Alex Edmans's "May Contain Lies"

Alex Edmans is Professor of Finance at London Business School. His TED talk "What to Trust in a Post-Truth World" has been viewed two million times; he has also spoken at the World Economic Forum, Davos, and in the UK Parliament. In 2013, he was awarded tenure at the Wharton School, and in 2021, he was named MBA Professor of the Year by Poets&Quants. Edmans writes regularly for the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and Harvard Business Review. His first book, Grow the Pie, was a Financial Times Book of the Year. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.

Edmans applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases―And What We Can Do about It, and reported the following:

Page 99 of May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases – And What We Can Do About It explains how to test a hypothesis. Here, the hypothesis is to test whether frequent traders earn higher returns than investors who buy shares and then leave their portfolio untouched. It says:

You then test the hypothesis. For this, you’d ideally like the trading records of every single trigger-happy investor. That’s impossible, so the second step is to gather a sample. What’s critical is that the sample is representative, not selected – it captures a broad mix of traders rather than pre-screening them on some criterion, such as whether they volunteered to share their record or had an account for five years (both of which would skew the sample to more successful investors). That’s similar to how you’d sample a cake by cutting it vertically so that your slice contains the icing, sponge, filling and base, rather than splitting it horizontally and skimming off only the icing. The extensive compilation of excitable shareholders is known as the test sample – you’re testing whether it performs better.

Step three is equally critical – to find a control sample that doesn’t have the input. The high returns to fidgety investors might be nothing to do with the input (frequent trading) but just because the market went up. So you need to find out how much was earned by buy-and-hold investors who didn’t trade at all. Step four is to calculate the average output across the two samples, which gives you the 11.4% and 17.9%.

You’re tempted to conclude that frequent trading lowers returns, but there’s one final step. Even if frequent trading has no effect on profits, it could still underperform due to luck.

The Page 99 Test works well because this page highlights one of the key messages of the book: that combating misinformation goes beyond just checking the facts. Even if the facts are 100% accurate, they may be misleading if they aren’t representative: the exception that doesn’t prove the rule. In the chapter leading up to page 99, I describe a YouTuber who brags about how much money he made day-trading. But even if he’s telling the truth and not exaggerating his profits, this doesn’t mean that day trading sets you on the road to riches. You have a selected sample: only the day traders that got lucky parade their success. There could be hundreds of other day traders who lost their shirt, but you’ll never hear about them.

Page 99 is part of Part II of the book, which takes the reader through the Ladder of Misinference, the four missteps we make when we interpret information. The first misstep is mistaking a statement for fact, when it may not be accurate: for example, it may be quoted out of context. The second misstep is confusing facts for data, when they may not be representative. This is the misstep addressed by page 99. The third misstep is mixing up data for evidence, when it may not be conclusive: such as a correlation without causation. The fourth misstep is misinterpreting evidence for proof, when it may not be universal: it may not apply in different contexts. The Ladder helps the reader to navigate the minefield of misinformation out there, to think smarter, sharper, and more critically, to make better sense of the world and take better decisions.

Visit Alex Edmans's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld's "The Hollow Parties"

Daniel Schlozman is associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of When Movements Anchor Parties: Electoral Alignments in American History. Sam Rosenfeld is associate professor of political science at Colgate University. He is the author of The Polarizers: Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era.

They applied the "Page 99 Test" to their new book, The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics (exactly a third of the way through the 297 pages of text) begins a capsule biography of Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin, a leading Progressive who in 1904 pushed through the country’s first statewide laws for the direct primary and the direct election of senators. More than other Republican Progressives, and certainly more than Theodore Roosevelt, with whom he was never close and whom he very conspicuously declined to endorse in 1912, La Follette saw party bosses as the servants of capital. To him, the railroad interests, not the politicians they backed, ultimately pulled the strings. Unlike the Socialists in Milwaukee with whom he often tactically cooperated, however, La Follette deemed political reform a worthy project in its own right.

