Books published by The University of Chicago Press

Winner of the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, this collection of verse from Atsuro Riley offers a vivid weavework rendering and remembering an American place and its people. Recognized for his "wildly original" poetry and his "uncanny and unparalleled ability to blend lyric and narrative," Atsuro Riley deepens here his uncommon mastery and tang. In Heard-Hoard, Riley has "razor-exacted" and "raw-wired" an absorbing new sequence of poems, a vivid weavework rendering an American place and its people. At once an album of tales, a portrait gallery, and a soundscape; an "inscritched" dirt-mural and hymnbook, Heard-Hoard encompasses a chorus of voices shot through with (mostly human) histories and mysteries, their "old appetites as chronic as tides." From the crackling story-man calling us together in the primal circle to Tammy figuring "time and time that yonder oak," this collection is a profound evocation of lives and loss and lore.

"Regina Kunzel here draws upon previously unseen case files to argue for a much subtler understanding of how 20th-century LGBTQ Americans conceived of themselves and the diagnoses they received from psychiatrists, showing the ways in which they assimilated, accommodated, challenged, rejected, and rearticulated the judgment that they were sick. She argues that, as central as psychiatry was to LGBTQ identity, the discipline's own expanding claims to authority were anchored in its assertion of expertise over gender and sexual difference. That is, shrinks told people they were sick; but in both acquiescing to and resisting this diagnosis, those people showed that shrinks were powerful"--

Winner of the Popular Culture Association's Ray and Pat Browne Award for Best Book in Popular or American Culture In the 1940s and '50s, comic books were some of the most popular-and most unfiltered-entertainment in the United States. Publishers sold hundreds of millions of copies a year of violent, racist, and luridly sexual comics to Americans of all ages until a 1954 Senate investigation led to a censorship code that nearly destroyed the industry. But this was far from the first time the US government actively involved itself with comics-it was simply the most dramatic manifestation of a long, strange relationship between high-level policy makers and a medium that even artists and writers often dismissed as a creative sewer. In Pulp Empire, Paul S. Hirsch uncovers the gripping untold story of how the US government both attacked and appropriated comic books to help wage World War II and the Cold War, promote official-and clandestine-foreign policy and deflect global critiques of American racism. As Hirsch details, during World War II-and the concurrent golden age of comic books-government agencies worked directly with comic book publishers to stoke hatred for the Axis powers while simultaneously attempting to dispel racial tensions at home. Later, as the Cold War defense industry ballooned-and as comic book sales reached historic heights-the government again turned to the medium, this time trying to win hearts and minds in the decolonizing world through cartoon propaganda. Hirsch's groundbreaking research weaves together a wealth of previously classified material, including secret wartime records, official legislative documents, and caches of personal papers. His book explores the uneasy contradiction of how comics were both vital expressions of American freedom and unsettling glimpses into the national id-scourged and repressed on the one hand and deployed as official propaganda on the other. Pulp Empire is a riveting illumination of underexplored chapters in the histories of comic books, foreign policy, and race.

Rigorous nonpartisan research on the effects of economic forces and public policy on entrepreneurship and innovation. Entrepreneurship and innovation are widely recognized as drivers of economic dynamics and long-term prosperity. This series communicates key findings about the implications of entrepreneurial and innovative activity across the economy. Entrepreneurship and Innovation Policy and the Economy, Volume 3, synthesizes key findings about entrepreneurial and innovative activity in the U.S. economy, conveying insights on contemporary challenges and providing an analytical base for policy design. In the first paper, Jorge Guzman, Fiona Murray, Scott Stern, and Heidi Williams examine regional innovation engines and highlight the place-specific actions, potential bottlenecks, and roles of different stakeholders in catalyzing entrepreneurship and innovation. Next, Lee Branstetter and Guangwei Li examine the challenges faced by the Chinese central government in implementing industrial policy to push the technology frontier while local governments and businesses deploy resources to advance their own, not necessarily aligned, interests. Turning to climate issues, James Sallee analyzes policies aimed at accelerating the energy transition by hastening the replacement of durable capital assets like automobiles and residential appliances that last for decades and slow the adoption of cleaner technologies. Joshua Gans studies cryptocurrencies and other crypto-token-based instruments and the broad range of government responses to them, particularly in the U.S. Finally, Ina Ganguli and Fabian Waldinger consider the effects of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on the human capital in the Ukrainian science community.

