Social Society

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.

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.

After the staggering slaughter of back-to-back world wars, the West embraced the ideal of the "open society". The promise: By liberating ourselves from the old attachments to nation, clan, and religion that had fueled centuries of violence, we could build a prosperous world without borders, freed from dogmas and managed by experts. But the populism and nationalism that are upending politics in America and Europe are a sign that after three generations, the postwar consensus is breaking down.

Papyrus rolls and Twitter have much in common, as each was their generation's signature means of "instant" communication. Indeed, as Tom Standage reveals in his scintillating new audiobook, social media is anything but a new phenomenon. From the papyrus letters that Roman statesmen used to exchange news across the Empire to the advent of hand-printed tracts of the Reformation to the pamphlets that spread propaganda during the American and French revolutions, Standage chronicles the increasingly sophisticated ways people shared information with each other....

In the immediate aftermath of the attack on the Capitol of January 6, 2021, a growing movement of grassroots activists began plotting around the country to pick up where the insurrection left off, laying the groundwork to succeed next time where Donald Trump had failed to keep himself in power. Inspired by Trump’s false claims of a stolen election, this nationwide groundswell quickly moved beyond rhetoric and into action. Election deniers began capturing local party committees, elevating like-minded insurgents, and developing a new way forward.

To many of us, the Earth's crust is a relic of ancient, unknowable history. But to a geologist, stones are richly illustrated narratives, telling gothic tales of cataclysm and reincarnation. For more than four billion years, in beach sand, granite, and garnet schists, the planet has kept a rich and idiosyncratic journal of its past. Fulbright Scholar Marcia Bjornerud takes the listener along on an eye-opening tour of Deep Time, explaining in elegant prose what we see and feel beneath our feet.

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.

Everything is a computer. Ovens are computers that make things hot; refrigerators are computers that keep things cold. These computers - from home thermostats to chemical plants - are all online. All computers can be hacked. And Internet-connected computers are the most vulnerable. Forget data theft: Cutting-edge digital attackers can now crash your car, your pacemaker, and the nation’s power grid. In Click Here to Kill Everybody, renowned expert and best-selling author Bruce Schneier examines the hidden risks of this new reality.

Im Leben ist irgendwann vieles entschieden: wen wir lieben, wo wir arbeiten, wie wir wohnen. Manche sind froh, angekommen zu sein – andere fürchten, festzustecken in einem Leben voller Routinen, und fragen sich, ob es das schon war. Wie finden wir neue Lebensziele, wenn vieles erreicht ist? Wie gehen wir damit um, dass sich die Zeithorizonte langsam verengen und einige Züge mittlerweile abgefahren sind? Philosophisch fundiert und voller Bezüge aus dem Alltag denkt Barbara Bleisch nach über Lebenserfahrung, Leichtigkeit und Gelassenheit.

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).

In The Revenge of Geography, Robert D. Kaplan builds on the insights, discoveries, and theories of great geographers and geopolitical thinkers of the near and distant past to look back at critical pivots in history and then to look forward at the evolving global scene. Kaplan traces the history of the world's hot spots by examining their climates, topographies, and proximities to other embattled lands.

At once a beautifully poetic memoir and an exploration of the various ways we live in the world, A Language Older Than Words explains violence as a pathology that touches every aspect of our lives and indeed affects all aspects of life on Earth. This chronicle of a young man's drive to transcend domestic abuse offers a challenging look at our worldwide sense of community and how we can make things better.

This comprehensive audio textbook has 17 chapters covering the beginnings of sociology as an academic research discipline, culture and media, sociological research, socialization across the life course, social structure and social interaction, groups and organizations, deviance and crime, and social class and social stratification, global stratification, race and ethnicity, gender and sex, sexuality, family, religion, education and healthcare, politics, the economy, and population and society.

What does it mean for someone to be an asshole? The answer is not obvious, despite the fact that we are often personally stuck dealing with people for whom there is no better name. Try as we might to avoid them, assholes are found everywhere - at work, at home, on the road, and in the public sphere. Encountering one causes great difficulty and personal strain, especially because we often cannot understand why exactly someone should be acting like that.

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.

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

" Une plongée vertigineuse dans les racines de la violence et dans les ravages du fanatisme. Et un vibrant plaidoyer pour que subsiste, même dans l'horreur, une part d'humanité. " Le Parisien week-end. Comment rester debout face à la violence, à l'horreur ? Comment regarder dans les yeux celui qui vous a enlevé ce que vous aviez de plus précieux ? Comment pardonner à l'assassin d'un des siens ? Comment garder espoir quand tant d'atrocités sont commises au nom de la religion ? Toutes ces questions qui nous assaillent dans une actualité toujours plus tragique, Colum McCann y a été confronté lors de sa rencontre avec Diane Foley.

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.

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.

Though created by humans, our technologies, markets, and institutions often contain an antihuman agenda. Douglas Rushkoff, digital theorist and host of the NPR-One podcast Team Human, reveals the dynamics of this antihuman machinery and invites us to remake these aspects of society in ways that foster our humanity. In 100 aphoristic statements, his manifesto exposes how forces for human connection have turned into ones of isolation and repression.