Social Society

An entertaining, scientifically rigorous exploration of the social and biological effects of our wireless world. The way we use technology is affecting our health and happiness. Engaging and entertaining yet scientifically rigorous, this fully revised and updated second edition of i-Minds comprehensively explores an era of screen-based technology's assimilation into our lives, pondering it as both godsend and plague. i-Minds is for anyone interested in fostering health and happiness or who is struggling with the role of screened technology in our lives.

International sex researcher, neuroscientist, and columnist Debra Soh debunks popular gender myths in this scientific examination of the many facets of gender identity that “is not only eminently reasonable and beautifully-written, it is brave and vital” (Ben Shapiro, number-one New York Times best-selling author).

Before the 18th century, every single nutmeg in the world originated around a group of small volcanic islands east of Java, known as the Banda Islands. As the nutmeg made its way across the known world, they became immensely valuable—in 16th-century Europe, just a handful could buy a house. It was not long before European traders became conquerors, and the indigenous Bandanese communities—and the islands themselves—would pay a high price for access to this precious commodity.

Reissued on the 10th anniversary of its publication, this classic work on our environmental crisis features a new introduction by the author, reviewing both the progress and ground lost in the fight to save the Earth. This impassioned plea for radical and life-renewing change is today still considered a groundbreaking work in environmental studies. McKibben's argument that the survival of the globe is dependent on a fundamental, philosophical shift in the way we relate to nature is more relevant than ever.

Sand and stone are Earth's fragmented memory. Each of us, too, is a landscape inscribed by memory and loss. One life-defining lesson Lauret Savoy learned as a young girl was this: the American land did not hate. As an educator and Earth historian, she has tracked the continent's past from the relics of time; but the paths of ancestors toward her - paths of free and enslaved Africans, colonists from Europe, and peoples indigenous to this land - lie largely eroded and lost. In this provocative and powerful mosaic of personal journeys and historical inquiry across a continent and time.

The men involved in secret societies use their special knowledge for the benefit of all mankind. At least, that is what they claim. How are we to know, since their knowledge and actions have been secret? Fortunately, some of it has become public knowledge.

As we move from the industrial age and its nation state to an internet age with a globalized postindustrial market, a question presents itself: What is the next major developmental stage of society after the liberal democracy with a balance between capitalism and welfare state? In this audiobook Hanzi Freinacht offers a compelling answer to this question. We are reaching the limits of modern society, and we must work to achieve a metamodern society, that is, a society that goes beyond modern life and its institutions. The metamodern society of the future is a listening society.

Jaron Lanier, a Silicon Valley visionary since the 1980s, was among the first to predict the revolutionary changes the World Wide Web would bring to commerce and culture. Now, in his first book, written more than two decades after the web was created, Lanier offers this provocative and cautionary look at the way it is transforming our lives for better and for worse.

When Ashley Shew became a self-described "hard-of-hearing chemobrained amputee with Crohn's disease and tinnitus," there was no returning to "normal." Suddenly well-meaning people called her an "inspiration" while grocery shopping or viewed her as a needy recipient of technological wizardry. Most disabled people don't want what the abled assume they want—nor are they generally asked. In vibrant prose, Shew shows how we can create better narratives and more accessible futures by drawing from the insights of the cross-disability community.

This audiobook is an invitation to a dream school with a faculty that includes 12 of the greatest philosophers from the ancient world, sharing their lessons in happiness, resilience and much more. Discover how soldiers, psychologists, gangsters, astronauts, anarchists and others use these ideas today. Lively and powerful, this is philosophy for the street, for the workplace, for the battlefield, for love, for life.

Listeners of this book will gain a clear understanding of what makes the Japanese, and their society, tick.

From the illustrious George Washington and the infamous J. Edgar Hoover to brilliant imaginer Walt Disney and bad boy of baseball Ty Cobb, Freemasons have influenced every aspect of American life. Yet this secret society remains as controversial and mysterious as ever. In this tell-all audiobook, you'll learn the truth about the largest - and oldest - fraternal organization and unravel the mystery of this intriguing society - one secret at a time!

Max Liboiron presents a framework for understanding scientific research methods as practices that can align with or against colonialism. Focusing on plastic pollution, the book models an anticolonial scientific practice aligned with Indigenous, particularly Metis, concepts of land, ethics, and relations. Liboiron draws on their work in the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research—an anticolonial science laboratory—to illuminate how pollution is not a symptom of capitalism but a violent enactment of colonial land relations that claim access to Indigenous land.

Explaining Postmodernism is intellectual history with a polemical twist, providing fresh insights into the debates underlying the furor over political correctness, multiculturalism, and the future of liberal democracy.

The Book of Radical Answers is a groundbreaking work of non-fiction by author and activist Sonya Renee Taylor that gives honest, empowering and age appropriate answers to real questions from young listeners about health, sex, gender, race and justice. Steeped in joy and possibility, Taylor's writing assures kids that, as they mature, life will be fun, complicated, strange and wonderful, and most importantly, that they are amazing and have the ability to thrive with the inherent knowledge of their self-worth.

Critical theory emerged in the 1920s from the work of the Frankfurt School, the circle of German-Jewish academics who sought to diagnose—and, if at all possible, cure—the ills of society, particularly fascism and capitalism. In this book, Stephen Eric Bronner provides sketches of leading representatives of the critical tradition (such as George Lukács and Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse and Jurgen Habermas) as well as many of its seminal texts and empirical investigations.

For too long, scientists have focused on the dark side of our biological heritage: our capacity for aggression, cruelty, prejudice, and self-interest. But natural selection has given us a suite of beneficial social features, including our capacity for love, friendship, cooperation, and learning. Beneath all our inventions - our tools, farms, machines, cities, nations - we carry with us innate proclivities to make a good society.

Award-winning author, Jeremy Lent, investigates humanity's age-old questions - Who am I? Why am I? How should I live? - from a fresh perspective, weaving together findings from modern systems thinking, evolutionary biology, and cognitive neuroscience with insights from Buddhism, Taoism, and Indigenous wisdom.

For years, consumers have been promised a simple, carefree digital future. We could live, work, learn, and play from the comforts of our homes, and have whatever we desire brought to our door with the flick of a finger. Instant communication would bring us together. Technological convenience would give us more time to focus on what really mattered. When the pandemic hit, that future transformed into the present, almost overnight. And the reviews aren't great.

When Pete Etchells was 13, his father died from motor neurone disease. In order to cope, he immersed himself in a virtual world - first as an escape, but later to try to understand what had happened. Etchells is now a researcher into the psychological effects of video games, and was co-author on a recent paper explaining why WHO plans to classify "game addiction" as a danger to public health are based on bad science and (he thinks) are a bad idea. In this, his first book, he journeys through the history and development of video games via scientific study....