"Getting a job means successfully navigating the application process, and today that requires the right mindset--and the skills to convey it to a potential employer. You need to focus on the organization's needs, not your own, often a challenge for recent and soon-to-be college graduates. In this book, writing professor Rachel Toor shows you how to identify those needs, decide whether you are a good match for a job, and then tell a clear, concise, and authentic story about yourself through your cover letter, resumâe, and interviews. Full of insights from hiring managers and career professionals in a wide range of fields, the book reveals the traits employers are looking for and how they--and their AI bots--evaluate application materials. Instead of templates and timelines, it offers advice on how to present yourself professionally, from cover letter salutation to post-interview thank-you note. It also includes practical tips on such matters as understanding LinkedIn, preparing for Zoom interviews, and selecting appropriate references. And throughout it features Toor's tips on good writing, from choosing the right words to get past the bots and make the most of limited space to using classic storytelling techniques to explain what you can contribute to an organization. Encouraging, funny, and blunt, this is a job-search guide like no other"--

A groundbreaking look at the transformation of SoHo. American cities entered a new phase when, beginning in the 1950s, artists and developers looked upon a decaying industrial zone in Lower Manhattan and saw, not blight, but opportunity: cheap rents, lax regulation, and wide open spaces. Thus, SoHo was born. From 1960 to 1980, residents transformed the industrial neighborhood into an artist district, creating the conditions under which it evolved into an upper-income, gentrified area. Introducing the idea--still potent in city planning today--that art could be harnessed to drive municipal prosperity, SoHo was the forerunner of gentrified districts in cities nationwide, spawning the notion of the creative class. In The Lofts of SoHo, Aaron Shkuda studies the transition of the district from industrial space to artists' enclave to affluent residential area, focusing on the legacy of urban renewal in and around SoHo and the growth of artist-led redevelopment. Shkuda explores conflicts between residents and property owners and analyzes the city's embrace of the once-illegal loft conversion as an urban development strategy. As Shkuda explains, artists eventually lost control of SoHo's development, but over several decades they nonetheless forced scholars, policymakers, and the general public to take them seriously as critical actors in the twentieth-century American city.

"These days, the world wide web has become the Wild West. We are faced with a seemingly endless source of information, all of it difficult to evaluate. Trusted sources can be full of ads, bad actors can slip under the radar, and seemingly questionable databases might hold a helpful treasure trove. Historian Sam Wineburg and media literacy guru Mike Caulfield are here to help with this informative, approachable guide to navigating the internet. With this illustrated tool kit, readers will learn to identify red flags, get quick context, and make better use of common tools like Google and Wikipedia that have the ability to help and hinder in equal measure"--

How is it that Americans are more obsessed with exercise than ever, and yet also unhealthier? Fit Nation explains how we got here and imagines how we might create a more inclusive, stronger future. If a shared American creed still exists, it's a belief that exercise is integral to a life well lived. A century ago, working out was the activity of a strange subculture, but today, it's almost impossible to avoid exhortations to exercise: Walk 5K to cure cancer! Awaken your inner sex kitten at pole-dancing class! Sweat like (or even with) a celebrity in spin class! Exercise is everywhere. Yet the United States is hardly a "fit nation." Only 20 percent of Americans work out consistently, over half of gym members don't even use the facilities they pay for, and fewer than 30 percent of high school students get an hour of exercise a day. So how did fitness become both inescapable and inaccessible? Spanning more than a century of American history, Fit Nation answers these questions and more through original interviews, archival research, and a rich cultural narrative. As a leading political and intellectual historian and a certified fitness instructor, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela is uniquely qualified to confront the complex and far-reaching implications of how our contemporary exercise culture took shape. She explores the work of working out not just as consumers have experienced it, but as it was created by performers, physical educators, trainers, instructors, and many others. For Petrzela, fitness is a social justice issue. She argues that the fight for a more equitable exercise culture will be won only by revolutionizing fitness culture at its core, making it truly inclusive for all bodies in a way it has never been. Examining venues from the stage of the World's Fair and Muscle Beach to fat farms, feminist health clinics, radical and evangelical college campuses, yoga retreats, gleaming health clubs, school gymnasiums, and many more, Fit Nation is a revealing history that shows fitness to be not just a matter of physical health but of what it means to be an American.

Now in paperback, a compelling biography of Lydia Maria Child, one of nineteenth-century America's most courageous abolitionists. By 1830, Lydia Maria Child had established herself as something almost unheard of in the American nineteenth century: a beloved and self-sufficient female author. Best known today for the immortal poem "Over the River and through the Wood," Child had become famous at an early age for spunky self-help books and charming children's stories. But in 1833, Child shocked her readers by publishing the first book-length argument against slavery in the United States--a book so radical in its commitment to abolition that friends abandoned her, patrons ostracized her, and her book sales plummeted. Yet Child soon drew untold numbers to the abolitionist cause, becoming one of the foremost authors and activists of her generation. Lydia Maria Child: A Radical American Life tells the story of what brought Child to this moment and the extraordinary life she lived in response. Through Child's example, philosopher Lydia Moland asks questions as pressing and personal in our time as they were in Child's: What does it mean to change your life when the moral future of your country is at stake? When confronted by sanctioned evil and systematic injustice, how should a citizen live? Child's lifetime of bravery, conviction, humility, and determination provides a wealth of spirited guidance for political engagement today.

