Popular Science

Culture will keep you fit and healthy. Culture will bring communities together. Culture will improve your education. This is the message from governments and arts organisations across the country; however, this book explains why we need to be cautious about culture. Offering a powerful call to transform the cultural and creative industries, Culture Is Bad for You examines the intersections between race, class, and gender in the mechanisms of exclusion in cultural occupations.

Astounding is the landmark account of the extraordinary partnership between four controversial writers - John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and L. Ron Hubbard - who set off a revolution in science fiction and forever changed our world.

In the American moral vernacular, we have a whole thesaurus for victims of exploitation. They are suckers (born every minute), fools (not suffered gladly), dupes, marks, chumps, pawns, and losers. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Cultural stories about suckers abound too: the Trojan Horse, the Boy Who Cried Wolf, the Emperor’s New Clothes, even Hansel and Gretel. If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you. Don’t go out with him; he only wants one thing.

Comment retisser les liens sociaux dans notre monde en guerre ? Loretta Napoleoni nous propose, à travers la métaphore du tricot, de penser à un futur plus uni.

From movies to politics, social media posts to the targeted ads between them, nostalgia is one of the most potent forces of our era. On Nostalgia is a panoramic cultural history of nostalgia, exploring how a force that started as a psychological diagnosis of soldiers fighting far from home has come become a quintessentially modern condition.

The Girl at the Baggage Claim is a provocative and important study of the different ideas easterners and westerners have about the self and society and what this means for current debates in art, education, geopolitics, and business. Never have East and West come as close as they are today, yet we are still baffled by one another. Is our mantra "To thine own self be true"? Or do we believe we belong to something larger than ourselves - a family, a religion, a troop - that claims our first allegiance?

Ever wonder why glum rock à la Nirvana became popular in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, or why gastropubs that serve organic kumquat have replaced all-American chain restaurants like Applebee’s as the trendiest dining establishments? Can the tennis rivalry between John McEnroe and Björn Borg shed light on the type of sadness inherent to success? And what’s the connection between the music of the bands Weezer and the Presidents of the United States of America?

Before he grew up and became one of Washington's most respected reporters and editors, Andrew Ferguson was, of all things, a Lincoln buff, with the photos hung on his bedroom wall to prove it. Decades later, Ferguson's latent buffdom is reignited. In Land of Lincoln, he embarks on a curiosity-fueled coast-to-coast journey through contemporary Lincoln Nation, encountering everything from hatred to adoration to opportunism and all manner of reaction in between.

What was it about a small, humble folk instrument that allowed it to become an American icon? The guitar represents freedom, the open road, protest and rebellion, the blues, youth, lost love, and sexuality. Tim Brookes explores with adoration these ideas and how they became entwined with the history of America.

Lisa Bloom fears that women are in danger of spiraling into a nation of dumbed-down, tabloid-media-obsessed, reality TV addicts. Too often, they outsource matters to "experts" and in doing so neglect to truly think for themselves. But she has the solution and it involves one simple word: Think.

When Stuever's narrative begins, he's standing in line with the people waiting to purchase flat-screen TVs at Best Buy on Black Friday, the opening of the Christmas shopping season. From there he follows a number of key residents of Frisco, Texas, as they navigate through the nativity and all its attendant crises.

Reviewing Gary Greenberg's 2013 expose about American psychiatry, the New York Times's Dwight Garner wrote that "Greenberg paces the psychiatric stage as if he were part George Carlin, part Gregory House." But on a spring night in 2013, he found himself pacing the stage of a grade school gym as if he were Hester Prynne. Two registered sex offenders had come to live in the small town Greenberg had called home for thirty years.

A fascinating guided tour of the complex, fast-moving, and influential world of algorithms - what they are, why they’re such powerful predictors of human behavior, and where they’re headed next. Algorithms exert an extraordinary level of influence on our everyday lives - from dating websites and financial trading floors, through to online retailing and internet searches - Google's search algorithm is now a more closely guarded commercial secret than the recipe for Coca-Cola.

Tacky is about the power of pop culture - like any art - to imprint itself on our lives and shape our experiences, no matter one's commitment to "good" taste. These 14 essays are a nostalgia-soaked antidote to the millennial generation's obsession with irony, putting the aesthetics we hate to love - snakeskin pants, Sex and the City, Cheesecake Factory's gargantuan menu - into kinder and sharper perspective.

Chuck Klosterman IV consists of three parts:

THINGS THAT ARE TRUE
Profiles and trend stories: Britney Spears, Val Kilmer, McDonalds, '70s rock band nostalgia cruises. With new introductions and asides.

Generation П - роман Виктора Пелевина о поколении россиян, которое взрослело и формировалось во времена политических и экономических реформ 1990-х годов. Когда главной мечтой молодежи было, чтобы свободный и поэтому запрещённый мир с той стороны океана вошел в их жизнь. Через 10 лет мечта сбылась.

Cathal Kelly grew up in the '70s and '80s, decades when dressing like Michael Jackson seemed like a good idea and The Beachcombers - "an adventure show about logging" - seemed to make sense. But apart from fashion missteps and baffling TV plot lines, Kelly's youth was a time of wonder, obsession, and discovery. Navigating an often fraught family life, Kelly sought refuge in books, music, movies, games, and at least one backyard hole.

Why does fashion hold so much power over us? Most of us care about how we dress and how we present ourselves. Style offers clues about everything from class to which in-group we belong to. Bad Feminist for fashion, Dress Code takes aim at the institutions within the fashion industry while reminding us of the importance of dress and what it means for self-presentation. Everything—from societal changes to the progress (or lack thereof) of women’s rights to the hidden motivations behind what we choose to wear to align ourselves with a particular social group—can be tracked through clothing.

In America, in London, in Amsterdam, in Paris, revolutionary ideas fomenting since the late 1950s reached boiling point, culminating in a year in which the transient pop moment burst forth. Exploring the canonical figures, from The Beatles and Boty to Warhol and Reagan, 1966 delves deep into the social and cultural heart of the decade through masterfully compiled archival primary sources.

The Secret Life of Science is a dispatch from the frontlines of modern science. It paints a startling picture of a complex scientific ecosystem that has become the most competitive free-market environment on the planet. It reveals how big this ecosystem really is, what motivates its participants, and who reaps the rewards.