Blogs

Book Review of The Social Construction of Kidnapping

By Mayukh Mukhopadhyay posted 2 days ago
BOOK REVIEW The Social Construction of Kidnapping: A Critical Perspective , by Camilo Tamayo Gomez, Routledge, 15 August 2025, 248 Pages, £ 155.00 (Hardback), ISBN 9781032633237 A man in a jungle camp learns to read time by footsteps, not clocks, and to read danger by the way a guard clears his throat before speaking. In the account Tamayo Gomez builds from such scenes, captivity becomes a whole social world, a place where watching is constant, where kindness can feel like strategy, and where the smallest routine, a bowl of rice, a radio crackling at night, can hold a person together for one more day. The tension ...

Book review of The Highest Exam

By Mayukh Mukhopadhyay posted 16 days ago
BOOK REVIEW The Highest Exam: How the Gaokao Shapes China, by Ruixue Jia, Hongbin Li, and Claire Cousineau. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2025. 256 pp. $29.95 (hbk). ISBN 978-0-674-29539-1 On a humid June morning in a county town in Henan, a father stands outside a sealed school gate, staring at his phone but not really reading it. Inside, his daughter is bent over a desk, answering questions that will decide not only which university she may enter, but also whether she will leave this town at all. The book recounts scenes like this without melodrama, noting how parents count the hours, police block roads, and silence settles ...

Book Review of Ethics in a Capitalist Economy

By Mayukh Mukhopadhyay posted 22 days ago
BOOK REVIEW Ethics in a Capitalist Economy: Why Markets Need Virtues , by Robert CB Miller, Bloomsbury Academic Ireland (2025), 264 pages. £85.00 (hbk). ISBN 978-1-350-51538-3 Capitalism rarely pauses to look at itself in the mirror (Sikula, 1996). It moves forward through contracts signed, risks taken, profits booked, and losses written off. Robert C. B. Miller begins his book with scenes that slow this motion down. He describes ordinary economic actors who believe they are simply playing by the rules, only to discover that the rules do not explain everything that happens to them or because of them. A trader misreads confidence ...

Book Review of The Psychology of Phubbing

By Mayukh Mukhopadhyay posted 24 days ago
BOOK REVIEW The Psychology of Phubbing, by Yeslam Al-Saggaf. Singapore: Springer Nature, 2022. XI+89 pages. EUR 54.99 (Softcover). ISBN 978-981-19-7047-4 People rarely notice the first small cut. In Al-Saggaf’s account, it happens at a dinner table, or in a car stopped at a red light, or on a couch at the end of a long day. A child is telling a story about school, something small but important to them, and the parent nods while their eyes slip downward. The phone lights up the face. The child keeps talking for a moment, then stops. Nothing dramatic follows. No argument. No raised voice. Just a pause that lingers too long, a ...

Book Review of Brain Tingles

By Mayukh Mukhopadhyay posted 25 days ago
BOOK REVIEW Brain Tingles: The Secret to Triggering Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response for Improved Sleep, Stress Relief, and Head-to-Toe Euphoria , by Craig Richard PhD (Author), Melinda Lauw (Foreword), Adams Media, 4 September 2018, 240 Pages, $15.51 (Paperback), ISBN 9781507207628 There is a moment described early in Brain Tingles when a simple sound does something strange to the body. A voice slows down. Fingertips trace a surface. The mind, restless a second ago, begins to soften. Sleep is not yet there, but anxiety loosens its grip. Craig Richard writes about this moment with care, not as spectacle but as ...

Book Review of Past Forward

By Mayukh Mukhopadhyay posted 27 days ago
BOOK REVIEW Past Forward: How Nostalgia can help you live a more meaningful life , by Clay Routledge, Sounds True, 5 December 2023, 224 Pages, $19.99 (Paperback), ISBN 9781683648642 A man watches his home burn in a California wildfire and says something that sounds like denial until it starts to sound like wisdom: the fire took the house, but it could not take the memories made inside it. It is a small moment, almost a throwaway line in the flow of a research-minded book, yet it lands with the blunt force of lived experience. People keep trying to save what can be saved, and when the physical world will not cooperate, ...

