Stanford University Press Blog

The Oppenheimer Enigma

Illuminating legend and doubt

JEAN-PIERRE DUPUY

1945— J. Robert Oppenheimer, General Leslie Groves and others at the Trinity test site. By United States Army Signal Corps - Image taken from Project Gutenberg and cropped and saved to a more appropriate file format. Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons

 

Robert Oppenheimer's tortured personality has given rise to several misunderstandings that have led to him becoming a legendary figure, as evidenced by Christopher Nolan's recent film. I try to demystify three of them, based on the analyses of my recent book, The War That Must Not Occur », Stanford University Press, 2023.

  

1. The work on the U.S. bomb justified by the hypothetical future Nazi bomb

It is undeniable that, as early as 1939 at least, the need to outpace Hitler played an important role in the decision to set up the Manhattan Project. After all, it was a German, Otto Hahn, who, in January 1939, succeeded for the first time in achieving the fission of the uranium atom by bombarding it with neutrons.

However, by the end of 1942, there was no Nazi bomb on the horizon anymore. Led by Werner Heisenberg, the German project had been on the wrong track from the start, and it was better suited to building a uranium pile capable of releasing energy than a bomb intended to explode and destroy nations. This failure can be explained in part by the fact that many of Central Europe's most prominent scientists, being Jews, had fled to America, and some of the greatest had joined the Manhattan Project! Heisenberg’s late admission that he didn’t really want to make a bomb remains a moot point.

ASSOCIATION FOR JEWISH STUDIES CONFERENCE 2023

 

In addition to our booth in the AJS exhibit hall, we offer this virtual space to showcase our new authors, award-winning books, and highlights from the last year of Jewish Studies at SUP.

 

Virtual Exhibit

Recent Award Winners

AJS Resources

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Virtual Exhibit

Announcing new books, published in the last year. We’re offering 30% off on listed SUP Jewish Studies titles with discount code S23XAJS through our virtual exhibit ».

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Recent Award Winners

 

 

Undesirables: A Holocaust Journey to North Africa »

AOMAR BOUM, ILLUSTRATED BY NADJIB BERBER

• Gold Medal in the Graphic Novel/Drawn Book Category for the 2023 Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPYs).

Climate Change, Seriously

Urgency can be the enemy of seriousness

STEVEN CONNOR

Free for commercial use. Via Pixabay.

 

What does it mean to take something seriously? Curiously, and unfortunately, if often means to be distracted from a serious matter by the question of its seriousness, and the style in which its seriousness is to be lived out. Serious matters are matters we believe require concentrated and urgent attention, but a preoccupation with the seriousness of the issue at hand can get in the way of the kind of serious action that might be called for, precisely by insinuating itself in its place. Aristotle believed that the work of human begetting required concentration on the job in hand, to the point of thinking that birth deformities might be the result of allowing your thoughts during copulation to wander to the likely winners of the upcoming chariot races. One of the compensations for being a professor of literature is being able to reveal to generations of incredulous undergraduates that it has been possible to build an entire novel around the consequences of this kind of interrupted coital cognition.

In the case of climate change, the temper of its seriousness involves a deflection of questions of rational action to questions of belief, or, more precisely, of faith. I must here try to encourage assent to an important distinction between belief and faith, as follows. Faith is the optative mood of belief; for beliefs concern things we take to be true, while faith concerns things we feel the need to be true. Faith is the opposite of warranted belief because it is both the expression and the auto-satisfaction of the need for it. I believe in gravity, and the warming powers of fire, and the near-certainty of the sun reappearing at the end of the regular periods of darkness known as nights, just because I have no need to believe in them. I would only need faith in them if I actually entertained doubts about them which I was looking for ways to countermand. In the long and continuing transaction between humans, their needs, and their beliefs, magic means have often been recruited for this countermanding.

