Wellness Culture

When Chrissy King first joined a gym, she had one goal in mind: to “get skinny.” In pursuit of this goal, she fell into the all-too-common cycle of “not enough-ness”; no matter what she achieved, there was always something she felt she needed to change about her body, her appearance, herself. This made her realize the most liberating truth of all: She was not the problem. The Body Liberation Project is about finding actual freedom in our bodies by discovering strength and aspects of fitness, movement, and eating that work for YOU.

When Johnson went to work for the US Antarctic Program (devoted to scientific research and education in support of the national interest in the Antarctic), he figured he'd find adventure, beauty, penguins, and lofty-minded scientists. Instead he found boredom, alcohol, and bureaucracy. As a dishwasher and garbage man at McMurdo Station, Johnson quickly shed his illusions about Antarctica.

When Eric Wendel was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia in 1966, the survival rate was less than 10 percent. Today, it is 90 percent. Even as politicians call for a "Cancer Moonshot", this accomplishment remains a pinnacle in cancer research. The author's daughter, then a medical student at Georgetown Medical School, told her father about this amazing success story. Tim Wendel soon discovered that many of the doctors at the forefront of this effort cared for his brother at Roswell Park in Buffalo, New York. Wendel went in search of this extraordinary group.

Journalist Debbie Nathan reveals the true story behind the famous case of Sybil, the woman with sixteen different personalities.

In Life Inc., award-winning writer, documentary filmmaker, and scholar Douglas Rushkoff traces how corporations went from being convenient legal fictions to being the dominant fact of contemporary life. Indeed, as Rushkoff shows, most Americans have so willingly adopted the values of corporations that they’re no longer even aware of it.

Clifford Nass has developed a powerful theory: Our brains can’t fundamentally distinguish between interacting with people and interacting with devices. Nass’s discoveries push the boundaries of both psychology and technology and provide nothing less than a new blueprint for successful human relationships.

In The Best Place to Work, award-winning psychologist Ron Friedman, Ph.D. uses the latest research from the fields of motivation, creativity, behavioral economics, neuroscience, and management to reveal what really makes us successful at work. Combining powerful stories with cutting edge findings, Friedman shows leaders at every level how they can use scientifically-proven techniques to promote smarter thinking, greater innovation, and stronger performance.

Social psychologist and Professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business Brian Lowery argues for the radical idea that the “self” as we know it, does not exist. The self—that “voice in your head”—is a social construct, created in our relationships and social interactions. We are unique because our individual pattern of relationships is unique. We change because our relationships change. Your self isn’t just you, it’s all around you.

For many women, body goals are all about loss. In Give Yourself More, leading health experts Georgie Fear and K. Aleisha Fetters draw on psychology, cultural studies, and the science of behavioral change to reveal how the pursuit of less gets women very little. They teach you how to flip the script on losing mind-sets, so you can change your body and life for the positive.

Researchers have found that the accelerated pace of modern office life is taking its toll on productivity, employee engagement, creativity and wellbeing. Faced with a relentless flood of information and distractions, our brains try to process everything at once, increasing our stress, decreasing our effectiveness and negatively impacting our performance.

What If This Were Enough? is a mantra and a clarion call. In its chapters--many of them original to the book, others expanded from their initial publication--Havrilesky takes on those cultural forces that shape us. We've convinced ourselves, she says, that salvation can be delivered only in the form of new products, new technologies, new lifestyles.

A research-based guide to navigating the newest dating phenomenon - "the love gap" - and a trailblazing action plan to help smart, confident, career-driven women find (and keep) their match. For a rising generation of young women, the sky is the limit. Women can be anything and have everything. Smart, driven, assertive women are succeeding at just about everything they do - except romance. Why are so many men afraid to date smart women?

In the groundbreaking tradition of In the Dream House and The Collected Schizophrenias, a gorgeously illustrated speculative memoir that draws upon the Japanese myth of the Hyakki Yagyo—the Night Parade of One Hundred Demons—to shift the cultural narrative around mental illness, grief, and remembrance.

For thousands of years, religion has woven its way through societies and people as if it were part and parcel to that society or person. In large measure it was left unexplained and unchallenged, it simply existed. Those who attempted to challenge and expose religion were often persecuted, excommunicated, shunned, or even executed. It could be fatal to explain that which the church, priest, or imam said was unexplainable. Before the germ, viral, and parasite theory of disease, physicians had no tools to understand disease and its propagation.

Never mind the high-profile cases of athletes Marion Jones and Lance Armstrong. Steroids and other pharmaceuticals are being sold and consumed in life-threatening quantities online and through the backrooms of gyms and fitness centres, and the people buying them range from teen girls trying to look good on Instagram to middle-aged men who can't say goodbye to their youthful physiques. This is a vivid, eye-opening and compassionate journey alongside a young doctor as he discovers an underworld of misinformation and misdirected ambition, drug abuse and lives cut short.

Americans love a hard worker. The employee who toils eighteen-hour days and eats meals on the run between appointments is usually viewed with a combination of respect and awe. But for many, this lifestyle leads to family problems, a decline in work productivity, and, ultimately, physical and mental burnout. Chained to the Desk in a Hybrid World provides an inside look at the impact of work stress on those who live and work with workaholics—partners, spouses, children, and colleagues—as well as the appropriate techniques for clinicians who treat them.

Hardly anyone is happy with American health care these days. Patients are getting sicker and going bankrupt from medical bills. Doctors are burning out and making dangerous mistakes. Both parties blame our nation’s outdated and dysfunctional health care system. But that’s only part of the problem. In this important and timely book, Dr. Robert Pearl shines a light on the unseen and often toxic culture of medicine.

Mindfulness isn't anything that we think; it's what we don't think. Mindfulness isn't something that other people do; it's something that we all do. Mindfulness is an ancient, life-enhancing, healing technique that can help us remember our natural state of happiness and health, even if we think we are too modern and too busy to prioritize what's really important--being fully alive and fully alive to our full life potential.

On January 7, 1980, in the run-up to the publication of his landmark best seller Thy Neighbor's Wife, Gay Talese received an anonymous letter from a man in Colorado. "Since learning of your long-awaited study of coast-to-coast sex in America," the letter began, "I feel I have important information that I could contribute to its contents or to contents of a future book." The man went on to tell Talese an astonishing secret: that he had bought a motel to satisfy his voyeuristic desires.

Two world wars, the Civil Rights movement, and a Jheri curl later, Blacks in America continue to have a complex and convoluted relationship with their hair. From the antebellum practice of shaving the head in an attempt to pass as a "free" person to the 2013 uproar over an Ohio school that banned Afro puffs, the issues surrounding Black hair continue to linger as we move through the 21stst century.