Popular Science

The charismatic radio personality from The Howard Stern Show celebrates what we love about American fast food, covering chains both national and regional and offering an opinionated view on restaurant history, secret menu items, and even drive-thru strategy.

Basketball is the second-most popular sport in the world - an insanely complicated game built on a combination of athleticism, craftiness, rules, intangibles, and superstardom. However, while it's enjoyable to watch, the real reason it works is because it's a game of culture, art, and all the things that make us human. How to Watch Basketball Like a Genius deconstructs the sport from top to bottom and then puts it back together again, detailing its intricacies through reporting and dozens of interviews with experts.

Political commentator and media personality Will Witt gives young conservatives the ammunition they need to fight back against the liberal media in this instant national bestseller. Popular culture in America today is dominated by the left. Most young people have never even heard of conservative...

The greatest wave of communal living in American history crested in the tumultuous 1960s era including the early 1970s. To the fascination and amusement of more decorous citizens, hundreds of thousands of mostly young dreamers set out to build a new culture apart from the established society. Widely believed by the larger public to be sinks of drug-ridden sexual immorality, the communes both intrigued and repelled the American people.

For 10 years, Louis Theroux has been making programmes about off-beat characters on the fringes of US society. Now he revisits America and the people who have most fascinated him to try to discover what motivates them, why they believe the things they believe, and to find out what has happened to them since he last saw them.

This audiobook is a compilation of sightings, encounters, and evidential findings as they pertain to Bigfoot in North America and those who have encountered them.

Everyone loves senior Carson Toliver, the captain and quarterback of the football team, heartthrob of South Burlington County Regional High - especially the girls. Even Jack's best friend, Weezy, has a crush on him. But Jack is surprised when Weezy tells him that Carson took her on a date and attacked her. Jack tries to convince her to report Carson, but Weezy would rather just forget it ever happened. But then Carson starts telling his own version of what happened that night, and suddenly everyone is calling her "Easy Weezy". Jack's concern turns to rage.

A People's History of Baseball, probes the less well-known but no less meaningful other side of baseball: episodes not involving equality, patriotism, heroism, and virtuous capitalism, but power - how it is obtained, and how it perpetuates itself. Through the growth and development of baseball Nathanson shows that, if only we choose to look for it, we can see the petty power struggles as well as the large and consequential ones that have likewise defined our nation.

Hairstyles of the Damned is an honest and affectionate depiction of wanting to belong, but never quite belonging. Joe Menos pitch-perfect prose illuminates the tumultuous realities of American adolescence, the disintegration of the modern family, and the way a mix-tape can change a persons life. Following the riotous exploits of Brian, a Catholic school malcontent, and his best friend Gretchen, a punk rock girl fond of brawling, this work pursues what it means to develop your own identity.

Marvel Comics in the 1970s explores a forgotten chapter in the story of the rise of comics as an art form. Bridging Marvel's dizzying innovations and the birth of the underground comics scene in the 1960s and the rise of the prestige graphic novel and postmodern superheroics in the 1980s, Eliot Borenstein reveals a generation of comic book writers whose work at Marvel in the 1970s established their own authorial voice within the strictures of corporate comics.

From pro wrestling and Pokémon to Vince McMahon and Jerry Springer, this look at the low culture of the late '90s reveals its profound impact and how it continues to affect our culture and society today.

As the world around us increases in technological complexity, our understanding of it diminishes. Underlying this trend is a single idea: The belief that our existence is understandable through computation, and more data is enough to help us build a better world. In reality, we are lost in a sea of information, increasingly divided by fundamentalism, simplistic narratives, conspiracy theories, and post-factual politics. Author James Bridle surveys the history of art, technology, and information systems and reveals the dark clouds that gather over our dreams of the digital sublime.

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 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.

Forged in the fires of the Bronx and Kingston, Jamaica, hip-hop became the Esperanto of youth rebellion and a generation-defining movement. In a post-civil rights era defined by deindustrialization and globalization, hip-hop crystallized a multiracial, polycultural generation's worldview and transformed American politics and culture. But that epic story has never been told with this kind of breadth, insight, and style.

From three-inch fang blennies to thirty-foot prehistoric crocodiles, from gaboon vipers to Neanderthals, Bite is a fascinating journey through the natural, scientific, and cultural history of something right in front of—or in—our faces: teeth. In Bite, zoologist Bill Schutt makes a...

The Star Wars films continue to revolutionize science fiction, creating new standards for cinematographic excellence and permeating popular culture around the world. The films feature many complex themes ranging from good versus evil and moral development and corruption to religious faith and pragmatism, forgiveness and redemption, and many others.

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.

From Nelson George, supervising producer and writer of the hit Netflix series The Get Down, Hip Hop America is the definitive account of the society-altering collision between Black youth culture and the mass media.

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...