"The term 'home economics' may conjure traumatic memories of lopsided hand-sewn pillows or sunken cakes. But obscured by common conception is the story of the revolutionary science of better living. The field exploded opportunities for women in the twentieth century by reducing domestic work and providing jobs as professors, engineers, chemists, and businesspeople that were otherwise foreclosed. In [this book], Danielle Dreilinger traces the field's...

A dazzlingly original account of the life and thought of Adam Smith, the greatest economist of all time Adam Smith (1723-1790) is now widely regarded as the greatest economist of all time. But what he really thought, and the implications of his ideas, remain fiercely contested. Was he an eloquent advocate of capitalism and individual freedom? A prime mover of "market fundamentalism"? An apologist for human selfishness? Or something else entirely? In...

"In the spring of 1934, Virginia Woolf sketched an affectionate three-page "biographical fantasy" of her great friend, John Maynard Keynes, attempting to encompass no less than 25 themes, which she jotted down at its opening: "Politics. Art. Dancing. Letters. Economics. Youth. The Future. Glands. Genealogies. Atlantis. Mortality. Religion. Cambridge. Eton. The Drama. Society. Truth. Pigs. Sussex. The History of England. America. Optimism. Stammer....

"Conventional economic theory holds that when individual users share a common resource, such as fishing waters, pastures, the atmosphere, or the office refrigerator, each will act independently in his or her own self-interest, using the resource to depletion or ruin. The two options for avoiding are to privatize the resource or impose government regulations, famously argued by Garrett Hardin in his 1968 essay, "The Tragedy of the Commons." Elinor...