
The Age of Magical Overthinking
Notes on Modern Irrationality
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Narrated by:
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Amanda Montell
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By:
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Amanda Montell
About this listen
A BookPage Best Nonfiction Book of 2024
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.
Utilizing the linguistic insights of her “witty and brilliant” (Blyth Roberson, author of America the Beautiful?) first book Wordslut and the sociological explorations of her breakout hit Cultish, Amanda Montell now turns her erudite eye to the inner workings of the human mind and its biases in her most personal and electrifying work yet.
“Magical thinking” can be broadly defined as the belief that one’s internal thoughts can affect unrelated events in the external world: think of the conviction that one can manifest their way out of poverty, stave off cancer with positive vibes, thwart the apocalypse by learning to can their own peaches, or transform an unhealthy relationship to a glorious one with loyalty alone. In all its forms, magical thinking works in service of restoring agency amid chaos, but in The Age of Magical Overthinking, Montell argues that in the modern information age, our brain’s coping mechanisms have been overloaded, and our irrationality turned up to an eleven.
In a series of razor sharp, deeply funny chapters, Montell delves into a cornucopia of the cognitive biases that run rampant in our brains, from how the “halo effect” cultivates worship (and hatred) of larger-than-life celebrities, to how the “sunk cost fallacy” can keep us in detrimental relationships long after we’ve realized they’re not serving us. As she illuminates these concepts with her signature brilliance and wit, Montell’s prevailing message is one of hope, empathy, and ultimately forgiveness for our anxiety-addled human selves. If you have all but lost faith in our ability to reason, Montell aims to make some sense of the senseless. To crack open a window in our minds, and let a warm breeze in. To help quiet the cacophony for a while, or even hear a melody in it.©2024 Amanda Montell (P)2024 Simon & Schuster Audio
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Interview: Amanda Montell explains why everyone is guilty of "Magical Overthinking"
Editorial Review
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Story
A gentle reminder for the days you feel light in this world, and for the days in which the sun rises a little slower. A gentle reminder for when your heart is full of hope and for when you are learning how to heal it. A gentle reminder for when you finally begin to trust in the goodness and for when you need the kind of words that hug your broken pieces back together. A gentle reminder for when growth hangs heavy in the air, for when you need to tuck your strength into your bones just to make it to tomorrow.
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Your Soul Will Appreciate This Book
- By J on 01-20-24
By: Bianca Sparacino
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The 99% Invisible City
- A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design
- By: Kurt Kohlstedt, Roman Mars
- Narrated by: Roman Mars
- Length: 10 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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99% Invisible is a big-ideas podcast about small-seeming things, revealing stories baked into the buildings we inhabit, the streets we drive, and the sidewalks we traverse. The show celebrates design and architecture in all of its functional glory and accidental absurdity, with intriguing tales of both designers and the people impacted by their designs.
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The 99% Invisible City
- By Louise Schraa on 01-09-21
By: Kurt Kohlstedt, and others
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We Were the Mulvaneys
- By: Joyce Carol Oates
- Narrated by: Scott Shina
- Length: 22 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Judd is the youngest of the four Mulvaney children - three boys and a girl - on their parents’ lush farm in upstate New York. In his childhood, Judd is swept along by the sheer energy of the Mulvaneys and their wealth of beloved family stories. But now, 30 years old, Judd looks back through his memories to tell the secrets that eventually ripped apart the fabric of his storybook family.
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Overlooked Masterpiece
- By Jason on 10-26-12
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Ghosts
- A Novel
- By: Dolly Alderton
- Narrated by: Holliday Grainger
- Length: 10 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Nina Dean is not especially bothered that she's single. She owns her own apartment, she's about to publish her second book, she has a great relationship with her ex-boyfriend, and enough friends to keep her social calendar full and her hangovers plentiful. And when she downloads a dating app, she does the seemingly impossible: She meets a great guy on her first date. Max is handsome and built like a lumberjack; he has floppy blond hair and a stable job. But more surprising than anything else, Nina and Max have chemistry.
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I’m glad I bought this on accident
- By James M. on 06-13-22
By: Dolly Alderton
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Unstoppable Brain
- The New Neuroscience That Frees Us from Failure, Eases Our Stress, and Creates Lasting Change
- By: Kyra Bobinet
- Narrated by: Kyra Bobinet MD MPH
- Length: 6 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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We all want the power and motivation to create change in our lives. But how to get that in a stumbling dance of one step forward and two steps back? Negative emotions run rampant in many people's lives today; a reality that feels like a shrink wrap of suffering. Popular fallback solutions of performance-based goals and tools focus on extrinsic rewards like fame, wealth, or winning. But overuse of those rewards doesn't work for the long term and in fact weakens our confidence and motivation over time, leaving us vulnerable to failure and shame.