The book traces multiple traditions in party politics—we term them the accommodationist, anti-party, pro-capital, policy-reform, radical, and populist strands—all the way from the Founding to the present. The book stresses how these traditions have combined and recombined over time. La Follette offers a good example. He is broadly a figure from the anti-party tradition. He broke power of the dominant Stalwart faction that had dominated state Republican politics and preached a politics done by the people themselves, imbued with education provided by wise leaders, rather than the party spirit and mass spectacle of nineteenth-century politics. But, like so many figures in our pages, La Follette contained contradictions of his own. He dominated the Republican Party in his state even as he clashed with its leading figures at the national level. For all his anti-machine rhetoric, he had a dedicated organization (including state game wardens with dubious responsibilities) to ease his path. The book’s treatment of La Follette is also emblematic in examining party actors’ thoughts and actions together. This method, in a sense, does a kind of applied intellectual history for figures—George Washington Plunkitt, the Tammany Hall district leader is the book’s paradigmatic example—not usually thought of as fit for highbrow close reading. But the book usually emphasizes such figures as examples of patterns or trends, and skirts clear of biography. In that sense, the longer treatment of La Follette, befitting not just his importance at an inflection point for party politics but the idiosyncratic character of figures in the anti-party strand skeptical of politics done together, offers a mild departure in approach for a text that primarily emphasizes party actors’ contributions as parts of collective projects for power.

Visit Sam Rosenfeld's website and Daniel Schlozman's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Polarizers by Sam Rosenfeld.

The Page 99 Test: When Movements Anchor Parties by Daniel Schlozman.

--Marshal Zeringue

Laikwan Pang's "One and All"

Laikwan Pang is the Choh-Ming Li Professor of Cultural Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, One and All: The Logic of Chinese Sovereignty, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book, One and All, can be seen as a snapshot of one of the biggest challenges of this book: to facilitate some true dialogues between Chinese and European political theories.

More specifically, here I want to explain how and why some contemporary Chinese intellectuals have incorporated both the traditional Chinese Confucian-Legalist ideas and works of Carl Schmitt to support their statist discourses. In other words, I have to explain three sets of political theories/agendas vastly different from each other to make sense of this phenomenon.

The current Chinese government raises state sovereignty as its highest political principle under the premise that it embodies the Chinese people's integrity, dignity, and common good. To give such a mythical status to state sovereignty, the statists have labored to assemble many ideas together. In this section, I want to demonstrate how this sovereigntism selectively picks and chooses elements from the political ideas of ancient China and contemporary Europe to justify its supreme political position.

Here I explain how the current Chinese statist theories ignored both Schmitt’s premise of the state’s neutrality and the challenges the earliest Legalist theorists in the fourth century BCE posed to the current powerful aristocrats. Schmitt upheld the state only because he believed it is neutral enough to protect the people’s best interest, while the ancient Chinese Legalists dared to provoke some of the most powerful parties of the time. In other words, subversive factors of the source materials of this Chinese sovereignty could be employed to challenge this state discourse. But obviously, the more challenging ideas are ignored, and this sovereigntism highlights only the supremacy of that state.

Learn more about One and All at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Susan D. Blum's "Schoolishness"

Susan D. Blum is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of I Love Learning; I Hate School and My Word!, as well as the editor of Ungrading.

Blum applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Schoolishness: Alienated Education and the Quest for Authentic, Joyful Learning, and reported the following:

On page 99 I’m wrapping up a chapter called “Pedagogy and Pedagogizing: From Direct Instruction to Independent Learning,” which is the first chapter of the core section of the book, “Key Elements of Schoolishness, with Some Less-Schoolish Variations.” Each of the ten chapters in this central section of the book takes a familiar dimension of school—in this case the need for teachers and teaching—and challenges it on the basis of principles and evidence. Then each chapter, like this one, provides examples of alternative approaches.

I love this idea of testing a random page and seeing if the book as a whole is represented there. It is reminiscent to me of the notion of a hologram, being able to reconstruct something three-dimensional from wave forms. In fact, as a writer, I should apply this test myself! In a book of this length and complexity, the challenge has always been to maintain the through-line, and I’m shocked to see that it is clear on page 99! Because the whole book is about a contrast between schoolish, alienated, and nonschoolish, authentic, ways of learning. And on this page, my commitment to anthropological reports about learning “in the wild,” outside school, shines through, as I begin to talk about the “chore curriculum,” children learning to walk, learning by doing, learning through trial and error, and all the ways humans learn when they are committed, and when it matters. This contrasts really clearly with the ways schools foster dependence and alienated impressions of learning based on some external force’s determination of what students should learn. This is really the core idea of the book! Who knew it would be laid out on page 99?

