I’m a writer and professor of literary studies whose work has been deeply involved in topics of truth, realism, and public policy. My recent book considers works of fiction that openly and honestly experiment with questions of uncertainty, identity, and risk in the supermodern present. This book draws from disciplinary discourses in law, finance, and economics, which similarly contend with competing claims to truth and value and dive deep into the circumstantial and speculative games that authors play when they write fiction about reality. I have my PhD in Spanish Literature (UVA), M.A. in International Affairs and Economics (Johns Hopkins Univ.), and a B.A. from Harvard University.
I wrote...
Derivative Lives: Biofiction, Uncertainty, and Speculative Risk in Contemporary Spanish Narrative
The title of this book alludes to the challenge of finding one's way within the contemporary market of virtually limitless information and claims to veracity. Amid this profusion of options, it is easy to feel lost in spaces of uncertainty where biographical truth teeters between the real and the imaginative. The title thus also points to the prolific market of biographical novels that openly and intentionally play in the speculative space between the real and the fictional.
Drawing on theories of risk and uncertainty, this book considers the surge in bio-fiction in Spain and globally, relating literary expression to concepts such as circumstantiality, derivatives, speculation, and game studies.
This book makes American history relevant, alive, and urgent.
This is not a book to read in one sitting–but to enjoy in segments. I felt so much smarter and prepared to understand our current challenges to truth and trust after reading this book.
At this critical juncture in our democracy, this book will illuminate, enlighten, and inform!
The American experiment rests on three ideas-"these truths", Jefferson called them-political equality, natural rights and the sovereignty of the people. And it rests, too, "on a dedication to inquiry, fearless and unflinching", writes Jill Lepore in a ground-breaking investigation into the American past that places truth at the centre of the nation's history.
Telling the story of America, beginning in 1492, These Truths asks whether the course of events has proven the nation's founding truths or belied them. Finding meaning in contradiction, Lepore weaves American history into a tapestry of faith and hope, of peril and prosperity, of technological progress…
I found this book so smart in the way that it examines and questions how we have made many parts of our worlds into winner-take-all competitions or “games.” I thought Jagoda did a great job making me think about “gamified” realities that simulate real-world situations and how we virtually experiment through gameplay.
I was also drawn to the idea that games could “safely” let us play out real-world scenarios, imagining and testing out new ways of trying out alternative futures without the risks of playing those for real.
At the same time, I am reminded that however simulatively real the game feels, the consequences are not similarly real. Win or lose, we can always “end” the game, reboot, and start again–not necessarily so in real life.
I loved this writer’s brilliant combination of memoir, eco- and literary criticism, and an exploration of contemporary life.
Each chapter feels so personal, and yet Schaberg manages to connect these experiences to broader questions of how we live our lives, what matters, and how many things (including the health of the planet and the confidence we have in truth) are under threat–and we need to protect them simultaneously.
I imagine Schaberg is as deeply engaging teacher as he is a writer. I found this book deeply compelling and relevant.
I love the idea that part of how we understand the world is the willingness not to know where we are going or to have the map fully charted beforehand–in effect, the willingness to become lost. Without becoming lost, all our worlds become algorithms with predetermined results.
I found Solnit’s argument that we have increasingly programmed our children (and selves) and no longer risk the freedom to roam and get lost (all in the name of safety) a powerful and compelling metaphor for the tradeoffs we have made in our society.
That people are increasingly siloed and we don’t communicate well across differences of opinion and belief is perhaps not surprising. We stay safely in our zone. We don’t risk getting lost or what we might discover if we traipsed beyond our comfortable assumptions and limits.
In this investigation into loss, losing and being lost, Rebecca Solnit explores the challenges of living with uncertainty. A Field Guide to Getting Lost takes in subjects as eclectic as memory and mapmaking, Hitchcock movies and Renaissance painting.
Beautifully written, this book combines memoir, history and philosophy, shedding glittering new light on the way we live now.
I found incredibly compelling the argument of how important humility and the willingness to admit what we don’t know are to democratic, liberal thought.
That we have become a society that rarely listens to ideas that challenge our own or that disrupt what we think we know to be true–is hugely dangerous.
As Lynch explores, more information has not led to greater certainty or confidence in the answers we find. What we are experiencing is not only a crisis of truth, but one of trust.
Taking stock of our fragmented political landscape, Michael Patrick Lynch delivers a trenchant philosophical take on digital culture and its tendency to make us into dogmatic know-it-alls. The internet-where most shared news stories are not even read by the person posting them-has contributed to the rampant spread of "intellectual arrogance." In this culture, we have come to think that we have nothing to learn from one another; we are rewarded for emotional outrage over reflective thought; and we glorify a defensive rejection of those different from us.
Interweaving the works of classic philosophers such as Hannah Arendt and Bertrand Russell…
I’m a professional historian and life-long lover of early American history. My fascination with the American Revolution began during the bicentennial in 1976, when my family traveled across the country for celebrations in Williamsburg and Philadelphia. That history, though, seemed disconnected to the place I grew up—Arkansas—so when I went to graduate school in history, I researched in French and Spanish archives to learn about their eighteenth-century interactions with Arkansas’s Native nations, the Osages and Quapaws. Now I teach early American history and Native American history at UNC-Chapel Hill and have written several books on how Native American, European, and African people interacted across North America.
A magisterial history of Indigenous North America that places the power of Native nations at its center, telling their story from the rise of ancient cities more than a thousand years ago to fights for sovereignty that continue today
Long before the colonization of North America, Indigenous Americans built diverse civilizations and adapted to a changing world in ways that reverberated globally. And, as award-winning historian Kathleen DuVal vividly recounts, when Europeans did arrive, no civilization came to a halt because of a few wandering explorers, even when the strangers came well armed.
A millennium ago, North American cities rivaled urban centers around the world in size. Then, following a period of climate change and instability, numerous smaller nations emerged, moving away from rather than toward urbanization. From this urban past, egalitarian government structures, diplomacy, and complex economies spread…
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