Showing titles in Popular Culture

For over five decades, the heart of Star Trek’s pro-science, anti-racist, and inclusive messaging has been its willingness to take big risks. Across 13 feature films, and 12 TV series—including five shows currently airing or in production—the brilliance of Star Trek is in its endless ability to be rethought, rebooted, and remade. Author and Star Trek expert Ryan Britt charts an approachable and entertaining course through Star Trek history

On January 7, 1980, in the run-up to the publication of his landmark best seller Thy Neighbor's Wife, Gay Talese received an anonymous letter from a man in Colorado. "Since learning of your long-awaited study of coast-to-coast sex in America," the letter began, "I feel I have important information that I could contribute to its contents or to contents of a future book." The man went on to tell Talese an astonishing secret: that he had bought a motel to satisfy his voyeuristic desires.

Turn Around Bright Eyes picks up Sheffield’s story right after Love Is a Mix Tape. He is a young widower devastated by grief, trying to build a new life in a new town after his wife’s death. As a writer for Rolling Stone, he naturally takes solace in music. But that’s when he discovers the sublime ridiculousness of karaoke, and despite the fact that he can’t carry a tune, he begins to find his voice.

Two recent books about Soviet history help answer questions raised by the ongoing crisis in Ukraine: What is wrong with Russia and why, despite two decades of optimistic predictions that it was on track to become a "normal" country, has it never become one?

You may have watched hundreds of episodes of The Simpsons (and its sister show Futurama) without ever realizing that cleverly embedded in many plots are subtle references to mathematics, ranging from well-known equations to cutting-edge theorems and conjectures. That they exist, Simon Singh reveals, underscores the brilliance of the shows’ writers, many of whom have advanced degrees in mathematics in addition to their unparalleled sense of humor.

For more than a decade, New York University president John Sexton has used baseball to illustrate the elements of a spiritual life in a wildly popular course at NYU. Using great works of baseball literature as well as the actual game’s fantastic moments, its legendary characters, and its routine rituals - from the long-sought triumph of the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers to the heroic achievements of players like the saintly Christy Mathewson and the sinful Ty Cobb to the loving intimacy of a game of catch between a father and son - Sexton teaches that through the game we can touch the spiritual dimensions of life.

Universal Studios never really wanted to get into the theme park business. They wanted to be the anti-Disney. But when forced to do so, they did it in a big way. Despite the fits and starts of multiple owners, the parks have finally gained the momentum to mount a serious challenge to the Walt Disney Company. How did this happen? Who made it happen? What does this mean for the theme park industry?

You know the type: the woman who won't shut up, who's too brazen, too opinionated - too much. She's the unruly woman, and she embodies one of the most provocative and powerful forms of womanhood today. In Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud, Anne Helen Petersen uses the lens of "unruliness" to explore the ascension of pop culture powerhouses like Serena Williams, Hillary Clinton, Nicki Minaj, and Kim Kardashian, exploring why the public loves to love (and hate) these controversial figures.

Assume nothing, question everything. This is the message at the heart of Freakonomics, Levitt and Dubner's rule-breaking, iconoclastic book about crack dealers, cheating teachers and bizarre baby names that turned everyone's view of the world upside-down and became an international multi-million-copy-selling phenomenon.

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. Up to 47 percent of US citizens admit to being addicted to their cell phones. Perhaps you’ve even said it of yourself, laughing it off as a light addiction—like saying you’re addicted to Pringles or your favorite song.

One of Michiko Kakutani's (New York Times) top 10 books of 2016. A funny thing happened on the way to the digital utopia. We've begun to fall back in love with the very analog goods and ideas the tech gurus insisted that we no longer needed. Businesses that once looked outdated, from film photography to brick-and-mortar retail, are now springing with new life. Notebooks, records, and stationery have become cool again.

When the Hart-Celler Act passed in 1965, opening up US immigration to non-Europeans, it ushered in a whole new era. But even to the first generation of Asian Americans born in the US after that milestone, it would have been impossible to imagine that sushi and boba would one day be beloved by all, that a Korean boy band named BTS would be the biggest musical act in the world, that one of the most acclaimed and popular movies of 2018 would be Crazy Rich Asians, or that we would have an Asian American Vice President.

A research-based guide to navigating the newest dating phenomenon - "the love gap" - and a trailblazing action plan to help smart, confident, career-driven women find (and keep) their match. For a rising generation of young women, the sky is the limit. Women can be anything and have everything. Smart, driven, assertive women are succeeding at just about everything they do - except romance. Why are so many men afraid to date smart women?

One of America’s finest historians shows us how Bob Dylan, one of the country’s greatest and most enduring artists, still surprises and moves us after all these years. Growing up in Greenwich Village, Sean Wilentz discov­ered the music of Bob Dylan as a young teenager; almost half a century later, he revisits Dylan’s work with the skills of an eminent American historian as well as the passion of a fan.

To understand how we got here, we have rewind the VHS tape. 90s Bitch tells the real story of women and girls in the 1990s, exploring how they were maligned by the media, vilified by popular culture, and objectified in the marketplace. Trailblazing women like Hillary Clinton, Anita Hill, Marcia Clark, and Roseanne Barr were undermined. Newsmakers like Monica Lewinsky, Tonya Harding, and Lorena Bobbitt were shamed and misunderstood. The advent of the 24-hour news cycle reinforced society's deeply entrenched sexism.

In the American moral vernacular, we have a whole thesaurus for victims of exploitation. They are suckers (born every minute), fools (not suffered gladly), dupes, marks, chumps, pawns, and losers. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Cultural stories about suckers abound too: the Trojan Horse, the Boy Who Cried Wolf, the Emperor’s New Clothes, even Hansel and Gretel. If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you. Don’t go out with him; he only wants one thing.

This is Diablo's captivating fish-out-of-water story of her yearlong walk on the wild side, from quiet gentlemen's clubs to multilevel sex palaces and glassed-in peep shows. In witty prose she gives readers a behind-the-scenes look at this industry through a writer's keen eye, chronicling her descent into the skin trade and the effect it had on her self-image and her relationship with her now husband.

Journalist and former Allure editor Sable Yong debuts with a sharp-toothed and hilarious essay collection about beauty and vanity, examining their stigmatization in the cultural zeitgeist, and how to shift the focus to use both for powerful tools for self-exploration, interpersonal connection, and cultural change.

This year is the fiftieth anniversary of Waterloo (the song, not the battle) – a seminal moment in pop history which saw Swedish sensation ABBA burst on to the international music scene. How is it that half a century later this seventies Eurovision act is bigger than ever – reaching listeners of all ages and spinning off into musicals, museums and holograms? Giles Smith, writer and music fan, sets out to find out why.

The definitive, shocking account of the FIFA scandal - the biggest international corruption case of recent years, spearheaded by US investigators, involving dozens of countries, and implicating nearly every aspect of the world’s most popular sport, soccer, including its biggest event, the World Cup.