Moses Chao argues that activity in the peripheral nervous system predicts the onset of neurological and psychiatric conditions such as Parkinson's disease, autism, and dementia. Responsible for regulating a range of involuntary bodily processes and for detecting smells, sounds, and touch, the peripheral system may also be a key to better health.

Seeking for philosophy the same spirit and assurance conveyed by artists like Fred Astaire, Cavell presents essays exploring the meaning of grace and gesture in film and on stage, in language and in life. Critical to the renaissance in American thought Cavell hopes to provoke is the recognition of the centrality of the “ordinary” to American life.

In the 18th century, bioprospectors sponsored by European imperial powers brought back medicines, luxuries, and staples from the New World to their king and country. This book explores the movement, triumph, and extinction of knowledge in the course of encounters between Europeans and the Caribbean populations.

In Poems from the Satsai, the seventeenth-century poet Biharilal blends amorous narratives about the god Krishna and the goddess Radha with archetypal hero and heroine motifs from older Sanskrit and Prakrit conventions. The Hindi text, composed in Braj Bhasha, is presented here in the Devanagari script with a new English verse translation.

Poetics of Music collects Igor Stravinsky’s 1939–1940 Norton Lectures, delivered at the height of his neoclassical period. Ranging from the phenomenology of rhythm to the fate of high culture in the Soviet Union, he explores both the creative potential and the limitations arising from fidelity to tradition and submission to formal constraints.

John Roemer presents a unified and rigorous theory of political competition between parties and he models the theory under many specifications, including whether parties are policy oriented or oriented toward winning, whether they are certain or uncertain about voter preferences, and whether the policy space is uni- or multidimensional.

Exploring the political struggles inspired by mass educational tests, McDonnell analyzes the design and implementation of statewide testing in California, Kentucky, and North Carolina in the 1990s. McDonnell draws lessons from these stories for the federal No Child Left Behind act, with its sweeping directives for high-stakes testing.

Today's electric power companies compete to provide cleaner electricity. That's a good thing, but progress has come with costs, especially for communities reliant on the coal industry. Thomas McGarity examines the changes of recent decades and offers ideas for building a more sustainable grid while easing the economic downsides of coal's demise.

It is widely believed that distributing cash to people in poverty is the best way to help them while avoiding paternalism. Heath Henderson pushes back, arguing that a markets-know-best model is itself paternalistic and displaces better interventions. Instead, people in poverty need the democratic power to coordinate solutions for themselves.