Research Studies

In How to Write an Excellent Personal Statement, Quincy Washington, an alumnus of the London School of Economics and the Founder of PlaceCoach—a trusted leader for university applications—guides you along each step of the writing process for your college admissions essay. You will benefit from insider knowledge and tips, as well as real-life examples from students’ personal statements and college admissions essays.

Countless would-be readers and listeners of Finnegans Wake - James Joyce's 1939 masterwork, on which he labored for a third of his life - have given up after a few pages and "dismissed the book as a perverse triumph of the unintelligible." In 1944, a young professor of mythology and literature named Joseph Campbell, working with novelist and poet Henry Morton Robinson, wrote the first guide to understanding the fascinating world of Finnegans Wake.

After spotting Netflix and the deep-pocketed Amazon Prime Video a decade’s head start, rivals from the tech and start-up realm (Apple, Quibi) and traditional media (Disney, WarnerMedia, NBCUniversal) all decided to move mountains to enter the streaming game. At a cost of billions, each went after their own piece of the market, launching five new services in a seven-month span. And just as the derby was heating up, the coronavirus pandemic arrived, a black-swan event bringing short-term benefits but also stiff challenges.

Merchants of Truth is the groundbreaking and gripping story of the precarious state of the news business told by one of our most eminent journalists. Jill Abramson follows four companies: The New York Times, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed, and Vice Media over a decade of disruption and radical adjustment. The new digital reality nearly kills two venerable newspapers with an aging readership while creating two media behemoths with a ballooning and fickle audience of millennials.

In The Advertising Effect, respected advertising insider, Adam Ferrier, reveals the ten techniques used by some of the best-known brands across the globe. These techniques are grounded in psychological theory with award winning real world examples and explore how the most effective way to change behaviour is through action rather than the conventional advertising practices (emotional or rational persuasion).

Gary Webb had an inborn journalistic tendency to track down corruption and expose it. For over thirty-four years, he wrote stories about corruption from county, state, and federal levels. He had an almost magnetic effect to these kinds of stories, and it was almost as if the stories found him. It was his gift, and, ultimately, it was his downfall.

Like the authors' classic book The Elements of Journalism, Blur is a unique and understandable discourse on how information culture is changing. Yes, old authorities are being dismantled and new ones created, and the way we obtain knowledge has changed. But seeking true and reliable information remains the most important purpose of journalism - and the object for those who consume it.

Have you logged into Facebook recently? Searched for something on Google? Chosen a movie on Netflix? If so, you've probably been an unwitting participant in a variety of experiments - also known as randomized controlled trials - designed to test the impact of different online experiences. In this book, Michael Luca and Max Bazerman explain the importance of experiments for decision making in a data-driven world.

Believers is a scientist's answer to attacks on faith by some well-meaning scientists and philosophers. It is a firm rebuke of the "Four Horsemen" - Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens - known for writing about religion as something irrational and ultimately harmful. Anthropologist Melvin Konner explores the psychology, development, brain science, evolution, and even genetics of the varied religious impulses we experience as a species.

Over her four decades of working in newsrooms big and small, Margaret Sullivan has become a trusted champion and critic of the American news media. In this bracing memoir, Sullivan traces her life in journalism and how trust in the mainstream press has steadily eroded.

Encounters at the Heart of the World concerns the Mandan Indians, iconic Plains people whose teeming, busy towns on the upper Missouri River were, for centuries, at the center of the North American universe. We know of them mostly because Lewis and Clark spent the winter of 1804-1805 with them, but why don't we know more? Who were they really? In this extraordinary book, Elizabeth A. Fenn retrieves their history by piecing together important new discoveries in archaeology, anthropology, geology, climatology, epidemiology, and nutritional science.

This CliffsNotes study guide on William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar supplements the original literary work, giving you background information about the author, an introduction to the work, and commentaries, all for you to use as an educational tool that will allow you to better understand the work. This study guide was written with the assumption that you have read Julius Caesar.

The romance novel has the strange distinction of being the most popular but least respected of literary genres. While it remains consistently dominant in bookstores and on best-seller lists, it is also widely dismissed by the critical community. Scholars have alleged that romance novels help create subservient readers, who are largely women, by confining heroines to stories that ignore issues other than love and marriage.

From Pickwick to Scrooge, Copperfield to Twist, how did Dickens find the perfect names for his characters? What was Dickens' favourite way of killing his characters? When is a Dickens character most likely to see a ghost? Why is Dickens’ trickery only fully realised when his novels are read aloud? In 13 entertaining and wonderfully insightful essays, John Mullan explores the literary machinations of Dickens’ eccentric genius, from his delight in clichés to his rendering of smells and his outrageous use of coincidences.

America’s Romance with the English Garden is the story of tastemakers and homemakers, of savvy businessmen and a growing American middle class eager to buy their products. It’s also the story of the beginnings of the modern garden industry, which seduced the masses with its images and fixed the English garden in the mind of the American consumer. Seed and nursery catalogs delivered aspirational images to front doorsteps from California to Maine, and the English garden became the look of America.

The CliffsNotes study guide on William Golding's Lord of the Flies supplements the original literary work, giving you background information about the author, an introduction to the work, and critical commentaries, all for you to use as an educational tool that will allow you to better understand the work. This study guide was written with the assumption that you have read Lord of the Flies.

Egyptian alchemy and Sufism, with a coherent explanation of fundamentals and practices. This audiobook explains how ancient Egypt is the origin of alchemy and present-day Sufism and how the mystics of Egypt camouflage their practices with a thin layer of Islam. The audiobook also explains the progression of the mystical way toward enlightenment, with a coherent explanation of its fundamentals and practices. It shows the correspondence between the ancient Egyptian calendar of events and the cosmic cycles of the universe.

Janet Malcolm delves into the psychopathology of journalism using a strange and unprecedented lawsuit as her larger-than-life example: the lawsuit of Jeffrey MacDonald, a convicted murderer, against Joe McGinniss, the author of Fatal Vision. Examining the always uneasy, sometimes tragic relationship that exists between journalist and subject, Malcolm finds that neither journalist nor subject can avoid the moral impasse that is built into the journalistic situation.

Designed to be compatible with virtually every standard textbook in its subject field, Barron's EZ-101 Study Keys gives you a valuable overview of your college-level course. Classroom-style notes emphasize important facts, remind you what you need to remember for term papers and exams, and help guide you through the complexities of lectures and textbooks.

In Winning Her Business, Bridget Brennan, advisor to some of the world’s biggest brands and businesses, provides a road map for selling in a world dominated by the rise of women’s economic power.