The Sociology category has 542 audiobooks on Listento.it, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 7,644 ratings. The most-rated is Blink.
Technically Wrong
Summary
Buying groceries, tracking our health, finding a date: whatever we want to do, odds are that we can now do it online. But few of us ask how all these digital products are designed, or why. It's time we change that. Many of the services we rely on are full of oversights, biases, and downright ethical nightmares. Chatbots that harass women. Signup forms that fail anyone who's not straight. Social media sites that send peppy messages about dead relatives. Algorithms that put more black people behind bars. Technically Wrong takes an unflinching look at the values, processes, and assumptions that lead to these problems and more. Wachter-Boettcher demystifies the tech industry, leaving those of us on the other side of the screen better prepared to make informed choices about the services we use - and demand more from the companies behind them.
©2017 Wachter-Boettcher Consulting (P)2017 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books
Daily Wisdom for Why Does He Do That?
Summary
Even if you've read Why Does He Do That?, it may be hard to see the truth of what is happening to you. You may feel overwhelmed by confusion, loss, and fear and find yourself looking away from the truth and falling back into traumatic patterns. Like a constant friend, this collection of meditations is a source of strength and reassurance designed to speak to women like you, women in relationships with angry and controlling men. It helps you to digest what is happening a piece at a time, so you can gain clarity, safety, and freedom. To learn to value and respect yourself - even when your partner makes it very clear that he does not - each day centers on one of seven themes designed to empower, encourage, and inspire you....
©2015 Lundy Bancroft (P)2015 Tantor
Anatomy of Love
Summary
First published in 1992, Helen Fisher's Anatomy of Love quickly became a classic. Since then, Fisher has conducted pioneering brain research on lust, romantic love, and attachment; gathered data on more than 80,000 people to explain why you love who you love; and collected information on more than 30,000 men and women on sexting, hooking up, friends with benefits, and other current trends in courtship and marriage. This is a cutting-edge tour de force that traces human family life from its origins in Africa over 20 million years ago to the Internet dating sites and bedrooms of today. It's got it all: the copulatory gaze and other natural courting ploys; the who, when, where, and why of adultery; love addictions; Fisher's discovery of four broad chemically based personality styles and what each seeks in romance; the newest data on worldwide (biologically based) patterns of divorce; how and why men and women think differently; the real story of women, men, and power; the rise - and fall - of the sexual double standard; and what brain science tells us about how to make and keep a happy partnership.
©2016 Helen E. Fisher (P)2016 Tantor
Invisible Acts of Power
Summary
Best-selling author Caroline Myss was pondering her next body of work when she witnessed a spontaneous act of generosity. A young man, tattooed and pierced, ran to help an older woman with a bundle of packages at the risk of missing his oncoming bus. That act, coupled with her own experience of receiving a helping hand just when she needed it, got Caroline thinking: What are the long-range consequences that result from even the smallest favors offered to others? What really takes place in the energetic field of life when someone responds to someone else in need? On Invisible Acts of Power, this four-time New York Times best-selling author employs her experience as a renowned medical intuitive to answer these questions, explaining why being of service to another person is not an option - it is a biological necessity. Invisible Acts of Power invites you to learn more about: The seven gifts of generosity and your chakras - how giving to others balances your vital energy system and sustains optimum health Chance meetings: coincidence or synchronicity? How to recognize the Sacred Contracts that they hold, and translate the messages they bring you The electricity of grace - where your currents of prana (life force) intersect Divine intention, and affect every choice you make As we move from visible acts, such as caring for a friend, to invisible acts, such as prayer and healing, we act divinely, without desire for credit or reward. Using her own stories and those drawn from her thousands of readers and listeners worldwide, Caroline Myss chronicles the many ways you can create small yet profound miracles, gain a greater sense of spirituality, and transform your life and others' lives in an instant. An original adaptation of the author's book by the same title.
©2004 Caroline Myss (P)2004 Caroline Myss
Upstanders: Season 2 (FREE)
Summary
Performed by the acclaimed actor Michael B. Jordan (The Wire, Fantastic Four, Creed), Upstanders is a stirring tribute to the ordinary people who make a remarkable difference in big cities and small towns across the country. For more than a year, Howard Schultz, the chairman and former CEO of Starbucks, and former Washington Post senior correspondent and associate editor Rajiv Chandrasekaran searched the country for even more of America's unsung heroes, as a follow-up to Upstanders' first season. Now you'll hear the stories and voices of the people they found - local citizens who are demonstrating unbelievable courage and inspiring a better America at a time when we need these heroes more than ever. From the Dallas chef who's staffing his restaurant with former juvenile offenders, to the Missoula, Montana mother who opened her community's hearts and doors to refugees, to the Seattle firefighter who's helping to destigmatize post-traumatic stress among our nation's first responders - the 11 individuals featured in this second volume of Upstanders embody the American spirit and much of what's missing from today's national debate over how to salvage America's soul. Through their passion for humanity, courage to lead, and willingness to act, the Upstanders we celebrate here remind us that we all have the power to create positive change in our communities and beyond.