You can easily believe that climate change is occurring, and will continue, and that it is occasioned or accelerated by human actions, and, as a consequence focus your attention purposively, and even ardently on the actions to be conceived and carried out. But that is not the quality of the seriousness which attaches to writing and thinking about climate change. Its seriousness seems to concern faith, to be characterized as a mode of fantasy, definable in its turn not as false belief, but belief in things the truth of which is intensely and agonistically desired. For, in the usage I favour, fantasies are not untrue things, but things we want to be true, whether or not they are. The wanting of things we crave has a sweet tooth of its own: hence the voracity of veracity.

An Exploration of Capitalism’s Sexual Division of Debt

How do women's debt, capitalism, sexuality, and kinship all connect?

ISABELLE GUÉRIN, SANTOSH KUMAR, and G. VENKATASUBRAMANIAN

Photograph provided by Isabelle Guérin, used with permission.

 

Our book goes by the title The Indebted Woman: Kinship, Sexuality, and Capitalism ». Why is it that financial capitalism is suddenly interested in poor women, even in remote parts of India? And why are women so keen to take out credit and pay it back on time, even when they lack income, capital and the support of their husbands? This book is a response to these questions.

A long journey

Initiated by Isabelle Guérin, a French research economist, it was made possible by collaboration with Santosh Kumar and G. Venkatasubramanian, both Indian socio-anthropologists. They have worked together for 20 years, combining their skills, but also their gender, their social background and their sensitivity to explore the materiality and intimacy of debt. Their fieldwork has gradually taken them in completely unexpected directions, revealing how women's debt is at the heart of contemporary financial capitalism, while being shaped by and constitutive of norms of kinship and sexuality.

Capitalism

This book will make for essential reading if you want to dig deeper into the complexities of our current financialized capitalist system.

We argue that the indebted woman plays a critical role in this financialized capitalism. Our perspective is rooted in two decades of on-the-ground research in rural Tamil Nadu, South India, where we combined quantitative surveys with ethnography. To make our point, we draw parallels across different times and places.

American Anthropological Association Conference 2023

Welcome!

We offer this virtual space in addition to our AAA booth to showcase our new authors, award-winning books, and highlights from the last year of anthropology publishing at SUP.

 

New Books and New SUP Authors

This Year’s Award Winners

AAA Resources

 

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New Books and New SUP Authors

Announcing  new books, published in the last year. We’re offering 30% off these and other recent SUP Anthropology titles with discount code S23XAAA through our virtual exhibit ».

 

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This Year’s Award Winners

 

Racial Equality, Affirmative Action, and the Supreme Court

How Brown v. Board of Education became both a weapon and an ameliorative

DANIEL KIEL

The U.S. 2022 Supreme Court By Fred Schilling -supremecourt.gov, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons 

 

Next spring will mark the 70^th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The Brown decision declaring legalized racial segregation unconstitutional is among the most well-known and impactful rulings in the Court’s history. Indeed, at a time when the justices vigorously disagree on virtually every cultural topic, everyone affirms their agreement that Brown was correctly decided. But this unanimity is misleading. Scratch the surface and there are chasms among today’s justices about what Brown means.

This summer, a divided 6-3 Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions  in a pair of cases brought against Harvard and the University of North Carolina. The plaintiffs in the case had argued that the universities’ consideration of race, albeit as one of many factors in a holistic process, violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause. In 1954, it had been that same equal protection clause that the Court used in Brown to end Jim Crow segregation in schools, a system of racialized exclusion of Black students from educational opportunities. While the cases were about affirmative action in the 21^st century, there was an underlying battle among the various opinions offered by six different justices about which side better aligned with the spirit of a case nearly 70 years old.

On one side was a colorblind interpretation in the majority opinion of Chief Justice John Roberts and concurrences by Justices Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh. By this view, Brown prohibited any consideration of race by universities no matter what the purpose. On the other side were dissents from Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson who claimed that the universities’ efforts were part of a broader demand for racially equal educational opportunities, like Brown itself.

