Sociology Science

Rose George, acclaimed chronicler of what we would rather ignore, sails from Rotterdam to Suez to Singapore on ships the length of football fields and the height of Niagara Falls; she patrols the Indian Ocean with an anti-piracy task force; she joins seafaring chaplains and investigates the harm that ships inflict on endangered whales. Sharply informative and entertaining, Ninety Percent of Everything reveals the workings and perils of an unseen world that holds the key to our economy, our environment, and our very civilization.

Liza was a healthy 34-year-old when she discovered she could not carry a baby. Like the one of every six women who hears this news, Liza and her husband, David, despaired that they would never be parents. They both had careers. Life would go on...in other ways.Then the unpredictable happened. Liza's cousin, Jennifer, offered to be the gestational carrier for Liza and David. This is the story of how two women and their husbands came to the incredible decision to put their faith, their lifelong friendship, and their hearts into the rigorous, uncharted and emotional science of creating new life.

In Four Lost Cities, acclaimed science journalist Annalee Newitz takes listeners on an entertaining and mind-bending adventure into the deep history of urban life. Investigating across the centuries and around the world, Newitz explores the rise and fall of four ancient cities, each the center of a sophisticated civilization: the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Central Turkey, the Roman vacation town of Pompeii in Italy, the medieval megacity of Angkor in Cambodia, and the indigenous metropolis Cahokia, which stood beside the Mississippi River where East St. Louis is today.

What do Soul Cycle, gratitude journals, and tech breaks have in common? For ter Kuile, they offer rituals that create the foundation for our modern spiritual lives. Casper ter Kuile, a Harvard Divinity School fellow and cohost of the popular Harry Potter and the Sacred Text podcast, explores how we can nourish our souls by transforming common, everyday practices - yoga, reading, walking the dog - into sacred rituals that can heal our crisis of social isolation and struggle to find purpose.

In this classic account of madness, Michel Foucault shows once and for all why he is one of the most distinguished European philosophers since the end of World War II. Madness and Civilization, Foucault's first book and his finest accomplishment, will change the way in which you think about society. Evoking shock, pity, and fascination, it might also make you question the way you think about yourself.

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.

What if I told you that all the research needed to end the disease of cancer forever has already been completed? Would you believe it? Well, now you don’t have to! Cancer: The Metabolic Disease Unravelled is your complete guide to the revolutionary scientific discoveries made over the past 150 years that reveal exactly what cancer is, what cancer isn’t, and the most efficient ways to heal it - without causing patients any harm whatsoever in the process.

Tapping their personal histories and drawing on numerous interviews, authors Brook Noel and Pamela D. Blair, Ph.D., explore unexpected death and its role in the cycle of life. I Wasn't Ready to Say Goodbye provides survivors with a rock-steady anchor from which to weather the storm of pain and begin to rebuild their lives.

Applying cutting-edge research in the field of positive psychology - the scientific principles taught in his wildly popular course at Harvard University - Ben-Shahar takes us off the impossible pursuit of perfection and directs us to the way to happiness, richness, and true fulfillment. He shows us the freedom derived from not trying to do it all right all the time and the real lessons that failure and painful emotions can teach us.

Many years of working with the dying showed the authors that certain lessons come up over and over again. Some of these lessons are enormously difficult to master but even the attempts to understand them can be deeply rewarding. Here, in 14 accessible chapters, from the "Lesson of Love" to the "Lesson of Happiness", the authors reveal the truth about our fears, our hopes, our relationships, and above all, about the grandness of who we really are.

Millions of Americans have lost confidence in our political and economic system. After years of stagnant wages, volatile job markets, and an unwillingness by those in power to deal with profound threats such as climate change, there is a mounting sense that the system is fixed, serving only those select few with enough money to secure a controlling stake. With the characteristic clarity and passion that has made him a central civil voice, Robert B. Reich shows how wealth and power have interacted to install an elite oligarchy, eviscerate the middle class, and undermine democracy.

As a childfree woman, Dr. Amy Blackstone is no stranger to a wide range of negative responses when she informs people she doesn't have - nor does she want - kids: confused looks, patronizing quips, thinly veiled pity, even outright scorn and condemnation. But she is not alone in opting out when it comes to children. More people than ever are choosing to forgo parenthood, and openly discussing a choice that's still often perceived as taboo. Yet this choice, and its effects personally and culturally, are still often misunderstood.

Capitalist ideology wants us to believe that there is an optimal way to live. "Making connections" means networking for work. Our emotional needs are to be fulfilled by a single romantic partner, and self-care equates to taking personal responsibility for our suffering. We must be productive and heteronormative; we must have babies and buy a house. But the kicker is most people cannot and do not want to achieve all or any of these life goals. Instead, we are left feeling atomized, exhausted, and disempowered. Radical Intimacy shows that it doesn't need to be this way.

Why You Think the Way You Do traces the development of the worldviews that underpin the Western world. Professor and historian Glenn S. Sunshine demonstrates the decisive impact that the growth of Christianity had in transforming the outlook of pagan Roman culture into one that—based on biblical concepts of humanity and its relationship with God—established virtually all the positive aspects of Western civilization.

World renowned scientist Carl Sagan and acclaimed author Ann Druyan have written a Roots for the human species, a lucid and riveting account of how humans got to be the way we are. It shows with humor and drama that many of our key traits - self-awareness, technology, family ties, submission to authority, hatred for those a little different from ourselves, reason, and ethics - are rooted in the deep past, and illuminated by our kinship with other animals.

Whether they conducted their research in life or in the lab, experts Tucker Max and Dr. Geoffrey Miller have spent the last 20-plus years learning what women really want from their men, why they want it, and how men can deliver those qualities.

Fans of MTV’s critically acclaimed hit series, Teen Mom, have followed Farrah Abraham’s tumultuous life as a single teen mother. Her fiery, relentless spirit, and her unwavering commitment to getting the best out of life for herself and her daughter, Sophia, in spite of all the drama constantly surrounding her have made her a beloved star and media sensation. Now, in this unflinching, at times heartbreaking, memoir, Farrah reveals the difficult truth about the life that hasn’t been seen on television.

Drawing on vast new data that reveal Americans' changing behavior, Putnam shows how we have become increasingly disconnected from one another and how social structures - whether they be PTA, church, or political parties - have disintegrated. Until the publication of this groundbreaking work, no one had so deftly diagnosed the harm that these broken bonds have wreaked on our physical and civic health, nor had anyone exalted their fundamental power in creating a society that is happy, healthy, and safe.

COVID-19 and the Global Predators is much more than an analysis of the current exploitation of humanity under cover of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. It discloses for the first time the actual blueprint and master plan that was 10 years in the making by global predators before the pandemic: a plan to reorganize the world in the name of public health. Billionaires, government agencies, giant funds, and major industries collaborated years ahead of time to lay the groundwork for what would become Operation Warp Speed and the Great Reset in 2020.

At a time when the crises of income inequality, climate, and democracy are compounding to create epic wealth disparity and the prospect of a second American civil war, four billionaires are hyping schemes that are designed to divert our attention away from issues that really matter. Each scheme—the metaverse, cryptocurrency, space travel, and transhumanism—is an existential threat in moral, political, and economic terms. In The End of Reality¸ Jonathan Taplin provides perceptive insight into the personal backgrounds and cultural power of these billionaires.