Our new series, the Lives of Great Religious Books is based on the idea that books, like people, are born and live fascinating lives worthy of biographical treatment. Now to get truly meta — can we then extend it out to say that series are like books are like people in the same way?

That is one way to look at this Q&A between religion editor Fred Appel and Ruth Braunstein at The Immanent Frame in which Fred reveals how the idea behind the series was actually born of a discussion with Avishai Margalit many years ago in a faculty lounge at NYU Law School.

If we accept that series are like books are like people — perhaps this closing paragraph in which Fred reveals his “wish list” of future biographical subjects can be viewed as the series version of a personal ad (“Established series seeks unattached authors for fun and stimulating conversation, must like dogs.“).

I would love to commission an accessible, lively biography of the Daodejing, and I’m also looking for a biography of the Talmud. I’ve been talking to one or two people about that. It is a tremendously important book in the Jewish tradition, and one that has had a fascinating history, not just within Jewish communities in Europe, in the Sephardic world, and in this country, but also in the Christian and Islamic worlds. I would love to commission a biography of Exodus as well. The liberationist story has been so very important. Michael Walzer, as I mentioned, wrote an important book about Exodus from the perspective of political theory and the history of political thought, but I think it’s time for a new book, and perhaps one written from a different perspective. The Koran is of course something that I’ve been thinking about a lot as well. There are a lot of fine Koranic scholars out there, but the state of that field, or subfield, is such that most people are writing in very specialized modes, for other specialists. So finding someone who can write engagingly and accessibly for the general educated public is something of a challenge. But that’s what keeps me busy, and that’s what makes it fun.

We always love it when local freelancers take the time to go to PUP events in town and write about them (favorably, of course.) Many thanks to Linda Arntzenius for attending last night’s John Ikenberry event at Labyrinth. Check out Linda’s coverage and review of the new book, Liberal Leviathan, at AllPrinceton.com.

Sylvia Lavin will be at Cornell University on April27th to speak about her new book, Kissing Architecture, as part of Cornell’s Department of Architecture Spring 2011 Lecture Series. Sylvia Lavin is professor and director of critical studies and M.A./Ph.D. programs at UCLA, is known for her scholarship and her criticism of contemporary architecture and design. This is an event you don’t want to miss!

“In the most sober assessment I can offer, I find Sylvia Lavin’s Kissing Architecture to rank among the most original writings in contemporary art discourse I have ever read. Utterly disarming, it is wondrous, brilliant, innocent, naughty, trite, hilarious, fresh, weightless, and profound. Simply put, I am mad for it.” -Jeffrey M. Kipnis, Ohio State University

Date: April 27, 2011

Time: 5:15 p.m.

Location: Lewis Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall

More Info: Here

If you are a chipmunk!

Read the adventures of Bobb and Bobbette who are putting their new copy of Hawks at a Distance to good use over at Birds from Behind blog.

Save a chipmunk. Buy a book.

If you’ll be near Houston, Texas this coming Monday, April 18th, don’t miss your chance to see Timur Kuran, author of The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East. The Long Divergence opens up a frank and honest debate on a crucial issue that even some of the most ardent secularists in the Muslim world have hesitated to discuss. Timur Kuran is professor of economics and political science and the Gorter Family Professor of Islamic Studies at Duke University. He is the author of Islam and Mammon: The Economic Predicaments of Islamism.

Date: Monday, April 18th.

Time: 12:00-1:30 p.m.

Location: Rice University, Baker Hall’s Doré Commons. View Directions.

More Info & RSVP: Here.

Be sure to check out the official Long Divergence Facebook Page.

Hope to see you all there!

Kazi Dawa Samdup and Walter Evans-Wentz

Visit the Berfrois web site to read Donald S. Lopez, Jr.”s explanation of why this photograph and the book these two men created aren’t quite what they seem.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead thus seems to entail multiple layers of dissimulation, beginning with the photograph of its translator and editor, and extending back to the ancient Tibetan text—how ancient remains a question—that lies buried under the prefaces, notes, and appendices of the American Theosophist Walter Evans-Wentz. And yet, it has been reprinted many times since 1927 and has sold hundreds of thousands of copies. The Tibetan text itself has been retranslated repeatedly, most recently in 2005 in “the first complete translation”, with various Tibetan lamas, including the Dalai Lama himself, offering their commentary.