Book Review of Reader Bot

By Mayukh Mukhopadhyay posted 01-15-2026
BOOK REVIEW Reader Bot: What Happens When AI Reads and Why It Matters , by Naomi S. Baron, Stanford University Press, 20 January 2026 (Available for Pre-Order), 292 Pages, $28.00 (Hardcover), ISBN 9781503643949 There is a moment in Reader Bot when Naomi S. Baron describes a college student who assigns an AI system to read a dense article and return a summary. The student scans the output on a phone while standing in line for coffee, nods once, and moves on. Nothing in that scene feels dramatic. There is no alarm, no sense of wrongdoing, no teacher peering over a shoulder. Yet Baron lingers on it because something quiet but ...

Book Review of Practices in Memory and Identity

By Mayukh Mukhopadhyay posted 01-11-2026
BOOK REVIEW Trauma and Nostalgia: Practices in Memory and Identity , edited by Lucien van Liere, Srdjan Sremac, Amsterdam University Press (2024), Routledge (2025), 202 Pages, £92.00 (Hardback). ISBN 9789048559220, https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.11930990 The book opens with a small but unsettling scene. A television screen flickers in an Israeli living room during the First Gulf War. Gas masks sit beside the sofa. The broadcast mixes fear, routine, and a strange calm. The war is real, yet it is experienced through images, commentators, and familiar domestic spaces. What lingers is not only fear but also a curious longing for togetherness, ...

Book Review of The Worlds I See

By Mayukh Mukhopadhyay posted 01-10-2026
BOOK REVIEW The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI , by Fei-Fei Li, Flatiron Books: A Moment of Lift Book, 02 September 2025, 336 pages, $18.48 (Paperback), ISBN 9781250898104 She is walking fast through a plain Washington hotel lobby, hearing her boots strike thin carpet like a metronome that has lost patience, trying to look calm while she feels anything but calm. In a few minutes she will sit at a witness table in the Rayburn House Office Building, her name printed in simple type, and testify about artificial intelligence, a topic that has suddenly become public property, fought over by lawmakers, ...

The studENT - To Everyone on the Academic Job Market

By Josh Wei-Jun Hsueh posted 01-08-2026
(posted on behalf of @Sergio Rodriguez-Garnica , PhD representative ) We’ve collectively turned the job market into a kind of “monster,” but at its core, it is simply academic institutions looking for new colleagues and scholars offering their talent to those institutions. Yes, it demands energy and time, but it’s also a natural part of academic life. What’s worth remembering is that an academic career is a long journey. It unfolds gradually. If you stay engaged, keep learning, and remain open to growth, you’ll move toward the place you aim for, step by step. Think about how you got here. You advanced through years of study, courses, ...

Practitioner’s Corner: Learning Toward Co-Creation

By Josh Wei-Jun Hsueh posted 01-08-2026
Practitioner’s Corner: Learning Toward Co-Creation (posted on behalf of @Paul Sanchez Ruiz ) For much of my own academic training, the relationship between scholarship and practice was framed in terms of translation. Research generated insights, and practice provided a setting in which those insights might later be applied. That framing remains useful, but recent conversations within the Practitioner–Scholars Committee have prompted me to reflect on its limits. Those conversations have increasingly centered on co-creation. By co-creation, I do not mean a formal method or a new label for engagement. I mean an approach to research in which ...

Book Review of The Promise

By Mayukh Mukhopadhyay posted 01-07-2026
BOOK REVIEW The Promise: How an everyday hero made the impossible possible , by Arnold Dix, Simon & Schuster Australia (2025), 304 pages, $28.75 (Paperback), ISBN 978-1-7614-2916-3 . The book opens with a confession that feels almost like a warning. Arnold Dix tells the reader that they should not know who he is. He presents himself as a man who has worked quietly for decades, arriving at disaster sites, doing the job, and leaving without applause. This calm anonymity is shattered by a single event in late 2023, when forty-one construction workers are trapped inside a collapsed tunnel high in the ...

