Matthew Smith

In 1973, San Francisco allergist Ben Feingold created an uproar by claiming that synthetic food additives triggered hyperactivity, then the most commonly diagnosed childhood disorder in the United States. He contended that the epidemic should not be treated with drugs such as Ritalin but, instead, with a food additive-free diet. Parents and the media considered his treatment, the Feingold diet, a compelling alternative. Physicians, however, were skeptical and designed dozens of trials to challenge the idea. The resulting medical opinion was that the diet did not work and it was rejected. Matthew Smith asserts that those scientific conclusions were, in fact, flawed. An Alternative History of Hyperactivity explores the origins of the Feingold diet, revealing why it became so popular, and the ways in which physicians, parents, and the public made decisions about whether it was a valid treatment for hyperactivity. Arguing that the fate of Feingold's therapy depended more on cultural, economic, and political factors than on the scientific protocols designed to test it, Smith suggests the lessons learned can help resolve medical controversies more effectively.

This study provides a comprehensive account and reconsideration of the contribution to political economy of Thomas Tooke (1774-1858). It clarifies Tooke’s monetary thought and its legacy to modern economics. The study shows Tooke possessed a rich and extensive political economy, covering many aspects of economic activity relevant to key policy issues. Tooke’s political economy is shown to be a unified and coherent body of intellectual thought in the classical tradition which, like most of his nineteenth-century contemporaries, was much influenced by Adam Smith’s economics. More particularly, Tooke’s monetary thought, especially his novel banking school theory, is shown to be theoretically coherent from the standpoint of nineteenth-century classical economics. It is also shown that besides contributing toward a better understanding of the behaviour of monetary systems in general, key elements of Tooke’s banking school theory make an important contribution to explaining distribution, growth and price inflation in modern economics.

"...as a philosophical objection to theism, the problem of evil fails to be cogent or compelling. The simple reason for this is that no matter how hard the objection is pressed, there remains no compelling reason to insist that God lacks a good reason for allowing evil... We thus conclude that the problem of evil is not a viable objection to theism. Our broader conclusion is that atheology has yet to produce a reasonably decent objection against belief in the existence of God." - from the text"Worlds with a revelation of the divine attributes of love and mercy-as well as justice-to rational creatures are simply superior to worlds with no such revelation. These worlds of course which do not include Christ becoming incarnate or Christ's making satisfaction on the cross, thus the state of affairs Christ's being incarnate and Christ's being crucified fail to obtain, and consequently the propositions God is with us, and Christ was crucified are false...such worlds are far inferior to the actual world, thus illustrating very probably what God's reason was for making actual a world which would contain evil."- from an appendix

Marilyn Monroe's death in August 1962, apparently a suicide, shocked the world. With fame, powerful friends and lovers, and the world at her feet, why would she have killed herself? This title argues strongly for a new version of events, based on thousands of documents, some never published before.