Social Media Study

Joshua Myers considers the work of thinkers who broke with the racial and colonial logic of academic disciplinarity and how the ideas of Black intellectuals created different ways of thinking and knowing in their pursuit of conceptual and epistemological freedom. Bookended by meditations with June Jordan and Toni Cade Bambara, Of Black Study focuses on how W.E.B. Du Bois, Sylvia Wynter, Jacob Carruthers, and Cedric Robinson contributed to Black Studies approaches to knowledge production within and beyond Western structures of knowledge.

The folklore roots of Christmas under its many other guises (Yule, the Winter Solstice, Saturnalia) is examined in a different, darker light. The Winter Solstice is a time to be afraid. It’s the shortest day of the year, the longest night. In some parts of the world, the sun doesn’t rise at all. It’s dark, and we have to wonder if the sun will ever come back at all. Christmas has always been creepy and with The Fright Before Christmas, you'll see that side. This is a book for everyone who loves a little darkness around the holidays.

We tend to think of revolutions as loud: frustrations and demands shouted in the streets. But the ideas fueling them have traditionally been conceived in much quieter spaces, in the small, secluded corners where a vanguard can whisper among themselves, imagine alternate realities, and deliberate about how to achieve their goals. This extraordinary book is a search for those spaces, over centuries and across continents, and a warning that—in a world dominated by social media—they might soon go extinct.

In I Wear the Black Hat, Klosterman questions the very nature of how modern people understand the concept of villainy. What was so Machiavellian about Machiavelli? Why don't we see Batman the same way we see Bernhard Goetz? Who's more worthy of our vitriol - Bill Clinton or Don Henley? What was O.J. Simpson's second-worst decision? Masterfully blending cultural analysis with self-interrogation and limitless imagination, I Wear the Black Hat delivers perceptive observations on the complexity of the anti-hero.

An incisive observer, writer, and participant in today's social movements, Zeynep Tufekci explains in this accessible and compelling book the nuanced trajectories of modern protests - how they form, how they operate differently from past protests, and why they have difficulty persisting in their long-term quests for change.

People are now exposed to more information than ever before, provided both by technology and by increasing access to every level of education. These societal gains, however, have also helped fuel a surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that has crippled informed debates on any number of issues. Today, everyone knows everything and all voices demand to be taken with equal seriousness, and any claim to the contrary is dismissed as undemocratic elitism.

The mysterious civilizations of Lemuria and Atlantis become reality as Shirley Andrews, the author of Atlantis: Insights From a Lost Civilization combines details from scholars, scientists and the respected psychic Edgar Cayce.

In Burn It Down, veteran reporter Maureen Ryan does just that. She draws on decades of experience to connect the dots and illuminate the deeper forces sustaining Hollywood’s corrosive culture. Fresh reporting sheds light on problematic situations at companies like Lucasfilm and shows like Lost, Saturday Night Live, The Goldbergs, Sleepy Hollow, Curb Your Enthusiasm and more.

Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station is intellectual history on a grand scale, full of romance, idealism, intrigue, and conspiracy, that traces the revolutionary ideas that shaped the modern world from the French Revolution up through Lenin's arrival at Finland Station in St. Petersburg in 1917. Fueled by Wilson's own passionate engagement with the ideas and politics at play, it is a lively and vivid, sweeping account of a singular idea—that it is possible to construct a society based on justice, equality, and freedom—gaining the power to change history.

Astrophysicist J. Craig Wheeler, former president of the American Astronomical Society, takes a critical look at the technological advances shaping our future. From artificial intelligence to genetic engineering, Wheeler explores how these innovations are interconnected and the potential they hold for humanity's evolution. With thought-provoking insights into the ethical dilemmas we face, Wheeler stresses the importance of staying informed and proactive.

In this widely acclaimed memoir ("Riveting, moving...a wonderful book" The New York Times Book Review), Katharine Graham tells her story—one that is extraordinary both for the events it encompasses and for the courage, candor, and dignity of its telling.

In TechGnosis - a cult classic now updated and reissued with a new afterword - Erik Davis argues that while the realms of the digital and the spiritual may seem worlds apart, esoteric and religious impulses have in fact always permeated (and sometimes inspired) technological communication. Davis uncovers startling connections between such seemingly disparate topics as electricity and alchemy; online roleplaying games and religious and occult practices; virtual reality and gnostic mythology; programming languages and Kabbalah.

As a young girl in a working-class neighborhood of Sydney, Australia, Geraldine Brooks longed to discover the places where history happens and culture comes from, so she enlisted pen pals who offered her a window on adolescence in the Middle East, Europe, and America. Twenty years later, Brooks, an award-winning foreign correspondent, embarked on a human treasure hunt to find her pen friends. She found men and women whose lives had been shaped by war and hatred, by fame and notoriety, and by the ravages of mental illness.

Clean water, paved roads, public transit, electricity and gas, sewers, waste processing, telecommunication, even the Internet—all this infrastructure is what makes cities work and powers our lives, often seamlessly and silently. Virtually everything we do and consume depends on infrastructure. Yet, most people have no idea how these systems work. How is water treated? How do cities manage rainwater? Why do traffic jams exist? How is electricity generated and distributed? What happens to trash after it is picked up? How does the Internet work?

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, there were only three major television networks. And there was only one Harlan Ellison taking them all to task in a series of weekly essays he wrote for the countercultural, underground newspaper, the Los Angeles Free Press, a.k.a. “The Freep”. For nearly four years, he channel-surfed through the mire of ABC, CBS, and NBC, finding little of value but much to critique. No one offered a more astute analysis of the idiot box’s influence on American culture, or its effects on the intelligence and psyche of viewers.

Supertrends: 50 Things You Need to Know About the Future is about how efficient futurists work and how we can expect the world to evolve in terms of demographics, general economics, technologies, business models, resources, environment, and lifestyles. This audiobook addresses how to predict the future, what we can expect from it, and how companies and government should adapt to the accelerating change.

Steven L. Kent has been playing video games since Pong and writing about the industry since the Nintendo Entertainment System. In volume 1 of The Ultimate History of Video Games, he chronicled the industry’s first thirty years. In volume 2, he narrates gaming’s entrance into the twenty-first century, as Nintendo, Sega, Sony, and Microsoft battle to capture the global market.

Unlikeable Female Characters traces the evolution of highly memorable female characters, examining what exactly makes them popular, how audiences have reacted to them, and the ways in which pop culture is finally allowing us to celebrate the complexities of being a woman. Anna Bogutskaya, film programmer, broadcaster, and cofounder of the horror film collective and podcast The Final Girls takes us on a journey through popular film, TV, and music, looking at the nuances of womanhood on and off-screen to reveal whether pop culture—and society—is finally ready to embrace complicated women.

On Instagram, the private work of mothering has been turned into a public performance that’s generating billions of dollars, and the message is simple: that we’re all just a couple of clicks away from a better, more beautiful experience of motherhood. Momfluenced examines the performance of motherhood—producers of it and consumers of it—through the multilayered phenomenon of the mommy influencer.

American society has become anti-male. Men are sensing the backlash and are responding. They're dropping out of college, leaving the workforce, and avoiding marriage and fatherhood at alarming rates. The trend is so pronounced that a number of books have been written about this man-child phenomenon, concluding that men have taken a vacation from responsibility. But why should men participate in a system that seems to be increasingly stacked against them?