Recommendations based on "This is not a Diary"

Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? How much do parents really matter? These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask. But Steven D. Levitt is not a typical economist. He studies the riddles of everyday life-from cheating and crime to parenting and sports-and reaches conclusions that turn conventional wisdom on its head. Freakonomics is a groundbreaking collaboration between Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, an award-winning author and journalist. They set out to explore the inner workings of a crack gang, the truth about real estate agents, the secrets of the Ku Klux Klan, and much more. Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, they 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.

These Are Dangerous Times For Democracy. We Live In An Age Of Winners And Losers, Where The Odds Are Stacked In Favour Of The Already Fortunate. Stalled Social Mobility And Entrenched Inequality Give The Lie To The Promise That You Can Make It If You Try. And The Consequence Is A Brew Of Anger And Frustration That Has Fuelled Populist Protest, With The Triumph Of Brexit And Election Of Donald Trump. Michael J. Sandel Argues That To Overcome The Polarized Politics Of Our Time, We Must Rethink The Attitudes Toward Success And Failure That Have Accompanied Globalisation And Rising Inequality. Sandel Highlights The Hubris A Meritocracy Generates Among The Winners And The Harsh Judgement It Imposes On Those Left Behind. He Offers An Alternative Way Of Thinking About Success - More Attentive To The Role Of Luck In Human Affairs, More Conducive To An Ethic Of Humility, And More Hospitable To A Politics Of The Common Good.

AN INSTANT USA TODAY and PUBLISHERS WEEKLY BESTSELLERFrom the author of the Wall Street Journal bestseller Barking Up the Wrong Tree comes a cure-all for our increasing emotional distance and loneliness—a smart, surprising, and thoroughly entertaining guide to help build better friendships, reignite love, and get closer to others, whether you’re an extrovert or introvert, socially adept or socially anxious.Can you judge a book by its cover?Is a friend in need truly a friend indeed?Does love conquer all?Is no man an island?In Plays Well with Others, Eric Barker dives into these age-old maxims drawing on science to reveal the truth beyond the conventional wisdom about human relationships. Combining his compelling storytelling and humor, Barker explains what hostage negotiation techniques and marital arguments have in common, how an expert con-man lied his way into a twenty-year professional soccer career, and why those holding views diametrically opposed to our own actually have the potential to become our closest, most trusted friends.Inside you will learn: The two things essential to making friends – and what Dale Carnegie got wrong. What creates love, reignites love, and sustains love. (There’s no Build-A-Bear store for a happy marriage but this is close.) The ethical and effective way to get your partner to change. How social media can actually improve relationships. The antidote to loneliness and why what we usually hear doesn’t work.And so much more. The book is packed with high-five-worthy stories about the greatest female detective to ever live, the most successful liar to ever open his mouth, genius horses, thieving hermits, the perils of perfect memories, and placebos. Leveraging the best evidence available—free of platitudes or magical thinking—Barker analyzes multiple sides of an issue before rendering his verdict. What he’s uncovered is surprising, counterintuitive, and timely—and will change the way you interact in the world and with those around you just when you need it most.

Are we deranged? The acclaimed Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh argues that future generations may well think so. How else to explain our imaginative failure in the face of global warming? In his first major book of nonfiction since In an Antique Land, Ghosh examines our inability—at the level of literature, history, and politics—to grasp the scale and violence of climate change.The extreme nature of today’s climate events, Ghosh asserts, make them peculiarly resistant to contemporary modes of thinking and imagining. This is particularly true of serious literary fiction: hundred-year storms and freakish tornadoes simply feel too improbable for the novel; they are automatically consigned to other genres. In the writing of history, too, the climate crisis has sometimes led to gross simplifications; Ghosh shows that the history of the carbon economy is a tangled global story with many contradictory and counterintuitive elements.Ghosh ends by suggesting that politics, much like literature, has become a matter of personal moral reckoning rather than an arena of collective action. But to limit fiction and politics to individual moral adventure comes at a great cost. The climate crisis asks us to imagine other forms of human existence—a task to which fiction, Ghosh argues, is the best suited of all cultural forms. His book serves as a great writer’s summons to confront the most urgent task of our time.

The New York Times best-selling Freakonomics was a worldwide sensation, selling over four million copies in thirty-five languages and changing the way we look at the world. Now, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner return with SuperFreakonomics, and fans and newcomers alike will find that the freakquel is even bolder, funnier, and more surprising than the first.Four years in the making, SuperFreakonomics asks not only the tough questions, but the unexpected ones: What's more dangerous, driving drunk or walking drunk? Why is chemotherapy prescribed so often if it's so ineffective? Can a sex change boost your salary?SuperFreakonomics challenges the way we think all over again, exploring the hidden side of everything with such questions as:How is a street prostitute like a department-store Santa? Why are doctors so bad at washing their hands? How much good do car seats do? What's the best way to catch a terrorist? Did TV cause a rise in crime? What do hurricanes, heart attacks, and highway deaths have in common? Are people hard-wired for altruism or selfishness? Can eating kangaroo save the planet? Which adds more value: a pimp or a Realtor?Levitt and Dubner mix smart thinking and great storytelling like no one else, whether investigating a solution to global warming or explaining why the price of oral sex has fallen so drastically. By examining how people respond to incentives, they show the world for what it really is – good, bad, ugly, and, in the final analysis, super freaky.Freakonomics has been imitated many times over – but only now, with SuperFreakonomics, has it met its match.

