Popular Science

Dr. Peter McGraw, founder of the Humor Research Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder, teamed up with journalist Joel Warner on a far-reaching search for the secret behind humor. Their journey spanned the globe, from New York to Japan, from Palestine to the Amazon. Meanwhile, the duo conducted their own humor experiments along the way-to wince-worthy, hilarious, and illuminating results.

In 12 Bytes, the New York Times best-selling author of Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal? Jeanette Winterson draws on her years of thinking and reading about artificial intelligence in all its bewildering manifestations. In her brilliant, laser focused, uniquely pointed, and witty style of storytelling, Winterson looks to history, religion, myth, literature, the politics of race and gender, and computer science, to help us understand the radical changes to the way we live and love that are happening now.

While everyone is talking about "big data", the truth is that understanding the "little data" - the stats that underlie newspaper headlines, stock reports, weather forecasts, and so on - is what helps you make smarter decisions at work, at home, and in every aspect of your life. The average person consumes approximately 30 gigabytes of data every single day but has no idea how to interpret it correctly. Everydata explains, through the eyes of an expert economist and statistician, how to decipher the small bytes of data we consume in a day.

In Move On Up, Aaron Cohen tells the remarkable story of the explosion of soul music in Chicago. Record producers and songwriters broadcast optimism for black America's future through their sophisticated, jazz-inspired productions for the Dells and many others. Musicians like Phil Cohran and the Pharaohs used their music to voice Afrocentric philosophies that challenged racism and segregation, while Maurice White of Earth, Wind, and Fire and Chaka Khan created music that inspired black consciousness.

Popular culture has taught us to picture the Old West as a land of men, whether it's the lone hero on horseback or crowds of card players in a rough-and-tumble saloon. But the taming of the frontier involved plenty of women, too - and this book tells their stories. At first, female pioneers were indeed rare - when the town of Denver was founded in 1859, there were only five women among a population of almost a thousand. But the adventurers arrived, slowly but surely.

Internationally revered cultural anthropologist and marketing expert Clotaire Rapaille reveals for the first time the techniques he has used to improve profitability and practices for dozens of Fortune 100 companies. His groundbreaking revelations shed light not just on business but on the way every human being acts and lives around the world.

Along with Batman, Spider-Man, and Superman, the Joker stands out as one of the most recognizable comics characters in popular culture. While there has been a great deal of scholarly attention on superheroes, very little has been done to understand supervillains. This is the first academic work to provide a comprehensive study of this villain, illustrating why the Joker appears so relevant to audiences today.

Kerrang! has an unparalleled reputation as one of the world's best-loved rock-focused publications. It continues to be at the forefront of alternative music, flying the flag for metal, hardcore, punk and beyond, introducing millions to their new favorite bands. Anyone who's anyone in the metal scene has featured Kerrang's hallowed pages and this unique book chronicles these appearances. If it happened in metal, Kerrang! covered it, as confirmed in this year-by-year survey of alternative music.

Can't Slow Down is the definitive portrait of the exploding world of mid-80s pop and the time it defined, from Cold War anxiety to the home-computer revolution. The story of that thrilling, turbulent time, an era when Top 40 radio was both the leading edge of popular culture and a moral battleground, has never been told with the full detail it deserves - until now.

Ever since its "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing" commercials from the 1970s, Coca-Cola has billed itself as the world's beverage, uniting all colors and cultures in a mutual love of its caramel-sweet sugar water. The formula has worked incredibly well, making it one of the most profitable companies on the planet and Coca-Cola the world's second-most-recognized word after hello.

GOTH is an entertaining and engaging historical memoir, and a journey through Goth music and culture, exploring creative giants like The Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus, Joy Division, and many more great bands that offered a place of refuge for the misfits of the ‘80s and ever since. Written by Lol Tolhurst, co-founder of The Cure, this book offers a riveting retrospective of the genre’s iconic movers and shakers, infused with stories from Tolhurst’s personal trove of memories.

Throughout the 1960s and '70s, Abbie Hoffman crisscrossed the country, ferreting out alternative ways of getting by in America - some illegal and all radical. Causing scandals with its advice on how to Survive!, Fight!, and Liberate! in the “prison that is Amerika”, Steal This Book is a revolutionary's manual to running a guerilla movement, as well as getting free food, housing, transportation, medical care, and more.

In his first memoir, Josh Widdicombe tells the story of a strange rural childhood, the kind of childhood he only realised was weird when he left home and started telling people about it. From only having four people in his year at school, to living in a family home where they didn't just not bother to lock the front door, they didn't even have a key. Using a different television show of the time as its starting point for each chapter, Watching Neighbours Twice a Day... is part-childhood memoir, part-comic history of '90s television and culture.

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....

Does the number of children gunned down double each year? Does anorexia kill 150,000 young women annually? Do white males account for only a sixth of new workers? Startling statistics shape our thinking about social issues. But all too often, these numbers are wrong. This book is a lively guide to spotting bad statistics and learning to think critically about these influential numbers. Damned Lies and Statistics is essential listening for everyone who reads or listens to the news....

Hearts on Fire is about the creative explosion in Canadian music of the early 2000s, which captured the world's attention in entirely new ways. The Canadian wave didn't just sweep over one genre or one city, it stretched from coast to coast, affecting large bands and solo performers, rock bands and DJs, and it connected to international scenes by capitalizing on new technology and old-school DIY methods.

A research-based guide to navigating the newest dating phenomenon - "the love gap" - and a trailblazing action plan to help smart, confident, career-driven women find (and keep) their match. For a rising generation of young women, the sky is the limit. Women can be anything and have everything. Smart, driven, assertive women are succeeding at just about everything they do - except romance. Why are so many men afraid to date smart women?

The original Dungeons & Dragons released by TSR (Tactical Studies Rules) in 1974 created a radical new medium: the role-playing game. For the next two decades, TSR rocketed to success. But by 1997, a series of ruinous choices and failed projects brought TSR to the edge of doom—only to be saved by their fiercest competitor, Wizards of the Coast. Unearthed from Ben Riggs’s own adventurous campaign of in-depth research, interviews with major players, and acquisitions of secret documents, Slaying the Dragon reveals the true story of the rise and fall of TSR.

Vivek Shraya knows this to be true: people change. We change our haircuts and our outfits and our minds. We change names, titles, labels. We attempt to blend in or to stand out. We outgrow relationships, we abandon dreams for new ones, we start fresh. We seize control of our stories. We make resolutions. In fact, nobody knows this better than Vivek, who’s made a career of embracing many roles: artist, performer, musician, writer, model, teacher. In People Change, she reflects on the origins of this impulse, tracing it to childhood influences from Hinduism to Madonna.

Sarah Vowell's special brand of armchair history makes the bizarre and esoteric fascinatingly relevant and fun. She takes us from the modern-day reenactment of an Indian massacre to the Mohegan Sun casino, from old-timey Puritan poetry, where "righteousness" is rhymed with "wilderness," to a Mayflower-themed waterslide. Throughout, The Wordy Shipmates is rich in historical fact, humorous insight, and social commentary by one of America's most celebrated voices.