Popular Science

We live in the age of speed. We strain to be more efficient, to cram more into each minute, each hour, each day. Since the Industrial Revolution shifted the world into high gear, the cult of speed has pushed us to a breaking point. Consider these facts: Americans on average spend 72 minutes of every day behind the wheel of a car, a typical business executive now loses 68 hours a year to being put on hold, and American adults currently devote on average a mere half hour per week to making love.

Mr Punch Presents: It’s a Wonderful Life, the irresistibly heart-warming story of George Bailey, who is prevented from committing suicide by the elderly angel Clarence, who takes him on a journey back through his life to show him how the town of Bedford Falls would have been had he never lived. Originally directed by the celebrated Frank Capra, it is performed here for radio with James Stewart, Victor Moore and Donna Reed recreating their original roles.

This cultural analysis of visual and narrative elements within Batman comics provides an important exploration of the ways readers and creators negotiate gender, identity, and sexuality in popular culture.

Along with Batman, Spider-Man, and Superman, the Joker stands out as one of the most recognizable comics characters in popular culture. While there has been a great deal of scholarly attention on superheroes, very little has been done to understand supervillains. This is the first academic work to provide a comprehensive study of this villain, illustrating why the Joker appears so relevant to audiences today.

While tech titans bragged they would 'move fast and break things', Kara Swisher was moving faster and breaking news. Covering the explosion of the digital sector in the early 1990s, she developed a long track record of digging up and reporting the truth of this new world order. Burn Book is part memoir, part history and, most of all, a necessary recounting of tech's most powerful players. This is the inside story we've all been waiting for of modern Silicon Valley and the biggest boom in wealth creation in the history of the world.

Exploring more than 80 of the big ideas and key theories in the field of sociology in a clear and simple way, narrated by Laurel Lefkow. This is the perfect introduction to the study of how humans live and interact with each other. Covering diversity and equality, globalization, human rights, modern urban living, and the role of work and institutions, The Sociology Book looks at the big questions of how we cooperate: What is society? What makes it tick? Why do we interact in the way that we do with our friends, co-workers, and rivals?

William Deresiewicz, a leading critic of the arts and of contemporary culture, set out to answer those questions. Based on interviews with artists of all kinds, The Death of the Artist argues that we are in the midst of an epochal transformation. If artists were artisans in the Renaissance, bohemians in the 19th century, and professionals in the 20th, a new paradigm is emerging in the digital age, one that is changing our fundamental ideas about the nature of art and the role of the artist in society.

When Emmie Keyes' twin brother, Will, is murdered she knows her time has also come to an end. That's how it has always been. Mentally linked together, the twins of her world, share everything, including death. Except this time. When Will dies, Emmie doesn't. Devastated and confused, Emmie sets off to find the only man who might have answers, Tobias Zen, a man known for saving the world from a devastating experiment that wiped out a fifth of the population and shifted the balance of power even to this day. Yet even he has grown power hungry in the decades since, unlikely to help Emmie and ...

For American women today, working out is as accepted as it is expected, fueling a multibillion-dollar fitness industrial complex. But it wasn’t always this way. For much of the 20th century, sweating was considered unladylike and girls grew up believing physical exertion would cause their uterus to literally fall out. It was only in the '60s that, thanks to a few forward-thinking fitness pioneers, women began to move en masse.

In a powerful and gripping debut, Rachel Aviv raises fundamental questions about how we understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress. Drawing on deep, original reporting as well as unpublished journals and memoirs, Aviv writes about people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are. Animated by a profound sense of empathy, Aviv’s exploration is refracted through her own account of living in a hospital ward at the age of six and meeting a fellow patient with whom her life runs parallel—until it no longer does.

Some events that transform a nation are frozen in time. Others pass with little public awareness and we only appreciate their momentous nature long after they occurred. Regardless, these events are few and - almost always - far between. But 50 years ago, in 1969, four such events took place within the span of only 100 days. In this book, cultural historian Harlan Lebo looks back at the first Moon landing, the Manson family murders, Woodstock, and the birth of the Internet to tell the story of how each event shaped the nation and how we perceive ourselves.

John Ortved's oral history is the first-ever look behind the scenes at the creation and day-to-day running of the television phenomenon known as The Simpsons, as told by many of the people who produce it.

Hollywood was built on beautiful and complicated matinee idols: James Dean and Marlon Brando are classic examples, but in the 1990s, the actor who embodied that archetype was River Phoenix. As the brightly colored 1980s wound down, a new crew of leading men began to appear on movie screens. Hailed for their acting prowess and admired for choosing meaty roles, actors such as Johnny Depp, Nicolas Cage, Keanu Reeves, and Brad Pitt were soon rocketing toward stardom while an unknown Leonardo DiCaprio prepared to make his acting debut. River Phoenix, however, stood in front of the pack.

Whether through a movie, television show, novel, or even myth, horror as a genre has always spoken to our deepest human fears and anxieties: fear of death, of the unknown, of knowing too much. Whether you're looking at classic narratives like Frankenstein, or contemporary films like Get Out, which explores racism and white guilt, horror provides a window into our culture and what makes us human. The same can be said of religion.

Are you happy? Right now? Happy enough? As happy as everyone else? Could you be happier if you tried harder? After she packed up her British worldview (that most things were basically rubbish) and moved to America, journalist and documentary filmmaker Ruth Whippman found herself increasingly perplexed by the American obsession with one topic above all others: happiness. The subject came up everywhere: at the playground swings, at the meat counter in the supermarket, and even at the gynecologist.

From the moments William and Harry are born into the House of Windsor, they become their young mother’s whole world. I’ve got two very healthy, strong boys. I realize how incredibly lucky I am, Diana reminds herself every morning. But even the Princess of Wales questions, Am I a good mother? Diana’s faced with a seemingly impossible challenge: one son destined to be King of England and another determined to find his own way. She teaches them to honor royal tradition, even while daring to break it.

When America won the Revolutionary War, its people offered General George Washington a crown. Two and a half centuries later, the House of Washington still sits on the throne. Like most royal families, the Washingtons have an heir and a spare. A future monarch and a backup battery. Each child knows exactly what is expected of them. But these aren't just any royals. They're American.

The Chaos Machine is the story of how the world was driven mad by social media. The election of populists like Trump and Bolsonaro; strife and genocide in countries like Myanmar, the rampant spread of COVID-19 conspiracy theories as deadly as the pandemic itself, all of these are products of a breakdown in our social and political lives, a breakdown driven by the apps, companies and algorithms that compete constantly for our attention.

Historians have long studied how civilizations rise and fall. But today it isn't just social collapse that makes thoughtful people fret but a potential end to everything. From nuclear war to ecological disaster to rocks from the sky all the way to luring unfriendly interest from "others" out there, science has shed light on myriad ways to fail. To tumble back down into entropy. So, want to have some fun listing and weighing all the ways (that we know) the universe could have it in for us?

A series of closely interrelated essays on game theory, this book deals with an area in which progress has been least satisfactory - the situations where there is a common interest as well as conflict between adversaries: negotiations, war and threats of war, criminal deterrence, extortion, tacit bargaining. It proposes enlightening similarities between, for instance, maneuvering in limited war and in a traffic jam; deterring the Russians and one's own children; the modern strategy of terror and the ancient institution of hostages.