Society & Social Sciences

A clear and comprehensive framework for bridging the widening gap between theorists and empiricists in social scienceThe credibility revolution, with its emphasis on empirical methods for causal inference, has led to concerns among scholars that the...

A fun and fact-filled AZ treasury for anyone with a head on their shoulders.Neuropedia journeys into the mysteries and marvels of the three pounds of tissue between your ears - the brain. Eric Chudler takes you on a breathtaking tour of the nervous...

A pioneering history that transforms our understanding of the colonial era and China's place in it. China has conventionally been considered a land empire whose lack of maritime and colonial reach contributed to its economic decline after the...

What an intensely divisive election portends for American politics.The year 2020 was a tumultuous time in American politics. It brought a global pandemic, protests for racial justice, and a razor-thin presidential election outcome. It culminated in an...

Looking beyond Putin to understand how today's Russia actually works**Shortlisted for the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize**Media and public discussion tends to understand Russian politics as a direct reflection of Vladimir Putin's seeming...

On Belonging and Not Belonging provides a sophisticated exploration of how themes of translation, migration, and displacement shape an astonishing range of artistic works. From the possibilities and limitations of translation addressed by Jhumpa Lahiri...

In 63 BC, frustrated by his failure to be elected leader of the Roman Republic, the aristocrat Catiline tried to topple its elected government. Backed by corrupt elites and poor, alienated Romans, he fled Rome while his associates plotted to burn the...

A new way of thinking about the climate crisis as an exercise in delimiting knowable, and habitable, worldsAs carbon dioxide emissions continue to rise, Earth's fragile ecosystems are growing increasingly unstable and unpredictable. Horizon Work explores...

From the acclaimed authors of Capitalism without Capital, radical ideas for restoring prosperity in today's intangible economyThe past two decades have witnessed sluggish economic growth, mounting inequality, dysfunctional competition, and a host of...

How a new breed of dictators holds power by manipulating information and faking democracyHitler, Stalin, and Mao ruled through violence, fear, and ideology. But in recent decades a new breed of media-savvy strongmen has been redesigning authoritarian...

A remarkable look at how the growth, technology, and politics of high-frequency trading have altered global financial markets In today's financial markets, trading floors on which brokers buy and sell shares face-to-face have increasingly been...

A compelling book that casts the Qur'anic encounter with Jews in an entirely new light.In this panoramic and multifaceted book, Meir Bar-Asher examines how Jews and Judaism are depicted in the Qur'an and later Islamic literature, providing needed context...

By the time a baby is born, its brain is equipped with billions of intricately crafted neurons wired together through trillions of interconnections to form a compact and breathtakingly efficient supercomputer. Zero to Birth takes you on an extraordinary...

Adrienne Mayor is renowned for exploring the borders of history, science, archaeology, anthropology, and popular knowledge to find historical realities and scientific insights-glimmering, long-buried nuggets of truth-embedded in myth, legends, and...

The untold story of the founding father's likely Jewish birth and upbringing-and its revolutionary consequences for understanding him and the nation he fought to create In The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton, Andrew Porwancher debunks a string of...

A radical reinterpretation of Adam Smith that challenges economists, moral philosophers, political theorists, and intellectual historians to rethink him - and why he mattersAdam Smith has long been recognised as the father of modern economics. More...

Few direct clues exist to the everyday lives and beliefs of ordinary Jews in antiquity. Prevailing perspectives on ancient Jewish life have been shaped largely by the voices of intellectual and social elites, preserved in the writings of Philo and...

A mesmerizing trip across America to investigate the changing face of death in contemporary lifeDeath in the United States is undergoing a quiet revolution. You can have your body frozen, dissected, composted, dissolved, or tanned. Your family can...

Digital technology, big data, big tech, machine learning, and AI are revolutionising both the tools of economics and the phenomena it seeks to measure, understand, and shape. In Cogs and Monsters, Diane Coyle explores the enormous problems - but also...

From the acclaimed author of Unfinished Business, a story of crisis and change that can help us find renewed honesty and purpose in our personal and political lives.Like much of the world, America is deeply divided over identity, equality, and history...

Why equality cannot be conditional on a shared human "nature" but has to be for allFor centuries, ringing declarations about all men being created equal appealed to a shared human nature as the reason to consider ourselves equals. But appeals to natural...

The surprising story of how George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson came to despair for the future of the nation they had createdAmericans seldom deify their Founding Fathers any longer, but they do still tend to venerate...

Co-winner of the 2019 Goldsmith Book Prize for Academic Books, Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School Winner of the 2018 Frank Luther Mott-Kappa Tau Alpha Journalism and Mass Communication Research AwardWhy...