Why do our headaches persist after we take a one-cent aspirin but disappear when we take a fifty-cent aspirin? Why do we splurge on a lavish meal but cut coupons to save twenty-five cents on a can of soup?When it comes to making decisions in our lives, we think we're making smart, rational choices. But are we?In this newly revised and expanded edition of the groundbreaking New York Times bestseller, Dan Ariely refutes the common assumption that we behave in fundamentally rational ways. From drinking coffee to losing weight, from buying a car to choosing a romantic partner, we consistently overpay, underestimate, and procrastinate. Yet these misguided behaviors are neither random nor senseless. They're systematic and predictable—making us predictably irrational.

From one of the world's most imaginative designers comes a story about humanity told through the lens of our buildings. 'This book is a super-accessible guide as to why we shouldn't put up with soulless buildings and how we might change that' GRAYSON PERRY ***** Our world is losing its humanity. Too many developers care more about their shareholders than society. Too many politicians care more about power than the people who vote for them. And too many cities feel soulless and depressing, with buildings designed for business, not for us. So where do we find hope? Thomas Heatherwick has an alternative. By changing the world around us, we can improve our health, restore our happiness, and save our planet. The time has come to put human emotion back at the heart of the design process. Drawing on thirty years of making bold, beautiful buildings, neuroscience and cognitive psychology, Heatherwick brings together vivid stories and hundreds of beautiful images into a visual masterpiece. Humanise will inspire us to do nothing less than remake our world. ***** 'Thomas Heatherwick brings a velvet sledgehammer to the way we think about buildings and how they change our lives . . . I want to live in the kind of city Heatherwick imagines!' SIMON SINEK 'Humanise is a masterwork. It's quietly furious, impassioned, rigorous and forensic in all the right doses. It leaves me very hopeful indeed about how things could go from here' ALAIN DE BOTTON

For more than twenty years, Naomi Klein has been the foremost chronicler of the economic war waged on both people and planet-and an unapologetic champion of a sweeping environmental agenda with justice at its center. In lucid, elegant dispatches from the frontlines of contemporary natural disaster, she pens surging, indispensable essays for a wide public: prescient advisories and dire warnings of what future awaits us if we refuse to act, as well as hopeful glimpses of a far better future. On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal gathers for the first time more than a decade of her impassioned writing, and pairs it with new material on the staggeringly high stakes of our immediate political and economic choices.These long-form essays show Klein at her most prophetic and philosophical, investigating the climate crisis not only as a profound political challenge but as a spiritual and imaginative one, as well. Delving into topics ranging from the clash between ecological time and our culture of "perpetual now," to the soaring history of humans changing and evolving rapidly in the face of grave threats, to rising white supremacy and fortressed borders as a form of 'climate barbarism,' this is a rousing call to action for a planet on the brink.With reports spanning from the ghostly Great Barrier Reef, to the annual smoke-choked skies of the Pacific Northwest, to post-hurricane Puerto Rico, to a Vatican attempting an unprecedented 'ecological conversion,' Klein makes the case that we will rise to the existential challenge of climate change only if we are willing to transform the systems that produced this crisis.An expansive, far-ranging exploration that sees the battle for a greener world as indistinguishable from the fight for our lives, On Fire captures the burning urgency of the climate crisis, as well as the fiery energy of a rising political movement demanding a catalytic Green New Deal.

In a true continuation of his thoughts in "Escape from Freedom," Dr. Fromm examines man's escape into over-conformity and the danger of robotism in contemporary industrial society. Then, affirmatively, he discusses the goals of a society in which the emphasis is on man and on social measures which would further his function as a responsible individual. This book is also, in many ways, an answer to Freud's "Civilization and Its Discontents."

Behavioral economist and New York Times bestselling author of Predictably Irrational Dan Ariely returns to offer a much-needed take on the irrational decisions that influence our dating lives, our workplace experiences, and our general behaviour, up close and personal. In The Upside of Irrationality, behavioral economist Dan Ariely will explore the many ways in which our behaviour often leads us astray in terms of our romantic relationships, our experiences in the workplace, and our temptations to cheat. Blending everyday experience with groundbreaking research, Ariely explains how expectations, emotions, social norms and other invisible, seemingly illogical forces skew our reasoning abilities. Among the topics Dan explores are: * What we think will make us happy and what really makes us happy; * How we learn to love the ones we are with; * Why online dating doesn't work, and how we can improve on it; * Why learning more about people make us like them less; * Why large bonuses can make CEOs less productive; * How to really motivate people at work; * Why bad directions can help us; * How we fall in love with our ideas; * How we are motivated by revenge; and * What motivates us to cheat. Drawing on the same experimental methods that made Predictably Irrational such a hit, Dan will emphasize the important role that irrationality plays in our day-to-day decisionmaking--not just in our financial marketplace, but in the most hidden aspects of our lives.