Jake Nabasny

Eugenics, the science of improving human reproduction, was enthusiastically embraced in early twentieth-century America. Offering the first thorough analysis of eugenicists’ diagnostic and therapeutic techniques, this book traces the paper-based tools used to convince a willing public of its inherent potential for disease, deviance, and disability and justify any means for curtailing that potential. During this period, the medium of paper was used for not just communicating the ideas and directives of eugenics programs, but also storing, analyzing, diagnosing, and computing the particularities of each individual’s genetic health. The development and deployment of devices and practices as varied as after-admission blanks, individual analysis cards, pedigree charts, personality tests, punch cards, case records, and experimental literature coalesced into a veritable arsenal of paper weapons by mid-century. These innovative techniques consolidated social hierarchies of race, sex, and disability with scientific facts and ways of seeing that continue to impact American attitudes toward health, reproduction, and identity. Against the dominant historiography of the last couple decades that treats bio-ethical issues related to eugenics as an alternative between choice and control, this new archival research reveals that many eugenicists encouraged personal choice to accomplish their plans for racial betterment. This revelation challenges the widely held belief that reproductive autonomy is the panacea for authoritarian eugenics. As reproductive and genetic technology rapidly change popular conceptions about what a person is, can be, and should be, it is more vital than ever to locate these perspectives and decisions in their historical context.

Chefs and food writers have adopted the commonplace of comparing cooking to science. Authors like Alton Brown and Harold McGee defend the view that flavor is a chemical event, and must be studied as such. Kitchen Alchemyswims against this hegemonic current to recall a time before modern chemistry transposed its atomic worldview on food. Part theory, part cookbook, part manifesto: this work calls on professional and amateur cooks alike to reimagine the practice of cooking, and it teaches them how! With original recipes, Kitchen Alchemy showcases essential cooking techniques divided into the three alchemical phases of preparation, explication, and transformation. As the first and only theory-cookbook ever written, This book illustrates and invites the reader to participate in the everyday alchemy of the kitchen.

Self, Ego, Subject – these are the terms that philosophers have used to define that indelible mark of an individual. At the same time, however, a counter-current runs through the history of philosophy and culture that challenges the primordiality and privilege of the purportedly self-identical Subject. This collection of texts from 2012-2018 traces the history of disavowal, a line of escape from subjectivity. Breaking free of the binary logic of affirmation-negation, these essays contend that a third possibility exists in the realm of human action: disavowal. Disavowal is a sly sidestepping of boolean responses, an absolute negation that nevertheless posits an alternative course of action. Positing that a refusal to participate in the current global capitalist order need not be a refusal of the world as such this collection engages in topics from Cartesian subjectivity to Sia’s live performance of "Chandelier," these essays provide a timely meditation on an urgent question and illuminate a path forward.