Why society's expectation of economic growth is no longer realistic Economic growth - and the hope of better things to come - is the religion of the modern world. Yet its prospects have become bleak, with crashes following booms in an endless...

Leading technologists, historians, and journalists reveal the stories behind the computer coding that touches all aspects of life - for better or worse.Few of us give much thought to computer code or how it comes to be. The very word...

The first investigation of how race and gender shaped the presentation and marketing of Modernist decor in postwar America.In the world of interior design, mid-century Modernism has left an indelible mark still seen and felt today in countless...

Computational models of urbanism - smart cities that use data-driven planning and algorithmic administration - promise to deliver new urban efficiencies and conveniences. Yet these models limit our understanding of what we can know about a city. A City...

A new theoretical framework for understanding how social, economic, and political conflicts influence international institutions and their place in the global order Today's liberal international institutional order is being challenged by the...

The Sky Is for Everyone is an internationally diverse collection of autobiographical essays by women who broke down barriers and changed the face of modern astronomy. Virginia Trimble and David Weintraub vividly describe how, before 1900, a woman who...

Mashable's 20 Books from 2020 That Make Great GiftsIn the course of making Human Flow, his epic feature documentary about the global refugee crisis, the artist Ai Weiwei and his collaborators interviewed more than 600 refugees, aid workers,...

A riveting account of how a popularly elected leader has steered the world's largest democracy toward authoritarianism and intolerance.Over the past two decades, thanks to Narendra Modi, Hindu nationalism has been coupled with a form of...

New perspectives on the role of collective responsibility in modern politics States are commonly blamed for wars, called on to apologise, held liable for debts and reparations, bound by treaties, and punished with sanctions. But what does it...

A War on Global Poverty provides a fresh account of U.S. involvement in campaigns to end global poverty in the 1970s and 1980s. From the decline of modernisation programs to the rise of microcredit, Joanne Meyerowitz looks beyond familiar histories of...

How populism is fueled by the demise of the industrial order and the emergence of a new digital society ruled by algorithms.In the revolutionary excitement of the 1960s, young people around the world called for a radical shift away from the old...

Ever since her triumphant debut in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath, arguably the first ordinary and recognisably real woman in English literature, has obsessed readers - from Shakespeare to James Joyce, Voltaire to Pasolini, Dryden to Zadie...

Why 'aporophobia' - rejection of the poor - is one of the most serious problems facing the world today, and how we can fight it.In this revelatory book, acclaimed political philosopher Adela Cortina makes an unprecedented assertion: the...

Invaluable wisdom on living a good life from one of the Enlightenment's greatest philosophersDavid Hume (17111776) is perhaps best known for his ideas about cause and effect and his criticisms of religion, but he is rarely thought of as a...

A look at the duty of nations to protect human rights beyond borders, why it has failed in practice, and what can be done about it. The idea that states share a responsibility to shield people everywhere from atrocities is presently under threat. Despite...

The brilliant but turbulent life of a public intellectual who transformed the social sciencesRobert Bellah (19272013) was one of the most influential social scientists of the twentieth century. Trained as a sociologist, he crossed disciplinary boundaries...

The little-known history of public school teachers across the Arab world-and how they wielded an unlikely influence over the modern Middle EastToday, it is hard to imagine a time and place when public school teachers were considered among the elite...

Hate crimes. Misinformation and conspiracy theories. Foiled white-supremacist plots. The signs of growing far-right extremism are all around us, and communities across America and around the globe are struggling to understand how so many people are being...

Why working-class Americans almost never become politicians, what that means for democracy, and what reformers can do about itWhy are Americans governed by the rich? Millionaires make up only three percent of the public but control all three branches of...

The lasting effects of slavery on contemporary political attitudes in the American SouthDespite dramatic social transformations in the United States during the last 150 years, the South has remained staunchly conservative. Southerners are more likely to...

How American political participation is increasingly being shaped by citizens who wield more resourcesThe Declaration of Independence proclaims equality as a foundational American value. However, Unequal and Unrepresented finds that political voice in...

Washington Post, One of E.J. Dionne Jr.'s Recommendations A major new history of how democracy became the dominant political force in Europe in the second half of the twentieth century What happened in the years following World War II to create a...

The last three decades have seen a massive expansion of China's visual culture industries, from architecture and graphic design to fine art and fashion. New ideologies of creativity and creative practices have reshaped the training of a new generation of...

Providing vital new insights into the ways repression shapes polarisation, After Repression helps to explain what happened in the turbulent days following the Arab Spring and illuminates the obstacles to democratic transitions around...

A compelling interpretation of a foundational concept of Jewish religious lifeThe love of God is arguably the most essential element in Judaism-but also one of the most confounding. In biblical and rabbinic literature, the obligation to love God appears...