©2017 Starbucks Coffee Company (P)2017 Audible, Inc.
Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon
Summary
The very strange but nevertheless true story of the dark underbelly of a 1960s hippie utopia. Laurel Canyon in the 1960s and early 1970s was a magical place where a dizzying array of musical artists congregated to create much of the music that provided the soundtrack to those turbulent times. Members of bands like the Byrds, the Doors, Buffalo Springfield, the Monkees, the Beach Boys, the Turtles, the Eagles, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Steppenwolf, CSN, Three Dog Night, and Love, along with such singer/songwriters as Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, James Taylor, and Carole King, lived together and jammed together in the bucolic community nestled in the Hollywood Hills. But there was a dark side to that scene as well. Many didn't make it out alive, and many of those deaths remain shrouded in mystery to this day. Far more integrated into the scene than most would like to admit was a guy by the name of Charles Manson, along with his murderous entourage. Also floating about the periphery were various political operatives, up-and-coming politicians, and intelligence personnel - the same sort of people who gave birth to many of the rock stars populating the canyon. And all the canyon's colorful characters - rock stars, hippies, murderers, and politicos - happily coexisted alongside a covert military installation.
©2014 Headpress (P)2017 Headpress
Spook
Summary
"What happens when we die? Does the light just go out and that's that - the million-year nap? Or will some part of my personality, my me-ness persist? What will that feel like? What will I do all day? Is there a place to plug in my laptop?"
In an attempt to find out, Mary Roach brings her tireless curiosity to bear on an array of contemporary and historical soul-searchers: scientists, schemers, engineers, mediums, all trying to prove (or disprove) that life goes on after we die. She begins the journey in rural India with a reincarnation researcher and ends up in a University of Virginia operating room where cardiologists have installed equipment near the ceiling to study out-of-body near-death experiences. Along the way, she enrolls in an English medium school, gets electromagnetically haunted at a university in Ontario, and visits a Duke University professor with a plan to weigh the consciousness of a leech. Her historical wanderings unearth soul-seeking philosophers who rummaged through cadavers and calves' heads, a North Carolina lawsuit that established legal precedence for ghosts, and the last surviving sample of "ectoplasm" in a Cambridge University archive.
©2005 Mary Roach (P)2005 Brilliance Audio
Pursuit of Perfect
Summary
We're all laboring under our own and society's expectations to be perfect in every way: to look younger, to make more money, to be happy all the time. But according to Tal Ben-Shahar, the New York Times best-selling author of Happier, the pursuit of perfect may actually be the number-one internal obstacle to finding happiness. Applying cutting-edge research in the field of positive psychology - the scientific principles taught in his wildly popular course at Harvard University - Ben-Shahar takes us off the impossible pursuit of perfection and directs us to the way to happiness, richness, and true fulfillment. He shows us the freedom derived from not trying to do it all right all the time and the real lessons that failure and painful emotions can teach us. He provides exercises for self reflection, meditations, and "Time-Ins" to help you rediscover what you really want out of life.
©2009 Tal Ben-Shahar (P)2009 HighBridge Company.
The Knowledge Illusion
Summary
We all think we know more than we actually do. Humans have built hugely complex societies and technologies, but most of us don't even know how a pen or a toilet works. How have we achieved so much despite understanding so little? Cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach argue that we survive and thrive despite our mental shortcomings because we live in a rich community of knowledge. The key to our intelligence lies in the people and things around us. We're constantly drawing on information and expertise stored outside our heads: in our bodies, our environment, our possessions, and the community with which we interact - and usually we don't even realize we're doing it. The human mind is both brilliant and pathetic. We have mastered fire, created democratic institutions, stood on the moon, and sequenced our genome. And yet each of us is error prone, sometimes irrational, and often ignorant. The fundamentally communal nature of intelligence and knowledge explains why we often assume we know more than we really do, why political opinions and false beliefs are so hard to change, and why individually oriented approaches to education and management frequently fail. But our collaborative minds also enable us to do amazing things. This book contends that true genius can be found in the ways we create intelligence using the world around us.
