What Wellesley's Reading

Cassandra Pattanayak reads from Who Counts: The Politics of Census-Taking in Contemporary America, by Margo Anderson and Stephen Fienberg, published by Russell Sage Foundation in 2001. "American census takers have ... confronted counting problems since 1790 and have [produced] a count of the population each decade despite wars, shipwrecked schedules, and the confusion of respondents."

Liza Oliver reads from White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in 18th Century India, by William Dalrymple, published by Penguin Books in 2002. "Ideas of racial and ethnic hierarchy were beginning to be aired for the first time in the late 1870s, and it was the ... mixed-blood Anglo-Indian[s] which felt the brunt of the new intolerance."

Charlene Galarneau reads from Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil, by Emilie Townes, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2006. "It is what we do every day that shapes us...It is...these acts that we do that say more about us than those grand moments of righteous indignation and action..."

Inela Selimovic reads from Talking to Ourselves, by Andres Neumann, published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in 2012. "Someone had to call the funeral home to buy the coffin. And the newspapers to dictate the death notice. Two simple, inconceivable tasks. So intimate, so remote."

Octavio Gonzalez reads from Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism, by Amber Jamilla Musser, published by NYU Press in 2014. "[Lorde] enacts the argument that black women are discursively outside of sexuality and individuality."

Nadya Hajj reads from Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within, by Natalie Goldberg, published by Shambhala in 1986. "When you are writing, if you write a question, that is fine. But immediately go to a deeper level inside yourself and answer it in the next line."

Yui Suzuki reads from Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body, by Neil Shubin, published by Pantheon in 2008. "This fish doesn't just tell us about fish; it also contains a piece of us. The search for this connection is what led me to the Arctic in the first place."

Erich Matthes reads from H Is For Hawk by Helen MacDonald, published by Grove Press in 2015. "Trained hawks have a peculiar ability to conjure history...You take a hawk onto your fist. You imagine the falconer of the past doing the same. It is hard not to feel it is the same hawk."

Kartini Shastry reads from Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, published by Public Affairs in 2011. "One issue that ... arises when we think about fertility choice ... is whose choice? Fertility decisions are made by a couple, but women end up paying most of the physical costs of bearing children."

Susan Ellison reads from Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States by Audra Simpson, published by Duke University Press in 2014. “The Mohawks of Kahnawà:ke … insist on being and acting as peoples who belong to a nation other than the United States or Canada.”

Francesca Southerden reads from For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression by Adriana Cavarero, published by Stanford University Press in 2005. "The voice is sound, not speech. But speech constitutes its essential destination."

Catherine Masson reads from Gabriel by George Sand, translated by Kathleen Robin Hart and Paul Fenouillet and published by Modern Language Association of America. "Gabriel, you are a woman! Oh, dear God!"

Marcy Thomas reads from The Secret Language of Color by Joann Eckstut and Arielle Eckstut, published by Black Dog & Leventhal. "Our world is color-coded so that all living creatures know what or whom to attract, what to eat, when to be afraid, and how to behave."

Kimberly Cassibry reads from The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found, by Mary Beard, published by Belknap Press. "It is easy to get the impression of a town crammed full of fast-food joints serving wine and filling stews to a hungry populace – albeit in an atmosphere less ‘family-friendly’ than the modern McDonald’s."

Igor Logvinenko reads from Parting With Illusions, by Vladimir Pozner, published by The Atlantic Monthly Press. "I certainly believed Stalin was a great man...But Father of the People? Of all the people? The infallible judge of all things, from linguistics and cybernetics to genetics and the most complex questions of nationality?"

George Caplan reads from Hydrogen: The Essential Element, by John Rigden published by Harvard University Press. "The evolving spectrum of hydrogen demonstrates the way experiment and theory goad each other and...provides a telling example of how great science advances..."

Corinne Gartner reads from Lucretius' On the Nature of Things from The Hellenistic Philosophers, Volume 1, by A.A. Long and D.N. Sedately, published by Cambridge University Press. "...When immortal death snatches away a mortal life it is no different from never having been born."

