Social Media Sociology

In an increasingly secular, fragmented, and distracted culture, nothing brings Americans together quite like sports. On Sundays in September, more families worship at the altar of the NFL than at any church. This appeal, which cuts across all demographic and ideological lines, makes sports perhaps the last unifying mass ritual of our era, with huge numbers of people all focused on the same thing at the same moment. That timeless, live quality makes sports very powerful, and very lucrative. And the media spectacle around them is only getting bigger, brighter, and noisier.

Researchers are now applying the lens of science to study heroism for the first time. How do biology, upbringing, and outside influences intersect to produce altruistic and heroic behavior? And how can we encourage this behavior in corporations, classrooms, and individuals? Elizabeth Svoboda explains how our genes compel us to do good for others, how going through suffering is linked to altruism, and how acting heroic can greatly improve your mental health.

This classic work is a journey to the heart of healing. With a foreword by Dr. Bernie Siegel, it has been acclaimed by Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen as "a masterful, awesome feat" and called by Dr. Joan Borysenko "a classic that rings with authenticity". It presents a guide to the healing process from the unique standpoint of patients who have overcome devastating odds. Replete with new science, it forms a bridge between the worlds of conventional and alternative medicine.

This international best seller shows why the Danes are happy and how we can be, too. For decades Denmark has ranked at the top of the world's happiness surveys. How is it that these 5.6 million Danes are so content when they live in a country that is dark and cold nine months of the year and where income taxes are at almost 60 percent? At a time when talk across the Western world is focused on unemployment woes, government overreach, and anti-taxation lobbies, our Danish counterparts seem to breathe a healthier and fresher air.

Karachi. Pakistan’s largest city is a sprawling metropolis of 20 million people, twice the size of New York City. It is a place of political turbulence in which those who have power wield it with brutal and partisan force. It takes an insider to know where is safe, whom to trust, and what makes Karachi tick. In this powerful debut, Samira Shackle explores the city of her mother’s birth in the company of a handful of Karachiites.

Humans are hard-wired for collaboration, and new technologies of communication act as a super-amplifier of our natural collaborative mindset. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series examines the emergence of a new kind of social collaboration enabled by networked technologies. This new collaborative society might be characterized as a series of services and startups that enable peer-to-peer exchanges and interactions though technology.

From Major League Baseball's inception in the 1880s through World War II, team owners enjoyed monopolistic control of the industry. Despite the players' desire to form a viable union, every attempt to do so failed. In the mid-1960s, star players Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale staged a joint holdout for multiyear contracts and much higher salaries. Their holdout quickly drew support from the public; for the first time, owners realized they could ill afford to alienate fans, their primary source of revenue.

This Must Be the Place introduces and examines music's relationship to cities. Not the influence cities have on music, but the powerful impact music can have on how cities are developed, built, managed, and governed.

Renyi Hong theorizes the notion of being "passionate about your work" as an affective project that encourages people to endure trying situations like unemployment, job change, repetitive and menial labor, and freelancing. Not simply a subject of aspiration, passion has been deployed as a means to build resilience and mend disappointments with our experiences of work. Tracking the rise of passion in nineteenth-century management to trends like gamification, coworking, and unemployment insurance, Hong argues that the ideal of passionate work sustains a condition of cruel optimism.

Many books have been written on the Jesus People movement in the United States, but what about its impact in the United Kingdom? When Jesus Met Hippies explores how this counter-cultural movement of Christians found its own expression in the United Kingdom, reshaping the lives of individuals along with the life and mission of the new and existing churches across the nation.

When journalist Tom Morton suffered a heart attack in 2015, his close encounter with death led him on an extraordinary journey into the world of the dead. He decided to train to become the only independent funeral celebrant on the remote Shetland islands. Armed with a new black suit and a second-hand undertaker's coat, Tom quickly learned that death requires you to think on your feet, and often to take a magpie approach to faith and philosophy.

In Food, John Coveney examines "food as . . . " identity, politics, industry, regulation, the environment, justice, and gastronomy. He explores how food helps us understand what it means to be human.

The best-selling social media book of the year! Too busy to spend hours trying to learn the fundamentals of social-media marketing? This is the book for you!

Politik als Beruf war der zweite Vortrag der Vortragsreihe Geistige Arbeit als Beruf, den Max Weber am 28. Januar 1919 vor dem Freistudentischen Bund, Landesverband Bayern gehalten hat (nach Wissenschaft als Beruf am 7. November 1917). Max Webers Analysen regen auch in der heutigen Zeit zum Nachdenken über politische Zusammenhänge an. Der Vortrag ist längst zu einem Klassiker der Politikwissenschaft geworden.

We humans have an extraordinary capacity for compassion—much of it in response to the atrocities we inflict on the planet, its animals, and each other. The popular explanation for this paradox is that we evolved as carnivorous “killer apes,” who gradually curbed our lust for violence (with frequent exceptions) by implementing humane social norms. This explanation is so well worn, especially in the American psyche, that it epitomizes cliché. So, we could be forgiven for believing it, when nearly every word is fiction.

Couple Therapy: The Basics provides a comprehensive introduction to couple therapy. Taking both a general overview and a psychoanalytic focus, it addresses the basic questions that both couples and those interested in becoming couple therapists can expect to ask. Using jargon-light language, this book summarizes the range of approaches available to those seeking couple therapy—from behavioral to psychoanalytic.

In Generation We, cultural and generational expert AnneMarie Hayek joins forces with thousands of Zs to tell their powerful story - one that impacts all of us. From new ideas on capitalism, politics, and climate change to education, gender, race, and work, AnneMarie explains how Gen Z thinks, what they envision, and why we should be hopeful. Zs are not naïve idealists. They’re hardened realists with a bold vision for how we can transition, recreate, and progress. Generation We is your invitation to see the future they will create as it’s unfolding.

In 1973, when Wenguang Huang was eight, his grandmother became obsessed with her own death. Fearing cremation, she appealed to her family to promise to bury her after she'd died. This was in Xi'an, a city in central China, at a time when a national ban on all traditional Chinese practices, including burials, was strictly enforced. But his grandmother was persistent, and two years later, Huang's father built her a coffin. Over the next 15 years, the whole family was consumed with planning Grandma's burial.

One in three American workers is now a freelancer. This “gig economy” - one that provides neither the guarantee of steady hours nor benefits - emerged out of the digital era and has revolutionized the way we do business. High-profile tech start-ups such as Uber and Airbnb are constantly making headlines for the disruption they cause to the industries they overturn. But what are the effects of this disruption, from Wall Street down to Main Street? What challenges do employees and job seekers face at every level of professional experience?

After her brother died unexpectedly and her mother moved into a dementia-care facility, spiritual travel writer and Episcopal deacon Lori Erickson felt called to a new quest: to face death head-on, with the eye of a tourist and the heart of a pastor. Blending memoir, spirituality, and travel, Near the Exit examines how cultures confront and have confronted death by investigating Egypt's Valley of the Kings, Mayan temples, Colorado cremation pyres, Day of the Dead celebrations, Maori settlements, and tourist-destination graveyards.