Chicago called the Seekers that believed in an imminent apocalypse and its coping mechanisms after the event did not occur. Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance can account for the psychological consequences of disconfirmed expectations. One of the first published cases of dissonance was reported in this book.

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Posted on November 11, 2020

By Susan Cosier/Undark

Roughly 123,000 years ago, oak, elm and hazel forests grew across Europe. Macaques swung from branches and aurochs and horses grazed on grasslands. Hippopotamuses swam in deep lakebeds in what is now Yorkshire, England. Small bands of Neanderthals, who had already existed for more than 200,000 years, frequented lakes and springs and hunted in the forests.
The continent was remarkably warm – even warmer than it is today – and the period marked a point of Neanderthal culture that we don’t often associate with the species, according to Rebecca Wragg Sykes in her compelling new book, Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art.
Long portrayed as a cave-dwelling Ice Age species, Neanderthals persisted for about another 80,000 years, living through many frigid glacial periods in an epoch of vast and sudden climate change before eventually giving way to modern humans.

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Posted on November 8, 2020

By Jennifer Shanahan/Chicago Literary Hall of Fame

A quarantine classic.

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Posted on November 4, 2020

By Rory Mir/The Electronic Frontier Foundation

The sudden move to remote education by universities this year has forced the inevitable: the move to an online education. While most universities won’t be fully remote, having course materials online was already becoming the norm before the COVID-19 pandemic, and this year it has become mandatory for millions of educators and students. As academia recovers from this crisis, and hopefully prepares for the next one, the choices we make will send us down one of two paths. We can move towards a future of online education which replicates the artificial scarcity of traditional publishing, or take a path which fosters an abundance of free materials by embracing the principles of open access and open education.
The well-worn, hefty, out-of-date textbook you may have bought some years ago was likely obsolete the moment you had a reliable computer and an internet connection. Traditional textbook publishers already know this, and tout that they have embraced the digital era and have e-books and e-rentals available – sometimes even at a discount. Despite some state laws discouraging the practice, publishers try to bundle their digital textbooks into “online learning systems,” often at the expense of the student. However, the costs and time needed to copy and send thousands of the digital textbooks themselves is trivial compared to their physical equivalent.

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Posted on October 30, 2020

By SIU Press
“When it came to the Wild West, the 19th-century press rarely let truth get in the way of a good story. James Butler ‘Wild Bill’ Hickok’s story was no exception. Mythologized and sensationalized, Hickok was turned into the deadliest gunfighter of all, a so-called moral killer, a national phenomenon even while he was alive,” SIU Press says.

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Posted on October 29, 2020

By Dan Falk/Undark

Rita Colwell is a pioneering microbiologist whose work on cholera helped illuminate the interplay between the environment and public health.
She was also the first woman to serve as director of the National Science Foundation, and is currently a Distinguished University Professor at both the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health.
In her half-century-plus in the sciences, Colwell has also seen very clearly the array of obstacles confronted by women as they try to navigate a traditionally male world. (When she applied for a graduate fellowship in bacteriology, she says was told, “We don’t waste fellowships on women.”)
Colwell’s new book, A Lab of One’s Own, co-authored with writer Sharon Bertsch McGrayne, documents much of what she has seen and heard over the years, from sexual harassment to the invisible structural obstacles placed in the way of women working in the sciences. (The book’s subtitle is “One Woman’s Personal Journey Through Sexism in Science.”)

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Posted on October 25, 2020