This debate goes back to the initial aftermath of the Court’s revolutionary decision in 1954. Segregationists argued that Brown merely required removal of the racial designations of schools, simply getting the law out of mandating racially separate schools. By this argument, single race schools could persist after Brown, so long as student assignment policies were not explicitly based on race. This position was just short of outright defiance of Brown and led to years of delays in integrating schools in many communities.

Surrogacy and Public Curiosity

A Q&A with My Body, Their Baby author Grace Y. Kao

GRACE Y. KAO

Free for commercial use. Via Pixabay.

 

What made you want to write this book?

I didn’t go into carrying and delivering a baby for my friends thinking that I’d ever turn my story into a book! Basically when folks around me would find out I was expecting a child for someone else, they’d gently pepper with me questions like “What does your husband think about this?” or “Aren’t you scared you’ll grow attached to the baby and not want to give it up?” I’d address their concerns, we’d sometimes launch into an extended conversation about childbearing, infertility or related topics, and then several of my interlocutors who were also academics would often ask if I’d consider publishing or speaking publicly about what I had just shared.

I eventually came to realize something my colleagues had grasped before I had—that the world of former surrogates who are also trained ethicists has got to be very small. Through my hyper-visibility as an “advanced maternal age” pregnant woman and my openness about the baby not being mine, I saw firsthand how folks around me had so many questions and misconceptions about the practice. It thus became important to me to research them, investigate whether popular fears about surrogacy were well-founded, and then do what I could to set the record straight.

 

Given that you draw from your personal experience as a surrogate mother, what were the challenges of relating that perspective?

I wrestled with two primary things. The story of how and why I became a surrogate was inextricably tied to my friends’ struggle to have their first child. So my first challenge was to work out how I could truthfully convey my surro-mom experiences—both the joys and the difficult parts—without sharing some details that my friends didn’t want to appear in print. I ended up self-censoring in early drafts, deleting some material in the penultimate draft at their request, and explaining in the intro the difference between speaking about vs. speaking for them.

The second challenge was more meta—how to oscillate between writing about my feelings and experiences in a manner appropriate for memoir-style reflections and also offering judgments about the use of assisted reproductive technology (ART) in a style consistent with good academic writing. As readers of My, Body, Their Baby » will see, I decided not only to open each chapter with a personal anecdote connected to the themes to be explored in the pages to follow, but also sometimes marble in my experiences elsewhere in ways that hopefully elucidate a point or provide a fuller picture of what surrogacy is like from someone who has gone through it firsthand.

 

Play and Destruction

A recommended reading list on toys, the atomic bomb, and the unlikely intersection of the two

 

 

A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and Its Legacies, Third Edition »

MARTIN J. SHERWIN, FOREWORD BY ROBERT J. LIFTON

Continuously in demand since its first, prize-winning edition was published in 1975, this is the classic history of the development of the American atomic bomb, the decision to use it against Japan, and the origins of U.S. atomic diplomacy toward the Soviet Union.

In his Preface to this new edition, the author describes and evaluates the lengthening trail of new evidence that has come to light concerning these often emotionally debated subjects. The author also invokes his experience as a historical advisor to the controversial, aborted 1995 Enola Gay exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution. This leads him to analyze the impact on American democracy of one of the most insidious of the legacies of Hiroshima: the political control of historical interpretation.

American Sociological Association 2023

 

Please enjoy this virtual space, showcasing our new authors, award-winning books, and highlights from the last year of sociology at SUP.

 

New Books 

Recent Award Winners

ASA Resources

 

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New Books 

Announcing new books, published in the last year. We’re offering 30% off recent SUP Sociology titles with discount code S23XASA through our virtual exhibit ».

