Popular Culture

A timely investigation into the new "safety culture" on campus and the dangers it poses to free speech, mental health, education, and ultimately democracy....

In ten brilliantly written chapters, Stephen King delivers one colorful observation after another about the great stories, books, and films that comprise the horror genre—from Frankenstein and Dracula to The Exorcist, The Twilight Zone, and Earth vs. The Flying Saucers.

A reflective, original invitation to recover and cultivate the human experiences that have atrophied in our virtual world.

Part memoir, part history, Burn Book is a necessary chronicle of tech’s most powerful players. This is the inside story we’ve all been waiting for about modern Silicon Valley and the biggest boom in wealth creation in the history of the world....

In The 50th Law, hip hop and pop culture icon 50 Cent offers a "bible" for success in life and work....

In this nostalgic and raucous collection of sixteen original essays, Ira Madison III—critic, television writer, and host of the beloved Keep It podcast—combines memoir and criticism to offer a brand-new pop-culture manifesto.

A transformative audiobook urging 21st-century women to embrace their anger and harness it as a tool for lasting personal and societal change....

A no-nonsense and helpful guide on how to cope with a slew of mental-health issues that are hell-bent on ruining the lives of millions of people worldwide....

Levitt and co-author Stephen J. Dubner show that economics is, at root, the study of incentives: how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing....

From actor Cary Elwes, who played the iconic role of Westley in The Princess Bride, comes a first-person account and behind-the-scenes look at the making of the cult classic film....

Dorian Lynskey looks into the evolution of apocalyptic thought, exploring how film and literature interact with developments in science, politics, and culture, and what factors drive our perennial obsession with the end of the world.

"What should we have for dinner?" To one degree or another, this simple question assails any creature faced with a wide choice of things to eat....

Step back inside the world of President Jed Bartlet’s Oval Office with Fitzgerald and McCormack as they reunite the West Wing cast and crew in a lively and colorful “backstage pass” to the timeless series.

Dish up the red meat, eggs, and whole milk! In this well-researched and captivating narrative, veteran food writer Nina Teicholz proves how everything we've been told about fat is wrong....

It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. After 1989, capitalism has successfully presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system–a situation that the bank crisis of 2008, far from ending, actually compounded....

From the number one New York Times best-selling author of The Midnight Library Matt Haig comes a new uplifting book, for anyone in search of hope, looking for a path to a more meaningful life, or in need of a little encouragement....

Tom Wolfe's classic The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, an unflinching portrait of Ken Kesey, his Merry Pranksters, LSD, and the 1960s, ushered in an era of New Journalism and defined a generation....

One of the most admired nonfiction writers of our time retells the story of one truly fabulous year in the life of his native country....

The untold story of how Japan became a cultural superpower through the fantastic inventions that captured - and transformed - the world’s imagination....

It was long ago, but not as long as it seems: The Berlin Wall fell and the Twin Towers collapsed. In between, one presidential election was allegedly decided by Ross Perot while another was plausibly decided by Ralph Nader.

The definitive account of Ed Gein, a mild-mannered Wisconsin farmhand who stunned an unsuspecting nation - and redefined the meaning of the word psycho....

The rollicking saga of reality television, an ambitious cultural history of America’s most influential, most divisive artistic phenomenon, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning New Yorker writer.

The Psychopath Test is a fascinating journey through the minds of madness. Jon Ronson's exploration of a potential hoax being played on the world's top neurologists takes him, unexpectedly, into the heart of the madness industry....

Thorne shares his experiences working as the science adviser on the film (Interstellar) and then moves on to the science itself....

In these eight piercing explorations on beauty, media, money, and more, Tressie McMillan Cottom embraces her venerated role as a purveyor of wit, wisdom, and Black Twitter snark about all that is right and much that is wrong with this thing we call society....

