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🧲 Books like this

Everything Is Obvious: How Common Sense Fails

Duncan J. Watts · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

Steven Pinker · 802 pages

From Goodreads: Selected by *The New York Times Book Review* as a Notable Book of the Year The author of *The New York Times* bestseller *The Stuff* of Thought offers a controversial history of violence. Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily think we live in the most violent age ever seen. Yet as *New York Times* bestselling author Steven Pin

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Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner · 320 pages

*A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything* Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? Why do drug dealers still live with their moms? How much do parents really matter? How did the legalization of abortion affect the rate of violent crime? These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask. But

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The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind

Gustave Le Bon · 208 pages

"Gustave LeBon's The Crowd is not only a classic, but one of the best-selling scientific books in social psychology and collective behavior ever written. Here, LeBon analyzes the nature of crowds and their role in political movements. He presents crowd behavior as a problem of science and power, a natural phenomenon with practical implications. Originally published in 1895, LeBon's book was the fi

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The Meme Machine

Susan Blackmore · 264 pages

After Richard Dawkins' *The Selfish Gene*, Susan Blackmore drive us deeply into the theory of the meme, social and cultural "replicators", trying to explain the human unique ability to imitate. Altruism, ideas, human behaviours, sex, poetry, music... seems to be simply the result of such as memetic selection... > Even our inner conscious self and our sense of free will are illlusion created by

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Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

Andrew Solomon · 721 pages

Solomon’s startling proposition in *Far from the Tree* is that being exceptional is at the core of the human condition—that difference is what unites us. He writes about families coping with deafness, dwarfism, Down's syndrome, autism, schizophrenia, or multiple severe disabilities; with children who are prodigies, who are conceived in rape, who become criminals, and who are transgender. While eac

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Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do

Tom Vanderbilt · 409 pages

A New York Times Notable BookOne of the Best Books of the YearThe Washington Post - The Cleveland Plain-Dealer - Rocky Mountain NewsIn this brilliant, lively, and eye-opening investigation, Tom Vanderbilt examines the perceptual limits and cognitive underpinnings that make us worse drivers than we think we are. He demonstrates why plans to protect pedestrians from cars often lead to more acciden

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Outliers: The Story of Success

Malcolm Gladwell · 320 pages

In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of "outliers"--the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different? His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their

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Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It's So Hard to Think Straight About Animals

Hal Herzog · 334 pages

Does living with a pet really make people happier and healthier? What can we learn from biomedical research with mice? Who enjoys a better quality of life -- the chicken destined for your dinner plate or the rooster in a Saturday night cockfight? Why is it wrong to eat the family dog? Drawing on more than two decades of research into the emerging field of anthrozoology, the science of human–animal

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The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction

Matthew B. Crawford · 320 pages

"A groundbreaking new book from the bestselling author of Shop Class as Soulcraft In his bestselling book Shop Class as Soulcraft, Matthew B. Crawford explored the ethical and practical importance of manual competence, as expressed through mastery of our physical environment. In his brilliant follow-up, The World Beyond Your Head, Crawford investigates the challenge of mastering one's own mind.

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Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Shafir · 304 pages

An examination of how scarcity--and our flawed responses to it--shapes our lives, our society, and our culture.

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What about Me? The Struggle for Identity in a Market-based Society

Paul Verhaeghe · 272 pages

According to current thinking, anyone who fails to succeed must have something wrong with them. The pressure to achieve and be happy is taking a heavy toll, resulting in a warped view of the self, disorientation, and despair. People are lonelier than ever before. Today's pay-for-performance mentality is turning institutions such as schools, universities, and hospitals into businesses - even indivi

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Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation

Michael Zielenziger · 340 pages

The world's second-wealthiest country, Japan once seemed poised to overtake America. But its failure to recover from the economic collapse of the early 1990s was unprecedented, and today it confronts an array of disturbing social trends. Japan has the highest suicide rate and lowest birthrate of all industrialized countries, and a rising incidence of untreated cases of depression. Equally as troub

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The Sane Society

Erich Fromm · 370 pages

Fromm offers a complete and systematic exploration of his "humanistic psychoanalysis." In so doing, he counters the profound pessimism for our future that Freud expressed and sets forth the goals of a society in which the emphasis is on each person and on the social measures designed to further function as a responsible individual.

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Crowds and Power

Elias Canetti · 535 pages

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The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

Erving Goffman, Sven Bergstrom · 255 pages

A notable contribution to our understanding of ourselves. This book explores the realm of human behavior in social situations and the way that we appear to others. Dr. Goffman uses the metaphor of theatrical performance as a framework. Each person in everyday social intercourse presents himself and his activity to others, attempts to guide and control the impressions they form of him, and employs

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Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

Sherry Turkle · 400 pages

Technology has become the architect of our intimacies. Online, we fall prey to the illusion of companionship, gathering thousands of Twitter and Facebook friends and confusing tweets and wall posts with authentic communication. In "Alone Together," MIT technology and society professor Sherry Turkle explores the power of our new tools and toys to dramatically alter our social lives. It's a nuanced

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The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement

David Brooks · 424 pages

From the influential and hugely popular "New York Times" columnist and bestselling author of "Bobos in Paradise" comes a landmark exploration of how human beings and communities succeed.

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Black Skin, White Masks

Frantz Fanon · 232 pages

Fanon, born in Martinique and educated in France, is generally regarded as the leading anti-colonial thinker of the 20th century. His first book is an analysis of the impact of colonial subjugation on the black psyche. It is a very personal account of Fanon's experience being black: as a man, an intellectual, and a party to a French education.--Adapted

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Solitude: A Singular Life in a Crowded World

Michael Harris · 256 pages

"Today, society embraces sharing like never before. Fueled by our dependence on mobile devices and social media, we have created an ecosystem of obsessive connection. Many of us now lead lives of strangely crowded isolation: we are always linked, but only shallowly so. The capacity to be alone, properly alone, is one of life's subtlest skills. Real solitude is a powerful resource we can call upon?

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