Mark D. White

Well.

I'm growing less and less comfortable with the idea of active self-promotion, especially when I seem to have less and less to promote. I'm tempted to abandon this experiment with timely "hey, look what I done did now" updates. Maybe I should make them shorter and more frequent when things come up to announce (akin to a Tumblr but by Jove with vowels placed where they are duly needed), or maybe I should just close this blog and keep the rest of the site as a resource for finding my work (a.k.a. passive self-promotion). Or maybe I'll use this space for album and movie reviews, interesting links and articles, or (egad) ruminations on life. (This sunny attitude is part and parcel of my ongoing reconsideration of where my life and career are going… move along, nothing to see here.)

Anyway.

If you caught my subtle hints in my August post, you'll have guessed that the book shown to your right (my left) is the project I wrapped in July: The Virtues of Captain America: Modern-Day Lessons on Character from a World War II Superhero, which comes out from Wiley-Blackwell in March 2014, ahead of the Captain America movie sequel the following month. You can read more about it at The Comics Professor, and the smaller picture to your left (my right) will take you to Amazon where they will be more than happy to let you pre-order it.

Meanwhile, along with the usual fits and frustratations associated with chairing an academic department in CUNY (even one a quarter the size of the one I chaired previously), work continues apace on The Illusion of Well-Being (sole-authored) and Economics and the Virtues (co-edited with Jennifer Baker), as well as a new project I signed on for since we last spoke: a two-volume edited set from Praeger titled The Insanity Defense:
Multidisciplinary Views on Its History, Trends, and Controversies, for which I already have several top people in the field(s) recruited. (Friends have joked that if I don't finish it, I have a ready-made excuse!)

In terms of print and electronic work, I can offer the following:

• My "Speaker's Corner" piece for Review of Social Economy, "Can We—or Should We—Measure Well-Being?", is now available online (with open access as of this writing); it serves as a preview of the argument I'm making at greater length and in a more reader-friendly fashion in The Illusion of Well-Being.
• I had one more post at Economics and Ethics discussing libertarian paternalism and "nudges" (August 14).
• Finally, I had three new posts at Psychology Today since I last updated here: "Why Men Find It So Hard to Understand What Women Want" (August 25), "Of Course Men Feel Threatened by Successful Girlfriends" (August 30), and "How Deep Is Your Love? Another Way to Look at Commitment" (September 29).

Until next time, my friends…