Sitewide Message
Free Shipping For All Orders Over $100
U.S. Only - $9.99 ground Shipping for Orders Less Than $100
Additional shipping charges to Hawaii and Alaska
Textbooks Available for In-store Pickup Only
Atlas of the Heart
- Please log in to review this product
Attention Seeking
Attention Seeking is a short, fascinating introduction to the concept of attention from Britain's leading psychoanalyst, author of Missing Out and On Kindness.
Everything depends on what, if anything, we find interesting: on what we are encouraged and educated to find interesting, and what we find ourselves being interested in despite ourselves. There is our official curiosity and our unofficial curiosity (and psychoanalysis is a story about the relationship between the two). Based on three connected lectures by Adam Phillips, this compact book is a lucid and memorable introduction to the concept of our attention, spanning from interest to obsession, private desire to corporate commodity. What is attention, and why do we seek it? How does our culture moralize attention as a force in need of control? Phillips is one of our brightest and most unusual thinkers, uniquely capable of bringing our deepest impulses and instincts to light.- Please log in to review this product
Belonging
We live in enormously divisive times. From politics to race, religion, gender, and class, division runs rampant. In 2020, 40 percent of each political party said that supporters of the opposing party were "downright evil." In 2019, hate crimes reached a ten-year high in the United States. One in five Americans suffers from chronic loneliness. How did we become so alienated? Why is our sense of belonging so undermined? What if there were a set of science-backed techniques for navigating modern social life that could help us overcome our differences, create empathy, and forge lasting connections even across divides?
In Belonging, Stanford University professor Geoffrey L. Cohen applies his and others' groundbreaking research to the myriad problems of communal existence and offers concrete solutions for improving daily life. We all feel a deep need to belong, but most of us don't fully appreciate that need in others. Often inadvertently, we behave in ways that threaten others' sense of belonging. Yet small acts that establish connection, brief activities such as reflecting on our core values, and a slew of practices that Cohen defines as "situation-crafting" have been shown to lessen political polarization, improve motivation and performance in school and work, combat racism in our communities, enhance health and well-being, and unleash the potential in ourselves and in our relationships. Belonging is essential for managers, educators, parents, administrators, caregivers, and everyone who wants those around them to thrive.
- Please log in to review this product
Belonging
- Please log in to review this product
Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole
"Susan Cain has described and validated my existence once again!"--GLENNON DOYLE, author of Untamed
"The perfect cure for toxic positivity."--ADAM GRANT, author of Think Again
ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2022--Oprah Daily, BookPage Bittersweetness is a tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world. It recognizes that light and dark, birth and death--bitter and sweet--are forever paired. If you've ever wondered why you like sad music . . .
If you find comfort or inspiration in a rainy day . . .
If you react intensely to music, art, nature, and beauty . . . Then you probably identify with the bittersweet state of mind. With Quiet, Susan Cain urged our society to cultivate space for the undervalued, indispensable introverts among us, thereby revealing an untapped power hidden in plain sight. Now she employs the same mix of research, storytelling, and memoir to explore why we experience sorrow and longing, and how embracing the bittersweetness at the heart of life is the true path to creativity, connection, and transcendence. Cain shows how a bittersweet state of mind is the quiet force that helps us transcend our personal and collective pain, whether from a death or breakup, addiction or illness. If we don't acknowledge our own heartache, she says, we can end up inflicting it on others via abuse, domination, or neglect. But if we realize that all humans know--or will know--loss and suffering, we can turn toward one another. At a time of profound discord and personal anxiety, Bittersweet brings us together in deep and unexpected ways.
- Please log in to review this product
Black-and-White Thinking
A groundbreaking and timely book about how evolutionary biology can explain our black-and-white brains, and a lesson in how we can escape the pitfalls of binary thinking.
