Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive

Monoculture: How One Story is Changing Everything

F.S. Michaels · 190 pages

"As human beings, we've always told stories: stories about who we are, where we come from, and where we're going. Now imagine that one of those stories is taking over the others, narrowing our diversity and creating a monoculture. Because of the rise of the economic story, six areas of your world -- your work, your relationships with others and the environment, your community, your physical and sp

Everything Is Obvious: How Common Sense Fails

Duncan J. Watts · 335 pages

Discusses how the concept of common sense is inadequate in an increasingly complex world and draws on multiple disciplines to offer insight into the sources of such topics as popularity, economics, and self-deception.

Intellectuals and Society

Thomas Sowell · 611 pages

This is a book about intellectuals written for the lay person. Its purpose is to unravel the world of intellectuals in order to understand an important social phenomenon how the thinkers of our society mold that society, leaving an impact on people in every walk of life, even if they are basically unknown to the world at large. It is a portion of the population whose activities can have, and have

The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can't Be Jammed

Joseph Heath, Andrew Potter · 376 pages

The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures

Jean Baudrillard · 224 pages

The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change

David Harvey · 378 pages

Traces the development of the concept of postmodernism, explains its differences with modernism, and discusses political and social influences.

Consuming Life

Zygmunt Bauman · 160 pages

"With the advent of liquid modernity, the society of producers is transformed into a society of consumers. In this new consumer society, individuals become simultaneously the promoters of commodities and the commodities they promote. They are, at one and the same time, the merchandise and the marketer, the goods and the travelling salespeople. They all inhabit the same social space that is customa

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

Cruel Optimism

Lauren Berlant · 342 pages

Lauren Berlant explores individual and collective affective responses to the unraveling of the U.S. and European economies by analzying mass media, literature, television, film, and video.

Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Reveals About Who We Really Are

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life

Anu Partanen · 448 pages

A Finnish journalist and naturalized American citizen compares and contrasts life in the U.S. with life in the Nordic region to encourage Americans to draw on practices from the Nordic way of life to create a fairer, happier, more secure, and less stressful society. At a 2012 conference on social mobility, where experts discussed whether people worldwide were attaining a better life than their pa

Arrival City: The Final Migration and Our Next World

Doug Saunders · 368 pages

24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

Jonathan Crary · 144 pages

24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep explores some of the ruinous consequences of the expanding non-stop processes of twenty-first-century capitalism. The marketplace now operates through every hour of the clock, pushing us into constant activity and eroding forms of community and political expression, damaging the fabric of everyday life. Jonathan Crary examines how this interminable non-t

Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic

John De Graaf, David Wann, Thomas H. Naylor · 288 pages

The Condition of the Working Class in England

Friedrich Engels · 336 pages

"The Condition of the Working Class is the best-known work of Engels, and in many ways still the best study of the working class in Victorian England. It was also Engels's first book, written during his stay in Manchester from 1842 to 1844. Manchester was then at the very heart of the Industrial Revolution and Engels compiled his study from his own observations and detailed contemporary reports. T

City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles

Mike Davis · 462 pages

Born to Buy

Juliet B. Schor · 289 pages

Ads aimed at kids are virtually everywhere -- in classrooms and textbooks, on the Internet, even at slumber parties and the playground. Product placement and other innovations have introduced more subtle advertising to movies and television. Companies are enlisting children as guerrilla marketers, targeting their friends and families. Even trusted social institutions such as the Girl Scouts are te

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity

Katherine Boo · 256 pages

The dramatic and sometimes heartbreaking story of families striving toward a better life in one of the twenty-first century's great, unequal cities. In this fast-paced book, based on three years of uncompromising reporting, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human. Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport, and as India starts

Toxic Charity: How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help

Robert D. Lupton · 191 pages

Public service is a way of life for Americans; giving is a part of our national character. But compassionate instincts and generous spirits aren't enough, says veteran urban activist Robert D. Lupton. In this groundbreaking guide, he reveals the disturbing truth about charity: all too much of it has become toxic, devastating to the very people it's meant to help. In his four decades of urban minis

The End of Men: And the Rise of Women

Hanna Rosin · 310 pages

Men have been the dominant sex since, well, the dawn of mankind. And yet, as journalist Hanna Rosin discovered, that long-held truth is no longer true. At this unprecedented moment, women are no longer merely gaining on men; they have pulled decisively ahead by almost every measure. Already "the end of men" -- the phrase Rosin coined -- has entered the lexicon as indelibly as Simone de Beauvoir's

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Yuval Noah Harari · 456 pages

From a renowned historian comes a groundbreaking narrative of humanity’s creation and evolution—a #1 international bestseller—that explores the ways in which biology and history have defined us and enhanced our understanding of what it means to be “human.” One hundred thousand years ago, at least six different species of humans inhabited Earth. Yet today there is only one—homo sapiens. What hap

Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

Barbara Ehrenreich · 248 pages

"Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed explored the lives of low-wage workers. Now, in Bait and Switch, she enters another hidden realm of the economy: the shadowy world of the white-collar unemployed." "Bait and Switch highlights the people who've done everything right - gotten college degrees, developed marketable skills, and built up impressive resumes - yet have become repeatedly vulnerable t

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

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Jared Diamond · 592 pages

"In his Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond examined how and why Western civilizations developed the technologies and immunities that allowed them to dominate much of the world. Now, Diamond probes the other side of the equation: What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates?" "As in Guns, G