Social Science

How should we think about sex? It is a thing we have and also a thing we do, a supposedly private act laden with public meaning, a personal preference shaped by outside forces, a place where pleasure and ethics can pull wildly apart.

How should we talk about sex? Since #MeToo, many have fixed on consent as the key framework for achieving sexual justice. Yet consent is a blunt tool. To grasp sex in all its complexity―its deep ambivalences, its relationship to gender, class, race, and power―we need to move beyond yes and no, wanted and unwanted.

We do not know the future of sex―but perhaps we could imagine it. Amia Srinivasan’s stunning debut helps us do just that. She traces the meaning of sex in our world, animated by the hope for a different world. She reaches back into an older feminist tradition that was unafraid to think of sex as a political phenomenon. She discusses a range of fraught relationships―between discrimination and preference, pornography and freedom, rape and racial injustice, punishment and accountability, students and teachers, pleasure and power, capitalism and liberation.

The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century is a provocation and a promise, transforming many of our most urgent political debates and asking what it might mean to be free.

Think you already own your brain? Think again. Your brain owns you. It pushes you around and insists upon getting its way, not yours. Rather than having your best interests in mind, your brain has its own very specific agendas and strategies the purpose of which is singular—to make it feel good. It doesn’t care that its goals are often at stark variance with your intentions or what you know is healthy and constructive in your life. Your brain is selfish, demanding, and devious.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Override introduces a new two-pronged theory of personality: serotonin types and dopamine types. Based on today’s breakthrough science into neurotransmitters—the chemicals that transmit signals through our nervous system—Override show readers how to recognize their own chemical imbalances, and what to do about them.

One of the key parts of developing these strategies is understanding the ways serotonin and dopamine are supposed to work, and which type you fall under. Equipped with this new information, the reader will learn to recognize and reshape their reflexive behavior and develop intentional self-control. With this book, nobody is doomed to remain trapped by their natural tendencies!

Override details the struggles of people, both D- and S-Types, and show how together with them the authors found a path to change that can start this minute and last a lifetime. Complete with easy-to-use questionnaires, strategies, and exercises, this book offers micro and macro thinking on iconic human problems, backed up by the latest scientific research into why we are the way we are.

Is it possible to do something more meaningful than mothering?

As a young Catholic girl who grew up in the American Midwest on white bread and Jesus, Erin S. Lane was given two options for a life well-lived: Mother or Mother Superior. She could marry a man and mother her own children, or she could marry God, so to speak, and mother the world’s children. Both were good outcomes for someone else’s life. Neither would fit the shape of hers.

Interweaving Lane’s story with those of other women—including singles and couples, stepparents and foster parents, the infertile and the ambivalent—Someone Other Than a Mother challenges the social scripts that put moms on an impossible pedestal and shame childless women and nontraditional families for not measuring up. You may have heard these lines before:
– “Motherhood is the toughest job.” This script diminishes the work of non-moms and pressures moms to make parenting their full-time gig.
– “It’ll be different with your own.” This script underestimates the love of nonbiological kin and pushes unfair expectations onto nuclear families.
– “Family is the greatest legacy.” This script turns children into the ultimate sign of a woman’s worth and discounts the quieter ways we leave our mark.

With candor and verve, Someone Other Than a Mother tears up the shaming social scripts that are bad for moms and non-moms alike and rewrites the story of a life well-lived, one in which purpose is bigger than body parts, identity is fuller than offspring, and legacy is so much more than DNA.

The printing press, the pencil, the flush toilet, the battery–these are all great ideas. But where do they come from? What kind of environment breeds them? What sparks the flash of brilliance? How do we generate the breakthrough technologies that push forward our lives, our society, our culture?

Steven Johnson’s answers are revelatory as he identifies the seven key patterns behind genuine innovation, and traces them across time and disciplines. From Darwin and Freud to the halls of Google and Apple, Johnson investigates the innovation hubs throughout modern time and pulls out the approaches and commonalities that seem to appear at moments of originality.