Several million years ago, natural selection equipped us with binary, black-and-white brains. Though the world was arguably simpler back then, it was in many ways much more dangerous. Not coincidentally, the binary brain was highly adept at detecting risk--the ability to analyze threats and respond to changes in the sensory environment was essential to our survival as a species. Since then, the world has evolved--but we, for the most part, have not. Confronted with a panoply of shades of gray, our brains have a tendency to "force quit" to sort the things we see, hear, and experience into manageable but simplistic categories. We stereotype, pigeonhole, and, above all, draw lines where in reality there are none. In Black-and-White Thinking, the renowned psychologist Kevin Dutton pulls back the curtains of the mind to reveal a new way of thinking about a problem as old as humanity itself. While our instinct for categorization often leads us astray, encouraging polarization, rigid thinking, and sometimes outright denialism, it is an essential component of the mental machinery we use to make sense of the world. Using the latest advances in psychology, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology, Dutton shows how we can optimize our tendency to categorize and fine-tune our minds to avoid the pitfalls of too little--and too much--complexity. He reveals the enduring importance of three "super-categories"--Fight versus Flight, Us versus Them, and Right versus Wrong--and argues that they remain essential not only to convincing others to change their minds but to changing the world for the better. Black-and-White Thinking is a science-based wake-up call for an era of increasing extremism and a thought-provoking, uplifting guide to training our gray matter to see that gray really does matter.- Please log in to review this product
Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism
The author of the widely praised Wordslut analyzes the social science of cult influence: how cultish groups from Jonestown and Scientology to SoulCycle and social media gurus use language as the ultimate form of power.
What makes "cults" so intriguing and frightening? What makes them powerful? The reason why so many of us binge Manson documentaries by the dozen and fall down rabbit holes researching suburban moms gone QAnon is because we're looking for a satisfying explanation for what causes people to join--and more importantly, stay in--extreme groups. We secretly want to know: could it happen to me? Amanda Montell's argument is that, on some level, it already has . . .
Our culture tends to provide pretty flimsy answers to questions of cult influence, mostly having to do with vague talk of "brainwashing." But the true answer has nothing to do with freaky mind-control wizardry or Kool-Aid. In Cultish, Montell argues that the key to manufacturing intense ideology, community, and us/them attitudes all comes down to language. In both positive ways and shadowy ones, cultish language is something we hear--and are influenced by--every single day.
Through juicy storytelling and cutting original research, Montell exposes the verbal elements that make a wide spectrum of communities "cultish," revealing how they affect followers of groups as notorious as Heaven's Gate, but also how they pervade our modern start-ups, Peloton leaderboards, and Instagram feeds. Incisive and darkly funny, this enrapturing take on the curious social science of power and belief will make you hear the fanatical language of "cultish" everywhere.
- Please log in to review this product
Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief
A Kirkus Best Book of October 2021
From poet Victoria Chang, a collection of literary letters and mementos on the art of remembering across generations.
For Victoria Chang, memory "isn't something that blooms, but something that bleeds internally." It is willed, summoned, and dragged to the surface. The remembrances in this collection of letters are founded in the fragments of stories her mother shared reluctantly, and the silences of her father, who first would not and then could not share more. They are whittled and sculpted from an archive of family relics: a marriage license, a letter, a visa petition, a photograph. And, just as often, they are built on the questions that can no longer be answered.
Dear Memory is not a transcription but a process of simultaneously shaping and being shaped, knowing that when a writer dips their pen into history, what emerges is poetry. In carefully crafted collages and missives on trauma, loss, and Americanness, Victoria Chang grasps on to a sense of self that grief threatens to dissipate.
In letters to family, past teachers, and fellow poets, as the imagination, Dear Memory offers a model for what it looks like to find ourselves in our histories.