More from the article here.

And read the first chapter of The Tibetan Book of the Dead: A Biography here: http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i9395.pdf

The speaker in this video clip, Michael Nielsen, is publishing a book with Princeton University Press in November 2011. The book titled Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science makes sense of the exciting ways scientists and people collaborate online to solve problems.

In this TEDx Waterloo talk, Nielsen describes the polymath project which is coincidentally the brainchild of another PUP author — Timothy Gowers.

Enjoy the video and I’ll post more info about Michael’s book when it is available.

The New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers Announces 2011-2012 Fellows. Its Thirteenth class of prestigious fellows stars fifteen diverse and extraordinary creative writers, independent scholars, and academics. On this list are two Princeton University Press authors – Ian Buruma and Shamus Khan!

Ian Buruma is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Democracy, Human Rights, and Journalism at Bard College. His many books include Anglomania (Random House), Inventing Japan (Modern Library), and Murder in Amsterdam (Penguin), which won a Los Angeles Times Book Award. He is a regular contributor to many publications, including the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, the Guardian, and the Financial Times. His latest Princeton published book is Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents. The book he will be working on at the Cullman Center, 1945: Life in Ruins, is about the immediate aftermath of World War II in Europe and Asia.

Shamus Rahman Khan is assistant professor of sociology at Columbia University. He is an alumnus and former faculty member of St. Paul’s School. His latest Princeton published book is Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School. At the Cullman Center he will be working on Exceptional: Elite New York and the Story of American Inequality, a monograph that will pursue his interest in understanding inequality by studying elites.

According to the New York Public Library’s website: “The Fellows, whose appointments were announced by Library President Dr. Paul LeClerc and Jean Strouse, the Sue Ann and John Weinberg Director of the Center, were selected from a pool of 274 applicants from 22 countries. Pursuing a wide array of book projects—ranging from the 1952 World Table Tennis Championships in Bombay to matters of race in 20th century New York to the British roots of American religious freedom—the fellows will have full access to the unparalleled research collections and online resources of The New York Public Library’s landmark Stephen A. Schwarzman Building at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. They will be in residence at the Center from September 2011 through May 2012.”

Again, many congratulations to Ian Buruma and Shamus Khan!

Continued »

On March 24 we posted some bold predictions on who would win the NCAA basketball championship game. We now have a winner and send our congratulations to Kelly Davis.

Vickie Kearn: My bold pick was Duke based on a little math, past performance, and the luck factor. The one thing missing from my equation was the upset factor and I will be sure to add that next year.

The winner of the ESPN bracket challenge is Joe Pearlman who filled out his bracket in 10 minutes and based his picks on a hunch. Out of 5.9 million entries, he is only one of two people who picked the final four and he will be taking home the $10,000 prize. Does this mean we should throw out all of our math models and go solely on hunches or throw darts at a bracket next year? Absolutely not! As you will see, Tim Chartier and his students did very well with their brackets.

Tim Chartier: Any prediction method is, at some level, working on the odds of longterm success. This can be seen by our methods producing brackets that were in the 90th percentile 3 of the past 4 years. However, this year was, indeed, quite different. Still, Kelly Davis, a senior math major at Davidson College, produced a bracket that beat many celebrity sports analysts’ brackets. We were only using the results of games, the time it occurred in the season, and whether the game was home, away or on neutral ground.

Caption: Kelly Davis with her prizes of Ben and Jerry’s and Princeton University Press books.

Vickie Kearn: What method did you use when preparing your bracket?

Kelly Davis: Like most students in my Math Modeling class, I used a linear weighted Colley Ranking method that we learned about in class, which uses a system of linear equations. Different derivations of the Colley Ranking Method are often used in sports rankings, including for the Bowl Championship Series. Each student then modified this method, to emphasize or add in different factors that each student felt was important. Not knowing much about college basketball, I had to pull from my somewhat limited knowledge of sports to help me decide what factors from the regular season were important to help predict the tournament outcomes. The three major factors that I implemented into my coding were the point difference between the winner and loser, when in the season the game was played and whether the game was home, away or on neutral ground.

