Minority Report

The history of the Black Sea littoral, an area of longstanding interest to Russia, provides important insight into Ukraine as a contemporary state. In Minority Report, Leonard G. Friesen and the volume’s contributors boldly reassess Mennonite history in Imperial Russia and the former Soviet Ukraine. This volume engages scholars from Ukraine, Russia, and North America, and includes translated and accessible contributions by scholars from the Ukrainian-German Institute of Dnipropetrovsk State University. Minority Report is divided into four sections: New Approaches to Mennonite History; Imperial Mennonite Isolationism Revisited; Mennonite Identities in Diaspora; and Mennonite Identities in the Soviet Cauldron. An appendix is included which recounts for the first time the emergence of Mennonite public history in southern Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The volume’s contributors reveal that far from being isolated from the larger society, Mennonites played an integral role in shaping the entire region. Minority Report successfully places Mennonite history within the recent historiographical insights offered by Ukrainian and Russian scholars and significantly enriches our understanding of minority relations in Soviet Ukraine.

Are the views of Latinos and African Americans underrepresented in our federal government? For that matter, what does it mean to be represented equitably? Rather than taking for granted a single answer to these complex questions, John Griffin and Brian Newman use different measures of political equality to reveal which groups get what they want from government and what factors lead to their successes. One of the first books to compare the representation of both African Americans and Latinos to that of whites, Minority Report shows that congressional decisions and federal policy tend to mirror the preferences of whites as a group and as individuals better than the preferences of either minority group, even after accounting for income disparities. This is far from the whole story, though, and the authors’ multifaceted approach illustrates the surprising degree to which group population size, an issue’s level of importance, the race or ethnicity of an office holder, and electoral turnout can affect how well government action reflects the views of each person or group. Sure to be controversial, Minority Report ultimately goes beyond statistical analyses to address the root question of what equal representation really means.

In the fall of 1948 H. L. Mencken, then at the top of his unmatchable form (he had spoken at a meeting of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia only a little while before), suffered a stroke. He soon recovered his physical vigor, but writing was for him a thing of the past. Some months before his death, in going through some papers that he was putting in order for deposit in his beloved Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, his long-time secretary discovered these Notebooks. Mencken meant to publish them, as he makes clear in the preface, which also describes them better than I can. Suffice it to say that here is one more generous sampling of the old Mencken battling fearlessly for the freedom and dignity of the individual and for the general decencies of life and attacking all that seems fundamentally hostile to man: government, organized religion, professional philosophers, and pedagogues above all. It shows his restless and inquiring mind ranging over many of the problems that beset all of us who ever take time out to think, all in his unmatchable style, which, however much it crackles, has the supreme virtue—which Henry always found in his own great model, Thomas Henry Huxley—that of never leaving you in doubt of its meaning. Read the preface and note that this book is precisely what its title suggests; it consists of hundreds of notes—some only a few lines in length, some running to several pages, all reflecting a rigorous and exhilarating mind and personality. It may be a long time before another like him crosses our path.

Imagine a future where crimes can be detected before they are committed, and criminals are convicted and sentenced for crimes before committing them. This is the scenario of Philip K. Dick's classic story, now filmed by Steven Spielberg, starring Tom Cruise. In addition to MINORITY REPORT this exclusive collection includes nine other outstanding short stories by the twentieth century's outstanding SF master, three of which have been made into feature films.

Imagine a future where crimes can be detected before they are committed, and criminals are convicted and sentenced for crimes before committing them. This is the scenario of Philip K. Dick's classic story, now filmed by Steven Spielberg, starring Tom Cruise. In addition to 'Minority Report' this exclusive collection includes nine other outstanding short stories by the twentieth century's outstanding sf master, three of which have been made into feature films.

In Philip K. Dick’s The Minority Report, ‘precogs’, who are imaginary individuals capable of seeing the future are relied upon to stop crime, with a consensus report synthesized from two of three precogs. When the protaganist is indicted for a future murder, he suspects a conspiracy and seeks out the “minority report,” detailing the suppressed testimony of the third precog. Science works a lot like this science fiction story. Contrary to the view that scientists in a field all share the same “paradigm,” as Thomas Kuhn famously argued, scientists support different, and competing, research programs. Statements of scientific consensus need to be actively synthesized from the work of different scientists. Not all scientific work will be equally credited by science as a whole. While this system works well enough for most purposes, it is possible for minority views to fail to get the hearing that they deserve. This book analyzes the support that should be given to minority views, reconsidering classic debates in science and technology studies and examining numerous case studies.

How secular governance in the Middle East is making life worse—not better—for religious minorities The plight of religious minorities in the Middle East is often attributed to the failure of secularism to take root in the region. Religious Difference in a Secular Age challenges this assessment by examining four cornerstones of secularism—political and civil equality, minority rights, religious freedom, and the legal separation of private and public domains. Drawing on her extensive fieldwork in Egypt with Coptic Orthodox Christians and Bahais—religious minorities in a predominantly Muslim country—Saba Mahmood shows how modern secular governance has exacerbated religious tensions and inequalities rather than reduced them. Tracing the historical career of secular legal concepts in the colonial and postcolonial Middle East, she explores how contradictions at the very heart of political secularism have aggravated and amplified existing forms of Islamic hierarchy, bringing minority relations in Egypt to a new historical impasse. Through a close examination of Egyptian court cases and constitutional debates about minority rights, conflicts around family law, and controversies over freedom of expression, Mahmood invites us to reflect on the entwined histories of secularism in the Middle East and Europe. A provocative work of scholarship, Religious Difference in a Secular Age challenges us to rethink the promise and limits of the secular ideal of religious equality.

List of members in each volume.