Other Honors for Dear Memory:
An Electric Literature Favorite Nonfiction Book of 2021
A TIME Magazine Most Anticipated Book of Fall 2021
A Los Angeles Times Most Anticipated Book of Fall 2021
A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2021An NPR Most Anticipated Book of October 2021
- Please log in to review this product
Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence
"Brilliant . . . riveting, scary, cogent, and cleverly argued."--Beth Macy, author of Dopesick,
as heard on Fresh Air This book is about pleasure. It's also about pain. Most important, it's about how to find the delicate balance between the two, and why now more than ever finding balance is essential. We're living in a time of unprecedented access to high-reward, high-dopamine stimuli: drugs, food, news, gambling, shopping, gaming, texting, sexting, Facebooking, Instagramming, YouTubing, tweeting . . . The increased numbers, variety, and potency is staggering. The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation. As such we've all become vulnerable to compulsive overconsumption. In Dopamine Nation, Dr. Anna Lembke, psychiatrist and author, explores the exciting new scientific discoveries that explain why the relentless pursuit of pleasure leads to pain . . . and what to do about it. Condensing complex neuroscience into easy-to-understand metaphors, Lembke illustrates how finding contentment and connectedness means keeping dopamine in check. The lived experiences of her patients are the gripping fabric of her narrative. Their riveting stories of suffering and redemption give us all hope for managing our consumption and transforming our lives. In essence, Dopamine Nation shows that the secret to finding balance is combining the science of desire with the wisdom of recovery.
- Please log in to review this product
Drop: How the Most Addictive Sport Can Help Us Understand Addiction and Recovery
In this revelatory and original book, award-winning author of the acclaimed surf memoir On a Wave illuminates the connection between waves, addiction, and recovery, exploring what surfing can teach us about the powerful undertow of addictive behaviors and the ways to swim free of them.
Addiction is arguably the dominant feature of contemporary life: sex, gambling, exercise, eating, shopping, Internet use--there's virtually no pleasurable activity that can't morph into a destructive obsession. For Americans under the age of fifty-five, the leading cause of death is drug overdose. But there is another side of addiction.
In some instances, the very activities that can lead to addiction can also lead out of it. As neurologists have recently discovered, surfing is a kind of study in the mechanism of addiction, delivering dopamine to the pleasure center of the brain and reshaping priorities and desire in a feedback loop of narrowing focus. Thad Ziolkowski knows this dynamic intimately. A lifelong surfer, he has been surrounded by addiction since his boyhood. In this unique, groundbreaking book, part addiction memoir, part sociological study, part spiritual odyssey, Ziolkowski dismantles the myth of surfing as a radiantly wholesome lifestyle immune to the darker temptations of the culture and discovers among the rubble a new way to understand and ultimately overcome addiction.
Combining his own story with insights from scientists, progressive thinkers and the experiences of top surfers and addicts from around the world, Ziolkowski shows how getting on a board and catching a wave is a unique and deeply instructive means of riding out of the darkness and back into the light. Yet while surfing is his salvation, its lessons can applied to other activities that can pull us free from the lethal undertow of addiction and save lives.
- Please log in to review this product
End of Trauma
A top expert on human trauma argues that we vastly overestimate how common PTSD is and fail to recognize how resilient people really are
After 9/11, mental health professionals flocked to New York to handle what everyone assumed would be a flood of trauma cases. Oddly, the flood never came. In The End of Trauma, pioneering psychologist George A. Bonanno argues that we failed to predict the psychological response to 9/11 because most of what we understand about trauma is wrong. For starters, it's not nearly as common as we think. In fact, people are overwhelmingly resilient to adversity. What we often interpret as PTSD are signs of a natural process of learning how to deal with a specific situation. We can cope far more effectively if we understand how this process works. Drawing on four decades of research, Bonanno explains what makes us resilient, why we sometimes aren't, and how we can better handle traumatic stress. Hopeful and humane, The End of Trauma overturns everything we thought we knew about how people respond to hardship.- Please log in to review this product
Evil
- Please log in to review this product
Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious
In recent decades, many philosophers and cognitive scientists have declared the problem of consciousness unsolvable, but Antonio Damasio is convinced that recent findings across multiple scientific disciplines have given us a way to understand consciousness and its significance for human life. In the forty-eight brief chapters of Feeling & Knowing, and in writing that remains faithful to our intuitive sense of what feeling and experiencing are about, Damasio helps us understand why being conscious is not the same as sensing, why nervous systems are essential for the development of feelings, and why feeling opens the way to consciousness writ large. He combines the latest discoveries in various sciences with philosophy and discusses his original research, which has transformed our understanding of the brain and human behavior. Here is an indispensable guide to understanding how we experience the world within and around us and find our place in the universe.