Let me give a few more details on this. Factoring in point difference helps to indicate the strength of the win. Winning by a lot is a stronger win than only winning by a little. It also helps to factor in games that are very close in point systems and ultimately come down to a bunch of fouls being called. Considering when in the season the game is played allowed me to give heavy emphasis on the end of the season. If a team is playing poorly at the end (such as due to the injury of a major player) then they will probably not do well. All teams are playing intensely at the end of the season in their conference tournaments, which I consider as a good predictor for tournament play. Finally, I fold in a weight for location. Teams that typically do poorly at away games, will have a hard time in March Madness where no one plays a home game.

Dr. Chartier included the brackets generated by the linear and the uniform Colley methods into our ESPN group so that we could see how our brackets compared to the simplistic/conservative, non-modified versions. Despite ranking lower than the majority of the class last year, the linear Colley method ironically ended up being the next highest bracket after mine, placing in the 64.4 percentile. Last year it placed in the 82 percentile. Perhaps sometimes the safest approach is the best approach!

Vickie: Did you submit more than one bracket? If so, which performed the best?

Kelly: Each student in our class was allowed to submit up to three brackets and I ended up submitting two. My bracket that ended up being the most successful was my initial one that I had to complete for a homework assignment. In this bracket, except for the very first portion of the season, I divided the season up into 10 segments and weighted each segment by an increasing 10% and then weighted the last two segments with a bit higher percentile because most teams are playing conference championship games during this time. In this bracket, I also subtracted a 3 point home court advantage from the score of the home team. For my second one, I placed in the 64.4 percentile, which placed it at the same percentile as the linear Colley method. For this one, I mostly shifted more weight to the end of the season in terms of how important it was to be winning at the end of the season instead of the beginning. I also penalized teams who tended to lose more at away games.

Vickie: Were there any surprises this year that you did not count on and that affected your bracket in a big way?

Kelly: With only 4.7% of over 5.9 million brackets submitted to the Tournament Challenge accurately predicting Connecticut to win, let alone only two people in the entire country correctly picking the final four, I think it is safe to say there were many surprises that most people did not count on! In terms of my bracket, early on in the tournament, my model actually did very well at predicting the outcomes of the first two rounds, with me finishing the second round in the 91.0 percentile, which placed me above many experts on this subject such as Mike Greenberg, Dick Vitale, and Matthew Berry, who ended up in the 21.3, 21.3, and 11.9 percentiles, respectively. Then again, Matt Hasselbeck’s (quarterback for the Seattle Seahawks) 5-year-old son finished in the 93.4 percentile.

As the tournament progressed and more of the upsets started occurring/becoming more apparent, my bracket, along with many others such as President Obama’s bracket, started to be less successful at predicting these surprises. Many of the unpredicted surprises in my bracket were pretty unexpected for most people, such as Kentucky’s win over Ohio, the team that over a quarter of the brackets, including mine, had predicted would win and Butler’s surprising series of wins, as evident by the fact that only 11,326 of the 5.2 million had accurately predicted Butler being in the finals.

Vickie: Each round of the competition provides a certain number of points for a correct pick. For example, you get 10 points for each winner you pick in the second round of play, 80 points for selecting the Elite 8 and 320 points for selecting the champion. The most points you can get is 1920. What was your ESPN score? You didn’t win the $10,000 but what was your prize?

Kelly: As Dr. Chartier mentioned earlier, for the first time in the past four years, my class’s mathematical models were not as successful at predicting all of this year’s surprises and my ESPN score ended up being 560 points, placing me in the 68.1 percentile, which was the same percentile as Colin Cowherd, an American sports radio personality.

Despite not doing as well as other students in previous years, I was a bit more successful within my modeling class and end up winning our inner-class pool. As part of winning our class pool, I received $100 worth of books from Princeton University Press, a t-shirt from the Davidson College Athletics Department and several free cones to Ben & Jerry’s. The picture above shows me sitting in our local Ben & Jerry’s with some books on ranking published by Princeton University Press while I enjoy one of my victory cones.