©2017 Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach (P)2017 Penguin Audio
The One World Schoolhouse
Summary
Salman Khan, founder of the Khan Academy, has written what is destined to become one of the most influential books about education in our time. A free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere: This is the goal of the Khan Academy, a passion project that grew from an ex-engineer and hedge funder's online tutoring sessions with his niece, who was struggling with algebra, into a worldwide phenomenon. Today millions of students, parents, and teachers use the Khan Academy's free videos and software, which have expanded to encompass nearly every conceivable subject; and Academy techniques are being employed with exciting results in a growing number of classrooms around the globe. Like many innovators, Khan rethinks existing assumptions and imagines what education could be if freed from them. And his core idea - liberating teachers from lecturing and state-mandated calendars and opening up class time for truly human interaction - has become his life's passion. Schools seek his advice about connecting to students in a digital age, and people of all ages and backgrounds flock to the site to utilize this fresh approach to learning. In The One World Schoolhouse, Khan presents his radical vision for the future of education, as well as his own remarkable story, for the first time. In this audiobook you will discover, among other things: How both students and teachers are being bound by a broken top-down model invented in Prussia two centuries ago; Why technology will make classrooms more human and teachers more important; How and why we can afford to pay educators the same as other professionals; How we can bring creativity and true human interactivity back to learning; and Why we should be very optimistic about the future of learning. Parents and politicians routinely bemoan the state of our education system. Statistics suggest we've fallen behind the rest of the world in literacy, math, and sciences. With a shrewd reading of history, Khan explains how this crisis presented itself, and why a return to "mastery learning", abandoned in the 20th century and ingeniously revived by tools like the Khan Academy, could offer the best opportunity to level the playing field, and to give all of our children a world-class education now. More than just a solution, The One World Schoolhouse serves as a call for free, universal, global education, and an explanation of how Khan's simple yet revolutionary thinking can help achieve this inspiring goal.
©2012 Salman Khan (P)2012 Hachette Audio
Rethinking Narcissism
Summary
Harvard Medical School psychologist and Huffington Post blogger Craig Malkin addresses the "narcissism epidemic" by illuminating the spectrum of narcissism, identifying ways to control the trait, and explaining how too little of it may be a bad thing. "What is narcissism?" is one of the fastest rising searches on Google, and articles on the topic routinely go viral. Yet, the word narcissist seems to mean something different every time it's uttered. People hurl the word as an insult at anyone who offends them. It's become so ubiquitous, in fact, that it's lost any clear meaning. The only certainty these days is that it's bad to be a narcissist - really bad - inspiring the same kind of roiling queasiness we feel when we hear the word sexist or racist. That's especially troubling news for millennials, the people born after 1980, who've been branded the "most narcissistic generation ever". In Rethinking Narcissism listeners will learn that there's far more to narcissism than its reductive invective would imply. The truth is that narcissists (all of us) fall on a spectrum somewhere between utter selflessness on the one side and arrogance and grandiosity on the other. A healthy middle exhibits a strong sense of self. On the far end lies sociopathy. Malkin deconstructs the healthy from the unhealthy narcissism and offers clear, step-by-step guidance on how to promote healthy narcissism in our partners, our children, and ourselves.
©2015 Craig Malkin (P)2015 HarperCollins Publishers
Active Hope
Summary
The challenges we face can be difficult even to think about. Climate change, the depletion of oil, economic upheaval, and mass extinction together create a planetary emergency of overwhelming proportions. Active Hope shows us how to strengthen our capacity to face this crisis so that we can respond with unexpected resilience and creative power. Drawing on decades of teaching an empowerment approach known as the Work That Reconnects, the authors guide us through a transformational process informed by mythic journeys, modern psychology, spirituality, and holistic science. This process equips us with tools to face the mess we're in and play our role in the collective transition, or Great Turning, to a life-sustaining society.
©2012 Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone (P)2017 Tantor
The Secret of Our Success
Summary
Humans are a puzzling species. On the one hand, we struggle to survive on our own in the wild, often failing to overcome even basic challenges, like obtaining food, building shelters, or avoiding predators. On the other hand, human groups have produced ingenious technologies, sophisticated languages, and complex institutions that have permitted us to successfully expand into a vast range of diverse environments. What has enabled us to dominate the globe, more than any other species, while remaining virtually helpless as lone individuals? This book shows that the secret of our success lies not in our innate intelligence, but in our collective brains - on the ability of human groups to socially interconnect and learn from one another over generations. Drawing insights from lost European explorers, clever chimpanzees, mobile hunter-gatherers, neuroscientific findings, ancient bones, and the human genome, Joseph Henrich demonstrates how our collective brains have propelled our species' genetic evolution and shaped our biology. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.
