The discovery of radium by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898 eventually led to a craze for radium products in the 1920s until their widespread use proved lethal for consumers, patients, and medical practitioners alike. Radium infiltrated American culture, Maria Rentetzi reveals, not only because of its potential to treat cancer but because it was transformed from a scientific obje...(展开全部)

Provides a fascinating and at times amusing insight into the real world uses of chemicals. Chemicals are everywhere. Many are natural and safe, others synthetic and dangerous. Or is it the other way around? Walking through the supermarket, you might ask yourself: Should I be eating organic food? Is that anti-wrinkle cream a gimmick? Is it worth buying BPA-free plastics? This Si...(展开全部)

The public intellectual, as a person and ideal, has a long and storied history. Writing in venues like the New Republic and Commentary, such intellectuals were always expected to opine on a broad array of topics, from foreign policy to literature to economics. Yet in recent years a new kind of thinker has supplanted that archetype: the thought leader. Equipped with one big idea...(展开全部)

Featured as one of "Six Books to Help Understand Trump's Win" by The New York Times --- A Fareed Zakaria GPS Book of the Week: "An intelligent guide to a phenomenon by no means over." -- Fareed Zakaria, CNN --- "Well-written and well-researched, powerfully argued and perfectly timed." ― The Economist --- Named one of the Best Books of 2016 by Bloomberg --- "Far and away the mos...(展开全部)

Humans are a striking anomaly in the natural world. While we are similar to other mammals in many ways, our behavior sets us apart. Our unparalleled ability to adapt has allowed us to occupy virtually every habitat on earth using an incredible variety of tools and subsistence techniques. Our societies are larger, more complex, and more cooperative than any other mammal's. In th...(展开全部)

Humans are a striking anomaly in the natural world. While we are similar to other mammals in many ways, our behavior sets us apart. Our unparalleled ability to adapt has allowed us to occupy virtually every habitat on earth using an incredible variety of tools and subsistence techniques. Our societies are larger, more complex, and more cooperative than any other mammal’s. In th...(展开全部)

The major American industries agriculture, petroleum, electricity, banking, telecommunications, movies, college sports, airlines, health care, and the beer, cigarette, and automotive industries intersect our lives every day. Studying these industries raises a number of economic questions: How are the individual industries organized and structured? What is their history? What ar...(展开全部)

“There’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story. Nothing can stop it. Nothing can defeat it.” So begins the scholar and literary critic Peter Brooks’s reckoning with today’s flourishing cult of story. Forty years after publishing his seminal work Reading for the Plot, his important contribution to what came to be known as the “narrative turn” in contemporary criti...(展开全部)

Feature films, television shows, homemade videos, tweets, blogs, and breaking news: digital media offer an always-accessible, apparently inexhaustible supply of entertainment and information. Although choices seems endless, public attention is not. How do digital media find the audiences they need in an era of infinite choice? In The Marketplace of Attention, James Webster expl...(展开全部)

Corporate executives are struggling with a new trend: people using online social technologies (blogs, social networking sites, YouTube, podcasts) to discuss products and companies, write their own news, and find their own deals. This groundswell is global, it s unstoppable, it affects every industry and it s utterly foreign to the powerful companies running things now. When con...(展开全部)