The six mean Herdman kids lie, steal, smoke cigars (even the girls) and then become involved in the community Christmas pageant.

Diane Ackerman's lusciously written grand tour of the realm of the senses includes conversations with an iceberg in Antarctica and a professional nose in New York, along with dissertations on kisses and tattoos, sadistic cuisine and the music played by the planet Earth. "Delightful . . . gives the reader the richest possible feeling of the worlds the senses take in".--The New York Times.

A fascinating exploration of how insights from computer algorithms can be applied to our everyday lives, helping to solve common decision-making problems and illuminate the workings of the human mind. All our lives are constrained by limited space and time, limits that give rise to a particular set of problems. What should we do, or leave undone, in a day or a lifetime? How much messiness should we accept? What balance of new activities and familiar...

"A new, counterintuitive theory for how social networks influence the spread of behavior. New social movements, technologies, and public-health initiatives often struggle to take off, yet many diseases disperse rapidly without issue. Can the lessons learned from the viral diffusion of diseases be used to improve the spread of beneficial behaviors and innovations? In How Behavior Spreads, Damon Centola presents over a decade of original research examining...

Presents a "case for public shaming as a nonviolent form of resistance that can challenge corporations and even governments to change policies and behaviors that are detrimental to the environment. Jennifer Jacquet argues that public shaming, when it has been retrofitted for the age of social media and aimed in the proper direction, can help compensate for the limitations of guilt in a globalized world. Jacquet leaves us with a new understanding...

An irreverent, provocative, and visually fascinating look at what our online lives reveal about who we really are--and how this deluge of data will transform the science of human behavior. Big Data is used to spy on us, hire and fire us, and sell us things we don't need. In Dataclysm, Christian Rudder puts this flood of information to an entirely different use: understanding human nature. Drawing on terabytes of data from Twitter, Facebook, Reddit,...

The misadventures of two terrible old people who enjoy playing nasty tricks and are finally outwitted by a family of monkeys.

"Highly accessible, authoritative, and intellectually provocative, a startlingly original theory of how Homo sapiens came to be: Richard Wrangham forcefully argues that, a quarter of a million years ago, rising intelligence among our ancestors led to a unique new ability with unexpected consequences: our ancestors invented socially sanctioned capital punishment, facilitating domestication, increased cooperation, the accumulation of culture, and ultimately...

"The world's leading expert on the unconscious mind reveals the hidden mental processes that secretly govern every aspect of our behavior. For more than three decades, Dr. John Bargh has been conducting revolutionary research into the unconscious mind--not Freud's dark, malevolent unconscious but the new unconscious, a helpful and powerful part of the mind that we can access and understand through experimental science. Now Dr. Bargh presents an engaging...

Ralph, a very, very, nasty cat, finally sees the error of his ways--or does he?