Book Review on The Routledge Handbook of Nostalgia

By Mayukh Mukhopadhyay posted 01-03-2026
BOOK REVIEW The Routledge Handbook of Nostalgia , edited by Tobias Becker, Dylan Trigg, Routledge (2024), 592 Pages, £184.00 (Hardcover). ISBN 978-1-032-42920-5 The handbook opens with an image that feels strangely familiar. A soldier far from home, weakened not by wounds but by longing, begins to fade. In early medical writing, nostalgia was not a metaphor but a diagnosis, sometimes fatal. The editors return to this forgotten scene to remind readers that nostalgia once carried the weight of illness before it became a shared cultural language. This anecdote does more than offer historical colour. It sets up the central tension ...

Book Review of Children in Tourism Communities

By Mayukh Mukhopadhyay posted 01-02-2026
BOOK REVIEW Children in Tourism Communities: Sustainability and Social Justice, by Marko Koščak, Mladen Knežević, Tony O’Rourke, Tina Šegota, Routledge, 2024, 228, GBP £145.00 (Hardback), ISBN 9781032448763 The book opens with a quiet scene that stays with the reader long after the page is turned. In a small alpine village shaped by seasonal tourism, a local child watches visitors arrive with cameras, skis, and expectations. The child knows the rhythm of these arrivals better than the calendar. School schedules bend during peak season, family routines adjust, and certain village spaces feel less like home and more like a stage. Koščak ...

Book Review of How Data Happened

By Mayukh Mukhopadhyay posted 12-31-2025
BOOK REVIEW How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms, by Chris Wiggins & Matthew L. Jones, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2023. 384 pages. ISBN: 978-1-324-00673-2 This book promises a comprehensive history of data with its technical, political, and ethical impact on individuals and authority. The book starts by discussing the importance of understanding data and its role in human society. A day after this book's worldwide release, on 22nd March 2023, more than a thousand technology leaders and researchers, including Elon Musk, urged artificial intelligence labs to halt development of the most ...

Book Review Essay on The Scrapper's Way

By Mayukh Mukhopadhyay posted 12-31-2025
BOOK REVIEW The Scrapper’s Way: Making It Big in an Unequal World, by Damodar Padhi, Harper Collins Publishers, Gurugram, India (2024). ISBN 978-9-3569-9993-0, 252 pages As a young boy growing up in rural Odisha, Damodar Padhi once struggled to understand how an indoor toilet worked. Used to open fields, he found the enclosed space unfamiliar, even unnecessary. On the very next day, confused and unsure, he relieved himself in a playground instead. This seemingly small incident, narrated with humor in The Scrapper’s Way , captures the essence of Padhi’s journey as he adapts to new environments, learns through trial and error, and constantly ...

The Scrapper’s Way: Book Review

By Mayukh Mukhopadhyay posted 12-31-2025
BOOK REVIEW The Scrapper’s Way: Making It Big in an Unequal World, by Damodar Padhi, Harper Collins Publishers, Gurugram, India (2024). ISBN 978-9-3569-9993-0, 252 pages As a young boy growing up in rural Odisha, Damodar Padhi once struggled to understand how an indoor toilet worked. Used to open fields, he found the enclosed space unfamiliar, even unnecessary. On the very next day, confused and unsure, he relieved himself in a playground instead. This seemingly small incident, narrated with humor in The Scrapper’s Way , captures the essence of Padhi’s journey as he adapts to new environments, learns through trial and error, and constantly ...

The Scrapper’s Way: Book Review

By Mayukh Mukhopadhyay posted 12-31-2025
BOOK REVIEW The Scrapper’s Way: Making It Big in an Unequal World, by Damodar Padhi, Harper Collins Publishers, Gurugram, India (2024). ISBN 978-9-3569-9993-0, 252 pages As a young boy growing up in rural Odisha, Damodar Padhi once struggled to understand how an indoor toilet worked. Used to open fields, he found the enclosed space unfamiliar, even unnecessary. On the very next day, confused and unsure, he relieved himself in a playground instead. This seemingly small incident, narrated with humor in The Scrapper’s Way , captures the essence of Padhi’s journey as he adapts to new environments, learns through trial and error, and constantly ...