A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice"In Daub’s hands the founding concepts of Silicon Valley don’t make money; they fall apart." --The New York Times Book ReviewFrom FSGO x Logic: a Stanford professor's spirited dismantling of Silicon Valley's intellectual originsAdrian Daub’s What Tech Calls Thinking is a lively dismantling of the ideas that form the intellectual bedrock ...

For readers of Jason Stanley and Timothy Snyder comes an urgent and rigorous comparison of our current political climate to that of Germany's during Hitler’s first year in power.Since a new wave of far right-wing sentiment entered American political life a decade ago, political scientists and pundits have chided people for what they see as overly facile comparisons between today’s Republican leadership and Nazism. Are these comparisons just scare-mongering? Or coul...

Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, and Siegfried. Parsifal. Tristan und Isolde. Both revered and reviled, Richard Wagner conceived some of the nineteenth century's most influential operas—and created some of the most indelible characters ever to grace the stage. But over the course of his polarizing career, Wagner also composed volumes of essays and pamphlets, some on topics seemingly quite distant from the opera house. His influential concept of G...

Fear of cancel culture has gripped the world, and it turns out to be an old fear in a new get-up.In this incisive new work, Adrian Daub analyzes the global spread of cancel culture discourse as a moral panic, showing that, though its object is fuzzy, talk of cancel culture in global media has become a preoccupation of an embattled liberalism. There are plenty of conservative voices who gin up worries about cancel culture to advance their agendas. But more remarkabl...

Adrian Daub's The Dynastic Imagination offers an unexpected account of modern German intellectual history through frameworks of family and kinship. Modernity aimed to brush off dynastic, hierarchical authority and to make society anew through the mechanisms of marriage, siblinghood, and love. It was, in other words, centered on the nuclear family. But as Daub shows, the dynastic imagination persisted, in time emerging as a critical stance by which the nuclear family's conservatism...

"What a strange invention marriage is!" wrote Kierkegaard. "Is it the expression of that inexplicable erotic sentiment, that concordant elective affinity of souls, or is it a duty or a partnership . . . or is it a little of all that?"Like Kierkegaard a few decades later, many of Germany's most influential thinkers at the turn of the eighteenth century wondered about the nature of marriage but rejected the easy answers provided by biology and theology. In Uncivil Unions, Ad...

In the course of the nineteenth century, four-hand piano playing emerged across Europe as a popular pastime of the well-heeled classes and of those looking to join them. Nary a canonic work of classical music that was not set for piano duo, nary a house that could afford not to invest in them. Duets echoed from the student bedsit to Buckingham Palace, resounded in schools and in hundreds of thousands of bourgeois parlors. Like no other musical phenomenon, it could cross national, social, a...

Starting with 1964's Goldfinger, every James Bond film has followed the same ritual, and so has its audience: after an exciting action sequence the screen goes black and the viewer spends three long minutes absorbing abstract opening credits and a song that sounds like it wants to return to 1964. In The James Bond Songs authors Adrian Daub and Charles Kronengold use the genre to trace not only a changing cultural landscape, but also evolving conceptions of what a pop song...

Starting with 1964's Goldfinger, every James Bond film has followed the same ritual, and so has its audience: after an exciting action sequence the screen goes black and the viewer spends three long minutes absorbing abstract opening credits and a song that sounds like it wants to return to 1964. In The James Bond Songs authors Adrian Daub and Charles Kronengold use the genre to trace not only a changing cultural landscape, but also evolving conceptions of what a pop song...

Over the course of the 19th century, ballads proliferated in German-speaking Europe in a truly remarkable range of contexts. Audiences were of course likely encounter balladry in the volumes of Goethe and Schiller, in various anthologies or illustrated editions. But they were just as likely to come across objects billed as ballads in recitation evenings by popular actors, in song-settings by Schubert and Loewe, in piano pieces by Chopin, in the opera house and the concert hall, in mass-pro...

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice"In Daub’s hands the founding concepts of Silicon Valley don’t make money; they fall apart." --The New York Times Book ReviewFrom FSGO x Logic: a Stanford professor's spirited dismantling of Silicon Valley's intellectual originsAdrian Daub’s What Tech Calls Thinking is a lively dismantling of the ideas that form the intellectual bedrock ...

In this incisive new work, Adrian Daub analyzes the global spread of cancel culture discourse as a moral panic, showing that, though its object is fuzzy, talk of cancel culture in global media has become a preoccupation of an embattled liberalism. There are plenty of conservative voices who gin up worries about cancel culture to advance their agendas. But more remarkable perhaps is that it is centrist, even left-leaning, media that have taken up the rallying cry and really defined the outl...