Popular Culture

A timely investigation into the new "safety culture" on campus and the dangers it poses to free speech, mental health, education, and ultimately democracy....

From the pages of Vanity Fair to the red carpets of Hollywood, editor Graydon Carter’s memoir revives the glamorous heyday of print magazines when they were at the vanguard of American culture.

From Atlantic critic and Pulitzer Prize finalist Sophie Gilbert, a blazing critique of early aughts pop culture.

In The 50th Law, hip hop and pop culture icon 50 Cent offers a "bible" for success in life and work....

Part memoir, part history, Burn Book is a necessary chronicle of tech’s most powerful players. This is the inside story we’ve all been waiting for about modern Silicon Valley and the biggest boom in wealth creation in the history of the world....

A no-nonsense and helpful guide on how to cope with a slew of mental-health issues that are hell-bent on ruining the lives of millions of people worldwide....

A reflective, original invitation to recover and cultivate the human experiences that have atrophied in our virtual world.

From the host of the Normal Gossip podcast, a delightfully insightful exploration of our obsession with gossip that weaves together journalism, cultural criticism, and memoir.

Cults Like Us explains why the eccentric doomsday beliefs of our Puritan founders are still driving American culture today, contextualizes the current rise in far-right extremism as a natural result of our latent indoctrination, and proposes that the United States is the largest cult of all.

From actor Cary Elwes, who played the iconic role of Westley in The Princess Bride, comes a first-person account and behind-the-scenes look at the making of the cult classic film....

In a world of social media and 24/7 news, screen addiction is a very real problem...but with the right guidance, you can escape its clutches and reclaim your life....

Ken Ivy pulls a square's coat on the unwritten rules that took him from the ghetto streets to the executive suites. Ken's lessons will serve any person in any interaction....

Tom Wolfe's classic The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, an unflinching portrait of Ken Kesey, his Merry Pranksters, LSD, and the 1960s, ushered in an era of New Journalism and defined a generation....

Dish up the red meat, eggs, and whole milk! In this well-researched and captivating narrative, veteran food writer Nina Teicholz proves how everything we've been told about fat is wrong....

A monumental, revealing narrative history about the legendary group of artists at the forefront of West Coast hip-hop: Eazy-E, Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg, and Tupac Shakur....

From the bestselling author of Cultish and host of the podcast Sounds Like a Cult, a delicious blend of cultural criticism and personal narrative that explores our cognitive biases and the power, disadvantages, and highlights of magical thinking.

Singer-songwriter. Trailblazer. Mastermind. The Beatles of her generation. From her genre-busting rise in country music as a teenager to the economic juggernaut that is the Eras Tour, Taylor Swift has blazed a path that is uniquely hers.

It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. After 1989, capitalism has successfully presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system–a situation that the bank crisis of 2008, far from ending, actually compounded....

A fascinating exploration and celebration of the life and work of the coolest man in Hollywood, Samuel L. Jackson - from his star-making turns in the films of Spike Lee and Quentin Tarantino to his ubiquitous roles in the Star Wars and Marvel franchises....

The rollicking saga of reality television, an ambitious cultural history of America’s most influential, most divisive artistic phenomenon, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning New Yorker writer.

From the authors of Quackery, a visual and narrative history of popular ideas, phenomena, and widely held beliefs disproven by science.

A hilarious and nostalgic memoir about the video games that entertain and inspire us, and even hold the power to transform our lives, from an Emmy-nominated television writer, stand-up comedian and former writer for Nintendo.

At once funny, heartbreaking, and surreal, Second Life is a journey that spans a network of fertility apps, prenatal genetic tests, gender reveal videos, rare disease Facebook groups, “freebirth” influencers, and hospital reality shows.

Change the world one trip at a time. In this illuminating collection of stories and lessons from the road, acclaimed travel writer Rick Steves shares a powerful message that resonates....

A transformative audiobook urging 21st-century women to embrace their anger and harness it as a tool for lasting personal and societal change....

What happened to feminism in the twenty-first century? This question feels increasingly urgent after a period of cultural and legislative backlash, when widespread uncertainty about the movement’s power, focus, and currency threatens decades of progress. Sophie Gilbert identifies an inflection point in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the energy of third-wave and “riot grrrl” feminism collapsed into a regressive period of hyper-objectification, sexualization, and infantilization.

Singer-songwriter. Trailblazer. Mastermind. The Beatles of her generation. From her genre-busting rise in country music as a teenager to the economic juggernaut that is the Eras Tour, Taylor Swift has blazed a path that is uniquely hers. But how exactly has she managed to scale her success—multiple times—while dominating an industry that cycles through artists and stars like fashion trends? How has she managed to make and remake herself time and again while remaining true to her artistic vision?

Why does the Twilight saga continue to inspire both passionate fandom and heated critique? In Why We Love (and Hate) Twilight, Sarah Elizabeth Gallagher unpacks the cultural obsession with Bella Swan, Edward Cullen, and the supernatural love story that redefined YA literature and pop culture forever.

We all deal with bad days and hard times that leave us feeling frustrated, angry, and defeated. Bestselling author and self-proclaimed instigator “The Captain” is the funny and wise friend we need most in times like these: someone who tells it like it is and gives us the tough-love advice we need to get back up and meet our challenges head on.

As an internet culture critic for The New York Times, Amanda Hess had built a reputation among readers as a sharp observer of the seductions and manipulations of online life. But when Hess discovered she was pregnant with her first child, she found herself unexpectedly rattled by a digital identity crisis of her own. In the summer of 2020, a routine ultrasound detected a mysterious abnormality in Hess’s baby. Without hesitation, she reached for her phone, looking for answers.

From Jon King, legendary front man of iconic post-punk band Gang of Four, comes a memoir to remember. To Hell with Poverty! documents King’s story from a south London slum and working-class background to international success as core musician, lyricist, writer, and producer in the legendary post-punk/funk band Gang of Four.

"Atenție, nelegiuiții pe două roți nu mai sunt la porțile orașului! Sunt chiar printre noi!" Așa ar fi sunat titlul vreunui ziar local din America anilor 1960 după ce Hell’s Angels ar fi dat năvală în oraș, doar ca să se distreze în stilul lor caracteristic: motoare, raiduri, femei, droguri și bere. Mituri, exagerări sau adevăruri îngrozitoare? Prejudecăți sau fapte dovedite? Ziariștii îi adorau pentru că le ofereau subiecte de scandal, iar publicul era fascinat de aerul lor amenințător și, într-un fel, misterios de răzvrătiți și antieroi neînțeleși.

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.

This Must Be the Place introduces and examines music's relationship to cities. Not the influence cities have on music, but the powerful impact music can have on how cities are developed, built, managed, and governed.

As all aspects of our social and informational lives increasingly migrate online, the line between what is "real" and what is digitally fabricated grows ever thinne rand that fake content has undeniable real-world consequences. A History of Fake Things on the Internet takes the long view of how advances in technology brought us to the point where faked texts, images, and video content are nearly indistinguishable from what is authentic or true.