Zuboff tackles the social, political, business, personal, and technological meaning of "surveillance capitalism" as an unprecedented new market form. It is not simply about tracking us and selling ads, it is the business model for an ominous new marketplace that aims at nothing less than predicting and modifying our everyday behavior.

A probing, witty, and deeply insightful history of blindness--in Western culture and literature, and in the author's own experience--that ranges from Homer to Milton to Braille to Stevie Wonder. M. Leona Godin begins her fascinating, wide-ranging study with an exploration of how the idea of sight is inextricably linked with knowledge and understanding; how "blindness" has, for millennia, been used as a metaphor for ignorance; and how, in metaphorical...

Fascinated by our pervasive fear of dead bodies, mortician Caitlin Doughty set out to discover how other cultures care for the dead. In rural Indonesia, she watches a man clean and dress his grandfather's mummified body, which has resided in the family home for two years. In La Paz, she meets Bolivian natitas (cigarette-smoking, wish-granting human skulls), and in Tokyo she encounters the Japanese kotsuage ceremony, in which relatives use chopsticks...

For readers of Mary Roach and Adam Diamond, an innovative look at the histories of different epidemics and what it meant for society, alongside what lessons different diseases have to teach us as society battles the novel Coronavirus. Throughout history, there have been numerous epidemics that have threatened mankind with destruction. Diseases have the ability to highlight our shared concerns across the ages, affecting every social divide from national...

"Like millions of Americans, Mark Leibovich has spent more of his life tuned into pro football than he'd care to admit. Being a lifelong New England Patriots fan meant growing up on a steady diet of lovable loserdom. That is, until the Tom Brady/Bill Belichick era made the Pats the most ruthlessly efficient and polarizing sports dynasty of the modern NFL, and its fans the most irritating in all of Pigskin America. Leibovich kept his obsession quiet,...

A social scientist dispels people's tidy versions of reality and delves deeply into the theories of random chance and chaos to demonstrate that the world really works through random events that can alter the trajectory of our lives.

Since the election of Donald J. Trump, political disagreements have been ravaging our personal relationships like never before. This already widespread phenomenon will continue to grow unless we learn to fight it. From friends to relatives to lovers, no relationship is immune to this crisis. I Love You, but I Hate Your Politics draws from interviews with every type of politically mixed couple, as well as Dr. Safer’s own experiences as a die-hard...

Tribal society has been exerting an almost gravitational pull on Westerners for hundreds of years, and the reason lies deep in our evolutionary past as a communal species. Combining history, psychology, and anthropology, TRIBE explores what we can learn from tribal societies about loyalty, belonging, and the eternal human quest for meaning.

"How Gentrification is killing our cities, and what we can do about it. Leslie Kern, author of the best-selling Feminist City, travels from Toronto, New York, London, Paris and San Francisco and scrutinizes the myths and lies that surround this most urgent urban crisis of our times: gentrification. This process can be seen today in rising rents and evictions, transformed retail areas, increased policing and broken communities. But Kern argues that...