Reviews

Elizabeth Stice 5/14/26 Elizabeth Stice 5/14/26

Maintenance and the Making of Civilization

Elizabeth Stice reviews Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One by Stewart Brand (Stripe Press, 2025)

Elizabeth Stice 3/26/26 Elizabeth Stice 3/26/26

Class Dismissed

Joel Harold Tannenbaum reviews Yuppies: The Bankers, Lawyers, Joggers, and Gourmands Who Conquered New York by Dylan Gottlieb (Harvard University Press, 2026)

Elizabeth Stice 3/21/26 Elizabeth Stice 3/21/26

Saturday Shortstack

Turkmenistan, Where on Earth is That? by Tam Macklin (Rowanvale Books, 2025)

Is Your Work Worth It? How to Think About Meaningful Work by Christopher Wong Michaelson and Jennifer Totsi-Kharas (Hachette, 2024)

Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect by Will Guidara (Optimism Press, 2022)

Elizabeth Stice 2/10/26 Elizabeth Stice 2/10/26

Getting Beyond Grit

Elizabeth Stice reviews Marked by Time: How Social Change Has Transformed Crime and the Life Trajectories of Young Americans by Robert J. Sampson (Harvard University Press, 2026)

Elizabeth Stice 1/29/26 Elizabeth Stice 1/29/26

“The Terminator” as non-fiction

Christian McNamara reviews If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares (Little, Brown and Company, 2025)

Elizabeth Stice 11/19/25 Elizabeth Stice 11/19/25

It’s Complicated

Elizabeth Stice reviews Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity by Paul Kingsnorth (Thesis, 2025)

Elizabeth Stice 9/11/25 Elizabeth Stice 9/11/25

Parting with parents: sweet or sorrow?

Don McCulloch reviews The Power of Parting: Finding Peace and Freedom Through Family Estrangement by Eamon Dolan (Penguin Random House, 2025).

Elizabeth Stice 9/9/25 Elizabeth Stice 9/9/25

Capitalism in a bottle: what could go wrong?

Kimberly Bain reviews Sweet and Deadly: How Coca-Cola Spreads Disinformation and Makes Us Sick by Murray Carpenter (MIT Press, 2025)

Elizabeth Stice 8/14/25 Elizabeth Stice 8/14/25

There’s No Place Like…Home? Addressing Housing Insecurity in Five Acts

Kimberly Bain reviews There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America by Brian Goldstone (Penguin Random House, 2025)

Elizabeth Stice 6/26/25 Elizabeth Stice 6/26/25

Catching a Vibe: How Spotify Licensed an Experience and Commercialized a Culture

Kimberly A. Bain reviews Mood Machine by Liz Pelly (First One Signal Publishers, 2025)

Elizabeth Stice 6/24/25 Elizabeth Stice 6/24/25

A Fair Fight

Joel Tannenbaum reviews How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist who Outwitted Hitler by Peter Pomerantsev (Hachette, 2024)

Elizabeth Stice 6/17/25 Elizabeth Stice 6/17/25

Profiles in Service

Elizabeth Stice reviews Who is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service by Michael Lewis et. al (Riverhead Books, 2025)

Elizabeth Stice 4/10/25 Elizabeth Stice 4/10/25

To Spur a Virtuous Cycle

Sarah Selden reviews Everything Is Tuberculosis by John Green (Crash Course Books, 2025)

Elizabeth Stice 2/20/25 Elizabeth Stice 2/20/25

Is a Return to Public Trust Possible?

Stephanie Bennett reviews Words for Conviviality: Media Technologies and Practices of Hope by Jeffrey Bilbro (Baylor University Press, 2024)

Elizabeth Stice 1/23/25 Elizabeth Stice 1/23/25

A Promise Kept

Dana Dickson reviews An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s by Doris Kearns Goodwin (Simon & Schuster, 2024)

Elizabeth Stice 1/9/25 Elizabeth Stice 1/9/25

“The American dream is calling: Won’t you pick up?”

Kimberly A. Bain reviews Drive: Scraping by in Uber’s America, One Ride at a Time by Jonathan Rigsby (Beacon Press, 2024)

Elizabeth Stice 12/12/24 Elizabeth Stice 12/12/24

Islands in the Stream

Joel Tannenbaum reviews Streaming Music, Streaming Capitalism (Duke, 2024) by Eric Drott, Unspooled: How the Cassette Made Music Shareable (Duke, 2024) by Rob Drew, and High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape (Univ. North Carolina, 2023) by Marc Masters.