Popular Science

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.

Jen Lancaster is here to take a hard look at our elevating anxieties, and with self-deprecating wit and levelheaded wisdom, she charts a path out of the quagmire that keeps us frightened of the future and ashamed of our imperfectly perfect human lives. Take a deep breath, and her advice, and you just might get through a holiday dinner without wanting to disown your uncle.

American culture loves Blackness. From music and fashion to activism and language, Black culture constantly achieves worldwide influence. Yet, when it comes to who is allowed to thrive from Black hipness, the pioneers are usually left behind as Black aesthetics are converted into mainstream success - and White profit. Weaving together narrative, scholarship, and critique, Lauren Michele Jackson reveals why cultural appropriation - something that's become embedded in our daily lives - deserves serious attention.

Before the league’s founding, East Coast basketball had crowned just three national champions in 40 years, and none since 1954. But in the Big East’s first 10 years, five of its teams played for a national championship. The league didn’t merely inherit good teams; it created them. But how did this unlikely group of schools come to dominate college basketball so quickly and completely?

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.

From Nelson George, supervising producer and writer of the hit Netflix series The Get Down, this passionate and provocative book tells the complete story of Black music in the last 50 years, and in doing so, outlines the perilous position of Black culture within white American society. In a fast-paced narrative, Nelson George’s book chronicles the rise and fall of “race music” and its transformation into the R&B that eventually dominated the airwaves, only to find itself diluted and submerged as crossover music.

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.

A riveting account of the birth and remarkable evolution of the most important development in entertainment since television, Replay is the ultimate history of video games. From its origins in the research labs of the 1940s to the groundbreaking success of the Wii, Replay sheds new light on gaming's past.

In September 1994, six friends sat down in their favorite coffee shop and began bantering about sex, relationships, jobs, and just about everything else. A quarter of a century later, new fans are still finding their way into the lives of Rachel, Ross, Joey, Chandler, Monica, and Phoebe, and thanks to the show’s immensely talented creators, its intimate understanding of its youthful audience, and its reign during network television’s last moment of dominance, Friends has become the most influential and beloved show of its era, and this is the story of how it all happened.

Are we living the good life - and what defines good, anyway? Americans today are constructing a completely different framework for success than their parents' generation, using new metrics that TEDWomen speaker and columnist Courtney Martin has termed collectively the "New Better Off".

Recent years have seen a revival of the heated culture wars of the 1990s, but this time its battleground is the Internet. On one side the alt-right ranges from the once obscure neo-reactionary and white separatist movements, to geeky subcultures like 4chan, to more mainstream manifestations such as the Trump-supporting gay libertarian Milo Yiannopolous. On the other side, struggle sessions and virtue signaling lurk behind a therapeutic language of trigger warnings and safe spaces. The feminist side of the online culture wars has its equally geeky subcultures.

For many outsiders, Thailand still conjures up images of the East at its most mysterious and enchanting - a view largely formed by Hollywood films like The King and I. Never conquered by foreigners, this proud and ancient land has been shaped by Buddhism, the monarchy, and the military. Today, it is ranked among the tiger economies of Southeast Asia. It is a manufacturing powerhouse, the world’s largest rice exporter, and a tourist paradise that welcomes 22 million visitors a year to its beach resorts and its vibrant capital, Bangkok.

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.

Noah Lefevre, creator of Polyphonic, explores how our favorite music does more than entertain. From Aretha Franklin carving out her own space in what had been considered a man's world by reworking the chauvinistic lyrics to the 1967's hit "Respect," to Doja Cat's successful backlash against toxic fans of the digital age; from a broken amplifier on "Rocket 88" ushering in the distorted sounds of rock n' roll, to Kendrick Lamar's release of "Alright," which became the unofficial anthem to the BLM protests-each song mirrors the strife, change and progress of our country's narrative.

Der Experte für Esskultur nimmt uns mit auf eine Reise in die spannende Geschichte des Koffeins. Erstmalig wurde der Wunderstoff im Osten Afrikas entdeckt, aber es dauerte nur ein kurzes Jahrhundert, bis der Großteil der Welt abhängig war. Durch den Einfluss des Koffeins wurden schon Kriege entschieden, politische Strömungen umgelenkt und ganze Wirtschaftssysteme dominiert. Der Autor erklärt anschaulich, dass sogar die industrielle Revolution ohne das Koffein unmöglich gewesen wäre.

For ten years, Calvin and Hobbes was one the world's most beloved comic strips. And then, on the last day of 1995, the strip ended. Its mercurial and reclusive creator, Bill Watterson, not only finished the strip but withdrew entirely from public life. In Looking for Calvin and Hobbes, Nevin Martell sets out on a very personal odyssey to understand the life and career of the intensely private man behind Calvin and Hobbes.

There’s never a dull moment with silly jokes just for kids! Forget being bored. That should never be a thing! Keep the fun and laughter going whether at home, on the go, or quite honestly…wherever! This book is overflowing with rounds of children friendly jokes!

Ghosted follows the journey of paranormal investigations from the Victorian era to the modern day, examining how our fascination with ghost hunting has changed alongside technology and culture. Where we once gathered around tables, observing and recording every movement of the medium, we now take electronic equipment and app-laden phones around haunted locations to catch ghosts digitally.

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.

Technology has given average humans far more health and wealth and freedom of action than ever. New gifts spill forth at an accelerating pace as the sheer amount that we know rockets beyond our ability to process. This acceleration has some pondering a looming singularity - an approaching time of transition, spurred in part by new kinds of artificial intelligence - that could make the year 2050 as strange to us as a cave dweller would find our modern cities. Are these extrapolations well based?