In the tradition of Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything , a smart and entertaining guide to the future of civilization When unexpectedly confronted with his own mortality, Mark Stevenson- a writer, deep-thinker, and stan...

Douglas Hofstadter’s critically acclaimed return to the themes of Gödel, Escher, Bach —an original and controversial view of the nature of consciousness and identity.

When psychologist Richard E. Nisbett showed an animated underwater scene to his American students, they zeroed in on a big fish swimming among smaller fish. Japanese observers instead commented on the background en...

In this provocative and headline- making book, Michael Specter confronts the widespread fear of science and its terrible toll on individuals and the planet. In Denialism, New Yorker staff writer Michael Specter reveals that Americans have co...

Our investments are devastated, obesity is epidemic, test scores are in decline, blue-chip companies circle the drain, and popular medications turn out to be ineffective and even dangerous. What happened? Didn't we listen to the scientists, econom...

In this classic, the world's expert on language and mind lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and ho...

One of the most innovative neuroscientists at work today investigates the bias toward optimism that exists on a neural level in our brains and plays a major part in determining how we live our lives. Psychologists have long been aware that mos...

Use of Force in Humanitarian Intervention, The: Morality and Practicalities

In 1989, Francis Fukuyama made his now-famous pronouncement that because "the major alternatives to liberal democracy had exhausted themselves," history as we knew it had reached its end. Ten years later, he revised his argument: we hadn't reach...

A. In the past, the elite manipulated the population through a more mystical belief system. In particular, there was the institution of Sun worship (typified by deities such as Osiris and Set). However, as antiquity gave way to modern history, thi...