I have been puzzling over the ways school doesn’t work, either in terms of learning or wellbeing, for so many students, for nearly twenty years. As an anthropologist, I try to observe how things actually are, not only how official accounts say they should be. But as a former student who thrived in school, I didn’t understand why it didn’t work for so many others. It has taken me writing this book, along with the first two in this trilogy, to feel that I have figured it out, to some extent. I don’t have all the answers, but I have a lot of questions, and I’ve answered some of them here.

Visit Susan D. Blum's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Larry Tye's "The Jazzmen"

Larry Tye is the New York Times bestselling author of Bobby Kennedy and Satchel, as well as Demagogue, Superman, The Father of Spin, Home Lands, and Rising from the Rails, and coauthor, with Kitty Dukakis, of Shock. Previously an award-winning reporter at the Boston Globe and a Nieman fellow at Harvard University, he now runs the Boston-based Health Coverage Fellowship. He lives on Cape Cod.

Tye applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America and reported the following:

Here’s a slightly abridged version of what is on page 99:

With most jazz kingpins, it was difficult to be sure when they were swinging at full throttle. With Bill Basie, the tell was his ten toes.

Those calloused and curled digits, planted squarely under his piano seat, foretold whether a song had the vital elixir, the rhythmic perfection, the sheer it. His bandmates watched for a hopeful nod of his close-cropped head, a flicker of his bushy brows, or perhaps a doubling of his fists. But they knew the true proof lay in any movement of his toes. Would it be enough to lift both feet? Would they thump or just flutter? Some musicians actually suspected he had radar hidden in his shoes...

Now that he was on center stage, the Count’s weren’t the only toes that counted. Everyone listening – dresses and pants, moldy figs and beboppers – had to be bobbing theirs. Then moving to the dance floor. Once they got there, the rest was a gut reaction – stomping, swaying, and swiveling with the Jump King of Swing.

“If you have a Count Basie record playing and your left foot isn’t tapping,” said jazz radio host and scholar Dick Golden, “you better go see your doctor because something must be wrong with your circulation.” Critic Gary Giddins concurred, saying, “Basie knew if he had your foot, your heart and mind would follow.”

That selection gives a flavor of my three-in-one biography, and of why Basie – like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington – warrants his place on the Mount Rushmore of jazz greats. But it misses the bigger point: that this book is mainly about these maestros’ lives off their bandstands, and the hidden history of their writing the soundtrack for the civil rights revolution.

Duke, Satchmo, and the Count set the table for racial insurrection by opening white America’s ears and souls to the grace of their music and their personalities, demonstrating the virtues of Black artistry and Black humanity. They toppled color barriers on radio and TV; in jukeboxes, films, newspapers, and newsmagazines; and in the White House, concert halls, and living rooms from the Midwest and both coasts to the Heart of Dixie. But they did it carefully, knowing that to do otherwise in their Jim Crow era would have been suicidal. The sound of their evolving jazz dialect formed a cultural fulcrum that no outraged protestor or government-issued desegregation order could begin to achieve.

Visit Larry Tye's website.

The Page 99 Test: Demagogue.

My Book, The Movie: Demagogue.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Soluri's "Creatures of Fashion"

John Soluri is associate professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Creatures of Fashion: Animals, Global Markets, and the Transformation of Patagonia and reported the following:

Given the crowd with whom Ford Madox Ford reputedly ran, I suspect that neither he nor most run of the mill readers would be deeply moved by reading page 99 of Creatures of Fashion. Given that I am an academic historian not Hemingway, I felt compelled to hook readers on page 1; so, dear (potential) readers, please begin my book at the beginning!

That said, page 99 invokes some of the book’s major themes:

The people who worked on estancias were overwhelmingly men, but men did not form a majority of the workforce. Horses and dogs usually outnumbered people and they played critical roles in ensuring the reproduction of sheep. Men formed close bonds with dogs and horses, often bestowing them an individuality, including names, denied to sheep.