- Please log in to review this product
Hero with a Thousand Faces
- Please log in to review this product
High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out
- Please log in to review this product
How to Be a Woman Online: Surviving Abuse and Harassment, and How to Fight Back
An essential guide for women interested in standing up for a fairer, safer online world. Publisher's Weekly
Timely. Booklist
When Nina Jankowicz's first book on online disinformation was profiled in The New Yorker, she expected attention but not an avalanche of abuse and harassment, predominantly from men, online.
- Please log in to review this product
Inspired: Understanding Creativity: A Journey Through Art, Science, and the Soul
Porchlight Business Book of the Year shortlist (Innovation & Creativity)
"The Pulitzer-winning author unpacks the myths and mysteries of the creative process." --Salon
From the New York Times science reporter acclaimed for "bring[ing] scientific concepts to life" (Bill Gates), a pathbreaking new investigation of human creativity
How does creativity work? Where does inspiration come from? What are the secrets of our most revered creators? How can we maximize our creative potential?
Creativity defines the human experience. It sparks achievement and innovation in art, science, technology, business, sports, and virtually every activity. It has fueled human progress on a global level, but it equally is the source of profound personal satisfaction for individual creators. And yet the origins of creative inspiration and the methods by which great creators tap into it have long been a source of mystery, spoken of in esoteric terms, our rational understanding shrouded in complex jargon. Until now.
Inspired is a book about the science of creativity, distilling an explosion of exciting new research from across the world. Through narrative storytelling, Richtel marries these findings with timeless insight from some of the world's great creators as he deconstructs the authentic nature of creativity, its biological and evolutionary origins, its deep connection to religion and spirituality, the way it bubbles in each of us, urgent and essential, waiting to be tapped.
Many of the questions Richtel addresses are practical: What are the traits of successful creators? Under which conditions does creativity thrive? How can we move past creative blocks? The ultimate message of Inspired is that creativity is more accessible than many might imagine, as necessary, beautiful, and fulfilling as any essential part of human nature.
- Please log in to review this product
Keep Sharp
- Please log in to review this product
Little Book of Kindness
Scientific evidence has proven that kindness changes the brain, impacts the heart and immune system, is an antidote to depression, improves relationships and even slows the ageing process. Yet, more than this, kindness can power real and lasting change in the world.
This little guide shows how the practice of kindness can increase our happiness, improve our health, help us to forge stronger connections with others and positively affect the world we live in.
In The Little Book of Kindness, kindness expert Dr David R Hamilton reveals the science of kindness and teaches us how, by using easy-to-follow tools, strategies and exercises, we can harness its power to improve all aspects of our lives and the lives of the people around us.
- Please log in to review this product
Memory Craft
Groundbreaking anthropologist and memory champion Lynne Kelly reveals how we can use ancient and traditional mnemonic methods to enhance and expand our memory.
Our brain is a muscle. Like our bodies, it needs exercise. In the last few hundred years, we have stopped training our memories and we have lost the ability to memorize large amounts of information-something our ancestors could do with ease.
After discovering that the true purpose of monuments like Easter Island and Stonehenge were to act as memory palaces, Kelly takes this knowledge and introduces us to the best memory techniques humans have ever devised, from ancient times and the Middle Ages to methods used by today's memory athletes. A memory champion herself, Kelly tests all these methods and demonstrate the extraordinary capacity of our brains at any age.
