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You’re probably stuck at home. Here’s what to read next.
Last year, in a pungent essay for Harper’s, Christian Lorentzen railed against the media’s obsession for bookish "Best Of" lists, which have in recent years “achieved a sort of mania": "What is the utility — to anyone — of an item like ‘Hot Books for Cold Days’?" He has a point. At their worst, such lists are little better than advertising puffery.
This list is better — more like a conversation among friends than a boosterish emanation of the publishing industry. As every scholar knows, it can become all too easy to cease learning about ideas outside of one’s own field. If you’re craving recommendations for recent reading across disciplines, these essays — for which we’ve asked 11 scholars to discuss "the best scholarly book" of the last decade — are for you.
Is this list definitive? Of course not. But it is rich, surprising, and idiosyncratic. You're probably stuck at home. Here's what to read next.
An Object Lesson in Engaging With One’s Opponents
By Amia Srinivasan
It’s been a bad decade for politics, but a great decade for political theory. Three standouts for me were Shatema Threadcraft’s Intimate Justice, Adom Getachew’s Worldmaking After Empire, and Kathi Weeks’s The Problem With Work. But the scholarly book that affected me most powerfully this past decade was Juno Mac and Molly Smith’s Revolting Prostitutes (Verso, 2018). It is a thrilling and formidable intervention into contemporary discussions of sex work, and settles the debate in favor of full and immediate global decriminalization. It does so without insisting that there is nothing troubling about sex work: about the psychosexual forces that lead men to buy it, or the economic forces that compel women to sell it.
To say that "sex work is work" is not to say, Mac and Smith explain, that it is thereby valuable or unproblematic, but simply that it is something that is overwhelmingly done out of material necessity. Mac and Smith show empirically that the women who need to sell sex to survive are rarely made better off through legal restrictions on the selling or purchase of sex. What does make such women better off is the strengthening of their...