From the author of the international bestseller Debt: The First 5,000 Years comes a revelatory account of the way bureaucracy rules our lives  Where does the desire for endless rules, regulations, and bureaucracy come from? How did ...

Are they human, or are they beast? Over the past several decades, the world has seen a new phenomenon on the rise, a group of people identifying as "furries." They have appeared in the news and popular TV shows as adults wea...

Thirty diverse, award-winning authors and illustrators invite you into their homes to witness the conversations they have with their children about race in America today in this powerful call-to-act...

A modern classic cherished by many of the greatest artists of our time, The Gift is a brilliant, life-changing defense of the value of creative labor. Drawing on examples from folklore and literature, history and tribal customs, econ...

Humanity is at a crossroads. We face mounting inequality, escalating political violence, warring fundamentalisms and an environmental crisis of planetary proportions. How can we fashion a world that has room for everyone, for generati...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.Speed. Bump. Speed. Traffic considers the history and philosophy of roundabouts, speed bumps, the pedestrian mall, and other eff...

“Perhaps the finest and most profound account of ethnographic fieldwork and discovery that has ever entered the anthropological literature.” —The Wall Street Journal “If you want to experience a profoundly diff...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. What exactly is jet lag? And, more importantly, how do we live with jet lag? Jet lag is a momentary condition resulting from th...

Best Books of 2019―Scholarly KitchenObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.Hashtags can silence as well as shout. They originate in the quiet of the archive and the ...

"Clash! explains some of the most bedeviling cultural divides in our workplaces and communities. It's mandatory reading for teachers, managers, and parents who want to raise their kids to succeed in a multicultural world." -...

How do different cultures think about race? In the modern era, racial distinctiveness has been assessed primarily in terms of a person's physical appearance. But it was not always so. As Denise McCoskey shows, the ancient Greeks and R...

An epic adventure that began with one simple question: Why does my foot hurt? Isolated by Mexico's deadly Copper Canyons, the blissful Tarahumara Indians have honed the ability to run hundreds of miles without rest or injury. In a ri...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. The ocean comprises the largest object on our planet. Retelling human history from an oceanic rather than terrestrial point of ...

Recent years have seen a revival of the heated culture wars of the 1990s, but this time its battle ground is the internet. On one side the alt right ranges from the once obscure neo-reactionary and white separatist movements, to geeky...

Mark Nepo—the #1 New York Times bestselling author and popular spiritual teacher—"has given us not only a much-needed message of hope and inspiration, but a practical guide on how to build a better tomorrow, together" (A...

From one of the world's most celebrated moral philosophers comes a thorough examination of the current political crisis and recommendations for how to mend our divided country.For decades Martha C. Nussbaum has been an acclaimed schol...

"The finest book on video games yet. Simon Parkin thinks like a critic, conjures like a novelist, and writes like an artist at the height of his powers—which, in fact, he is." —Tom Bissell, author of Extra Lives: Why V...

In March 1946, scientists began to track thousands of children born in one cold week. No one imagined that this would become the longest-running study of human development in the world, growing to encompass five generations of childre...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. For as long as people have traveled to distant lands, they have brought home objects to certify the journey. More than mere mer...

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER! ANew York Times Book ReviewEditor's Pick "Secrets of the Sprakkar is a fascinating window into what a more gender-equal world could look like, and why it's worth striving for. Iceland is doing...

The New York Timesbestselling coauthor of Sex at Dawn explores the ways in which “progress” has perverted the way we live—how we eat, learn, feel, mate, parent, communicate, work, and die—in this “engagin...

In this pithy two-part essay, Marshall Sahlins reinvigorates the debates on what constitutes kinship, building on some of the best scholarship in the field to produce an original outlook on the deepest bond humans can have. Covering t...

Covering the ground from Antonio Gramsci to Raymond Williams, postcolonial discourse to the politics of diaspora, feminism to queer theory, technoculture and the media to globalization, Introducing Cultural Studies serves as an insigh...

France is a seductive country, seductive in its elegance, its beauty, its sensual pleasures, and its joie de vivre. Elaine Sciolino, the longtime Paris bureau chief of The New York Times, has discovered that seduction is much more. It...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.Bread is an object that is always in process of becoming something else: flower to grain, grain to dough, dough to loaf, loaf to...

Furry fandom is a recent phenomenon, but anthropomorphism is an instinct hard-wired into the human mind: the desire to see animals on a more equal footing with people. It's existed since the beginning of time in prehistoric cave paint...

“An in-depth and compelling account of diverse Americans living off the grid.” —Los Angeles TimesThe radical search for the simple life in today’s America. On a frigid April night, a classically trained opera singer, five mont...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. When the Sony Walkman debuted in 1979, people were enthralled by the novel experience it offered: immersion in the music of the...

Use of the term "culture" as an expression of the full range of learned human behavior patterns began with this classic two-volume work, first published in 1871. Edward B. Tylor, the first Professor of Anthropology at the Un...

The first Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oxford, Edward B. Tylor, defined the term "culture" for modern readers in this groundbreaking work. Initially published in 1871, this classic two-volume study explores...