For anyone who needs to memorize a speech or a script, learn anatomy or a foreign language, or prepare for an exam, Memory Craft offers proven techniques and simple strategies for anyone who has trouble remembering names or dates, or for older people who want to keep their minds agile. In addition to getting in touch with our own human and anthropological foundations, Memory Craft shows how all things mnemonic can be playful, creative, and fun.
- Please log in to review this product
Mind Fixers
In Mind Fixers, "the preeminent historian of neuroscience" (Science magazine) Anne Harrington explores psychiatry's repeatedly frustrated efforts to understand mental disorder. She shows that psychiatry's waxing and waning theories have been shaped not just by developments in the clinic and lab, but also by a surprising range of social factors. Mind Fixers recounts the past and present struggle to make mental illness a biological problem in order to lay the groundwork for creating a better future.
- Please log in to review this product
Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture
- Please log in to review this product
Navigating Autism
International best-selling writer and autist Temple Grandin joins psychologist Debra Moore in presenting nine strengths-based mindsets necessary to successfully work with young people on the autism spectrum. Examples and stories bring the approaches to life, and detailed suggestions and checklists help readers put them to practical use.
Temple Grandin shares her own personal experiences and anecdotes from parents and professionals who have sought her advice, while Debra Moore draws on more than three decades of work as a psychologist with kids on the spectrum and those who love and care for them. So many people support the lives of these kids, and this book is for all of them: teachers; special education staff; mental health clinicians; physical, occupational, and speech therapists; parents; and anyone interacting with autistic children or teens.
Readers will come away with new, empowering mindsets they can apply to develop the full potential of every child.
- Please log in to review this product
Night School: Lessons in Moonlight, Magic, and the Mysteries of Being Human
- Please log in to review this product
On Getting Better
On Getting Better is a thoughtful and compact book about self-improvement from Britain's leading psychoanalyst, author of Missing Out and On Kindness.
To talk about getting better--about wanting to change in ways that we might choose and prefer--is to talk about pursuing the life we want, in the full knowledge that our pictures of the life we want, of our version of a good life, come from what we have already experienced. (We write the sentences we write because of the sentences we have read.) How can we talk differently about how we might want to change, knowing that all change precipitates us into an uncertain future? In this companion book to On Wanting to Change, Adam Phillips explores how we might get better at talking about what it is to get better.- Please log in to review this product
On Wanting to Change
From the UK's foremost literary psychoanalyst, a dazzling new book on the universal urge to change our lives.
We live in a world in which we are invited to change--to become our best selves through politics, or fitness, or diet, or therapy. We change all the time--growing older and older--and how we think about change changes over time too. We want to think of our lives as progress myths--as narratives of positive personal growth--at the same time as we inevitably age and suffer setbacks. Adam Phillips's sparkling book On Wanting to Change explores the stories we tell about change, and the changes we actually make--and the fact that they don't always go, or come, together.- Please log in to review this product
Pattern Seekers
*A New York Times Editors' Choice Pick*
An "ambitious work" (Washington Post) tracing the links between autism and ingenuity
Is the ability to invent things unique to humans? In The Pattern Seekers, Cambridge University psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen argues that it is, and proposes that autistic people have played a key role in human progress for seventy to one hundred thousand years, from the first complex tools like the bow and arrow and the first musical instrument to the digital revolution.
He presents the science that the same genes that contribute to autism enable a special kind of pattern seeking that is essential to our species' inventiveness. However, these abilities come at a cost for autistic people, including social and neurological challenges. Baron-Cohen calls on us to support and celebrate autistic people in both their disabilities and their talents. Ultimately, The Pattern Seekers isn't just a new theory of human evolution, but a call to reconsider how society treats those who think differently.
- Please log in to review this product