Popular Science

Los Angeles in 1974 exerted more influence over popular culture than any other city in America. Rock Me on the Water traces the confluence of movies, music, television, and politics in Los Angeles month by month through that transformative, magical year. Ronald Brownstein reveals how 1974 represented a confrontation between a massive younger generation intent on change, and a political order rooted in the status quo. Brownstein shows how the voices resistant to change may win the political battle for a time, but they cannot hold back the future.

In the days before cheap air travel, families didn’t so much take vacations as survive them. Between home and destination lay thousands of miles and dozens of annoyances, and with his family Richard Ratay experienced all of them - from being crowded into the backseat with noogie-happy older brothers, to picking out a souvenir only to find that a better one might have been had at the next attraction, to dealing with a dad who didn’t believe in bathroom breaks.

Martin A. Lee traces the dramatic social history of marijuana, from its origins to its emergence in the 1960s as a defining force in a culture war that has never ceased. Lee describes how the illicit marijuana subculture overcame government opposition and morphed into a dynamic, multibillion-dollar industry. Colorful, illuminating, and at times irreverent, this is a fascinating listen for recreational users and patients, students and doctors, musicians and accountants, Baby Boomers and their kids, and anyone who has ever wondered about the secret life of this ubiquitous herb.

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".

From a Gold Star polycotton shirt to a pack of Wrigley's Extra, from his teenage attempts to write songs to the Sexy Laughs Fantastic Dirty Joke Book, this is the hard evidence of Jarvis's unique life, Pulp, 20th-century pop culture, the good times and the mistakes he'd rather forget. And this accumulated debris of a lifetime reveals his creative process—writing and musicianship, performance and ambition, style and stagecraft.

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Good Lord Bird, winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Fiction, Deacon King Kong, and Five-Carat Soul, Kill ’Em and Leave is more than a book about James Brown. Brown embodied the contradictions of American life: He was an unsettling symbol of the tensions between North and South, Black and White, rich and poor. After receiving a tip that promises to uncover the man behind the myth, James McBride goes in search of the “real” James Brown.

Chuck Palahniuk's world has always been, well, different from yours and mine. These pieces from Stranger Than Fiction, his first nonfiction collection, prove just how different, in ways both highly entertaining and deeply unsettling.

From the moments William and Harry are born into the House of Windsor, they become their young mother’s whole world. I’ve got two very healthy, strong boys. I realize how incredibly lucky I am, Diana reminds herself every morning. But even the Princess of Wales questions, Am I a good mother? Diana’s faced with a seemingly impossible challenge: one son destined to be King of England and another determined to find his own way. She teaches them to honor royal tradition, even while daring to break it.

This cultural analysis of visual and narrative elements within Batman comics provides an important exploration of the ways readers and creators negotiate gender, identity, and sexuality in popular culture.

In Of Dice and Men, David Ewalt recounts the development of Dungeons & Dragons from the game’s roots on the battlefields of ancient Europe, through the hysteria that linked it to satanic rituals and teen suicides, to its apotheosis as father of the modern video-game industry. As he chronicles the surprising history of the game’s origins (a history largely unknown even to hardcore players) and examines D&D’s profound impact, Ewalt weaves laser-sharp subculture analysis with his own present-day gaming experiences.

The societies we live in are increasingly making our minds ill, making it feel as though the way we live is engineered to make us unhappy. When Matt Haig developed panic disorder, anxiety, and depression as an adult, it took him a long time to work out the ways the external world could impact his mental health in both positive and negative ways. Notes on a Nervous Planet collects his observations, taking a look at how the various social, commercial, and technological "advancements" that have created the world we now live in can actually hinder our happiness.

Batman is one of the most compelling and enduring characters to come from the Golden Age of Comics, and interest in his story has only increased through countless incarnations since his first appearance in Detective Comics #27 in 1939. Why does this superhero without superpowers fascinate us? What does that fascination say about us? Batman and Psychology explores these and other intriguing questions about the masked vigilante.

New York Times best-selling author, comedian, and actor Patton Oswalt shares his entertaining memoir about coming of age as a performer and writer in the late '90s while obsessively watching classic films at the legendary New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles. Between 1995 and 1999, Patton Oswalt lived with an unshakeable addiction. It wasn't drugs, alcohol, or sex. It was film.

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.

Pink and pretty or predatory and hardened, sexualized girlhood influences our daughters from infancy onward, telling them that how a girl looks matters more than who she is. Somewhere between the exhilarating rise of Girl Power in the 1990s and today, the pursuit of physical perfection has been recast as a source - the source - of female empowerment. And commercialization has spread the message faster and farther, reaching girls at ever-younger ages.

In Pop Masculinities, author Kai Arne Hansen investigates the performance and policing of masculinity in pop music as a starting point for grasping the broad complexity of gender and its politics in the early 21st century. Drawing together perspectives from critical musicology, gender studies, and adjacent scholarly fields, the book presents extended case studies of five well-known artists: Zayn, Lil Nas X, Justin Bieber, The Weeknd, and Take That.

Andy Griffith and Don Knotts met on Broadway in the 1950s. When Andy went to Hollywood to film a TV pilot about a small-town sheriff, Don called to ask if the sheriff could use a deputy. The comedic synergy between Sheriff Andy Taylor and Deputy Barney Fife ignited The Andy Griffith Show, elevating a folksy sitcom into a timeless study of human friendship, as potent off the screen as on.

Few things in life are more satisfying than beating a rival. We love to win and hate to lose, whether it's on the playing field or at the ballot box, in the office or in the classroom. In this bold new look at human behavior, award-winning journalist and Olympian Matthew Syed explores the truth about our competitive nature: why we win, why we don't, and how we really play the game of life.

For American women today, working out is as accepted as it is expected, fueling a multibillion-dollar fitness industrial complex. But it wasn’t always this way. For much of the 20th century, sweating was considered unladylike and girls grew up believing physical exertion would cause their uterus to literally fall out. It was only in the '60s that, thanks to a few forward-thinking fitness pioneers, women began to move en masse.

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.