An insightful look at how avant-garde musicians of the postwar period in New York explored the philosophical dimensions of music's ineffability. The Musician as Philosopher explores the philosophical thought of avant-garde musicians in postwar New York: David Tudor, Ornette Coleman, the Velvet Underground, Alice Coltrane, Patti Smith, and Richard Hell. It contends that these musicians--all of whom are understudied and none of whom are traditionally taken to be composers--not only challenged the rules by which music is written and practiced but also confounded and reconfigured gendered and racialized expectations for what critics took to be legitimate forms of musical sound. From a broad historical perspective, their arresting music electrified a widely recognized social tendency of the 1960s: a simultaneous affirmation and crisis of the modern self.

A close and selective commentary on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, offering a novel interpretation of Aristotle's teachings on the relation between reason and moral virtue. What does it mean to live a good life or a happy life, and what part does reason play in the quest for fulfillment? Lorraine Smith Pangle shows how Aristotle's arguments for virtue as the core of happiness and for reason as the guide to virtue emerge in response to Socrates's paradoxical claim that virtue is knowledge and vice is ignorance. Against Socrates, Aristotle does justice to the effectual truth of moral responsibility--that our characters do indeed depend on our own voluntary actions. But he also incorporates Socratic insights into the close interconnection of passion and judgment and the way passions and bad habits work not to overcome knowledge that remains intact but to corrupt the knowledge one thinks one has. Reason and Character presents fresh interpretations of Aristotle's teaching on the character of moral judgment and moral choice, on the way reason finds the mean--especially in justice--and on the relation between practical and theoretical wisdom.

"Amid sweeping conversations about the future of artificial intelligence and its impact on US industry and economy, one economic domain has remained relatively insulated from the discussion: health care. How is it possible that an industry so bemoaned for inefficiency and expense, an industry so large that it now makes up a quarter of the US economy, could escape the efficiency- and cost-driven disruptions of AI? How are doctor's offices still relying on fax machines in the age of driverless cars? Why is it the one industry where we'd like to see AI try some things the one that machines can't seem to infiltrate? The Economics of Artificial Intelligence: Health Care Challenges convenes contributions from health economists, physicians, philosophers, and legal scholars to identify the primary barriers to entry for AI in America's biggest industry. Across original papers and wide-ranging written responses, they find five domains of barriers: incentives; management; data availability; regulation. They also find evidence of real opportunity: AI has promise to improve outcomes and lower costs, and if paths to intervention are seized upon, improvements will follow"--

"The number of international agreements defining and committing signatories to enforcing human rights in their domestic law has grown over the postwar era. Accompanying these agreements has been the development of domestic agencies to enforce these obligations. Cora Lacatus has surveyed human rights agencies around the world to determine how effective they are in enforcing human rights and what explains the success of some of these agencies and the failures of others. Lacatus contends that international support for these agencies is critical to their success. She points to the efforts of the European Union to set standards for agency performance and to provide political support for the agencies in its member countries as an example of the influence of international organizations. Lacatus also contends that how these agencies cultivate domestic political support is important. Are the agencies important to a government in sending a signal to key groups in the country of its support for human rights? Does the vitality of the agency send an important signal to key international actors of the governments support for certain values? The audience for this book will primarily be among scholars in international relations. It is the last book for the series Chicago Series on International and Domestic Institutions"--

"Everyone's a critic-in the best way. Criticism is what we do when we face a work or event that bowls us over and makes us scramble for a response. We're motivated to criticism by a series of realizations: Something speaks to me, I need to tell you about it, I don't know how. This, Michel Chaouli argues, is the heart of criticism and its difficulty, no matter its form, no matter its refinement. Criticism arises fundamentally from the need to share what overwhelms us. This is not how we usually think of criticism, which we tend to associate with the worlds of scholarship and journalism, with professionals careful not to show themselves being bowled over. But Chaouli is not describing professional criticism per se, but what he calls "poetic criticism." At the same time, he holds that even the stiffest professional criticism "holds somewhere within it, often well hidden, a vulnerability to being jolted by what speaks to it." For Chaouli, the point is not to set poetic criticism against non-poetic criticism, but to encourage more criticism to be done poetically. Written in the mode of a philosophical essay, Something Speaks to Me is less concerned with joining academic debates than with communicating the urgency of criticism in ways that transcend scholarly argument and appeal to readers unschooled in theory"--

"For decades, Virginia Woolf's work has been seen as part of the "women's writing" canon. Elizabeth Abel extracts Woolf from this women's tradition to position her in a different light, one that shows Woolf's role in a far-reaching modernist genealogy. Abel traces the strong echoes of Woolf in the work of four major writers from diverse cultural contexts: Nella Larsen, James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, and W. G. Sebald. As Abel shows, what Woolf called the "odd affinities" between herself and these successors give us an altogether different picture of the development of transnational modernism, with Woolf as a shadowy but important connection among disparate writers. By charting new pathways of twentieth-century literary transmission, Odd Affinities will appeal to students and scholars working in New Modernist studies, comparative literature, and African American studies"--