Beginning with a single dealer who lands in a small Virginia town and sets about turning high school football stars into heroin overdose statistics, journalist Beth Macy endeavors to answer a grieving mother's question -- why her only son died -- and comes away with a harrowing story of greed and need. From the introduction of OxyContin in 1996, Macy parses how America embraced a medical culture where overtreatment with painkillers became the norm....

"Our brains are constantly sorting and labeling the world around us.  Those four-legged barking things?  They're dogs.  The bouncy things are balls.  Toys are different from food, and food is different from milk.  Pretty simple, right?  But our brains don't just sort things.  They sort people.  And that's where life gets really complicated.  How and why do our brains create categories?  And how can we avoid falling into the stereotype trap?"...

"A startling work of historical sleuthing and synthesis, Of Fear and Strangers reveals the forgotten histories of xenophobia-and what they mean for us today. By 2016, it was impossible to ignore an international resurgence of xenophobia. What had happened? Looking for clues, psychiatrist and historian George Makari started out in search of the idea's origins. To his astonishment, he discovered an unfolding series of never-told stories. While a fear...

"We often think of our capacity to experience the suffering of others as the ultimate source of goodness. Many of our wisest policy-makers, activists, scientists, and philosophers agree that the only problem with empathy is that we don't have enough of it. Nothing could be farther from the truth, argues Yale researcher Paul Bloom. In Against Empathy, Bloom reveals empathy to be one of the leading motivators of inequality and immorality in society....

Charles Tilly (1929-2008) was the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University. His books include Why? (Princeton) and Democracy. In his eye-opening book Why?, world-renowned social scientist Charles Tilly exposed some startling truths about the excuses people make and the reasons they give. Now he's back with further explorations into the complexities of human relationships, this time examining what's really going on...

Quizás el gran desafío político-intelectual de este tiempo, por lo menos en esta zona del mapa geopolítico, no sea ya pelear contra un poder despótico o tiránico, ni historizar los discursos para desnudar los juegos de poder que circulan por detrás de saberes y verdades. Quizás tampoco tenga que ver ya con la descentralización de las estructuras jerárquico-burocráticas ni con la deconstruccción de los centrismos. En la obscenidad del capitalismo...

First published in 1895, "The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind" is a pivotal work in the field of group psychology written by French social psychologist Gustave Le Bon. Le Bon theorizes that there are several characteristics of crowds as distinguishable from individual behavior. As it states in the preface: "The following work is devoted to an account of the characteristics of crowds. The whole of the common characteristics with which heredity endows...

Una universidad corre el riesgo de que se la lleve la corriente, de flotar a la deriva sobre lineamientos institucionales y mediciones estandarizadas que se importan desde afuera, irreflexivamente, con cierto afán de no quedar atrás en la carrera, sin mirar muy bien hacia dónde se corre. Y todo esto, al tiempo en que, en lo psicopolítico, crece la paranoia y la desconfianza. No es para extrañarse: la universidad es una comunidad política, ciertamente,...

John Dewey (1859-1952) is an American philosopher and psychologist most notably remembered for his theories on progressive education. He grew up in the rapidly industrializing town of Burlington, Vermont, where he was able to witness increasing social and economic division of the classes. Although he displayed little vivacity or imagination as a child, he was immensely analytical and spent years teaching and writing on a wide range of philosophical...

Just My Type introduces readers to the history of personality profiling, ranging from ancient Chinese astrology, to Freud and Jung, to the modern-day Myers-Briggs and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) assessments. Examine the world of online personality assessments through mini self-administered quizzes. Learn how to distinguish useful applications from biased typecasting.