Human space journeys are awe-inspiring but risky and immensely expensive. Donald Goldsmith and Martin Rees argue that science calls for leaving space exploration to AI-guided robots, since robots range more widely and see more than any human can. Humanity's future in space must await decisions based on results from our ever-better machines.

The End of Ideology has been a landmark in American social thought, regarded as a classic since its first publication in 1962. Daniel Bell postulated that the older humanistic ideologies derived from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were exhausted, and that new parochial ideologies would arise.

Far from a stagnant “Middle Ages,” the years 600–1350 witnessed globalization and social innovation. Entangled Worlds explores long-distance trade in the Americas, cosmopolitan effects of Islamic and Mongol expansion, the spread of monotheist and Sinitic models of sociocultural organization, and the birth of settled political order in South Asia.

This first detailed study of the bishops of Florence tells the story of a dynamic Italian lordship during the most prosperous period of the Middle Ages. Drawing upon a rich base of primary sources, Dameron demonstrates that the nature of the Florentine episcopal lordship results from the tension between seigneurial pressure and peasant resistance.

How does science create knowledge? Epistemic cultures, shaped by affinity, necessity, and historical coincidence, determine how we know what we know. In this book, Karin Knorr Cetina compares two of the most important and intriguing epistemic cultures of our day, those in high energy physics and molecular biology.

Equity for Women in Science is the first large-scale empirical study of the global gender gap in science. Analyzing millions of scientific papers, the authors show that women are undervalued for their labor in science as measured through publications and citations. The data also reveal how the scientific community can promote equity.

For 60 million Americans a criminal record overshadows everything else about their identity. Citizens have a right to know when someone around them represents a threat. But convicted persons have rights too. James Jacobs examines the problem of erroneous records and proposes ways to eliminate discrimination for those who have been rehabilitated.

Everywhere we hear of decline, of a world that was better before the influence of modernity. While some lament Western culture’s slide into relativism and nihilism and others celebrate the trend as a liberating sort of progress, Taylor calls on us to face the moral and political crises of our time, and to make the most of modernity’s challenges.

Katerina Clark recovers the story of leftist world literature, a massive project that united writers from the Soviet Union, Europe, Turkey, Iran, India, and China to create a Eurasian commons: a single cultural space that would overcome national, cultural, and linguistic differences in the name of an anticapitalist and anti-imperialist aesthetic.