These sentences describing the “multispecies” workforce typical of sheep ranches in early twentieth-century Patagonia, address the quotidian entanglements of the lives of people and animals. These kinds of entanglements are examined throughout Creatures of Fashion whose narrative arc traces the consequential transformations of diverse and divided people due to the commodification of wild and domesticated animals whose furs, fibers, and feathers became commodities. The trade in animal furs and fibers helped to bankroll the settler colonial projects of central governments in Argentina and Chile, while integrating Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego into sprawling networks of investors, workers, animals, and goods.

Page 99 conveys a glimpse of the story more or less at its midpoint, when the wool industry’s importance supplanted that of nineteenth-century trades in furs and feathers—principally from fur seals, guanacos (a camelid related to llamas) and rheas. Sheep ranching in Patagonia, as in many other parts of the world, involved the violent removal of Indigenous foragers and hunters who maintained different kinds of relationships with animals than those that formed between settlers and animals. One critical difference that I alluded to on page 99 is the taken-for-granted need to control the reproduction of animals in order for them to become—and remain—livestock.

Two important aspects of Creatures of Fashion that are absent from page 99 include the role of fashion markets in driving demand for the furs and fibers from animals in Patagonia, and the concomitant rise of wildlife conservation and tourism in Patagonia during the second half of the twentieth century. Calling attention to the transboundary forces that transformed Patagonia is one of the book’s main innovations that is best appreciated by taking a deeper dive.

Learn more about Creatures of Fashion at the University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Yolanda Ariadne Collins's "Forests of Refuge"

Yolanda Ariadne Collins is Lecturer in the School of International Relations at University of St Andrews. She studies the intersection between climate change governance, environmental policy, and international development. Her work examines processes of racialization and histories of colonialism and the ways in which they challenge the successful enactment of forest governance policies in the Global South.

Collins applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Forests of Refuge: Decolonizing Environmental Governance in the Amazonian Guiana Shield (2024) and reported the following:

From page 99:

The firm is widely used in climate change and environmental matters to provide economic analyses and to attribute financial values to environmental services. This value estimation acted as the foundation of Guyana’s REDD+ effort, which builds on McKinsey’s estimates to estimate Guyana’s forests’ value to the world at US$40 billion per year.

The Guyana Government explained: Our work suggests that baseline assumptions should be driven by analysis that assumes rational behaviour by countries seeking to maximize economic opportunities for their citizens (an “economically rational” rate of deforestation). Such baselines can be developed using economic models of expected profits from activities that motivate deforestation (vs. in-country benefits of maintaining the standing forest), and timing and costs required to harvest and convert lands to alternative uses.

The estimated value of those in-country benefits was estimated at a more conservative US$580 million per year. The economically rational path that Guyana should take was depicted by a wide array of statistical graphs based on economic valuations attached to activities that have traditionally taken place in the country, or that are likely to take place to generate income. For example, the estimation of the carbon abatement costs for predicted avoided deforestation in Guyana amounted to an annual payment of US$430 million to Guyana for the services of its forests. It is worth pointing out that these values are estimates based not on historical trends, but on possible future pressure on the forests. Development here is used to justify the need for these policy shifts, and for REDD+, since a “rational” development path is predicted as necessitating the destruction of forests. Therefore, the pursuance of REDD+ through the LCDS draws on these economic rationalities rooted in neoliberal logic and points out that a rational development path would result in the destruction of the forests, making room for REDD+ to alter that equation. Thus far, only forests conserved and managed by the state have been allocated for REDD+ activities. Indigenous groups who have some tenure over the forests within which they reside (in the case of Guyana but not in Suriname) should eventually have the option of opting into the REDD+ mechanism and being remunerated for the services of their forests.

This page refers to several ideas that form the core of my book, although this core can only be accessed if the reader had already been exposed to the acronyms used. Page 99 highlights the economically rational method of valuing forests that dominates the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) initiative. It points to some of the key international and national actors and ideas behind REDD+. It also highlights (albeit insufficiently compared to the rest of the book) the tension between the state claim on land and that of indigenous people. This page, naturally, also misses a lot. It misses the book’s connection of colonialism to the evolution across time of these ‘rational’ ways of relating to nature in the Amazonian Guiana Shield.