SUP 2023 Sociology Catalog »

The Legacy of Project Mohole

The Subterranean in practice and popular imagination

PATRICK WHITMARSH

1898 Illustration By A. D. McCormick for The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym by Edgar Allan Poe. Google Books, Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons

 

In May 2023, researchers for the International Ocean Discovery Program, or IODP (a collaborative effort that draws funding from multiple government institutions across four continents), retrieved core samples from the planet’s mantle. The achievement is over sixty years in the making; in 1961, scientists and engineers aboard the barge CUSS I practiced an experimental drilling routine off Guadalupe Island in preparation for reaching the mantle. The official attempt, known as Project Mohole, proved a disappointing failure. The company selected to conduct the drilling—Brown & Root, a construction firm with no offshore experience—delivered minimal results and a blown budget. Although core samples from sediment beneath the ocean floor yielded some valuable information, the drilling failed to reach the earth’s mantle, which would remain out of reach for decades.. The Deep Sea Drilling Project (the predecessor of the IODP) struggled for years to succeed where Mohole had not, until the team aboard the JOIDES Resolution, the IODP’s flagship vessel operated out of Texas A&M University, cracked the case, extracting “a core of rock more than 1 kilometer long.” The discovery is of no small significance, carrying with it the potential for unlocking subterranean secrets long inaccessible. In geochemist Jessica Warren’s words, “We’re finally going to see the Wizard of Oz.”

Anthony Comstock Rides Again

The resurgence of American censorship and book bans

KATHERINE GIUFFRE

2016— Then Vice President Joe Biden examines James Joyce manuscripts at Trinity college, Dublin.  Official White House Photo by David Lienemann. Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons 

 

Anthony Comstock is back in the news. More than a century after his death, the founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (NYSSV) and the law he inspired – the 1873 “Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use,” more commonly known as the “Comstock Act” – have emerged once again as players in America’s cultural wars, cited by right-wing judges in 2023 to support banning books, drag shows, and the medical abortion drug mifepristone.

Comstock was active throughout the end of the 19^th century and into the 20^th. He opposed women’s suffrage, the dissemination of any information regarding birth control or abortion, and pornography or other “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” material. Thousands were arrested under the Act and Comstock himself boasted that 15 people were driven to suicide by his actions. After his death in 1915, Comstock’s work was carried on by his successor at the NYSSV, John Sumner.

As I discuss in my book, Outrage: The Arts and the Creation of Modernity », it was Sumner who had Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap arrested in 1920 in New York for publishing an excerpt of James Joyce’s Ulysses in their literary magazine, The Little Review. In January of that same year, Prohibition became law in the US after the Volstead Act passed. In April, Italian immigrants Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were arrested for the murder of a Boston-area paymaster in what many believed was a politically motivated action based on their anarchist political beliefs. And perhaps most importantly, in 1920 the 19^th Amendment became law, guaranteeing women the right to vote, sending Sumner into a frenzy over the fear that “radical feminists” would upend American society. In the midst of these social and cultural changes, Anderson and Heap were convicted, narrowly escaped a prison sentence, and were fined fifty dollars each (about $750 today). Joyce’s Ulysses was effectively banned from the United States. Copies of The Little Review that contained excerpts of it were taken to the official government incinerator and burned. Fortunately, copies already in the hands of purchasers survived to be digitized for us today.

 

Berkshire Conference of Women, Genders and Sexualities 2023

 

 

Announcements

Recent Award Winners

BCHW Resources

 

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Announcements

Announcing new books, published in the last year. We’re offering 30% off these and other recent SUP History titles with discount code S23XBCHW through our virtual exhibit ».

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Recent Award Winners

 

 

Pious Peripheries: Runaway Women in Post-Taliban Afghanistan 

SONIA AHSAN-TIRMIZI 

• Winner of the 2022 Fatema Mernissi Book Award, sponsored by the Middle East Studies Association (MESA). 
• Honorable Mention for the 2022 AMEA Bi-annual Book Award, sponsored by the Association for Middle East Anthropology (AMEA). 
• Honorable Mention for the 2022 AMEWS Book Award, sponsored by the Association for Middle East Women’s Studies.