I think the largest prize of all, however, was the opportunity to show my friends and fellow college students an exciting and cool application of math to a topic most people would never associate with math. Some of my friends hated seeing their carefully thought out brackets lose to a bracket generated by a “math nerd” who knows very little about college basketball, which made my ice cream victory taste even sweeter!

Vickie: What would you do differently next year?

Kelly: After having had a lot of success with running my coding on some of the past few seasons in terms of fairly consistently predicting a large portion of the elite eight’s each year, in some ways I would be tempted to change very little. As with most mathematical models, my model has many limitations and flaws, and consequentially will have instances such as this year where it is less successful at accurately predicting real world outcomes, but then again so were many experts. I think one of the coolest things about using math modeling to predict tournament outcomes is that you can use the same coding to predict outcomes each year without having to spend the entire regular season keeping track of scores and top teams.

A couple of things I would be interested in exploring would be to look at a team’s patterns of wins and losses as an indicator of how to weight wins at different points in the season. After seeing how successful Butler was for the second year in a row, I also think it would be interesting to consider the success rates of teams in previous March Madness tournaments.

Vickie: In the earlier post, Lucy McMurry was doing well. How did her bracket do in the end?

Tim Chartier: Lucy was, indeed, doing very well. However, many of her picks did not lead to points as the tournament progressed and so she ended up in the 50.9 percentile. So, she was better than over half the brackets but it was indeed a difficult year! We look forward to next year and maybe this year will give us new ideas and even new statistics to fold into our methods. Nevertheless, there will also be upsets and a certain amount of madness in March as the tournament unfolds.
Continued »

This is the answer to the age-old question “How does he do it?” Anyone who has admired birds from afar and then looked through their favorite bird book at the close-up photographs has wondered, “How do they get so close to the birds?” Well, here’s Richard’s take on it.

Earlier Crossley Unplugged videos:

• Where to go birding?
• In the garden: bird baths and plantings
• In the garden: bird feeders
• Becoming a Better Birder
• ID Tips: Size
• ID Tips: Shape
• ID Tips: Behavior
• ID Tips: Probability
• ID Tips: Color
• ID Tips: Sound
• Optics
• Don’t Be Afraid to Make Mistakes
• Birding in the City

This week’s book giveaway is the 10th Anniversary Edition of “Galapagos: Islands Born of Fire” by Tui de Roy. Ever since Charles Darwin visited there in 1835, the Galapagos have fascinated us like no other spot on Earth. This richly illustrated book captures the ethereal, haunting quality of the Galapagos and of the birds and animals that make these islands their home.

This updated tenth-anniversary edition of De Roy’s celebrated book offers an unforgettable photographic tour of the Galapagos. Explore with her the incredible diversity of wildlife and habitats that rank these islands among the most fascinating and exotically beautiful places in the world.

“[E]ngaging and inspirational. . . . The author makes one appreciate the fragile beauty of the fiery isles.”–The Press

Have you LIKE(d) Princeton University Press on Facebook? Yes? Then you’re in this Friday’s book giveaway random draw. If not, go to our FACEBOOK page and click on LIKE. Each week you will be entered in our book-of-the-week giveaway.

Galapagos: Islands Born of Fire by Tui de Roy

If you haven’t read it already, be sure to have a look at Martin E. Marty’s op-ed piece, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Feb. 4, 1906 — April 9, 1945” on Living Lutheran’s website. Here’s a sneak peak:

Visitors today can still imagine something of what it must have been like for a captive to squirm or pace in the 10-foot by 7-foot floor space of a dismal cell at a Nazi prison called Tegel.

All the senses can come into play during such imagining. For instance, the odor of the whole third floor in which this cell stood, the prisoner’s pen for a year and a half, was barely endurable.

From that cramped space designed to kill creativity and bury hope, however, there issued letters and papers that became the substance of one of the great testimonial books of the 20th century.

Since there is so little to observe in the shadowed picture of this room, we are left other reminders and, later, his words written there, to fill it in with a human portrait, that of the author.

Read on…