Sociology Science

Rory Stewart was an unlikely politician. He was best known for his two-year walk across Asia—in which he crossed Afghanistan, essentially solo, in the months after 9/11—and for his service, as a diplomat in Iraq, and Afghanistan. But in 2009, he abandoned his chair at Harvard University to stand for a seat in Parliament, representing the communities and farms of the Lake District and the Scottish border—one of the most isolated and beautiful districts in England.

How do we make and keep friends in an era of distraction, burnout, and chaos, especially in a society that often prizes romantic love at the expense of other relationships? In Platonic, Dr. Marisa G. Franco unpacks the latest, often counterintuitive findings about the bonds between us—for example, why your friends aren’t texting you back (it’s not because they hate you!), and the myth of “friendships happening organically” (making friends, like cultivating any relationship, requires effort!).

Fascinated by our pervasive terror of dead bodies, mortician Caitlin Doughty set out to discover how other cultures care for their dead. In rural Indonesia, she observes a man clean and dress his grandfather's mummified body. Grandpa's mummy has lived in the family home for two years, where the family has maintained a warm and respectful relationship. She meets Bolivian natitas (cigarette-smoking, wish-granting human skulls) and introduces us to a Japanese kotsuage.

The Strange Order of Things is a pathbreaking investigation into homeostasis, the condition that regulates human physiology within the range that makes possible not only the survival but also the flourishing of life. Antonio Damasio makes clear that we descend biologically, psychologically, and even socially from a long lineage that begins with single living cells; that our minds and cultures are linked by an invisible thread to the ways and means of ancient unicellular life and other primitive life-forms.

In 2007, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett filmed a landmark discussion about modern atheism. The video went viral. Now, the transcript of their conversation is illuminated by new essays from three of the original participants and an introduction by Stephen Fry.

What is it like for a convicted murderer who has spent decades behind bars to suddenly find himself released into a world he barely recognizes? What is it like to start over from nothing? To answer these questions Sabine Heinlein followed the everyday lives and emotional struggles of Angel Ramos and his friends Bruce and Adam - three men convicted of some of society's most heinous crimes - as they return to the free world.

In this eloquent and persuasive book, Neil Postman examines the deep and broad effects of television culture on the manner in which we conduct our public affairs, and how "entertainment values" have corrupted the very way we think. As politics, news, religion, education, and commerce are given less and less expression in the form of the printed word, they are rapidly being reshaped to suit the requirements of television.

Avez-vous l'impression que ce que vous faites dans la vie n'est pas décidé par vous ? Ou comme si quelqu'un vous manipulait et vous utilisait comme une pièce d'échec ? Voulez-vous commencer à comprendre rapidement les gens, détecter leurs tromperies et vous en défendre ?

In 1945, Germany lay in ruins, morally and materially. Its citizens stood condemned by history, responsible for a horrifying genocide and war of extermination. But by the end of Angela Merkel’s tenure in 2021, Germany looked like the moral voice of Europe. How did a nation whose past has been marked by mass murder reinvent themselves, and how much? Trentmann tells this dramatic story of the German people from the middle of the Second World War through the Cold War and the division of East and West to the fall of the Berlin Wall and their struggle to find their place in the world today.

A Paradise Built in Hell is an investigation of the moments of altruism, resourcefulness, and generosity that arise amid disaster's grief and disruption and considers their implications for everyday life. It points to a new vision of what society could become - one that is less authoritarian and fearful, more collaborative and local.

"The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently," wrote David Graeber. A renowned anthropologist, activist, and author, Graeber was as well-known for his sharp, lively essays as he was for his iconic role in the Occupy movement and his paradigm-shifting tomes. Today we live amidst converging political, economic, and ecological crises, and yet our politics are dominated by either a "business as usual" attitude or nostalgia for a mythical past.

In Poor Queer Studies, Matt Brim shifts queer studies away from its familiar sites of elite education toward poor and working-class people, places, and pedagogies. Brim shows how queer studies also takes place beyond the halls of flagship institutions: in night school; after a three-hour commute; in overflowing classrooms at no-name colleges; with no research budget; without access to decent food; with kids in tow; in a state of homelessness.

In 1968, at the climax of the '60s, Os Guinness visited the United States for the first time. There he was struck by an impression he’d already felt in England and elsewhere: Beneath all the idealism and struggle for freedom was a growing disillusionment and loss of meaning. “Underneath the efforts of a generation”, he wrote, “lay dust”. Even more troubling, Christians seemed uninformed about the cultural shifts and ill-equipped to respond. Guinness took on these concerns by writing his first book, The Dust of Death.

Capital Without Borders tackles this tantalizing question through a groundbreaking multi-year investigation of the men and women who specialize in protecting the fortunes of the world's richest people. Brooke Harrington followed the money to the 18 most popular tax havens in the world, interviewing wealth managers to understand how they help their high-net-worth clients dodge taxes, creditors, and disgruntled heirs - all while staying just within the letter of the law.

With the appearance of Grunch of Giants, R. Buckminster Fuller consummates his literary canon, his panoramic lifetime survey of all aspects of the responsibility of human beings for their own destiny. This book is a modern allegory - his long-gestated myth-of the villainy of capitalism and the fecklessness of classic economics. For Fuller, the academic discipline of economics is irrelevant since it derives from an invalid assumption of scarcity.

Funerary rituals show us what people thought about mortality; how they felt about loss; what they believed came next. From Roman cremations and graveside feasts, to deviant burials with heads rearranged, from richly furnished Anglo Saxon graves to the first Christian burial grounds in Wales, Buried provides an alternative history of the first millennium in Britain.

Throughout the world, mental capacity is declining, especially among young people, while depression rates are rising dramatically. Meanwhile, one in forty men and women suffers from Alzheimer's, and the age of onset is falling rapidly. But the causes are not being eliminated, quite the opposite. Can this just be coincidence? The Indoctrinated Brain introduces a largely unknown, powerful neurobiological mechanism whose externally induced dysfunction underlies these catastrophic developments.

Tribalism is our most misunderstood buzzword. We’ve all heard pundits bemoan its rise, and it’s been blamed for everything from political polarization to workplace discrimination. But as acclaimed cultural psychologist and Columbia professor Michael Morris argues, our tribal instincts are humanity’s secret weapon. Ours is the only species that lives in tribes: groups glued together by their distinctive cultures that can grow to a scale far beyond clans and bands. Morris argues that our psychology is wired by evolution in three distinctive ways.

Dr. Brian Goldman always believed that caring came naturally to physicians but over time was left wondering if he might not be the same caring doctor he was at the beginning of his career. The Power of Kindness takes us far from the theatre of medicine and into the world at large and investigates why kindness is so vital to our existence.

How Real Estate Developers Think considers developers from three different perspectives. Brown profiles the careers of individual developers to illustrate the character of the entrepreneur; considers the roles played by innovation, design, marketing, and sales in the production of real estate; and examines the risks and rewards that motivate developers as people.