Science Research

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.

Imagine knowing what the brain craves from every tale it encounters, what fuels the success of any great story, and what keeps readers transfixed. Wired for Story reveals these cognitive secrets—and it’s a game-changer for anyone who has ever set pen to paper.

The one real difference between the American press and the Soviet state newspaper Pravda was that the Russian people knew they were being lied to. To expose the lies our media tell us today, controversial journalist James O'Keefe created Project Veritas, an independent news organization whose reporters go where traditional journalists dare not. Their investigative work - equal parts James Bond, Mike Wallace, and Saul Alinsky - has had a consistent and powerful impact on its targets.

In the 18th century, two men dedicated their lives to the same daunting task: identifying and describing all life on Earth. Their approaches could not have been more different. Carl Linnaeus, a pious Swedish doctor with a huckster's flair, believed that life belonged in tidy, static categories. Georges-Louis de Buffon, an aristocratic polymath and keeper of France's royal garden, viewed life as a dynamic swirl of complexities. Both began believing their work to be difficult, but not impossible—how could the planet possibly hold more than a few thousand species?

In the wake of the September 11 attacks and the US-led invasion of Iraq, Suzy Hansen, who grew up in an insular conservative town in New Jersey, was enjoying early success as a journalist for a high-profile New York newspaper. Increasingly, though, the disconnect between the chaos of world events and the response at home took on pressing urgency for her. Seeking to understand the Muslim world that had been reduced to scaremongering headlines, she moved to Istanbul.

The Israel lobby exerts incredible power and influence over America. While some informed voters know the US provides more foreign aid to Israel than any other country, the total flow of charitable, tax dollar, military aid, intelligence, and “opportunity cost” are unknown to those footing the bill - and the lobby is determined to keep it that way. Yet storm clouds are gathering over Israel’s lobby. Public opinion polls asking the right questions indicate Americans are nowhere near as approving as many Israel lobbyists insist.

Readability, aesthetics, and argumentation are intertwined. Ryan McCarl shows how litigation documents that are easier and more pleasant to read are more likely to persuade judges and other busy readers. The book also discusses parts of legal writing that many guides overlook, including sentence mechanics, writing technology, and typography.

On the morning of July 3, 1994, a misreported forest fire on Storm King Mountain in Colorado became one of the greatest tragedies in the annals of firefighting. In this dramatic reconstruction of the disaster and its aftermath, John N. MacLean tells the heroic and cautionary story of nature at its most unforgiving.

As a scientist, you are a professional writer: your career is built on successful proposals and papers. Success isn't defined by getting papers into print, but by getting them into the reader's consciousness. Writing Science is built upon the idea that successful science writing tells a story. It uses that insight to discuss how to write more effectively.

You've heard of the "Great Books"? These are their evil opposites. From Machiavelli's The Prince to Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto to Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, these "influential" books have led to war, genocide, totalitarian oppression, family breakdown, and disastrous social experiments. And yet these authors' bad ideas are still popular and pervasive. Here with the antidote is Professor Benjamin Wiker.

For the last 10 years, psychologist Sam Gosling has been studying how people project (and protect) their inner selves. By exploring our private worlds (desks, bedrooms, even our clothes and our cars), he shows not only how we showcase our personalities in unexpected - and unplanned - ways, but also how we create personality in the first place, communicate it to others, and interpret the world around us.

Regina Martínez was no stranger to retaliation. A journalist out of Mexico’s Gulf Coast state of Veracruz, Regina's stories for the magazine Proceso laid out the corruption and abuse underlying Mexican politics. She was barred from press conferences, and copies of Proceso often disappeared before they made the newsstands. In 2012, shortly after Proceso published an article on corruption and two Veracruz politicians, and the magazine went missing once again, she was bludgeoned to death in her bathroom. The message was clear: No journalist in Mexico was safe.

At thirty-seven, Dr. Stephanie Cacioppo was content to be single. She was fulfilled by her work on the neuroscience of romantic love—how finding and growing with a partner literally reshapes our brains. That was, until she met the foremost neuroscientist of loneliness. A whirlwind romance led to marriage, to sharing an office at the University of Chicago. After seven years of being inseparable at work and home, she lost her beloved husband following a devastating battle with cancer.

On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik detonated a bomb outside government buildings in central Oslo, killing eight people. He then proceeded to a youth camp on the island of Utøya, where he killed 69 more, most of them teenage members of Norway's governing Labour Party. In One of Us, the journalist Åsne Seierstad tells the story of this terrible day and what led up to it. What made Breivik, a gifted child from an affluent neighborhood in Oslo, become a terrorist?

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.

If you understand why people buy, you are already one step ahead in reaching out to them effectively with your products and services. Decoded: The Science Behind Why We Buy offers a groundbreaking exploration into the science of purchasing. The book specifically demonstrates why decision science has proven invaluable to the field of marketing by helping to explain purchasing behaviors.

We live in an age of extreme corporate concentration, in which global industries are controlled by just a few giant firms - big banks, big pharma, and big tech, just to name a few. But concern over what Louis Brandeis called the "curse of bigness" can no longer remain the province of specialist lawyers and economists, for it has spilled over into policy and politics, even threatening democracy itself.

In four decades, bookended by the Pope’s visits to Ireland in September 1979 and August 2018, Ireland has become one of the wealthiest and most progressive nations in the world. Characteristically brilliant and timely, Renaissance Nation is a thrilling account of Ireland’s vertiginous rise and a timely exploration of its conflicted present, where stark decisions await the next generation of would-be revolutionaries.

At the age of 27, Whitney Dafoe was forced to give up his life as a photographer who traveled the world. Bit by bit a mysterious illness stole away the pieces of his life: First, it took the strength of his legs, then his voice, and his ability to eat. The Puzzle Solver follows several years in which he desperately sought answers. Whitney's father, Ron Davis, PhD, a world-class geneticist at Stanford University whose legendary research helped crack the code of DNA, suddenly changed the course of his career in a race against time to cure his son's debilitating condition.

This seminal work of nonfiction recounts the new, journalistic mass movement of today. Compiled from more than a decade of investigative reporting, coupled with a vast reference of philosophical research, American Muckraker is the definitive guide of truth-telling in the video age.