Oman’s revolutionary past resurfaces

How revolutionary values survive repression in postwar Dhufar

ALICE WILSON

Overhead view of  Salalah and the Jabal al Qar mountains. Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

 

The Dhufar region of Oman was famous in ancient times for its frankincense. Visitors today can learn about this past in “The Museum of the Frankincense Land” near the ruins of the former port city where medieval traveler Ibn Battuta sojourned. Visitors can later enjoy a frankincense flavor ice cream at a peaceful café that looks out from the edge of Dhufar’s mountain interior, across its coastal plain, to the city of Salalah and the Arabian Sea beyond. But it was not always frankincense that brought Dhufar renown, nor did the mountains, plain, and coast always offer such peaceful landscapes.

From 1965 to 1976, Dhufar captured global attention for its anti-colonial revolutionaries and their liberation movement. Fighting against the British-backed al-Busaid dynasty of Sultans, the front pursued political and social emancipation, initially for Dhufar but later for Oman and the Arabian Gulf under formal and informal British colonialism. The increasingly internationalized, British-led counterinsurgency militarily defeated the movement in 1976. This campaign deployed indiscriminate violence such as airstrikes and food and water blockades that destroyed Dhufari lives and livelihoods. Subsequently, the Sultanate expunged the revolution, and other episodes of dissent, from official history.

In postwar Oman, former revolutionaries have lived, worked, raised families, and buried peers while living under the authoritarian rule of the very government that they once opposed. As such, theirs is a predicament reminiscent of that of later generations of disappointed activists and sympathizers of the revolutions in Southwest Asia and North Africa that met with backlash, repression, counterinsurgency, and counterrevolution. Taking a close look at the postwar lives of former revolutionaries in Dhufar offers the opportunity to ask: what happens to the ideas and values of revolution after military defeat and repression?

Law and Society Association Conference 2023

 

 

 

Please enjoy this virtual space, showcasing our new authors, award-winning books, and highlights from the last year of Law at SUP.

 

New Books and New SUP Authors

Recent Award Winners 

LSA Resources

 

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New Books and New SUP Authors

Announcing new books, published in the last year. We’re offering 30% off these and other recent SUP Law titles with discount code S23XLSA-FM through our virtual exhibit ».

Browse new and forthcoming titles in our latest Law catalog »

Your Table Of Contents is a Marketing Tool

Embracing the flexibility of an under-utilized resource

Richard Narramore, Executive Editor

Free for commercial use. Via Pixabay.

 

Your table of contents is not just an outline–it is an overlooked, underappreciated marketing and sales tool.  An editor will use your table of contents to evaluate your book proposal. They will share it with marketing colleagues and their Editorial Board, to rally support. Your publisher’s sales team will share it with retailers. Marketers will post it to Amazon and online stores around the world. Foreign language rights managers will use it to persuade publishers in China, Germany, or Brazil to translate your book into their language.

But you also want a captivating table of contents for your most important audience–your reader. Readers deciding whether or not to buy your book will look at the cover and the marketing copy, and perhaps skim chapter 1, but they will also browse your table of contents. Will it grab their interest or not? I’m a business book editor, and when I’m working with an author, I ask them to picture a browsing reader scanning the table of contents online or in a bookstore, deciding whether or not the book is worth their valuable time. A book I published called The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy received a rave review in the New York Times, including praise for the author’s “beguilingly titled subchapters.” That’s the response we want from a reader browsing the table of contents!

Creating a polished, marketing-oriented, reader-friendly table of contents, is a way of getting to know your audience better.

So I encourage you to put on your marketing/copywriter hat for an hour and finesse your chapter titles. This requires a mental shift, since you have been thinking about the internal coherence and narrative flow of your argument. You don’t want frothy chapter titles that undercut the scholarly rigor of your work.  But you strongly believe in your book and you care about connecting deeply with your reader and their concerns. Think about which of your book’s topics, ideas, claims, and themes your readers care about most. Whatever those are…they should show up, stated clearly, in your chapter titles.