Popular Science

This is the first biography of Greer for two decades, drawing on unprecedented access to her extensive personal archive, opened at Melbourne University in 2016. Kleinhenz has interrogated Greer's personal and professional files, spoken to people who have known her from her school days onwards, and read every word written by and about her. Beginning with Greer’s troubled early life in 1940s Melbourne, it traces her career, relationships with men and women, her travels and her home life and examines Greer’s work and ideas from The Female Eunuch to the #MeToo movement.

Gen X is the “forgotten generation.”

Virtually anyone who has ever watched a profound movie, a powerful TV show, or read a moving novel understands that entertainment can and does affect us in surprising and significant ways. But did you know that our most popular forms of entertainment can have a direct physical effect on us, a measurable impact on society, geopolitics, the economy, and even the future itself? In You Are What You Watch, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Walter Hickey proves how exactly how what we watch (and read and listen to) has a far greater effect on us and the world at large than we imagine.

Rolling Stone contributing editor Steve Knopper delves deeply into Michael Jackson's music and talent. From the artist's early days with the Jackson 5, to his stratospheric success as a solo artist, to "Beat It" and "Thriller", "Bad", and "The Man in the Mirror", to his volatile final years, his attempted comeback, and his untimely death, Knopper explores the beguiling and often contradictory forces that fueled Michael Jackson's genius.

Cool had a lot to do with sex, sex appeal, and sex roles. Girls have never received enough credit for the fantastic leap of the mind they took in the 60s. In these post-women's-power days, we've come to take a lot for granted. But when the 17-year-old girl from the comfortable home started adopting some of the attitudes of the black jazz musician, the lessons of centuries of class and gender indoctrination were dumped in the trash along with the pink plastic curlers.

It is increasingly in the media, but what exactly is culture jamming and how does it work? Culture jamming is a form of protest in which advertisements and other media messages are re-arranged or parodied in humorous or disturbing ways. The term covers a range of practices, including sabotaging billboards, spoofing well-known ads, and hoaxing the mainstream media.

Learn about your world with iMinds Specialist Series. Have a particular interest? Recognize gaps in your knowledge? iMinds Specialist works across each of our 12 categories bringing you targeted information to broaden your mind.

Pop Culture, Volume 1, looks at the history of fireworks, the role of culture jamming, the phenomenon of the flash mob, the dance style called krumping, the "mocumentary" film genre, and the street art called Stencil Art.

Technology has given average humans far more health and wealth and freedom of action than ever. New gifts spill forth at an accelerating pace as the sheer amount that we know rockets beyond our ability to process. This acceleration has some pondering a looming singularity - an approaching time of transition, spurred in part by new kinds of artificial intelligence - that could make the year 2050 as strange to us as a cave dweller would find our modern cities. Are these extrapolations well based?

Learn about the idea that everyone has 15 minutes of fame with iMinds insightful audio knowledge series.

Commenting on the increasingly fleeting nature of celebrity, in 1968 artist Andy Warhol quipped: "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." In a 21st-century world of reality TV and youtube, it appears Warhol's prediction has come true. The changing nature of celebrity over time is an interesting backdrop to today's short-lived fame.

Let's zoom in to the Internet, that magnificent new world for latter-day explorers, so much more vast than any realm discovered by Columbus or Magellan. Zealous enthusiasts point to how much more knowledge the average person can access, predicting better students, better workers, better minds and citizenship. Pessimists perceive a dumbing down that spread users too thin, resulting in shallowness that could be lethal to politics, to clear thinking. Is Google making us stupid? Let's weigh the evidence.

Happy Singlehood charts a way forward for singles to live life on their terms, and shows how everyone - single or coupled - can benefit from accepting solo living. Based on personal interviews, quantitative analysis, and extensive review of singles' writings and literature, author Elyakim Kislev uncovers groundbreaking insights on how unmarried people create satisfying lives in a world where social structures and policies are still designed to favor marriage.

A physicist explains daily phenomena from the mundane to the magisterial. Take a look up at the stars on a clear night and you get a sense that the universe is vast and untouchable, full of mysteries beyond comprehension. But did you know that the key to unveiling the secrets of the cosmos is as...

Food consumption is a significant and complex social activity - and what a society chooses to feed its children reveals much about its tastes and ideas regarding health. In this groundbreaking historical work, Amy Bentley explores how the invention of commercial baby food shaped American notions of infancy and influenced the evolution of parental and pediatric care. Until the late 19th century, infants were almost exclusively fed breast milk. But over the course of a few short decades, Americans began feeding their babies formula and solid foods....

In the tradition of Just Kids, Ronen Givony's Us v. Them chronicles the generation of young artists who came to Brooklyn in the mid-2000s: a small but seismic scene that coalesced under a billionaire mayor, a series of forever wars, and a music industry in free fall. In tandem with the impresarios and unlicensed venues that lined the Williamsburg waterfront, combining elements of noise and pop, a few became unlikely superstars. Meanwhile, countless flared and vanished, reminders of an unusually fertile moment—the age of indie—that now means little more than a term of marketing.

In 2018, the Marvel Cinematic Universe finally delivered on something fans had long been waiting for: a feature film with a solo Black superhero. Black Panther introduced viewers to the stunning world of Wakanda and to T'Challa, a young man stepping into his role as king and taking up the mantle of the Black Panther title from his late father. Why Wakanda Matters gives this iconic film the in-depth analysis it deserves under the lens of the latest psychological concepts - as well as delving into the lasting cultural impact of this unforgettable story.

In this fascinating exploration into the curious world of packaged foods, Twinkie, Deconstructed takes us from the phosphate mines in Idaho to the corn fields in Iowa, from gypsum mines in Oklahoma to oil fields in China, to demystify some of America's most common processed food ingredients: where they come from, how they are made, how they are used, and why.

How much do you know about the radiation all around you? Your electronic devices swarm with it; the sun bathes you in it. It's zooming at you from cell towers, microwave ovens, CT scans, mammogram machines, nuclear power plants, deep space, even the walls of your basement. You cannot see, hear...

But something goes wrong during the teleportation, and she is separated from her other half...once again. With Mithra's help, she has to return to Kongenssoevn to bring those she left behind to the safety of the Dominion before locating Asoko. But first comes the long-awaited reunion with her mother. The young Crawling Chaos gains insights into her past life, faces betrayal, and makes a new unlikely ally. Her involuntary journey even takes her into space, where she will learn the terrible secret about the world she reincarnated into.

En estos ensayos magistrales, en los que analiza la estructura del mal gusto, la lectura de cómics, el mito de Superman, la canción de consumo, el papel de los medios audiovisuales como instrumento de información o el influjo de la televisión en el mundo actual, Umberto Eco se plantea el problema central de la doble postura ante la cultura de masas: la de los apocalípticos, que ven en ella el signo de una caída irrecuperable, y la de los integrados, que creen de forma optimista que estamos viviendo una magnífica generalización del marco cultural.

Here is the epic human drama behind the making of the five movies nominated for Best Picture in 1967 - Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, The Graduate, In the Heat of the Night, Doctor Dolittle, and Bonnie and Clyde - and through them, the larger story of the cultural revolution that transformed Hollywood and America forever.