In the rest of the book, I explore the contestation that emerges when REDD+ encounters the colonial histories of forest use at the local and regional levels. I move past questions of whether market-based, international environmental policies should be seen as successes or as failures, and towards an understanding of the associated effects of their pursuit. In essence, the book presents a regional, two-country case study of environmental governance in the largely neglected Guiana Shield eco-region that demonstrates how REDD+ builds upon existing, colonially-rooted land claims. Forests of Refuge, thus, offers a unique exploration of REDD+ through the lens of postcolonial and decolonial thinking, highlighting interrelationships between ethics of extraction, state formation, race, and conservation in the transition from formal colonialism to post-colonial status.

Visit Yolanda Ariadne Collins's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Miles M. Evers and Eric Grynaviski's "The Price of Empire"

Miles M. Evers is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Connecticut. Eric Grynaviski is an associate professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University.

They applied the "Page 99 Test" to their new book, The Price of Empire: American Entrepreneurs and the Origins of America's First Pacific Empire and reported the following:

Opening The Price of Empire to page 99 gives the reader an excellent summary of the book. We were surprised. Our central argument is that American entrepreneurs were responsible for early American imperialism in the Pacific. This page is at a turning point in the book and captures this argument well.

Page 99 briefly summarizes the previous chapters about how the search for guano and copra led to imperial projects. The page then compares these to American imperialism in Hawaii. It begins by discussing the conventional wisdom of U.S. annexation of Hawaii, which is often credited to American strategic and trade interests. We describe this position (which we disagree with): “Pearl Harbor, since the 1940s, has been central to the U.S. Navy’s strategies for defending the American west coast. It is also economically important as a harbor and, of course, later became a destination for American tourists. Theories that emphasize strategic or trade interests should therefore be well-placed to discuss Hawaii.”

It then turns to a summary of our argument about Hawaii: “Rising sugar prices led Americans to invest in the Hawaiian Islands. These entrepreneurs entered the economic and political life of the islands with vim and vigor, reshaping the domestic political environment of Hawaii to suit their interests. When threats arose – primarily tariffs and falling prices – they turned from entrepreneurs into lobbyists, using their positional advantages to secure favorable trade terms that initiated a pattern of imperialism in Hawaii decades before annexation.”

There are two aspects of the argument not well represented. The first is the idea of “positional advantages.” A significant part of the book explains why the U.S. government turned to entrepreneurs in crafting policies concerning overseas expansion, where we argue that their position in-between societies created special opportunities for political lobbying. The second is the long legacy of entrepreneurs with respect to indigenous rights. The introduction and conclusion highlight the long legs of imperialism and why they continue to persist today.

In sum, we give ourselves a passing grade on the Page 99 Test. Most of the argument is present, along with a summary of the historical chapters of the book, but the discussion about why it matters for contemporary readers – the nexus between economics and security, and its racist legacy – is missing.

Visit Miles M. Evers's website and Eric Grynaviski's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Grant Bollmer and Katherine Guinness's "The Influencer Factory"

Grant Bollmer is Senior Lecturer in Digital Media, and Katherine Guinness is Lecturer in Art History, at the University of Queensland.

They applied the "Page 99 Test" to their new book, The Influencer Factory: A Marxist Theory of Corporate Personhood on YouTube and reported the following:

On page 99 of The Influencer Factory we see a screenshot from MrBeast’s popular video “$456,000 Squid Game in Real Life!” We describe how this video cost more, minute-to-minute, than the actual Netflix show it recreates. MrBeast’s videos, and their ever-increasing scale and cost, we argue, “almost seem to enact a contemporary form of potlatch,” a competitive system of giving and waste described by the Anthropologist Marcel Mauss. Potlatch, for Mauss, was a kind of mutual squandering of resources between equals. What differentiates MrBeast’s spectacular giving is that he mostly seems to be competing with himself. MrBeast’s stunts grow larger and larger while the cash squandered must perpetually increase—pressure that comes from his need to attract and maintain his massive global audience.

