Political Culture

In 2004 Kentaro Toyama, an award-winning computer scientist, moved to India to start a new research group for Microsoft. Its mission: to explore novel technological solutions to the world's persistent social problems. But after a decade of designing technologies for humanitarian causes, Toyama concluded that no technology, however dazzling, could cause social change on its own.

Read & Riot is structured around Nadya’s 10 rules for revolution (Be a pirate! Make your government shit its pants! Take back the joy!) and illustrated throughout with stunning examples from her extraordinary life and the philosophies of other revolutionary rebels throughout history. Rooted in action and going beyond the typical “call your senator” guidelines, Read & Riot gives us a refreshing model for civil disobedience, and encourages our right to question every status quo and make political action exciting - even joyful.

Combining historical analysis with contemporary observation, Susan Jacoby dissects a new American cultural phenomenon - one that is at odds with our heritage of Enlightenment reason and with modern, secular knowledge and science. With mordant wit, Jacoby surveys an antirationalist landscape extending from pop culture to a pseudo-intellectual universe of "junk thought".

The political landscape has never been so tumultuous: issues with the electoral college, gerrymandering, voter suppression, and a lack of representation in the polls and in our leadership have led to Americans of all ages asking, How did we get here? The power to change lies with the citizens of this great country - especially teens! Rather than pointing fingers at people and political parties, You Call This Democracy? looks at flaws in the system - and offers a real way out of the mess we are in.

In April 1962, President and Mrs. John F. Kennedy hosted 49 Nobel Prize winners - along with many other prominent scientists, artists, and writers - at a famed White House dinner. Held at the height of the Cold War, the dinner symbolizes a time when intellectuals were esteemed, divergent viewpoints could be respectfully discussed at the highest level, and the great minds of an age might all dine together in the rarefied glamour of "the people's house."

This book chronicles the long history of the fight for women's voting rights, beginning in 1848, with a focus on the years between 1913 and 1920 when the Nineteenth Amendment was passed. The book includes profiles of notable women in the struggle.

Noam Chomsky dismisses efforts to resurrect Camelot - an attractive American myth portraying JFK as a shining knight promising peace, foiled only by assassins bent on stopping this lone hero from withdrawing from Vietnam. Chomsky argues that US institutions an political culture, not individual presidents, are the key to understanding US behavior during the Vietnam War.

"He who controls the spice controls the universe." Frank Herbert's Dune saga is the epic story of Paul, son of Duke Leto Atreides, and heir to the massive fortune promised by the desert planet Arrakis and its vast reservoirs of a drug called "spice." To control the spice, Paul and his mother Jessica, a devotee of the pseudo-religious Bene Gesserit order, must find their place in the culture of the desert-dwelling Fremen of Arrakis. Paul must contend with both the devious rival House Harkonnen and the gargantuan desert sandworms—the source of the spice.

Tommy Douglas was known as the father of socialized medicine. What does that mean? Is socialized medicine under the umbrella of medical science? Not really. You see, socialized medicine pertains to the introduction of programs such as Medicare, bargaining rights for civil servants, and a Canada-wide pension plan. Why did Tommy fight for these programs? Find out by listening to this book.

In 2009, an influential panel of medical experts ignited a controversy when they recommended that most women should not begin routine mammograms to screen for breast cancer until the age of 50, reversing guidelines they had issued just seven years before when they recommended 40 as the optimal age to start getting mammograms. Many women’s groups, health care advocates, and individual women saw the guidelines as privileging financial considerations over women’s health and a setback to decades-long efforts to reduce the mortality rate of breast cancer.

For the last 60 years, fear has seeped into every area of American life: Americans own more guns than citizens of any other country, sequester themselves in gated communities, and retreat from public spaces. And yet, crime rates have plummeted, making life in America safer than ever. Why, then, are Americans so afraid - and where does this fear lead to? In this remarkable work of social history, May demonstrates how our obsession with security has made citizens fear each other and distrust the government, making America less safe and less democratic.