In Pure Innocent Fun, Madison explores the key cultural moments that inspired his career as a critic and guided his coming of age as a Black gay man in Milwaukee. In this hilarious, full-throttle trip through the ’90s and 2000s, he recounts learning about sex from Buffy the Vampire Slayer; facing the most heartbreaking election of his youth (not George W. Bush’s win, but Jennifer Hudson losing American Idol); and how never getting his driver’s license in high school made him just like Cher Horowitz in Clueless: “a virgin who can’t drive.”

As Dorian Lynskey writes, “People have been contemplating the end of the world for millennia.” In this immersive and compelling cultural history, Lynskey reveals how religious prophecies of the apocalypse were secularized in the early 19th century by Lord Byron and Mary Shelley in a time of dramatic social upheaval and temporary climate change, inciting a long tradition of visions of the end without gods.

For almost a century, movie fans have been riveted by the Academy Awards and the stars who have won Oscars. 50 Oscar Nights takes listeners behind the scenes of Hollywood’s most storied awards show through new and exclusive interviews with dozens of A-list actors, filmmakers, and craftspeople spanning sixty years of the Oscars. Here these artists reflect on their winning work and recount all the details of how they got ready, how they felt when they heard their name and got up on stage to accept their award, what they wore, how the entire experience impacted their life, and more.

Fast-talking, warm-hearted, and endlessly rewatchable, Gilmore Girls has bonded real-life mothers and daughters since 2000, when its iconic pilot introduced us to Lorelai, Rory, and their idyllic Connecticut town of Stars Hollow. More than twenty years later, it has become one of the most-streamed TV shows, ever. In an anthology as intimate and quick-witted as Gilmore Girls itself, bestselling author Ann Hood invites fifteen writers to investigate their personal relationships to the show.

In this hard-hitting and deeply personal book, a combination of manifesto and memoir, scholar, sociologist, and activist Bianca Mabute-Louie transforms the ways we understand race, class, citizenship, and the concept of assimilation and its impact on Asian American communities from the nineteenth century to present day.

Hello Stranger is a book about chance encounters—at a bar, through social media, in a bathhouse—and what a stranger can reveal about who we are and who we could still yet be. A stranger, after all, is a site of endless possibilities. As Manuel Betancourt looks back on his past relationships, he turns to characters and narratives that helped him question notions of what monogamy and coupledom (and relationships and marriage) can and should look like.

I’ve been burned out too many times and I don’t have the time for it. I don’t have the patience. I don’t have the luxury. I have too much that I have to do and too much that I want to do. I’m not alone in that attitude and I won’t apologize for it either. But there’s something to that attitude. Especially when it comes to burn out. Am I going to blame hustle culture? Let me shock you and say no. I don’t have time for blame games. I’m not blaming hustle, I’m not blaming our culture, and I’m not blaming you or me. We’re a product of our environment and we do what’s ...

Horror begins at home. From family homes in Amityville to Gothic mansions in Los Angeles and the Unabomber's cabin, houses often capture and contain the horror that has happened within them. Sick Houses crosses the threshold of these eerie spaces to explore how different types of architecture become vessels for terror and how these spaces, meant to shelter us, instead become the source of our deepest fears.

The air conditioner is often hailed as one of the modern world's greatest inventions—yet nearly as often blamed for global disaster. It has changed everything from architecture to people's food habits; saved countless lives, and caused countless deaths. First appearing in 1902, when Willis Carrier, an engineer barely out of college, developed the "Apparatus for Treating Air," everyone assumed it would instantly change the world. But the story of air conditioning and its rise to ubiquity is far from simple.

Assinada por uma constelação de consagrados estudiosos das ciências humanas, esta importante e necessária obra dedica cada um de seus 45 artigos a grandes mulheres brasileiras cujas trajetórias pessoal e profissional impactaram enormemente a história do país, mas que, quase sempre, tiveram seus feitos obscurecidos e suas vozes silenciadas pela história oficial – branca, masculina, patriarcal e burguesa.