Page 99 gives the reader a good sense of The Influencer Factory as a whole. The theme of waste and excess is central to many of our arguments about the “elite” influencers we discuss in the book—not only MrBeast, who is mentioned throughout, but people like Jeffree Star and Emma Chamberlain, both of whom regularly engage in feats of wasteful spending and other excessive stunts. This page also provides a good sense of the approach we take in our book. We look closely at the content of specific videos made by these influencers, branching out into an analysis of their backgrounds, their production, their broader historical and conceptual contexts. In doing so, The Influencer Factory reframes how we understand YouTube, capital, and the class politics of influencer culture. The specific image on page 99 is captioned “I could remake this.” This is also a theme that follows many of the other image captions in the book, many of which also begin “I could,” examining some of the aspirational forms of wastage that can be seen in many influencer videos. Waste gets attention, and foregrounding waste reveals a different way of understanding luxury and excess, in which the literal production of trash can be understood as a performance of class mobility.

MrBeast’s excessive spending, we argue elsewhere in The Influencer Factory, points towards a context in which individual human beings and vertically integrated conglomerations converge. Each MrBeast video is also an advertisement for some other industry into which MrBeast has some ownership stake—chocolate bars, apps, a burger chain. The individual person that is MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, is indistinguishable from the corporate enterprise that is MrBeast. We term this moment the Corpocene, a moment in which individual body and corporate body converge, in which individuals like MrBeast become images of “success” to be emulated by countless others who are seeking to make it as an influencer or content creator. Influencer culture, we ultimately conclude, represents a point in time in which one desires to become capital personified—a kind of individual represented by MrBeast—and how class mobility on YouTube should be understood as motivated by a desire to literally become capital, to transform oneself into a vertically integrated corporation.

Visit Grant Bollmer's website and Katherine Guinness's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joshua O. Reno's "Home Signs"

Joshua O. Reno is professor and graduate director of anthropology at Binghamton University. He is the author of several books, including Military Waste: The Unexpected Consequences of Permanent War Readiness and, with Britt Halvorson, Imagining the Heartland: White Supremacy and the American Midwest.

Reno applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Home Signs: An Ethnography of Life beyond and beside Language and reported the following:

My latest book is about the subtle ways that we all communicate with those closest to us using facial expressions, gestures, bodily movement and contact, that is, without words. The passage that concerns me here is from the third chapter, which is the only one in the book that appeared previously, twelve years ago in fact, as a standalone article.

Like that article and like all the other chapters of this book, page 99 focuses a lot on my non-verbal son, Charlie. Charlie was diagnosed on the autism spectrum years ago and non-verbal communication is all that he has, so he offers a useful case study of how much we can do without language. Nearly one hundred pages in, and I am explaining how attempts to get him to use language have failed over the years (twelve years ago and in the present day). I describe one method in particular, known as PECS, which is a method specifically designed by speech and language therapists to get people like him to learn to exchange words (in the form of symbols) for things they want. But from another point of view this is not just an example about how incapable Charlie is of using words. Rather, it shows how well he can assert and express himself:

Sometimes Charlie would push the PECS folder away, a home sign for “I don’t want to do this now.” Sometimes he would decide not to eat at all when he would see it near his food, a sign that he was defying the exercise even if it meant starving himself for that moment. But Charlie’s most common way of defying the exercise, then and now, is to look away while grabbing symbols or tapping icons on a screen. If he did this over and over again, even if I moved the symbols around, eventually he’d get food out of it.... From our perspective, he was too good even then at home signing, at expressing his intentions and modifying interactions without symbols, to the extent that he could work around them if need be.

In that sense, at least, on page 99 readers will encounter something that they have witnessed already for several chapters -- a purportedly “disabled” communicator capably controlling situations and making his intentions known to those around him. Charlie may not do what his teachers and parents want, may refuse to communicate in socially prescribed ways, but in so doing he shows us all that he is neither hapless nor helpless simply because he lives now, and likely will live for his whole life, beyond and beside language.

Learn more about Home Signs at the University of Chicago Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Waste Away.

The Page 99 Test: Military Waste.

--Marshal Zeringue