In an unparalleled collaboration, two leading global thinkers in technology and foreign affairs give us their widely anticipated, transformational vision of the future: a world where everyone is connected - a world full of challenges and benefits that are ours to meet and to harness. Eric Schmidt is one of Silicon Valley’s great leaders, having taken Google from a small startup to one of the world’s most influential companies. Jared Cohen is the director of Google Ideas and a former adviser to secretaries of state Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton.

We live in an age when the pursuit of authenticity—from living our 'best life' to eating artisan food—matters more and more to us, but where the forces of inauthenticity seem to be taking over. Our world is full of people and products that are not what they seem. We no longer know whether we are talking to a person or a machine. But we can fight back—and this award-winning book shows us how. Authenticity argues that although our counterfeit culture is shaped by the most powerful forces of evolution, economics and technology, we can still come together to reclaim reality.

Greg Gutfeld hates artificial tolerance. At the root of every single major political conflict is the annoying coddling Americans must endure of these harebrained liberal hypocrisies. In fact, most of the time liberals use the mantle of tolerance as a guise for their pathetic intolerance. And what we really need is smart intolerance, or as Gutfeld reminds us, what we used to call common sense. The Joy of Hate tackles this conundrum head on- - replacing the idiocy of open-mindness with a shrewd judgmentalism that rejects stupid ideas, notions, and people.

Dan Savage eviscerates the right-wing conservatives as he commits each of the Seven Deadly Sins himself (or tries to) and finds those everyday Americans who take particular delight in their sinful pursuits. Combine a unique history of the Seven Deadly Sins, a new interpretation of the biblical stories of Sodom and Gomorrah, and enough Bill Bennett, Robert Bork, Pat Buchanan, Dr. Laura, and Bill O'Reilly bashing to more than make up for their incessant carping, and you've got the most provocative book of the fall.

Meet the elites. They think you're stupid. They think all freedom-loving Americans are stupid. They think patriotism is stupid. They think churchgoing is stupid. They think flag-flying is stupid. They think your SUV is evil - although theirs is absolutely necessary. They think owning a gun is criminal. They think George Bush is an idiot. But in this refreshing and blisteringly insightful look at the elites, Laura Ingraham reveals that it is they, not us, who are pickled in prejudice, morally blind, and outrageously hypocritical.

Our culture tells parents there's one best way to raise kids: enroll them in a dozen activities, protect them from trauma, and get them into the most expensive college you can. If you can't do that, don't bother. How is that going? Record rates of anxiety, depression, medication, debts, loneliness and more. In Family Unfriendly, bestselling author and Washington Examiner columnist Timothy P. Carney says it's time to end this failed experiment in overparenting.

Ideology consists of normative prescriptions regarding how society should be shaped, together with an interpretive roadmap indicating how this normative vision can be implemented in reality. Ideological Fixation is the result of tensions and conflicts between these two elements. The book focuses on ideologies' factual claims about the world, typically subordinate to, and often distorted by, their normative commitment. In exploring this phenomenon, the book combines insights from evolutionary psychology regarding the nature of some of our deepest proclivities.

What makes a country fall to a dictator? How are authoritarian leaders - strongmen - capable of killing millions acquire their power? How are they able to defeat the ideal of democracy? And what can we do to make sure it doesn't happen again? By profiling five of the most notoriously ruthless dictators in history - Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Saddam Hussein - Kenneth C. Davis seeks to answer these questions, examining the forces in these strongmen's personal lives and historical periods that shaped the leaders they'd become.

Surviving the Future is a story drawn from the fertile ground of the late David Fleming's extraordinary Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It. That hardback consists of 404 interlinked dictionary entries, inviting listeners to choose their own path through its radical vision. Recognizing that Lean Logic's sheer size and unusual structure can be daunting, Fleming's long-time collaborator Shaun Chamberlin has selected and edited one of these potential narratives to create Surviving the Future.