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The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction
Matthew B. Crawford · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorMental Illness and Psychology
Michel Foucault · 90 pages
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
Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud
Herbert Marcuse · 277 pages
This is Herbert Marcuse's masterpiece which transfixed youth in the 1960s, convincing the New Left there was hope in revolutionary activity. It's also Marcuse encounter with Signmund Freud, well worth the time to decipher it. Narcuse is optimistic, in that if we tame or transform capitalism, we can fix ourselves. It's a far cry from Freud's pessimistic outlook.
Dialectic of Enlightenment
Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno · 192 pages
The Human Condition
Hannah Arendt · 340 pages
A work of striking originality bursting with unexpected insights, The Human condition is in many respects more relevant now than when it first appeared in 1958. In her study of the state of modern humanity, Hannah Arendt considers humankind from the perspective of the actions of which it is capable. The problems Arendt identified then--diminishing human agency and political freedom, the paradox th
Status Anxiety
Alain de Botton · 306 pages
This is a book about an almost universal anxiety that rarely gets mentioned directly: an anxiety about what others think of us; about whether we’re judged a success or a failure, a winner or a loser. This is a book about status anxiety. We care about our status for a simple reason: because most people tend to be nice to us according to the amount of status we have (it is no coincidence that the f
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari
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
The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil
Erich Fromm · 158 pages
Strangers Drowning: Grappling with Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Overpowering Urge to Help
Larissa MacFarquhar · 328 pages
"What does it mean to devote yourself wholly to helping others? In Strangers Drowning, Larissa MacFarquhar seeks out people living lives of extreme ethical commitment and tells their deeply intimate stories; their stubborn integrity and their compromises; their bravery and their recklessness; their joys and defeats and wrenching dilemmas. A couple adopts two children in distress. But then they thi
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.
The Technological Society
Jacques Ellul · 449 pages
Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
Donna J. Haraway · 288 pages
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
Beyond Freedom and Dignity
B.F. Skinner · 225 pages
Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism
Melanie Joy · 224 pages
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
Steven Pinker · 528 pages
In The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker, one of the world's leading experts on language and the mind, explores the idea of human nature and its moral, emotional, and political colorings. With characteristic wit, lucidity, and insight, Pinker argues that the dogma that the mind has no innate traits-a doctrine held by many intellectuals during the past century-denies our common humanity and our individual
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion
Jonathan Haidt · 473 pages
A groundbreaking investigation into the origins of morality, which turns out to be the basis for religion and politics. The book explains the American culture wars and refutes the "New Atheists."
The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
Nassim Nicholas Taleb · 128 pages
By the author of the modern classic The Black Swan, this collection of aphorisms and meditations expresses Taleb's view of modern civilization's hubristic side effects--modifying humans to satisfy technology, blaming reality for not fitting economic models, inventing diseases to sell drugs, defining intelligence as what can be tested in a classroom, and convincing people that employment is not sla
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
The Empathic Civilization: The Race To Global Consciousness In A World In Crisis
Jeremy Rifkin · 688 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