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Must Read Brain Science on Motivation and Personal Change
- By Richard Tuley Jr. on 07-25-24
By: Kyra Bobinet
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Conversations on Love
- Lovers, Strangers, Parents, Friends, Endings, Beginnings
- By: Natasha Lunn
- Narrated by: various
- Length: 7 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Interweaving personal essays and revealing interviews with some of the most sough-after experts on love, journalist Natasha Lunn guides us through the paradoxical heart of three key questions about love - How do we find love? How do we sustain it? And how do we survive when we lose it? - to deliver a book that is a solace, a beacon, a call to arms, a toolkit. The real-life love stories in this audiobook will leave you hopeful and validated, while the insights from experts will transform the way you think about your relationships.
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Can’t get passed minute 11!
- By S. Soto on 01-13-23
By: Natasha Lunn
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Fantasyland
- How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History
- By: Kurt Andersen
- Narrated by: Kurt Andersen
- Length: 19 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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A razor-sharp thinker offers a new understanding of our post-truth world and explains the American instinct to believe in make-believe, from the Pilgrims to P. T. Barnum to Disneyland to zealots of every stripe...to Donald Trump. In this sweeping, eloquent history of America, Kurt Andersen demonstrates that what's happening in our country today - this strange, post-factual, "fake news" moment we're all living through - is not something entirely new, but rather the ultimate expression of our national character and path.
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Bland Title For An Amazing Book!
- By David Larson on 09-07-17
By: Kurt Andersen
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Plagues upon the Earth
- Disease and the Course of Human History
- By: Kyle Harper
- Narrated by: Tim Fannon
- Length: 19 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Plagues upon the Earth is a monumental history of humans and their germs. Weaving together a grand narrative of global history with insights from cutting-edge genetics, Kyle Harper explains why humanity’s uniquely dangerous disease pool is rooted deep in our evolutionary past, and why its growth is accelerated by technological progress. He shows that the story of disease is entangled with the history of slavery, colonialism, and capitalism, and reveals the enduring effects of historical plagues all around us, in patterns of wealth, health, power, and inequality.
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Waste of time...endless dribble.
- By Kathleen A. Massey on 12-29-21
By: Kyle Harper
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The Patriarchs
- The Origins of Inequality
- By: Angela Saini
- Narrated by: Sohm Kapila
- Length: 10 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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For fans of Sapiens and The Dawn of Everything, a groundbreaking exploration of gendered oppression—its origins, its histories, our attempts to understand it, and our efforts to combat it.
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Patriarchys over time and space
- By Lynda Dickson on 12-22-23
By: Angela Saini
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Perfume and Pain
- A Novel
- By: Anna Dorn
- Narrated by: Natalie Naudus
- Length: 9 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Having recently moved both herself and her formidable perfume bottle collection into a tiny bungalow in Los Angeles, mid-list author Astrid Dahl finds herself back in the Zoom writer’s group she cofounded, Sapphic Scribes, after an incident that leaves her and her career lightly canceled. But she temporarily forgets all that by throwing herself into a few sexy distractions—like Ivy, a grad student researching 1950s lesbian pulp who smells like metallic orchids, or her new neighbor, Penelope, who smells like patchouli.
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Hilarious!!
- By Marilyn on 05-22-24
By: Anna Dorn
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You Didn't Hear This from Me
- (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip
- By: Kelsey McKinney
- Narrated by: Kelsey McKinney
- Length: 7 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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As the pandemic forced us to socialize at a distance, Kelsey McKinney was mourning the juicy updates and jaw-dropping stories she’d typically collect over drinks with friends—and from her hunger, the blockbuster Normal Gossip podcast was born. With listenership in the millions, Kelsey found herself thinking more critically about gossip as a form, and wanting to better understand the role it plays in our culture. In You Didn't Hear This From Me, McKinney explores the murkiness of everyday storytelling.
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Breaking down gossip
- By JASmall on 04-30-25
By: Kelsey McKinney
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Trick Mirror
- Reflections on Self-Delusion
- By: Jia Tolentino
- Narrated by: Jia Tolentino
- Length: 9 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Jia Tolentino is a peerless voice of her generation, tackling the conflicts, contradictions, and sea changes that define us and our time. Now, in this dazzling collection of nine entirely original essays, written with a rare combination of give and sharpness, wit and fearlessness, she delves into the forces that warp our vision, demonstrating an unparalleled stylistic potency and critical dexterity.
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Couldn’t stop listening
- By Alice on 08-25-19
By: Jia Tolentino
Sorry. I could not make it out of the first chapter
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Eye Opening!
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Modern-Day Sociology Recap
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I wonder if some of the studies could have been cherry picking to fit with her narrative, but that is always a danger when trying to craft a narrative.
I will recommend this to people who might enjoy this style because the concepts are important.
Introduction of Research on Thinking in an understandable way
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Me encantó
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This was a memoir pretending to be something more scientific
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Nothing new
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Couldn’t put it down
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Maybe my favorite of her work so far
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I am in awe by the writing, and I truly learned so much
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