Showing titles in Society

Steven Pinker's 12-part guide to thinking better 'A paean to human potential' The Telegraph Cognitive scientist Professor Steven Pinker has spent his life thinking about thinking, and now he wants us to join him. With the aid of his critical thinking toolkit, he hopes to help us make smarter...

Da dicembre 2021 a luglio 2022 la più autorevole figura internazionale a disposizione dell'Italia, l'ex presidente della Banca Centrale Europea Mario Draghi, è passato dall'essere il presidente del Consiglio con un piede e mezzo al Quirinale alla rappresentazione vivente di come il Palazzo sia in grado di logorare chiunque.

A profoundly inspiring and transformative argument that purposeful commitment and civic engagement can be a powerful force in today’s age of restlessness and indecision. Most of us have had this experience: browsing through countless options on Netflix, unable to commit to watching any given...

“There are at least two kinds of games,” states James P. Carse as he begins this extraordinary book. “One could be called finite; the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.” Finite games are the...

Maintenance is what keeps everything going. It’s what keeps life going. Yet it’s also easy to shirk or defer—until the thing breaks, the system falters, and everything stops. The apparent paradox is profound: Maintenance is absolutely necessary and maintenance is optional. The first in a multi-volume work, Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One offers a comprehensive overview of the civilizational importance of maintenance. The book begins with a dramatic contest of maintenance styles under life-critical conditions:

Have you heard that language is violence and that science is sexist? Have you read that certain people shouldn't practice yoga? Or been told that being obese is healthy, that there is no such thing as biological sex, or that only White people can be racist? Are you confused by these ideas, and do you wonder how they have managed to challenge the logic of Western society? In this probing volume, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay document the evolution of the dogma that informs these ideas, from its coarse origins in French postmodernism to its refinement within activist academic fields.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER #1 New York Times bestselling author Ben Shapiro examines the current state of America and Western civilization, and poses a question: will we be Lions, or will we be Scavengers? In a world split between noble Lions and destructive Scavengers, only the brave can...

Hailed upon publication as a cogent and hard-hitting critique, The Sociological Imagination took issue with the ascendant schools of sociology in the United States, calling for a humanist sociology connecting the social, personal, and historical dimensions of our lives. The sociological imagination Mills calls for is a sociological vision, a way of looking at the world that can see links between the apparently private problems of the individual and important social issues.

The work of queer autistic scholar Nick Walker has played a key role in the evolving discourse on human neurodiversity. Neuroqueer Heresies collects a decade's worth of Dr. Walker's most influential writings, along with new commentary by the author and new material on her radical conceptualization of Neuroqueer Theory. This book is essential for anyone seeking to understand the foundations, terminology, implications, and leading edges of the emerging neurodiversity paradigm.

Linear and progressive views of history have dominated the popular imagination for the past seventy years in a worldview wedded to the inexorable rise of globalization and GDP growth at any cost. However, the end of the Cold War failed to produce the end of history as hoped, a fact brought home to many by Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

An odyssey into life’s challenging questions during an unforgettable summer motorcycle trip Acclaimed as one of the most exciting books in the history of American letters, Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance became an instant bestseller upon its publication in 1974...

In thirteen iconoclastic essays, Slavoj Žižek disrupts the death-grip that neoliberalists, Trumpian populists, toxic self-improvement industries and accelerationists alike have established on the idea of progress. Anatomizing what is lost when opponents of the future are allowed to define it, Žižek ruthlessly exposes what different visions of progress exclude or sacrifice and the dynamics of desire, denial and disavowal at work in Hollywood blockbusters, Buddhist economics, decolonization movements and other engines of vision.

“Its theme is political fanaticism, with which it deals severely and brilliantly.” —New Yorker The famous bestseller with “concise insight into what drives the mind of the fanatic and the dynamics of a mass movement” (Wall Street Journal) by the legendary San Francisco longshoreman. A...

Our overwhelmingly divisive socio-political climate is among the greatest challenges of our time. Not only in America but also internationally, it seems that almost every issue raises incredibly vocal oppositional views. Not least of all, the arising of vast networks of disinformation is a testament to our deepening rifts. With so much hostility, antagonism, cynicism, and discord, how can we mend the ruptures in our society?

To Have or to Be? is one of the seminal books of the second half of the 20th century. Fromm's thesis is that two modes of existence struggle for the spirit of humankind: the having mode, which concentrates on material possessions, power, and aggression, and is the basis of the universal evils of greed, envy, and violence; and the being mode, which is based on love, the pleasure of sharing, and in productive activity.

This audiobook is an invitation to a dream school with a faculty that includes 12 of the greatest philosophers from the ancient world, sharing their lessons in happiness, resilience and much more. Discover how soldiers, psychologists, gangsters, astronauts, anarchists and others use these ideas today. Lively and powerful, this is philosophy for the street, for the workplace, for the battlefield, for love, for life.

In recent decades, the philosophy of humor has been recognized as a legitimate subfield of philosophy. The reason for this? Because to understand how humor works is to better understand the nature of human experience. In these 24 insightful, informative, illuminating, and (yes) humorous lectures, explore the philosophical theories and explanations of humor, from blatantly obvious puns to complex narratives to sly twists of language.

Even the most reasonable of us can be selective about when we think reasonably. We may realize that the best thing to do is to take the advice of our doctor when facing a medical issue. When shopping for a new car or appliance we might carefully assess online reviews and weigh our options calmly before making an informed decision. But when it comes to things that feel more fraught, we might throw this approach out the window, dismissing facts and patterns that form a body of evidence, and trust our gut.

Byung-Chul Han is one of the most widely read philosophers in Europe today, a member of the new generation of German thinkers that includes Markus Gabriel and Armen Avanessian. In The Agony of Eros, a bestseller in Germany, Han considers the threat to love and desire in today's society. For Han, love requires the courage to accept self-negation for the sake of discovering the Other. In a world of fetishized individualism and technologically mediated social interaction, it is the Other that is eradicated, not the self.

In this book, Stuart Jeffries analyzes how we got into this parlous state and wonders if the stupid, like the poor, are always with us, or if, rather, stupidity is like Japanese knotweed, difficult to root out but to be exterminated with extreme prejudice.