Pamela Regis argues that the romance novel, the most popular but least respected of literary genres, does not enslave women but celebrates their freedom and joy. Regis provides critics with an expanded vocabulary for discussing a genre that is both classic and contemporary, sexy and entertaining.

In No Use, national security scholar Thomas M. Nichols examines the role of nuclear weapons and their prominence in U.S. security strategy, ultimately arguing that this belief in the utility of nuclear force is misguided and dangerously obsolete.

By the eighteenth century, personal networks bound together the widening British world. In The Opened Letter, Lindsay O'Neill argues that the British became an early networking society, relying on letters to maintaining necessary social networks that British global expansion and mobility threatened to disconnect.