Kyung Park reads from The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, by Khalili Gibran Muhammad, published by Harvard University Press. "...Between 1890 and 1940, how and why did racial crime statistics become...a subject of dialogue and debate about blacks' fitness for modern life?"

Vanja Klepac-Ceraj reads from Life's Engines: How Microbes Made Earth Habitable by Paul Falkowski, published by Princeton University Press. "If we don’t see things, we tend to overlook them. Microbes were long overlooked, especially in the story of the history of evolution."

Brenna Greer reads from The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin, published by The Dial Press. “They are...still trapped in a history which they do not understand...They have had to believe for many years...that black men are inferior to white men.”

Stephen Chen reads from Compelled to Excel: Immigration, Education, and Opportunity among Chinese Americans by Vivian Louie Baldwin, published by Stanford University Press. "About a fifth of my Columbia sample were [Chinese American] students who came from the urban enclaves...They saw themselves as the lucky ones who made it, while not everyone else did."

Eni Mustafaraj reads from The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer by Neal Stephenson, published by Bantam Spectra. “If the Duke was human, [Princess Nell] should notify him so that they could plan their escape. If he was a machine, doing so would lead to disaster.”

Cord Whitaker reads from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, translated by Simon Armitage and published by W. W. Norton. "...Clouds shed their cargo of crystallized rain which froze as it fell to the frost-glazed earth."

Tom Cushman reads from the essay Politics and Conscience by Václav Havel, collected in Open Letters: Selected Writings 1965-1990, published by Vintage. "...One simple electrician with his heart in the right place, honoring something that transcends him and free of fear, can influence the history of his nation."

Julie Walsh reads from A Woman Who Defends All the Persons of Her Sex by Gabrielle Suchon, translated by Domna C. Stanton and Rebecca M. Wilkin and published by University of Chicago Press. "...a difficult husband is a painful and rigorous kind of purgatory in its own right, if not sheer hell."

Simon Grote reads from Letter to M. D'Alembert on the Theatre by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, published by Cornell University Press. "What then does he go to see at the theatre? ...Lessons of virtue for the public, from which he excepts himself, and people sacrificing everything to their duty while nothing is exacted from him."

Shiao Wei Tham reads from The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature by Steven Pinker, published by Penguin Books. "A good way to appreciate the role of verb constructions in language is to ponder jokes that hinge on an ambiguity between them: same words, different constructions... 'Call me a taxi.' 'OK, you’re a taxi.'"

Heather Mattila reads from Wicked Bugs: The Louse That Conquered Napoleon's Army & Other Diabolical Insects by Amy Stewart, published by Algonquin Books. "Some pest control experts hoped that Hurricane Katrina would have one silver lining — a mass drowning of Formosan termites. Unfortunately, the termites were undeterred."

Yu Jin Ko reads from The Luminous Heart of Jonah S. by Gina Nahai, published by Akashic Books. "The women converged into a circle of stiff beehives and exposed necklines...discussing just how and why the most eligible bachelor in Tehran’s upper-class Jewish society...had managed to escape the noose."

Christen Deveney reads from Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers by Robert Sapolsky, published by Holt Paperbacks. "You have better things to do than digest breakfast when you are trying to avoid being someone's lunch."

Ben Wood reads from Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness by Edward Abbey, published by Ballantine Books. "After twenty-six weeks of sunlight and stars, wind and sky and golden sand, I want to hear once more the crackle of clamshells on the floor of the bar in the Clam Broth House in Hoboken."

Codruta Morari reads from Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz by Georges Didi-Huberman, published by The University of Chicago Press. "...The very notion of image...is intermingled with the incessant urge to show what we cannot see. We cannot 'see desire' as such, yet painters have played with crimson tones to show it..."

Dan Fetter reads from Sharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South by Gavin Wright, published by Belknap Press. "Why did white southerners defend so passionately and for so long an inefficient system that evidently failed to serve their own best economic interests?"

Amy Banzaert reads from Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the Word by Alan Weisman, published by Chelsea Green Publishing. "People who dare to build a utopia use the same materials available to anyone, but they find surprising ways to combine them...In a dream you aren't limited by what is assumed to be permissible or possible."

