Popular Culture

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.

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

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

Levitt and co-author Stephen J. Dubner show that economics is, at root, the study of incentives: how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing....

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....

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....

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....

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.

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.

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.

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....

From the best-selling author of Blood, Sweat, and Pixels comes the next definitive, behind-the-scenes account of the video game industry: how some of the past decade's most renowned studios fell apart - and the stories, both triumphant and tragic, of what happened next....

From the moment powerful men started falling to the #MeToo movement, the lamentations began: This is feminism gone too far, this is injustice, this is a witch hunt....

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....

Leah Sottile investigates the New Age movement in America that aims to understand its appeal to women and the self-proclaimed prophetesses, like Love Has Won's Amy Carlson, who've created kingdoms for themselves within it.

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

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.

In ten brilliantly written chapters, Stephen King delivers one colorful observation after another about the great stories, books, and films that comprise the horror genre—from Frankenstein and Dracula to The Exorcist, The Twilight Zone, and Earth vs. The Flying Saucers.

Since The Karate Kid first crane-kicked its way into the pop culture stratosphere in June 1984, there hasn’t been a week Ralph Macchio hasn’t heard friendly shouts of “Wax on, wax off” or “Sweep the leg”....

A “galvanizing” (The Wall Street Journal) deep dive into cancel culture and its dangers to all Americans from the team that brought you Coddling of the American Mind.

One of the most admired nonfiction writers of our time retells the story of one truly fabulous year in the life of his native country....

From the number one New York Times best-selling author of The Midnight Library Matt Haig comes a new uplifting book, for anyone in search of hope, looking for a path to a more meaningful life, or in need of a little encouragement....

An expanded edition of the bestselling self-published self-help book, featuring 13 exclusive essays from creator and self-proclaimed instigator Kyle Creek, aka “The Captain.”

Comedian, activist, and hugely popular culture blogger at AwesomelyLuvvie.com Luvvie Ajayi serves up necessary advice for the masses in this hilarious book of essays....

Psychedelics for spiritual, therapeutic, and problem-solving use....

When Graydon Carter was offered the editorship of Vanity Fair in 1992, he knew he faced an uphill battle—how to make the esteemed and long-established magazine his own. Not only was he confronted with a staff that he perceived to be loyal to the previous regime, but he arrived only a few years after launching Spy magazine, which gloried in skewering the celebrated and powerful—the very people Vanity Fair venerated.

At the ripe age of three, Mike Drucker got his very first Nintendo console—the Nintendo Entertainment System—and he was hooked. Every video game felt like a new chapter was opening in his life, expanding his world for the better and—sometimes—for worse. In this fond and joyful memoir, Drucker combines ridiculous personal stories and fascinating gaming history to explore the poignant ways that electronic entertainment can save us from ourselves. Good Game, No Rematch is a love letter to video games and the people who play them, from a very nerdy voice in the world of comedy.

Since the Mayflower sidled up to Plymouth Rock, cult ideology has been ingrained in the DNA of the United States. In this eye-opening book, journalist Jane Borden argues that Puritan doomsday belief never went away; it went secular and became American culture. From our fascination with cowboys and superheroes to our allegiance to influencers and self-help, susceptibility to advertising, and undying devotion to the self-made man, Americans remain particularly vulnerable to a specific brand of cult-like 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. 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?

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.

Since her canonical 2017 essay “On Liking Women,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Andrea Long Chu has established herself as a public intellectual straight out of the 1960s. With devastating wit and polemical clarity, she defies the imperative to leave politics out of art, instead modeling how the left might brave the culture wars without throwing in with the cynics and doomsayers. Authority brings together Chu’s critical work across a wide range of media—novels, television, theater, video games—as well as an acclaimed tetralogy of literary essays first published in n+1.

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.

The author’s musings continue onward as he collects his thoughts and responds to the daily events. As time marches on, many of these thoughts reflect what is natural as we age. It shapes and molds as we apply the lessons of daily living, the highs, the lows, the major milestones, and the times we might ought to slow down long enough to notice the small but rather important things. A worldview fully grounded in compassion and sound reasoning. From “ Random Musings of the Left Hemisphere,” and “Random² Musings-A Left Hemisphere Continuum,” the author continues to refine, resolve, ...

Contemporary cultural style boosts transparency and instantaneity. These are values absorbed from our current economic conditions of disintermediation: cutting out the middleman. Like Uber, but for art. Immediacy names this style to make sense of what we lose when the contradictions of twenty-first-century capitalism demand that aesthetics negate mediation. Surging realness as an aesthetic program synchs with the economic imperative to intensify circulation when production stagnates. Flow is the ultimate twenty-first-century buzzword, but speedy circulation grinds art down to the nub.

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.