Bücher veröffentlicht von Harvard University Press

Exploring breakthroughs in language and cognition research, Caleb Everett finds that fundamentals of human perception are culturally encoded by the words and sentences we use. The experience of time, space, color, odor, and taste is substantially influenced by language, so that basic interactions with the world vary greatly across peoples.

Imagination is thought to be the province of childhood¿the stuff of free play and unrestrained ideas. Then comes the dull routine of adulthood, stifling creativity. In fact, the opposite is true. Andrew Shtulman shows that imagination is not inherited at birth, nor does it diminish with age. It grows as we do, through education and reflection.

Does temperament in childhood shape adult personality? Four psychologists followed thousands of people as they grew up, observing how genes, parenting, and other aspects of young people's experience influence development. This holistic approach offers unprecedented insight into what makes us the adults we become.

Political theorist Jeremy Waldron makes a bracing case against identifying rule of law with predictability. Seeing the rule of law as just one value to which democracies aspire, he embraces thoughtfulness rather than rote rule-following, flexibility even at the cost of vagueness, and emphasizing procedure and argument over predictable outcomes.

Joseph LeDoux argues that ideas like the self are increasingly barriers to discovery and understanding. He offers a new framework, theorizing four realms of existence¿bodily, neural, cognitive, and conscious. Together, these four realms operate continuously as an ¿ensemble of being¿ to make humans who and what we are.

The Op-Ed Novel follows a clutch of globally renowned Spanish novelists who swept into the political sphere via the pages of El Pais. Their literary sensibility transformed opinion journalism, and their weekly columns changed their novels, which became venues for speculative historical claims, partisan political projects, and intellectual argument.

Nostalgia, supposedly, is the sphere of the sentimentalist. But also, and most definitely, it is a force in the creation of the present and future and thus worth careful thought. Yesterday argues that nostalgiäs critics defend an idea of progress as naïve as the longing they denounce, while conflating nostalgia itself with historical whitewashing.

Futurists are certain that humanlike AI is on the horizon, but in fact engineers have no idea how to program human reasoning. AI reasons from statistical correlations across data sets, while common sense is based heavily on conjecture. Erik Larson argues that hyping existing methods will only hold us back from developing truly humanlike AI.

In countries with officially egalitarian property law, women still accumulate less wealth than men. Combining quantitative, ethnographic, and archival research, The Gender of Capital explains how and why women of all classes are economically disadvantaged at crucial junctures in family life such as divorce, inheritance, and succession.

Fredrik Albritton Jonsson and Carl Wennerlind chart ideas about economic scarcity across centuries of European intellectual history. Showing how ideologies of infinite desire and infinite growth came to dominate capitalist societies, they argue for alternative modes of economic thought that respect nature's boundaries in the face of climate crisis.

Deeply Responsible Business profiles corporate leaders of the past two centuries who made social missions vital to their businesses. Geoffrey Jones explores the characters and motivations of fourteen such leaders and compares their deep social and environmental commitments to the lukewarm "corporate social responsibility" of today.

Charles Maier offers a new narrative of the long twentieth century, focused on institutions that shaped politics and societies: project-states, driven by democratic or authoritarian ideologies; capital; and advocates of apolitical values, such as health, human rights, and international law. In this we discern the unfolding of our own troubled time.

What do Germans mean when they say "never again"? Andrew Port examines German responses to the genocides in Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda, showing how these events transformed the meaning of the Holocaust in Germany, inspired partial remilitarization, and changed the country's relationship to refugees fleeing war-torn regions.

The Mongols are universally known as conquerors, but they were more than that: influential thinkers, politicians, engineers, and merchants. Challenging the view that nomads are peripheral to history, The Horde reveals the complex empire the Mongols built and traces its enduring imprint on politics and society in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.

Central banks are supposed to stabilize markets, yet decades of mounting central bank power have seen wave after wave of financial crisis. Leon Wansleben offers novel explanations for the rise of central banks and the problematic implications of their finance-dependent policies.

The root of democratic decline is insecurity, not inequality. Antidemocrats across the globe feel differently about inequality, but all fear losing what they have¿financially or culturally. Pranab Bardhan urges context-sensitive policy solutions and the promotion of civic patriotism and moderate community values over aggrandizing ethnonationalism.