Anjeana Hans reads from The Artificial Silk Girl by Irmgard Keun, translated by Kathie von Ankum and published by Other Press. "All the people are in a hurry — and sometimes they look pale under those lights, then the girls' dresses look like they're not paid off yet and the men can't really afford the wine — is nobody really happy?"

Nancy Hall reads from Down the Rabbit Hole by Juan Pablo Villalobos, published by FSG Originals. "Some people say I'm precocious. They say it mainly because they think I know difficult words for a little boy. Some of the difficult words I know are: sordid, disastrous, immaculate, pathetic, and devastating."

Pinar Keskin reads from Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier by Edward Glaeser, published by Penguin. "If energy users are taxed for the social costs of their actions, then they'll use more fuel-efficient cars and live in more energy-efficient houses. They'll also find energy-conserving big-city life more appealing."

Yoon Sun Lee reads from A Defense of Poetry by Percy Shelley, collected in the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. "Poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions... It compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which we know."

David Ellerby reads from The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins, published by W.W. Norton and Company. "We are entirely accustomed to the idea that complex elegance is an indicator of premeditated, crafted design. This is probably the most powerful reason for the belief...in some kind of supernatural deity."

Nicholas Knouf reads from #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, edited by Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian, published by Urbanomic. "Libraries burning in Babylon. Knowledge is decoded from its proprietary grid of occult encryption. The academy in flames."

Paul Wink reads from My Struggle: Book Two: A Man in Love, by Karl Ove Knausgaard published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. "But sitting there I was rendered completely harmless, without dignity, impotent, there was no difference between me and her, except that she was more attractive, and the leveling ...filled me with rage."

Karen Lange reads from Alan Turing: The Enigma, by Andrew Hodges, published by Princeton University Press. “Alan…had discovered…the idea of a universal machine that could take over the work of any machine. And he had argued that anything performed by a human computer could be done by a machine.”

Lamia Balafrej reads from The Cognitive Work of Images by Barbara Stafford, published by the University of Chicago Press. "Consciousness seems to be tied to the experience of depth...Our inner life thus advances and retreats, stretches forward, backward, but, above all, away and down."

Angela Carpenter reads from The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?, by Jared Diamond, published by Viking Adult. "...Bilinguals have an advantage at solving...tasks that are confusing because the rules of the task change unpredictably, or because there are misleading...but obvious cues that must be ignored!"

Kaye Peterman reads from The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology by Horace Freeland Judson, published by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press. "I put a lot of sugar in a glass and filled it with water, and then cut off a piece of fingernail...just to see if it could float...We didn't know the density of DNA, but fingernail seemed a reasonable analogy."

Guy Rogers reads from The Epic of Gilgamesh, translated by Andrew George and published by the Folio Society. "Ever the river has risen and brought us the flood, the mayfly floating on the water. On the face of the sun its countenance gazes, then all of a sudden nothing is there!"

Paul MacDonald reads from Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, edited by Robert Strassler and published by Free Press. "Hope, danger's comforter, may be indulged in by those who have abundant resources...Let not this be the case with you, who are weak and hang on a single turn of the scale."

Michael Hearn reads from Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation by Steven Johnson, published by Riverhead. "The work of dreams turns out to be a particularly chaotic, yet productive, way of exploring the adjacent possible."

Helena de Bres reads from Death and the Afterlife by Samuel Scheffler, published by Oxford University Press. "...The existence of the [collective] afterlife matters more to us than our own continued existence."

Quinn Slobodian reads from The Bridge of the Golden Horn by Emine Sevgi Ozdamar, published by Serpent's Tail. "It was about words. All the students had big ears, because they heard every word and, like surgeons, immediately dissected them."

Andy Schultz reads from The Man Who Knew Infinity, by Robert Kanigel, published by Scribner. "...I have been employing the spare time at my disposal to work at Mathematics...I am striking out a new path for myself... the results I get are termed by the local mathematicians as 'startling'.”