Wellness Culture

The unprecedented access to other humans that technology provides has ironically freed us from engaging with them. According to social psychologist Adam Waytz, our increasingly human-free lives come with a serious cost that we’ve already begun to pay: the loss of our humanity. Humans have superpowers. More than any other psychological stimulus, our presence can make experiences feel significant, inspire moral behavior, and encourage action. The Power of Human shows us how to rehumanize and harness these unique abilities to improve our lives, beginning with our jobs.

In Distracted, journalist Maggie Jackson ponders our increasingly cyber-centric world and fears we're entering a dark age of interruption that will render us unable to think critically, work creatively or cultivate meaningful relationships.

A powerful treatise that demonstrates the existence of altruism in nature, with surprising implications for human society. Does altruism exist? Or is human nature entirely selfish? In this eloquent and accessible book, famed biologist David Sloan Wilson provides new answers to this age-old question based on the latest developments in evolutionary science.

To keep doing what you love, you need to maintain your own systems, not just the ones you write code for. Regular exercise and proper nutrition help you learn, remember, concentrate, and be creative - skills critical to doing your job well. Learn how to change your work habits, master exercises that make working at a computer more comfortable, and develop a plan to keep fit, healthy, and sharp for years to come.

In Under Pressure, Carl Honoré shows how the pressure to give our children the best of everything and make them the best at everything is backfiring on kids, parents and society as a whole. He maps out how we can rescue childhood from the excesses of the 21st century.

In the American moral vernacular, we have a whole thesaurus for victims of exploitation. They are suckers (born every minute), fools (not suffered gladly), dupes, marks, chumps, pawns, and losers. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Cultural stories about suckers abound too: the Trojan Horse, the Boy Who Cried Wolf, the Emperor’s New Clothes, even Hansel and Gretel. If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you. Don’t go out with him; he only wants one thing.

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 2003, the Columbia Space Shuttle exploded on reentry, resulting in the loss of life for all seven astronauts and leaving NASA with a huge problem. But this problem wasn’t easily identified - the investigation revealed that the organizational culture was as much to blame for the explosion as technical difficulties. Enter Drs. Phillip Meade and Laura Gallaher - experts in the psychology of organizational culture and the owners of Gallaher Edge. Drs. Gallaher and Meade apply their vast expertise to map out the "missing links" between human nature and organizational culture.

In this collection of beautiful and raw essays, Amy S. F. Lutz writes openly about her experience - the positive and the negative - as a mother of a now 21-year-old son with severe autism. Lutz's human emotion drives through each moment and challenges commonly held ideas that define autism either as a disease or as neurodiversity.

Public Sex collects the best of Pat Califia's work published over the past 20 years. Providing both a chronicle of the radical sex movement in the United States, as well as the definitive opinions of America's most consistent and trenchant sexual critic, Public Sex is must-listen material for anyone interested in sexual practices, feminism, censorship, or simply the art of the political essay.

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.

Pictures of half-naked girls and women can seem to litter almost every screen, billboard, and advertisement in America. Pole-dancing studios keep women fit. Men airdrop their dick pics to female passengers on planes and trains. This pornification of our society is what Bernadette Barton calls "raunch culture". Barton explores what raunch culture is, why it matters, and how it is ruining America. She exposes how internet porn drives trends in programming, advertising, and social media, and makes its way onto our phones, into our fashion choices, and into our sex lives.

Mr. A. was admitted to Dr. Joel Gold’s inpatient unit at Bellevue Hospital in 2002. He was, he said, being filmed constantly, and his life was being broadcast around the world "like The Truman Show" - the 1998 film depicting a man who is unknowingly living out his life as the star of a popular soap opera. Over the next few years, Gold saw a number of patients suffering from what he and his brother, Dr. Ian Gold, began calling the "Truman Show Delusion," launching them on a quest to understand the nature of this particular phenomenon and the nature of madness itself.

Young adulthood: the time of our lives when, theoretically, anything can happen, and the pressure is on to make sure everything does. Social media has long been the scapegoat for a generation of unhappy young people, but perhaps the forces working beneath us — wage stagnation, student debt, perfectionism, and inflated costs of living — have a larger, more detrimental impact on the world we post to our feeds.

Martin Torgoff details the rise of early drug culture in America by weaving together the disparate elements that formed this new segment of the American fabric. Channeling his decades of writing experience, Torgoff connects the birth of jazz in New Orleans, the first drug laws, Louis Armstrong, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, swing, Lester Young, Billie Holiday, the Savoy Ballroom, Charlie Parker, the birth of bebop, the rise of the Beat Generation, and the launch of heroin in Harlem.

In Faking It, Lux Alptraum tackles the topic of seemingly dishonest women; investigating whether women actually lie, and what social situations might encourage deceptions both great and small. Using her experience as a sex educator and former CEO of Fleshbot (the foremost blog on sexuality), first-hand interviews with sexuality experts and everyday women, Alptraum raises important questions: Are lying women all that common - or is the idea of the dishonest woman a symptom of male paranoia? Are women trying to please men, or just avoid their anger?

Feminine traits that were once disparaged as weaknesses—such as sensitivity, intuition, and feeling emotional—are reclaimed as powerful strengths that can be embraced as the keys to a happier life for everyone.

Erno Rubik was a child when he first became obsessed with puzzles of all kinds. "Puzzles", he writes, "bring out important qualities in each of us: concentration, curiosity, a sense of play, the eagerness to discover a solution". To Rubik, puzzles aren't just games - they're creativity machines. He encourages us to embrace our inner curiosity and find the puzzles that surround us in our everyday lives. "If you are determined, you will solve them", he writes. Rubik's own puzzle, the Cube, has been solved by millions worldwide for more than 40 years....

Best-selling, award-winning writer Simon Garfield returns with an enthralling investigation of humans’ peculiar fascination with small things - and what small things tell us about our larger world.

Why is mystery so compelling? What draws us to the unknown? Jonah Lehrer sets out to answer these questions in a vividly entertaining and surprisingly profound journey through the science of suspense. He finds that nothing can capture a person’s attention as strongly as mystery, and that mystery is the key principle in how humans view and understand the world. Whenever patterns are broken, we are hard-wired to find out why.