"Mental Calisthenics and Self-Reflexive Fiction" is chapter 27 of the The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, edited by Lisa Zunshine and published by Oxford University Press.

The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies considers, via a variety of methodologies and combinations of interdisciplinary approaches, how the architecture that enables human cognitive processing interacts with cultural and historical contexts. Organized into five parts (Narrative, History, Imagination; Emotions and Empathy; The New Unconscious; Empirical and Qualitative Studies of Literature; and Cognitive Theory and Literary Experience), the volume uses case studies from a wide range of historical periods (from the fourth century BCE to the twenty-first century) and national literary traditions (including South Asian, postcolonial anglophone and francophone, Chinese, Japanese, English, Iranian, Russian, Italian, French, German, and Spanish).

"Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War" is chapter 25 of the book The Contemporary Conflict Resolution Reader, edited by Hugh Miall, Tom Woodhouse, Oliver Ramsbotham, and Christopher Mitchell and published by Polity.

Armed conflict may appear to be in long term decline, but the intractability and destructiveness of contemporary conflicts make conflict resolution as urgent and necessary as ever. The Contemporary Conflict Resolution Reader is the first comprehensive survey of the field as it has evolved over the last fifty years, bringing together the seminal writings of its founders with the cutting-edge interventions of today’s leading exponents and practitioners.

"The Distribution of Power: Hierarchy and its Discontents" is chapter 18 of the book The Cambridge World History (Volume 3), edited by Norman Yoffee and published by the Cambridge University Press.

From the fourth millennium BCE to the early second millennium CE the world became a world of cities. This volume of The Cambridge World History explores this critical transformation, from the appearance of the earliest cities in Mesopotamia and Egypt to the rise of cities in Asia and the Mediterranean world, Africa, and the Americas.

Transatlantic Food and Agricultural Trade Policy traces the past fifty years of transatlantic trade relations in the area of food and agricultural policy, from early skirmishes over chicken exports to ongoing conflicts over biotech foods and hormone use in animal rearing. The current talks on a free-trade area between the US and the EU (TTIP) bring all these differences to the negotiating table. The book points to possible solutions to these decades-old problems.

"Greek Cities in the First Millenium BCE" is chapter 16 of the book The Cambridge World History (Volume 3), edited by Norman Yoffee and published by the Cambridge University Press.

From the fourth millennium BCE to the early second millennium CE the world became a world of cities. This volume of The Cambridge World History explores this critical transformation, from the appearance of the earliest cities in Mesopotamia and Egypt to the rise of cities in Asia and the Mediterranean world, Africa, and the Americas. Through case studies and comparative accounts of key cities across the world, leading scholars chart the ways in which these cities grew as nodal points of pilgrimages and ceremonies, exchange, storage and redistribution, and centres for defence and warfare. They show how in these cities, along with their associated and restructured countrysides, new rituals and ceremonies connected leaders with citizens and the gods, new identities as citizens were created, and new forms of power and sovereignty emerged. They also examine how this unprecedented concentration of people led to disease, violence, slavery and subjugations of unprecedented kinds and scales.

Most people in the world today think democracy and gender equality are good, and that violence and wealth inequality are bad. But most people who lived during the 10,000 years before the nineteenth century thought just the opposite. Drawing on archaeology, anthropology, biology, and history, Ian Morris, author of the best-selling Why the West Rules--for Now, explains why. The result is a compelling new argument about the evolution of human values, one that has far-reaching implications for how we understand the past--and for what might happen next.

Fundamental long-term changes in values, Morris argues, are driven by the most basic force of all: energy. Humans have found three main ways to get the energy they need--from foraging, farming, and fossil fuels. Each energy source sets strict limits on what kinds of societies can succeed, and each kind of society rewards specific values. In tiny forager bands, people who value equality but are ready to settle problems violently do better than those who aren't; in large farming societies, people who value hierarchy and are less willing to use violence do best; and in huge fossil-fuel societies, the pendulum has swung back toward equality but even further away from violence.

But if our fossil-fuel world favors democratic, open societies, the ongoing revolution in energy capture means that our most cherished values are very likely to turn out--at some point fairly soon--not to be useful any more.

Originating as the Tanner Lectures delivered at Princeton University, the book includes challenging responses by novelist Margaret Atwood, philosopher Christine Korsgaard, classicist Richard Seaford, and historian of China Jonathan Spence.

What explains short-term fluctuations of stock prices? This paper exploits a natural experiment from the 18^th century in which information flows were regularly interrupted for exogenous reasons. English shares were traded on the Amsterdam exchange and news came in on sailboats that were often delayed because of adverse weather conditions. The paper documents that prices responded strongly to boat arrivals, but there was considerable volatility in the absence of news. The evidence suggests that this was largely the result of the revelation of (long-lived) private information and the (transitory) impact of uninformed liquidity trades on intermediaries' risk premia.