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In celebration of the 10th anniversary of the landmark book Freakonomics comes this curated collection from the most readable economics blog in the universe. When Freakonomics was first published, the authors started a blog--and they've kept it up. The writing is more casual, more personal, even more outlandish than in their books. Now they've gone through and picked the best of the best. Here, they ask a host of typically off-center questions: Why...
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"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. We often complain about our fractured mental lives and...
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We've all asked, "What is the world coming to?" But we seldom ask, "How bad was the world in the past?" In this startling new book, cognitive scientist Steven Pinker shows that the past was much worse. Evidence of a bloody history has always been around us: genocides in the Old Testament, gory mutilations in Shakespeare and Grimm, monarchs who beheaded their relatives, and American founders who dueled with their rivals. The murder rate in medieval...
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Your Global Positioning System guides you across town; it also helps land planes, and anticipates earthquakes. Milner takes us on a fascinating tour of a hidden system that touches almost every aspect of our modern life, and shows how it has created new forms of human behavior. But the potential misuse of GPS data by government and corporations raise disturbing questions about ethics and privacy. GPS satisfies the scientific urge toward precision--...
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Four years ago, Jonell McLain saw a diamond necklace in a jewelry store window. The necklace aroused desire first, then a provocative question: What if we shared what we desired? Several weeks, dozens of phone calls, and a leap of faith later, Jonell bought the necklace with twelve other women. With vastly dissimilar histories and lives, the women transcended their individual personalities and politics to join together in an uncommon journey. Part...
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"Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning author Richard Rhodes reveals the fascinating history behind energy transitions over time--wood to coal to oil to electricity and beyond. People have lived and died, businesses have prospered and failed, and nations have risen to world power and declined, all over energy challenges. Ultimately, the history of these challenges tells the story of humanity itself. ... Human beings have confronted the problem...
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As Cumings eloquently explains, for the Asian world the Korean War was a generations-long fight filled with untold stories of bloody insurgencies and rebellions, massacres and atrocities. He incisively ties America's current foreign policy back to this remarkably violent war that killed as many as four million Koreans, two thirds of whom were civilians.
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A former Google data scientist presents an insider's look at what the vast, instantly available amounts of information from the Internet can reveal about human civilization and society.
"How much sex are people really having? How many Americans are actually racist? Is America experiencing a hidden back-alley abortion crisis? Can you game the stock market? Does violent entertainment increase the rate of violent crime? Do parents treat sons differently...
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With wit, wisdom, and a sharp scalpel, Jack Hartnell dissects the medieval body and offers a remedy to our preconceptions.
Just like us, medieval men and women worried about growing old, got blisters and indigestion, fell in love, and had children. And yet their lives were full of miraculous and richly metaphorical experiences radically different from our own, unfolding in a world where deadly wounds might be healed overnight
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"Young Jane Young's heroine is Aviva Grossman, an ambitious Congressional intern in Florida who makes the life-changing mistake of having an affair with her boss who is beloved, admired, successful, and very married and blogging about it. When the affair comes to light, the Congressman doesn't take the fall, but Aviva does, and her life is over before it hardly begins. She becomes a late night talk show punchline; she is slut shamed, labeled as fat...
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"From Tim Wu, author of the award-winning The Master Switch and who coined the phrase "net neutrality"--a revelatory look at the rise of "attention harvesting, " and its transformative effect on our society and our selves. Attention merchant: an industrial-scale harvester of human attention. A firm whose business model is the mass capture of attention for resale to advertisers. In nearly every moment of our waking lives, we face a barrage of advertising...
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"For too long, scientists have focused on the dark side of our biological heritage: our capacity for aggression, cruelty, prejudice, and self-interest. But natural selection has given us a suite of beneficial social features, including our capacity for love, friendship, cooperation, and learning. Beneath all our inventions--our tools, farms, machines, cities, nations--we carry with us innate proclivities to make a good society. In Blueprint, Nicholas...
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Explores the concept of land ownership and how it has shaped history, examining how people fight over, steward, and occasionally share land, and what humanity's proprietary relationship with land means for the future.
"Land examines in depth how we determine where the land lies, how we acquire it, how we steward it, how and why we fight over it, and, finally, how we can, and on occasion do, come to share it. Ultimately, Winchester confronts the...