Popular Science

Starr brilliantly illuminates the dominant economic, social, and cultural forces in California in these pivotal years. In a powerful blend of telling events, colorful personalities, and insightful analyses, Starr examines such issues as the overnight creation of the postwar California suburb, the rise of Los Angeles as Super City, the reluctant emergence of San Diego as one of the largest cities in the nation, and the decline of political centrism.

In 2005, Brad Balukjian left his position as a magazine fact-checker to pursue a dream job: partner with his childhood hero, The Iron Sheik (whose real name was Khosrow Vaziri), to write his biography. Things quickly went south, culminating in the Sheik threatening Balukjian’s life. Now seventeen years later, Balukjian returns to the road in search of not only a reunion with the Sheik, but something much bigger: truth in a world built on illusion.

In Eating the Dinosaur, Klosterman is more entertaining and incisive than ever. Whether he's dissecting the boredom of voyeurism, the reason why music fan's inevitably hate their favorite band's latest album, or why we love watching can't-miss superstars fail spectacularly, Klosterman remains obsessed with the relationship between expectation, reality, and living history. It's amateur anthropology for the present tense, and sometimes it's incredibly funny.

Upon becoming a new mother, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal was called to Mexico to reconnect with her ancestors and recover her grandmother’s story, only to return to the sudden loss of her marriage, home, and reality. In Magical/Realism, Villarreal crosses into the erasure of memory and self, fragmented by migration, borders, and colonial and intimate violence, reconstructing her story with pieces of American pop culture, and the music, video games, and fantasy that have helped her make sense of it all.

To a generation in revolt against authority, "Tune in, turn on, drop out" was a mantra, and its popularizer, Dr. Timothy Leary, a guru. A charismatic and brilliant psychologist, Leary became intrigued, and then obsessed, by the effects of psychedelic drugs in the 1960s while teaching at Harvard. What began as research into human consciousness turned into a mission to alter consciousness itself. Timothy Leary is the first major biography of one of the most controversial figures in postwar America.

The primal image of the black-caped vampire Dracula has become an indelible fixture of the modern imagination. It's recognition factor rivals, in its own perverse way, the familiarity of Santa Claus. In this critically acclaimed excursion through the life of a cultural icon, David Skal maps out the archetypal vampire's relentless trajectory from Victorian literary oddity to movie idol to cultural commodity, digging through the populist veneer to reveal what the prince of darkness says about us all.

This audiobook is Nick Carter's autobiography and self-help hybrid, in which he chronicles his struggles with a dysfunctional family and the unimaginable rigors of becoming an internationally successful pop-star at the age of 12. From his battle with addiction to serious health complications and the pain of his younger sister's tragic death, Nick leaves nothing to the imagination and offers true and heartfelt advice to help listeners overcome obstacles in their own lives.

The definitive account of Bill Cosby's transition from revered father figure to convicted criminal, told by a veteran crime reporter and former senior writer for People Magazine.

How can a blind person learn to see with her tongue or a deaf person learn to hear with his skin? What does a baby born without a nose tell us about our sensory machinery? Might we someday control a robot with our thoughts? And what does any of this have to do with why we dream? The answers to these questions are not right in front of our eyes; they're right behind our eyes. This book is not simply about what the brain is but what it does. Covering decades of research to the present day, Livewired also presents new findings from Eagleman's own research.

The charismatic radio personality from The Howard Stern Show celebrates what we love about American fast food, covering chains both national and regional and offering an opinionated view on restaurant history, secret menu items, and even drive-thru strategy.

In nearly every moment of our waking lives, we face a barrage of advertising enticements, branding efforts, sponsored social media, commercials, and other efforts to harvest our attention. Over the last century, few times or spaces have remained uncultivated by the "attention merchants", contributing to the distracted, unfocused tenor of our times. Tim Wu argues that this is not simply the byproduct of recent inventions, but the end result of more than a century's growth and expansion in the industries that feed on human attention.

Mad Men and Philosophy will give Mad Men fans everywhere something new to talk about around the water cooler. From Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle to John Kenneth Galbraith, Milton Friedman, and Ayn Rand, Mad Men and Philosophy brings the thinking of some of history's most powerful minds to bear on the world of Don Draper and the Sterling Cooper ad agency. You'll gain insights into a host of compelling Mad Men questions and issues.

The sensationalism and hysteria of the rescue attempt in early 1925 of caver Floyd Collins generated America's first true media spectacle and one of the seminal events of the century.

Dreaming the Beatles is not another biography of the Beatles or a song-by-song analysis of the best of John and Paul. It isn't another exposé about how they broke up. It isn't a history of their gigs or their gear. It is a collection of essays telling the story of what this ubiquitous band means to a generation who grew up with the Beatles' music on their parents' stereos and their faces on T-shirts. What do the Beatles mean today? Why are they more famous and beloved now than ever? Find out.

The origin story of the post-truth age: the candid inside tale of two online media rivals, Nick Denton of Gawker Media and Jonah Peretti of HuffPost and BuzzFeed, whose delirious pursuit of attention at scale helped release the dark forces that would overtake the internet and American society.

Let's zoom in to the Internet, that magnificent new world for latter-day explorers, so much more vast than any realm discovered by Columbus or Magellan. Zealous enthusiasts point to how much more knowledge the average person can access, predicting better students, better workers, better minds and citizenship. Pessimists perceive a dumbing down that spread users too thin, resulting in shallowness that could be lethal to politics, to clear thinking. Is Google making us stupid? Let's weigh the evidence.

You may have watched hundreds of episodes of The Simpsons (and its sister show Futurama) without ever realizing that cleverly embedded in many plots are subtle references to mathematics, ranging from well-known equations to cutting-edge theorems and conjectures. That they exist, Simon Singh reveals, underscores the brilliance of the shows’ writers, many of whom have advanced degrees in mathematics in addition to their unparalleled sense of humor.

Millions of people go to enormous lengths to achieve fame. Fame is woven into our lives in ways that may have been unimaginable in years past. Mining decades of experience, writer, director, producer, and actress Justine Bateman writes a visceral, intimate look at the experience of Fame. Combining the internal reality-shift of the famous, theories on the public’s behavior at each stage of a famous person’s career, and the experiences of other famous performers, Bateman takes the listener inside and outside the emotions of Fame.

This is a comprehensive beginner's guide to all things conspiracy! Learn how to decode Illuminati symbolism that's hidden in plain sight with the help of an expert in spotting occult secrets. Conspiracy theorists like David Icke got you confused? Wondering how a reptilian can live among us and shape shift in and out of our dimensions? Are your favorite entertainers part of a transhumanistic alien agenda with mind control signals coming from Saturn and the Moon?

Every day, in dance studios all across America, legions of little children line up at the barre to take ballet class. This time in the studio shapes their lives, instilling lessons about gender, power, bodies, and their place in the world both in and outside of dance. In Turning Pointe, journalist Chloe Angyal captures the intense love for ballet that so many dancers feel, while also grappling with its devastating shortcomings....