Human Culture

Tabletop games are ordinary and extraordinary. Ordinary because they're everywhere: played in bars and cafés, churches and casinos, through sunless winters in polar research stations and in the sweltering summer heat of Tanzanian villages and streamed live over Twitch to millions of viewers. And they're extraordinary for precisely the same reason: they're everywhere, in every civilization, everywhere in the world across all recorded human history. In Across the Board, tabletop game aficionado Tim Clare takes us through that history and across those civilizations.

"The Mean Genes message is optimistic . . . a self-help book for the merely average human being." (The Washington Post Book World) "An unusual cross between a social Darwinist monograph and a self-help manual." (The New Yorker) Why do we want-and do-so many things that are bad for us? In Mean...

The workplace is going through a large-scale transition with digitization, automation, and acceleration. Critical skills and expertise are imperative for companies and their employees to succeed in the future, and the most forward-thinking companies are being proactive in adapting to the shift in the workforce. Kelly Palmer, Silicon Valley thought leader from LinkedIn, Degreed, and Yahoo, and David Blake, cofounder of ed-tech pioneer Degreed, share their experiences and describe how some of the smartest companies in the world are making learning and expertise a major competitive advantage.

Arthashastra' is one of the oldest books with immense historical significance written by Kautilya or Arya Chanakya as he was popularly known. This book is one of the most effective books ever written on the art of statecraft and the science of everyday living. Originally written in Sanskrit...

AI poses a real and present danger. It contains the capacity to amplify social problems, drive a wedge further into our already-polarized society, and sow seeds of distrust in communities and personal relationships. When approached without a robust sense of human dignity,AI also threatens to undermine our self-understanding. To a degree beyond any previous technology, AI can make us forget ourselves. In this new era of AI, we must consciously make a choice: to stay human. In this book I provide a map and the tools for doing just that." (From the author, Joseph Vukov)

This definitive and magnificent 10-volume unabridged translation is one of the rare English translations in full of the epic. Bibek Debroy makes the Mahabharata marvellously accessible to contemporary readers. Dispute over land and kingdom may lie at the heart of this story of war...

People are quitting their jobs in droves, then coming back. Employees are demanding flexibility, while some leaders insist they return to the physical office. Remote work is incredibly convenient but complicated. The job market is always in flux, but one thing is for sure: the last few years have presented the greatest challenges the business world has ever faced. Don't freak out. If you accept the new reality and harness the incredible power of healthy, authentic relationships, you can seize the competitive edge in this new world of work.

The first rung of the career ladder is gone. If you’re still hiring like it’s there, you’re building on air. Entry-level jobs are disappearing. AI agents are quietly replacing the roles that once gave humans a foothold. Internships lead nowhere. Degrees don’t translate. And your best-intentioned hiring programs are quietly failing the people they were designed to help. The Broken Ladder, created by Autonomous AI Agents, is your guide to stopping the collapse and building what comes next.

Digital Apollo examines the design and execution of each of the six Apollo moon landings, drawing on transcripts and data telemetry from the flights, astronaut interviews, and NASA's extensive archives. Mindell's exploration of how human pilots and automated systems worked together to achieve the ultimate in flight - a lunar landing - traces and reframes the debate over the future of humans and automation in space.

How Could You Do That?! illustrates Dr. Laura Schlessinger's philosophy of personal responsibility through her usually provocative but always stimulating moral dialogues with callers about everyday ethical dilemmas. In her lively pull-no-punches style, Dr. Laura takes on the moral dilemmas of...

The first all-encompassing biography of Elliott Smith, offering an intimate portrait of his life and musical legacy with brand-new interviews, lyrics, and correspondence from the people closest to him, many speaking for the first time Nobody Broke Your Heart is a tender, nuanced narrative of...

Some people insist that culture is strictly a human feat. What are they afraid of? This book looks into three cultures of other-than-human beings in some of Earth's remaining wild places. It shows how if you're a sperm whale, a scarlet macaw, or a chimpanzee, you too experience your life with the understanding that you are an individual in a particular community. You too are who you are not by genes alone; your culture is a second form of inheritance. And your culture, too, changes and evolves.

From making faster, better decisions to automating rote work to enabling robots to respond to emotions, AI and machine learning are already reshaping business and society. What should you and your company be doing today to ensure that you're poised for success and keeping up with your competitors in the age of AI? Artificial Intelligence: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review brings you today's most essential thinking on AI and explains how to launch the right initiatives at your company to capitalize on the opportunity of the machine intelligence revolution.

A wry look at what the astonishing world of animal penises can tell us about how we use our own. The fallacy sold to many of us is that the penis signals dominance and power. But this wry and penetrating audiobook reveals that in fact nature did not shape the penis--or the human attached to...

This definitive and magnificent 10-volume unabridged translation is one of the rare English translations in full of the epic. Bibek Debroy makes the Mahabharata marvellously accessible to contemporary readers. Dispute over land and kingdom may lie at the heart of this story of war...

This definitive and magnificent 10-volume unabridged translation is one of the rare English translations in full of the epic. Bibek Debroy makes the Mahabharata marvellously accessible to contemporary readers. Dispute over land and kingdom may lie at the heart of this story of war...

From world-renowned public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy comes an incisive and provocative look at the heart of Judaism. “A smart, revealing, and essential book for our times.”—The Washington Post For more than four decades, Bernard-Henri Lévy has been a singular figure on the world...

A “gripping and scrupulously reported” (The Washington Post) investigation into the battle over identity in China, chronicling the state oppression of those who fail to conform to Xi Jinping’s definition of who is “Chinese,” from an award-winning NPR correspondent. “Emily Feng’s...

Robots may one day rule the world, but what is a robot-ruled Earth like? Many think the first truly smart robots will be brain emulations, or ems. Scan a human brain, then run a model with the same connections on a fast computer, and you have a robot brain, but recognizably human. Train an em to do some job and copy it a million times; an army of workers is at your disposal. When they can be made cheaply, within perhaps a century, ems will displace humans in most jobs.

Most of us would agree that there’s a clear—and even obvious—connection between the things we believe and the way we behave. But what if our actions are driven not by our conscious values and beliefs but by hidden motivations we’re not even aware of? The “hidden brain” is Shankar...