Showing titles in Popular Culture

The leisure class has been replaced by a new elite. Highly educated and defined by cultural capital rather than income bracket, these individuals earnestly buy organic, carry NPR tote bags, and breast-feed their babies. They care about discreet, inconspicuous consumption. In The Sum of Small Things, Elizabeth Currid-Halkett dubs this segment of society "the aspirational class" and discusses how, through deft decisions about education, health, parenting, and retirement, the aspirational class deepens the ever-wider class divide.

Random House presents the audiobook edition of Hello World, written and read by Hannah Fry. You are accused of a crime. Who would you rather determined your fate – a human or an algorithm? An algorithm is more consistent and less prone to error of judgement. Yet a human can look you in the eye...

Who does the Mona Lisa actually depict? Why do we still look to the Greeks and Romans to inform our politics? Where do we find meaning in a world dominated by technology? Culture is like a language. Art, architecture, history and philosophy are its grammar. And, like a language, anyone can learn...

NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2025 A TIME MUST-READ BOOK OF 2025 ELLE BEST BOOKS OF 2025 'Essential reading' Irish Independent 'Fascinating and powerfully argued' Daily Telegraph 'A captivating must-read for anyone who wants to understand how and why misogyny is as powerful a force as ever'...

'Incisive' PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 'A brilliant, funny, omnivorous excavation of how technology and entertainment have warped humanity' SOPHIE GILBERT, PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST AND AUTHOR OF GIRL ON GIRL _______ From an award-winning staff writer for the Atlantic, Screen People is an eye-opening look...

In the modern information age, our brain’s coping mechanisms have been overloaded, and our irrationality turned up to eleven. Amanda Montell blends cultural criticism and personal narrative to explore our modern cognitive biases and the power, disadvantages and highlights of magical...

 In Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, Jaron Lanier draws on his insider's expertise to explain precisely how social media works - by deploying constant surveillance and subconscious manipulation of its users - and why its cruel and dangerous effects are at the heart of its current business model and design. As well as offering 10 simple arguments for liberating yourself from its addictive hold, his witty and urgent manifesto outlines a vision for an alternative that provides all the benefits of social media without the harm. 

Can a song trigger a murder? Can a poem spark a riot? Can a book divide a people? Away from the gaze of mainstream urban media, across India's dusty, sleepy towns, a brand of popular culture is quietly seizing the imagination of millions, on the internet and off it. From catchy songs with...

The legendary bestseller that encouraged millions of readers to look at the hidden side of everything | Read by author Stephen J. Dubner! Which is more dangerous: a gun or a swimming pool? Why do drug dealers still live with their moms? What do real estate agents and the KKK have in common?...

'Amazingly well researched, fabulously informative and an awful lot of fun. If you love Japanese culture or are just curious to know more I can't recommend this book highly enough' Jonathan Ross 'A nerd- and generalist-friendly look at how Japan shaped the post-World War II world, from toys to...

Internationally revered cultural anthropologist and marketing expert Clotaire Rapaille reveals for the first time the techniques he has used to improve profitability and practices for dozens of Fortune 100 companies. His groundbreaking revelations shed light not just on business but on the way every human being acts and lives around the world.

The feminist truths hiding in plain sight behind every glitter-fueled meltdown. For feminist media scholar Evie Psarras, The Real Housewives franchise has been her greatest source of entertainment and comfort since its first iteration. It’s also where she learned some of life’s most...

Brought to you by Penguin. From the rise of leetspeak and words such as “unalive” to the trend of adding “-core” to different influencer aesthetics, the internet has ushered in an unprecedented linguistic upheaval. We’re entering an entirely new era of etymology, heralded by the...

THE SUNDAY TIMES #1 BESTSELLER A Book of the Year in The Times and Financial Times ‘The biographer who brought down Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’ THE OBSERVER ‘This isn’t a book; it’s a case for revolution’ SUNDAY TIMES 'Undoubtedly the most important book of the last year, if not the...

A BEST BOOK OF 2023 FOR THE TELEGRAPH, FINANCIAL TIMES, NEW SCIENTIST AND STYLIST A NEXT BIG IDEA CLUB MUST READ 2023 You may be familiar with the idea of our body’s biome – the bacterial fauna that populates our gut and can so profoundly affect our health. In We Are Electric we cross the...

WE BUILT THE SMARTEST MACHINES IN HISTORY, AND WE PROGRAMMED THEM TO MAKE US FEEL INADEQUATE. A Simple Guide to Being Alive is a bold, playful, profound science-backed manual for anyone who has ever felt overwhelmed by the modern world and wondered if there was a simpler, saner way to live. This...

Batman is one of the most compelling and enduring characters to come from the Golden Age of Comics, and interest in his story has only increased through countless incarnations since his first appearance in Detective Comics #27 in 1939. Why does this superhero without superpowers fascinate us? What does that fascination say about us? Batman and Psychology explores these and other intriguing questions about the masked vigilante.

The Accidental Billionaires is the inspiration behind the Oscar winning film, The Social Network, dramatising Zuckerberg’s success and proving you don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies… Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg – an awkward maths prodigy and a painfully shy computer genius – were never going to fit in at elite, polished Harvard. Yet that all changed when master-hacker Mark crashed the university’s entire computer system by creating a rateable database of female students.

Brought to you by Penguin. From the award-winning scientist who identified the bones of Richard III in a Leicester carpark and genetically analysed Hitler, discover the myth-busting book that provides a window into the world of modern genetics and reveals the extraordinary true stories and...

A visual and narrative history of popular ideas, phenomena, and widely held beliefs disproven by science from the authors of Quackery. From the easily disproved to the wildly speculative, to straight-up hucksterism, Pseudoscience is a romp through much more than bad science—it’s a...