©2015 Princeton University Press (P)2018 Tantor
Troublemakers
Summary
In this dazzling debut, Carla Shalaby, a former elementary school teacher, explores the everyday lives of four young "troublemakers", challenging the ways we identify and understand so-called problem children. Time and again, we make seemingly endless efforts to moderate, punish, and even medicate our children, when we should instead be concerned with transforming the very nature of our institutions, systems, and structures, large and small. Through delicately crafted portraits of these memorable children - Zora, Lucas, Sean, and Marcus - Troublemakers allows us to see school through the eyes of those who know firsthand what it means to be labeled a problem. From Zora's proud individuality to Marcus's open willfulness, from Sean's struggle with authority to Lucas's tenacious imagination, comes profound insight - for educators and parents alike - into how schools engender, exclude, and then try to erase trouble, right along with the young people accused of making it. And although the harsh disciplining of adolescent behavior has been called out as part of a school-to-prison pipeline, the children we meet in this book demonstrate how a child's path to excessive punishment and exclusion in fact begins at a much younger age. Shalaby's empathetic, discerning, and elegant prose gives us a deeply textured look at what noncompliance signals about the environments we require students to adapt to in our schools. Both urgent and timely, this paradigm-shifting book challenges our typical expectations for young children and with principled affection reveals how these demands - despite good intentions - work to undermine the pursuit of a free and just society.
©2017 Carla Shalaby (P)2017 Audible, Inc.
The Warrior Elite
Summary
With a postscript describing SEAL efforts in Afghanistan, The Warrior Elite takes you into the toughest, longest, and most relentless military training in the world. What does it take to become a Navy SEAL? What makes talented, intelligent young men volunteer for physical punishment, cold water, and days without sleep? In The Warrior Elite, former Navy SEAL Dick Couch documents the process that transforms young men into warriors. SEAL training is the distillation of the human spirit, a tradition-bound ordeal that seeks to find men with character, courage, and the burning desire to win at all costs, men who would rather die than quit.
©2001, 2003 SEAL Productions Limited (P)2011 Tantor
A Way of Being
Summary
A profound and deeply personal collection of essays by renowned psychologist Carl Rogers. The late Carl Rogers, founder of the humanistic psychology movement and father of client-centered therapy, based his life's work on his fundamental belief in the human potential for growth. A Way of Being was written in the early 1980s, near the end of Carl Rogers's career, and serves as a coda to his classic On Becoming a Person. More philosophical than his earlier writings, it traces his professional and personal development and ends with a prophetic call for a more humane future.
©1980 Houghton Mifflin Company; Introduction copyright 1995 by Irvin D. Yalom (P)2018 Tantor
The Sleep Revolution
Summary
In her new book, Arianna Huffington, the cofounder and editor in chief of The Huffington Post and the author of the number-one New York Times best seller Thrive , delves into the sleep revolution that is happening all across the world - a revolution that can transform our lives. Sleep, she writes, is one of humanity's great unifiers, binding us to each other, to our ancestors, to our past, and to the future. Yet we find ourselves in the middle of a crisis of sleep deprivation, with devastating effects on our health, our happiness, our job performance, and our relationships. Only by renewing our relationship with sleep, she writes, can we take control of our lives, live more fully, and be more engaged with ourselves and with the world and more able to meet the inevitable challenges we all face. In Thrive, Arianna Huffington introduced her audience to the importance of sleep as a part of redefining success through well-being, wisdom, wonder, and giving. The topic struck such a powerful chord, resonating so intensely with her audiences around the world, that she realized the power of sleep needed a full exploration. The result is a sweeping, scientifically rigorous, and deeply personal look at sleep, from its history through the ages and the current crisis of sleep deprivation to the mysteries of dreams and the golden age of sleep science that is revealing all the ways sleep plays a vital role in our health, happiness, well-being, and productivity. In The Sleep Revolution, Arianna identifies the many ways our cultural dismissal of sleep as time wasted undermines our health and our decision making and ravages our relationships, our work lives, and even our sex lives. She takes on sleep from every angle, exploring the latest science on sleep, the manipulative and dangerous sleeping pill industry, and all the ways our addiction to technology disrupts our sleep. She also presents scientific recommendations and expert tips on how we can all achieve better and more restorative sleep and learn how to make the power of sleep work for us. Most important, by highlighting the many areas where sleep's benefits are being rediscovered - from the world of sports and technology to college campuses, the hotel industry, and even workplaces around the world - she points the way forward to amazing innovations, reforms, and inventions rooted in our new love affair with sleep. In today's 24/7, fast-paced, always-connected, perpetually harried, and sleep-deprived world, the hunger for sleep is only getting stronger. The Sleep Revolution both sounds the alarm on the worldwide sleep crisis and offers a road map for how we can take back our sleep and transform our lives and our world. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2015 Arianna Huffington (P)2015 Random House Audio
Messy
Summary
From the award-winning columnist and author of the national best-seller The Undercover Economist comes a provocative big-idea book about the genuine benefits of being messy: at home, at work, in the classroom, and beyond.
Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives celebrates the benefits that messiness has in our lives: why it's important, why we resist it, and why we should embrace it instead. Using research from neuroscience, psychology, and social science as well as captivating examples of real people doing extraordinary things, Tim Harford explains that the human qualities we value - creativity, responsiveness, resilience - are integral to the disorder, confusion, and disarray that produce them.
From the music studio of Brian Eno to the Lincoln Memorial with Martin Luther King Jr., from the boardroom to the classroom, messiness lies at the core of how we innovate, how we achieve, how we reach each other - in short, how we succeed.
In Messy, you'll learn about the unexpected connections between creativity and mess; understand why unexpected changes of plans, unfamiliar people, and unforeseen events can help generate new ideas and opportunities as they make you anxious and angry; and come to appreciate that the human inclination for tidiness - in our personal and professional lives, online, even in children's play - can mask deep and debilitating fragility that keeps us from innovation.
Stimulating and listenable as it points exciting ways forward, Messy is an insightful exploration of the real advantages of mess in our lives.
©2016 Tim Harford (P)2016 Random House Audio
Blindspot
Summary
I know my own mind. I am able to assess others in a fair and accurate way. These self-perceptions are challenged by leading psychologists Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald as they explore the hidden biases we all carry from a lifetime of exposure to cultural attitudes about age, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, social class, sexuality, disability status, and nationality. Blindspot is the authors’ metaphor for the portion of the mind that houses hidden biases. Writing with simplicity and verve, Banaji and Greenwald question the extent to which our perceptions of social groups - without our awareness or conscious control - shape our likes and dislikes and our judgments about people’s character, abilities, and potential. In Blindspot, the authors reveal hidden biases based on their experience with the Implicit Association Test, a method that has revolutionized the way scientists learn about the human mind and that gives us a glimpse into what lies within the metaphoric blindspot. The title’s "good people" are those of us who strive to align our behavior with our intentions. The aim of Blindspot is to explain the science in plain enough language to help well-intentioned people achieve that alignment. By gaining awareness, we can adapt beliefs and behavior and "outsmart the machine" in our heads so we can be fairer to those around us. Venturing into this book is an invitation to understand our own minds. Brilliant, authoritative, and utterly accessible, Blindspot is a book that will challenge and change listeners for years to come. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.
©2013 Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald (P)2014 Audible, Inc.
The Devil in the White City
Summary
Two men embodied an element of the great dynamic that characterized America's rush toward the 20th century. The architect was Daniel Hudson Burnham the brilliant director of works for the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and the builder of many of the country's most important structures, including the Flatiron Building in New York and Union Station in Washington, D.C. The murderer was Henry H. Holmes, a young doctor who, in a malign parody of the White City, built his "World's Fair Hotel" just west of the fairgrounds - a torture palace complete with dissection table, gas chamber, and 3,000-degree crematorium. Burnham overcame tremendous obstacles and tragedies as he organized the talents of Frederick Law Olmsted, Charles McKim, Louis Sullivan, and others to transform swampy Jackson Park into the White City, while Holmes used the attraction of the great fair and his own satanic charms to lure scores of young women to their deaths. What makes the story all the more chilling is that Holmes really lived, walking the grounds of that dream city by the lake. The Devil in the White City draws listeners into a time of magic and majesty, made all the more appealing by a supporting cast of real-life characters, including Buffalo Bill, Theodore Dreiser, Susan B. Anthony, Thomas Edison, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, and others. Erik Larson's gifts as a storyteller are magnificently displayed in this rich narrative of the master builder, the killer, and the great fair that obsessed them both.
©2003 Erik Larson (P)2003 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.