Popular Science

A groundbreaking history of the human mind told through our experience of dreams—from the earliest accounts to current scientific findings—and their essential role in the formation of who we are and the world we have made. "A resounding case for the mystery, beauty and cognitive importance...

Most of us are familiar with the greatest hits and legendary heroes of US history. In George Washington Is Cash Money, Cory O'Brien, author of Zeus Grants Stupid Wishes, does away with the pomp and circumstance and calls America's history what it is: one long violent soap opera.

Joan Morgan offers a provocative and powerful look into the life of the modern Black woman: a complex world in which feminists often have not-so-clandestine affairs with the most sexist of men, where women who treasure their independence frequently prefer men who pick up the tab, and where the deluge of babymothers and babyfathers reminds Black women who long for marriage that traditional nuclear families are a reality for less than 40 percent of the population.

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.

Historians have long studied how civilizations rise and fall. But today it isn't just social collapse that makes thoughtful people fret but a potential end to everything. From nuclear war to ecological disaster to rocks from the sky all the way to luring unfriendly interest from "others" out there, science has shed light on myriad ways to fail. To tumble back down into entropy. So, want to have some fun listing and weighing all the ways (that we know) the universe could have it in for us?

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.

Since her introduction in 1959, Barbie’s impact has been revolutionary. Far from being a toy designed by men to oppress women, she was a toy invented by women to teach women what was expected of them, for better or for worse. Whether tarred-and-glittered as antifeminist puffery or celebrated as a feminist icon, Barbie has undeniably influenced generations of girls. In Forever Barbie, cultural critic, investigative journalist, and first-generation Barbie owner M. G. Lord uncovers the surprising story behind Barbie’s smash success.

Martin Torgoff details the rise of early drug culture in America by weaving together the disparate elements that formed this new segment of the American fabric. Channeling his decades of writing experience, Torgoff connects the birth of jazz in New Orleans, the first drug laws, Louis Armstrong, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, swing, Lester Young, Billie Holiday, the Savoy Ballroom, Charlie Parker, the birth of bebop, the rise of the Beat Generation, and the launch of heroin in Harlem.

From movies to politics, social media posts to the targeted ads between them, nostalgia is one of the most potent forces of our era. On Nostalgia is a panoramic cultural history of nostalgia, exploring how a force that started as a psychological diagnosis of soldiers fighting far from home has come become a quintessentially modern condition.

What part of your beautiful self were you taught to hate? We spend a lot of time trying to improve our 'defects', according to society's ideals of beauty. But these ideals that are often reductive, tyrannical and commercially entangled, imposed upon us by oppressive systems and further strengthened by our conditioned self-loathing. This book encourages unruliness, exploring the ways in which we can rebel against and subvert the current system.

This new edition of What Makes Us Tick takes us beneath the often overwhelming surface noise of politics, economics, new technology and social change to explore something that hasn't changed: the 10 desires that drive us all and, now in a new prologue, the seven characteristics that define us as a species. From our desire to be taken seriously, to be useful and to be loved, to the desire for more, the desire for control and the desire for something to believe in, these universal human motivations powerfully influence our behaviour towards each other.

As Daphné B. obsessively watches YouTube makeup tutorials and haunts Sephora’s website, she’s increasingly troubled by the ways in which this obsession contradicts her anti-capitalist and intersectional feminist politics. In this poetic treatise, she rejects the false binaries of traditional beauty standards and delves into the celebrities and influencers who have shaped the reflection she sees in the mirror. At once confessional and essayistic, Made-Up is a meditation on the makeup that colors, that obscures, that highlights who we are and who we wish we could be.

Propaganda, an influential book written by Edward L. Bernays in 1928, incorporated the literature from social science and psychological manipulation into an examination of the techniques of public communication. Propaganda explored the psychology behind manipulating masses and the ability to use symbolic action and propaganda to influence politics, effect social change, and lobby for gender and racial equality.

In the early 20th century, World War I was the most devastating event humanity had yet experienced. New machines of war left tens of millions killed or wounded in the most grotesque of ways. The Great War remade the world's map, created new global powers, and brought forth some of the biggest problems still facing us today. But it also birthed a new art form: the horror film, made from the fears of a generation ruined by war. From Nosferatu to Frankenstein's monster and the Wolf Man, the touchstones of horror can all trace their roots to the bloodshed of the First World War.

A notorious white supremacist named Richard Barrett was brutally murdered in Mississippi in 2010 by a young Black man named Vincent McGee. At first the murder seemed a twist on old Deep South race crimes. But then new revelations and complications came to light. Maybe it was a dispute over money rather than race - or, maybe and intriguingly, over sex.

Hollywood stars have always furthered fashion's cause of seducing the masses into buying designers' clothes by acting as living billboards. Now, red carpet celebrities are no longer content to just advertise and are putting their names on labels that reflect the image they - or their stylists - created.