Social Sciences Media Studies

Communication professor and CNN Opinion contributor Kara Alaimo reveals how social media is affecting every aspect of the lives of women and girls—from our relationships and our parenting to our physical and mental well-being. Over the Influence is an audiobook about what it means to live in the world social media has wrought—whether you’re constantly connected or have deleted your accounts forever.

When Rupert Murdoch enlisted Roger Ailes to launch a cable news network in 1996, American politics and media changed forever. With a remarkable level of detail and insight, Vanity Fair magazine reporter Gabriel Sherman puts Ailes’s unique genius on display, along with the outsize personalities - Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Megyn Kelly, Sarah Palin, Karl Rove, Glenn Beck, Mike Huckabee, Gretchen Carlson, Bill Shine, and others - who have helped Fox News play a defining role in the great social and political controversies of the past two decades.

Why has punditry overtaken news, with so many media outlets pushing partisan agendas instead of information? Comedian Stephen Colbert's catchword "truthiness" has captured something essential about our age: that people are more comfortable with ideas that feel true, even if the evidence for those beliefs is thin.

Providing a post-COP26 perspective on the climate emergency, Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant's Guide acknowledges that it is now practically impossible to keep this side of the 1.5°C dangerous climate change guardrail. The upshot is that we can no longer dodge the arrival of a disastrous, all-pervasive climate breakdown that will come. Bill McGuire explains the science behind the climate crisis, painting a blunt but authentic picture of the sort of world our children will grow old in, and our grandchildren grow up in, a world that we catch only glimpses of today.

From one of the greatest French philosophers of the 20th century comes a seminal study and critique of propaganda. Taking not only a psychological approach but a sociological approach as well, Jacques Ellul outlines the taxonomy for propaganda and, ultimately, its destructive nature towards democracy. Drawing from his own experiences fighting for the French resistance against the Vichy regime, Ellul offers a unique insight into the propaganda machine.

First published in 1991, Backlash made headlines and became a best-selling classic for its thoroughgoing debunking of a decade-long antifeminist backlash against women’s advances. As Faludi writes in a new preface for this edition, much has changed in the intervening years. This startling and essential book helps explain why women’s freedoms are still so demonized and threatened - and urges us to choose a different future.

El nou llibre del reconegut historiador i autor del fenomen global Sàpiens. Una obra que analitza com les xarxes d'informació han conformat el món i a nosaltres mateixos. A Nexus, Y. N. Harari contempla la humanitat des de l'àmplia perspectiva de la història per analitzar com les xarxes d'informació han conformat el nostre món i a nosaltres mateixos. Durant els últims 100.000 anys, els sàpiens hem acumulat un poder enorme.

Steven L. Kent has been playing video games since Pong and writing about the industry since the Nintendo Entertainment System. In volume 1 of The Ultimate History of Video Games, he chronicled the industry’s first thirty years. In volume 2, he narrates gaming’s entrance into the twenty-first century, as Nintendo, Sega, Sony, and Microsoft battle to capture the global market.

Brought to life through real-world examples and backed by rigorous data, The Athena Doctrine shows how feminine traits are ascending - and bringing success to people and organizations around the world. By nurturing, listening, collaborating and sharing, women and men are solving problems, finding profits, and redefining success in every realm.

Lewis Howes grew up as an athlete. He was a two-sport All-American and went on to play football professionally. Howes then transferred his competitive nature from sports to business, building his podcast, The School of Greatness, into a global phenomenon. But his whole identity was built on misguided beliefs about what "masculinity" was: dangerous, false ideas learned from teammates and coaches in locker rooms and stereotypes in the media. Like so many men, Howes grew up to be angry, frustrated, and always chasing something that was never enough.

This memoir written by writer, orator, and former slave Frederick Douglass describes, in gripping detail, the circumstances of his upbringing, his brutal treatment at the hands of slave-owners, and his narrow escape from Maryland to freedom. Written in 1845, this narrative is one of the most famous works of American literature and provided fuel for the abolitionist movement that began in the early 19th century.

People are now exposed to more information than ever before, provided both by technology and by increasing access to every level of education. These societal gains, however, have also helped fuel a surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that has crippled informed debates on any number of issues. Today, everyone knows everything and all voices demand to be taken with equal seriousness, and any claim to the contrary is dismissed as undemocratic elitism.

When a murderous psychopath goes on a killing spree, law enforcement officials and the media never make his religion the central issue - unless he happens to be a Muslim. Then it sets off another frenzied wave of commentary about the inherent evils that lurk within the Muslim faith. From Fox News talking heads, who regularly smear Muslim leaders as secret terrorists, to Bill Maher, who has made Islam a routine target, it has become widely acceptable to libel a religion with a following of over 1.5 billion people.

With all the whiz, bang, pop, and shimmer of a glowing arcade, volume 1 of The Ultimate History of Video Games reveals everything you ever wanted to know and more about the unforgettable games that changed the world, the visionaries who made them, and the fanatics who played them. Starting in arcades then moving to televisions and handheld devices, the video game invasion has entranced kids and the young at heart for nearly fifty years. And gaming historian Steven L. Kent has been there to record the craze from the very beginning.

Is it just a phase, a fad, or a real issue with your teen? This comprehensive guidebook explores the unique challenges that thousands of families face every day raising a teenager who may be transgender, gender-variant, or gender-fluid. Covering extensive research and with many personal interviews, as well as years of experience working in the field, the author covers pressing concerns relating to physical and emotional development, social and school pressures, medical options, and family communications.

In an era of increasing social isolation, platforms like Facebook and Twitter are among the most important tools we have to understand each other. We use social media as a mirror to decipher our place in society, but, as Chris Bail explains, it functions more like a prism that distorts our identities, empowers status-seeking extremists, and renders moderates all but invisible.

When NBC decided to move Jay Leno into prime time to make room for Conan O'Brien to host the Tonight show - a job he had been promised five years earlier - skeptics anticipated a train wreck for the ages. It took, in fact, only a few months for the dire predictions to come true. Leno's show, panned by critics, dragged down the ratings - and the profits - of NBC's affiliates, while ratings for Conan's new Tonight show plummeted to the lowest levels in history.

In Raising Trump, Ivana Trump reflects on her extraordinary life and the raising of her three children - Donald Jr., Eric, and Ivanka - and recounts the lessons she taught her children as they were growing up.

Early True Believers: The Untold Story of Silicon Alley is a 1990s saga of ambition and innovation set in Manhattan’s Silicon Alley, a swath of downtown that served as New York City’s nerve center of tech entrepreneurship. The series features the stories of a forgotten cohort of early internet visionaries, countercultural social networks, the digital gold rush, and the lavish events that came with it, including one held in an underground Tribeca bunker that abruptly ended in a police raid—a harbinger of the upheaval to come.

How did we become a world where facts—shared truths—have lost their power to hold us together as a community, as a country, globally? How have we allowed the proliferation of alternative facts, hoaxes, even conspiracy theories, to destroy our trust in institutions, leaders, and legitimate experts? Best-selling journalist Steven Brill documents the forces and people, from Silicon Valley to Moscow to Washington, that have created and exploited this world of chaos and division—and offers practical solutions for what we can do about it.