This project is focused on the relationship among ideas, social practices, and ways of talking about both. This will be, first, the foundation for a methodological article. In addition, in a new book project this method intends to put into practice an exploration of five books, by five very different women, that all a) had roots in the journalistic world of mid-twentieth-century New York City, b) appeared between 1961 and 1963 (i.e. just before the women’s liberation movement really got off the ground), and c) effectively changed the way we think about the world. The books are Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963). The project explores the connection between their radical critiques of different aspects of modern life—suburbia, advertising, bureaucratization, the advances of technology, the sexual mores of the nuclear family, and more—and their accounts of their own daily lives and of the lived experiences and, indeed, daily lives of others, from mothers pushing strollers down the sidewalk to bureaucrats stuck in offices. It is precisely their collective attention to practices, and the way those practices shaped emotional, intellectual, and bodily life alike, that made their force so great that these early sixties books are not only still widely read but seem, collectively, to have captured what will be the defining problems of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century life. The book is intended as a plea to those looking to upset the disastrous trajectory of our current political moment that re-connecting ideas and policy recommendations with people’s lived experiences, and indeed our most banal, everyday habitual behavior, is a political as well as intellectual imperative.