Women and the Jet Age: A Global History of Aviation and Flight Attendants

By Phil Tiemeyer, AM’01; Cornell University Press, 2025

Histories of the jet age have tended to focus on the United States and Western Europe, writes Phil Tiemeyer, but the rise of commercial aviation during the Cold War decades was a global phenomenon. Tiemeyer explores the impacts of this new industry in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly in the Soviet Union and the Global South. Taking Yugoslavia and Jamaica as case studies, he argues that countries used commercial aviation to assert themselves on the international stage as cosmopolitan and modern. The women who served as flight attendants, in particular, had a major role to play in determining how their home country was perceived abroad. Tiemeyer analyzes the complex position they navigated as informal ambassadors of their countries.

Moonrising

By Claire Barner, AB’08, MAT’09; Diversion Books, 2025

Billie Eilish has announced her farewell tour, self-driving cars buzz around Chicago, climate refugees shelter in Hyde Park, and the United Arab Emirates just invested $1 billion in a lunar colony. In this near-future sci-fi debut novel, Claire Barner introduces agronomist Alex Cole, who is developing controversial “mutagenetic” food. With funding for her lab drying up, Alex moves to the moon to engineer a sustainable food source for a lunar hotel. She comes to love life on the moon and falls for the hotel owner, Mansoor. But as tensions rise due to political fights on Earth and ecoterrorist threats to the colony, her values are put to the test.

Magic’s Translations: Reality Politics in Colonial Indonesia

By Margaret J. Wiener, PhD’90; Duke University Press, 2025

Far from being a universal concept, magic, argues anthropologist Margaret J. Wiener, was an idea that European colonizers brought around the world. It became a useful tool to draw lines between Europeans and colonial subjects, contrasting “real” European ideology with magical thinking. Wiener focuses on magic’s role in the Dutch East Indies—present-day Indonesia—where, she says, the concept was imported by Dutch colonizers. Wiener explores how magic changes as it is carried through space and time: What is absorbed under its umbrella and what, in contrast, comes to be defined as real?

Trade in War: Economic Cooperation across Enemy Lines

Mariya Grinberg, AM’13, PhD’19; Cornell University Press, 2025

People commonly assume that economic interdependence between countries will deter war. Historically, however, this has not been the case. In fact, states at war often continue trading with one another. Mariya Grinberg studies this phenomenon in wars throughout the 20th century, exploring how governments balance the short-term demands of conflict with the long-term need to ensure economic stability. She finds that states at war have set trade policies on a product-by-product basis in response to the projected duration of the conflict, continuing trade in goods they do not believe will give military benefit to the other side and pausing trade in goods that could contribute to the war effort.

Psychedelics in Palliative Care

Edited by Marcia Glass, AB’98; Oxford University Press, 2025

Psychedelics have shown promise in the treatment of addiction and chronic and terminal illnesses. Editor Marcia Glass, a professor of medicine at Tulane University, brings together diverse perspectives from physicians, therapists, researchers, spiritual guides, and entrepreneurs. In each chapter the contributors break down the origins, political and cultural context, legal status, and bodily effects of a major psychedelic—including psilocybin, LSD, ketamine, and ayahuasca. The book offers insight into the substances’ potential use in new avenues of treatment in palliative care.