Social Sciences Media Studies

Army Wives goes beyond the sound bites and photo ops of military life to bring listeners into the hearts and homes of today's military wives. Biank tells the story of four typical Army wives who, in a flash, find themselves in extraordinary circumstances that ultimately force them to redefine who they are as women and wives.

A global exploration of the Internet meme as an agent of pop culture, politics, protest, and propaganda on and offline and how they will save or destroy us all. Using social media-driven movements as her guide, technologist and digital media scholar An Xiao Mina unpacks the mechanics of memes and how they operate to reinforce, amplify, and shape today's politics.

The crisis that followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers marked the fourth systemic transformation of capitalism since the late 18th century. Capitalism was not destroyed by the crisis, but it was irrevocably changed. This provocative audiobook shows how the forces that precipitated the financial meltdown of 2007-2009 are now creating a new and stronger version of the global capitalist system. This system will continue to be led and shaped by the U.S. if its businesses and politicians play their cards well.

Almost everyone is doing it. Aimlessly scrolling through their social media feeds. From presidents to the postmen, most people you know and probably even yourself. Mindlessly, your fingers move across the screen, and content, from selfies to memes, flickers by at a blistering pace. Why is it that the screen sometimes seems more important than looking up and being present in real life? And what does it mean that more and more people are turning into so-called "Scroll Zombies"? Sven Rollenhagen thoughtfully discusses social media use and how it affects us both psychologically and physically.

Trans woman and screenwriter Tilly Bridges takes you through the trans allegories of the Matrix franchise, with deep dives into The Matrix, The Matrix Reloaded, The Animatrix, The Matrix Revolutions, and The Matrix Resurrections, tracking one person’s transition journey—from Thomas Anderson, to Neo… to Trinity. Each movie’s allegory is deeply layered, building from movie to movie, and speaks to a different aspect of trans existence.

As consumers of art, and especially as fans, we have a host of tricky moral question to navigate: do the moral lives of artists affect the aesthetic quality of their work? In Drawing the Line, Erich Hatala Matthes argues that it doesn't matter whether we can separate the art from the artist, because we shouldn't. Matthes argues both that the lives of artists can play an important role in shaping our moral and aesthetic relationship to the artworks that we love and that these same artworks offer us powerful resources for grappling with the immorality of their creators.

Investors beware! That's the message in Howard Kurtz's The Fortune Tellers. It reveals what happens when 'Net technology meets stock market hype. Listen to an interview with the author on archive edition of Marketplace.

Narratives about decision making are often inadvertently tailored primarily to men. Meanwhile, narratives about women in business overlook decision making or offer advice that is unhelpful and can even backfire. How Women Decide fills this gap. It takes on the very real psychological and cultural obstacles women face, asks how these affect decision making, and suggests practical changes for approaching important choices.

The future is an uncertain, uncomfortable prospect for employees, employers, and society at large. A flurry of unprecedented events have proven that, despite what some politicians and economists may tell us, the future is not set in stone. In light of this uncertainty, The Future Starts Now looks toward the various innovations and technologies that may shape our future. Authors Theo Priestley and Bronwyn Williams have brought together the world's leading futurists to articulate and clarify the current trajectories in technology, economics, politics, and business.

From the popular and award-winning staff writer for The Atlantic, an eye-opening look at how the current media landscape has incentivized us to see our fellow citizens as characters in an ongoing entertainment—and how we can fight back against this phenomenon.

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.

Over the past generation, the Democratic and Republican parties have each become nationally coordinated political teams. American political institutions, on the other hand, remain highly decentralized. Laboratories against Democracy shows how national political conflicts are increasingly flowing through the subnational institutions of state politics—with profound consequences for public policy and American democracy.

Women have been told that being pretty comes at the expense of being taken seriously. If a woman is physically attractive, there is often a presumption that she lacks the substance and smarts necessary to provide leadership. This narrative implies that being pretty and being capable are mutually exclusive. But in Pretty Powerful, Fox News political commentator and legal analyst Eboni Williams rejects that narrative. She says that to accept the false notion that beauty and power are mutually exclusive is to leave an incredibly powerful tool on the table.

The perfect book for all student journalists, this young learners adaptation of Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters' Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey's New York Times best-selling She Said will inspire a new generation of investigative journalists.

What is the connection between physics and consciousness? In this groundbreaking new audiobook, Samuel Avery presents the quantum screen, a paradigm-shifting model of perceptual consciousness and of the world. This model looks to the enigmas of modern physics to demonstrate the primacy of consciousness - the essential oneness of spirit and matter.

Every president has been convinced of his own honesty and transparency; every reporter who has covered the White House beat has believed with equal fervency that his or her journalistic rigor protects the country from danger. Our first president, George Washington, was also the first to grouse about his treatment in the newspapers, although he kept his complaints private. Subsequent chiefs like John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Barack Obama were not so reticent, going so far as to wield executive power to overturn press freedoms, and even to prosecute journalists.

Barcelona and Real Madrid: two of the most powerful and popular clubs in world football, and one of the world's most bitter sporting rivalries. Going far beyond the boundaries of just sport alone, this is a rivalry at the heart of Spanish life, taking in politics and culture and splitting a country in two. El Clasico gets to the heart of that rivalry, investigating the intrigue, the larger-than-life characters, the key flashpoints and their consequences.

Producing the Acceptable Sex Worker considers how sex work is produced in news media narratives, a site where much of the general public draws its understanding of the industry in the absence of lived interaction with it. Taking New Zealand as a case study, this book considers an emerging discourse of acceptability for some sex workers, primarily those who do low-volume indoor work. Their acceptability is established in comparison with other kinds of sex workers, resulting in a redistribution but not a reduction of stigma.

There's no such thing as ghosts. It's always a trick, a scheme devised by mere mortal men to keep people away from the site of the haunting or other creepy phenomenon.

The consequences of adopting the cynical but popular worldview are many, including needless pessimism, missed investment opportunities, and - surprisingly - even poorer health. Yet An Embarrassment of Riches provides a powerful antidote. Green begins with a robust survey of the many ways our lives are becoming longer, easier, safer, healthier and more prosperous. He then embarks on a wide-ranging exploration of the ideas and the many men and women - both living and dead - who are still enriching our lives today.