In Everybody Have Fun: What can policymakers learn from happiness research? New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert features several books including Derek Bok’s The Politics of Happiness.

“It’s not just hitting the jackpot that fails to lift spirits; a whole range of activities that people tend to think will make them happy—getting a raise, moving to California, having kids—do not, it turns out, have that effect,” writes Kolbert.

“What should we do with information like this?” she asks. “On an individual level, it’s possible to stop buying lottery tickets, move back to Minnesota, and, provided the news reaches you in time, have your tubes tied. But there are more far-reaching societal implications to consider. Or so Derek Bok argues in his new book.”

The New Republic hosts a symposium on Diane Ravitch’s new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. Participants include Ravitch, PUP author Ben Wildavsky (The Great Brain Race, coming this May), and former NY Times education writer Richard Rothstein.

Tom Boellstorff conducted a full-scales ethnographic study of Second Life and wrote about the experience and his findings in the award-winning book Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Tomorrow morning, he will participate in The Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education Conference.

In a session titled “Virtual Worlds, Culture and Change – A Conversation”, Tom will be in conversation with Doug Thompson the CEO of Remedy Communications and owner of Metanomics.

You can “attend” the session in Second Life or view it on the conference Web site.

Economist and PUP author Diane Coyle has penned a piece for The Chronicle of Higher Education’s The Chronicle Review in which she provides a powerful defense of economics–and then some.  In “Economics is on the Verge of a Golden Age,” published this week, Coyle goes beyond the questions swirling about the role of economists in anticipating the current crisis to explain how economists of the current generation have transformed the field into a broader, richer, livelier, more policy-relevant discipline.  The second edition of Coyle’s widely admired book, The Soulful Science: What Economists Really Do, and Why It Matters, is now available from PUP. Check out Diane’s daily blog Enlightenment Economics.

Ian Buruma will read from and sign copies of his new book Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents at Politics and Prose in Washington, DC tonight at 7 PM.

Library Journal posts the best-sellers (to libraries that is) in medicine and two of our books make the list.

Coming in at #2 is Daniel Callahan’s Taming the Beloved Beast: How Medical Technology Costs Are Destroying Our Health Care System.

And #7 on the list is The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood by Didier Fassin.

After nearly 500 years spent lurking in the shadows of Florentine Golden Boy Michelangelo, Caravaggio is having his moment in the spotlight.   Thanks in part to this front page piece in the New York Times and a flurry of media attention surrounding a new retrospective at the Quirinale (through June 13) the edgy Baroque artist has dethroned the king of Renaissance Art at the top of the charts.

It’s a Smack Down of WWF proportions in the book market, as well.  Several fall releases focusing on both artists are slated for next season and we’ve got our hat in the ring here in Princeton.  The Times article mentions, “art historian Michael Fried, who has just written a book about Caravaggio” – and said book is one of ours!  PUP is proud to announce that Fried’s forthcoming THE MOMENT OF CARAVAGGIO will be published in September while Leonard Barkan’s book, MICHELANGELO: A LIFE ON PAPER is due out in November.

Just a reminder that Tom Espenshade will be presenting from his book No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life at the Princeton Public Library tonight. The event starts at 7:30 PM. Read more about the event here.

Books will be available for sale at the event courtesy of Labyrinth Books.

As part of the run-up to the annual meeting of the Association of American University Presses, the program committee is posting Essential Reading and provocative links for publishers. This link to BBC News struck me in particular because we have had several discussions about the effectiveness of our book jackets in recent weeks.

From BBC News:

Never-judge-a-book-by-its-cover is a cliche that has at its root an anti-superficiality message. But the truth is that publishers and authors do want us to judge a book by its cover, otherwise they would simply produce books wrapped in block colours to denote a genre.

Indeed, nothing in the production process is quite as tension-filled as the jacket design process (titles and subtitles do give jacket design a run for the money, though), but it is high on my list of key ingredients to a successful book. What do you think? Are there some recent books that really hit the mark for jacket design? Any PUP titles you like in particular? Sound off below.

Also, visit this link for some examples of the award-winning handiwork from our seriously talented jacket design team and here to vote on some of the new paperback covers for Spring 2010.

Do academics get an unfair rep for speaking (and writing) in academic gobbledygook? If you are undecided, stop by The Virtual Academic for a taste of REAL jargon courtesy of the virtual academic Pootwattle and the virtual critic Smedley and then sample one of our excellent trade titles for comparison.

Just for the record, my randomly generated academic-ese for the day is:

Pootwattle, the Virtual Academic(TM), says:

The discourse of the public sphere goes along with the project of communicative rationality.

Smedley, the Virtual Critic(TM), responds:

Pootwattle’s classic essay on the relationship between the discourse of the public sphere and the project of communicative rationality suffers from an idiosyncratic and ultimately unsatisfying reading of Kant.

Kant you say? Well we have a book on that too.

For years, we have fielded calls from birders asking when the new edition of Birds of Europe will publish. Well, it is finally here and hopefully it lives up to the hype.

The 2nd edition includes sixteen extra pages as well as new artwork, extensive text revisions that incorporate the latest identification knowledge, and updated maps.

The first edition of this authoritative text is already a staple for many bird enthusiasts and was praised as the “richest and the most comprehensive of the current guides,” by The Times (London). Bird Watcher’s Digest wrote, “if you are birding in Europe, you must have this guide…It should also be in the library of anyone who collects field guides.”

Not sure if I missed this earlier, but I ran across Five Books because of this interview with Jeremy Mynott.  What a terrific site. Click through and read their interviews, loosely arranged around various authors’ five books lists. What makes this site different is that they ask for the lists and then interview the authors about their selections. It makes for much better reading than a simple 1-5 ranking.