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This book is a fascinating mix of essays that examine the American fashion industry (read very broadly) from a wide variety of angles. Covering the social production of fashion, the business of fashion in the US, the beginnings of cultural marketing, and more, these individual essays give incredible insight into their particular areas of focus, albeit with essentially no connective tissue. There's also an essay on the DuPont company, with a huge shoutout to the Hagley! Highly recommend

This is best thought of two books - the first, up to chapter 8, is a revelatory look at the category error we've made around understanding emotions, revealing through a wide variety of experiments and research how emotions are constructed in real time as an act of categorization - they don't "exist" anywhere in the body. The second, comprising most of the rest of the book, is a combined self-help book/pontification about topics that Barrett is demonstrably unqualified for (there are so many sections that essentially begin "I don't know anything about this area, but let me shoot from the hip and tell entire fields why they're wrong and how to do it better"). Citing misleading, racist stereotypes in the final chapter doesn't help. I would highly recommend picking up this book from your library and putting it down after chapter 8.

This book is an incredible dive into the history of the concept of a "fair" price, which until quite recently was radically different than the one we're used to today. Geiss traces that history - mostly in the West but with significant time devoted to price fairness in the Muslim world as well - starting at Aristotle and moving through the Enlightenment and eventually the modern world. The idea that the market should set a price on its own, or that arbitrage should be allowed to set a single price across different regions developed surprisingly late, and even recent decades have demonstrated that the combined moral/economic argument of price and interest fairness is by no means a settled issue. Highly recommend

Whitt does a service by diving into the sordid, surprisingly recent history of the institutionalization of American Indians, bringing together archival government documents and written accounts to present a shocking and largely unacknowledged stain on US history. As one might expect boarding schools are centered here, but their position within the prison pipeline and their usage to illegally institutionalize adults is also covered. The topic of labor as a "cure" for Native American ailments, and the participation of many major corporations in this scheme, is also examined here. This is an extremely tough but important read. Highly recommend