In Last Chance to Save Our Republic, Hannah delivers a powerful wake-up call to Americans of all ages and backgrounds, urging them to fight for the Republic that so many have sacrificed their lives to protect. She confronts the moral decay threatening the nation, from the breakdown of the family to the absurdity of leaders who can't define basic truths like What is a woman? Hannah traces these issues back to America's rejection of God and the Judeo-Christian values that once guided the nation, arguing that we cannot hope to overcome the historical roots of today's crises. With a deep sense of urgency, she calls on We the People to resist the manipulation and fearmongering of global elites who seek control, reminding readers that the only thing standing in their way is us. Last Chance is a rallying cry for all freedom fighters to unite, stay the course, and protect the future of this great Republic-because Hannah believes with all her heart that this may be our last chance to save America.

Embark on a journey that will change your perspective on community and individual well-being. In The Great Good Place, Ray Oldenburg gave the term third places, where people gather for the pleasure of good company and conversation, and explained just how important they are.

• Discover the benefits of informal public and civic life and how it contributes to community health and individual well-being.
• Explore how third places have been, and still are, vital to grassroots democracy.
• Experience the power of third places and how they bring people together, fostering a sense of belonging and connection.
• Allow this book to inspire you to create and revitalize your own third places, from coffee houses to community centers, and make a positive impact on your community.
• Learn from real-life examples around the world, and see how third places have transformed and revitalized communities.
• Gain a deeper understanding of the history and evolution of third places, from coffee houses to bookstores, and how they continue to play a vital role in our society.

Discover the power and potential of third places and how they can change your community and your life. Don't miss out on this new edition of the original, groundbreaking The Great Good Place.

Deeply moving, frequently eloquent and extraordinarily incisive.--The Washington Post

Every so often, you meet people who radiate joy--who seem to know why they were put on this earth, who glow with a kind of inner light. Life, for these people, has often followed what we might think of as a two-mountain shape. They get out of school, they start a career, and they begin climbing the mountain they thought they were meant to climb. Their goals on this first mountain are the ones our culture endorses: to be a success, to make your mark, to experience personal happiness. But when they get to the top of that mountain, something happens. They look around and find the view . . . unsatisfying. They realize: This wasn't my mountain after all. There's another, bigger mountain out there that is actually my mountain.

And so they embark on a new journey. On the second mountain, life moves from self-centered to other-centered. They want the things that are truly worth wanting, not the things other people tell them to want. They embrace a life of interdependence, not independence. They surrender to a life of commitment.

In The Second Mountain, David Brooks explores the four commitments that define a life of meaning and purpose: to a spouse and family, to a vocation, to a philosophy or faith, and to a community. Our personal fulfillment depends on how well we choose and execute these commitments. Brooks looks at a range of people who have lived joyous, committed lives, and who have embraced the necessity and beauty of dependence. He gathers their wisdom on how to choose a partner, how to pick a vocation, how to live out a philosophy, and how we can begin to integrate our commitments into one overriding purpose.

In short, this book is meant to help us all lead more meaningful lives. But it's also a provocative social commentary. We live in a society, Brooks argues, that celebrates freedom, that tells us to be true to ourselves, at the expense of surrendering to a cause, rooting ourselves in a neighborhood, binding ourselves to others by social solidarity and love. We have taken individualism to the extreme--and in the process we have torn the social fabric in a thousand different ways. The path to repair is through making deeper commitments. In The Second Mountain, Brooks shows what can happen when we put commitment-making at the center of our lives.

Solidarity is often invoked, but it is rarely analyzed and poorly understood. Here, two leading activists and thinkers survey the past, present, and future of the concept across borders of nation, identity, and class to ask: how can we build solidarity in an era of staggering inequality, polarization, violence, and ecological catastrophe? Offering a lively and lucid history of the idea--from Ancient Rome through the first European and American socialists and labor organizers, to twenty-first century social movements like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter--Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor trace the philosophical debates and political struggles that have shaped the modern world.

Looking forward, they argue that a clear understanding of how solidarity is built and sustained, and an awareness of how it has been suppressed, is essential to warding off the many crises of our present: right-wing backlash, irreversible climate damage, widespread alienation, loneliness, and despair. Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor insist that solidarity is both a principle and a practice, one that must be cultivated and institutionalized, so that care for the common good becomes the central aim of politics and social life.

Do you have a third place? Your first place is home, your second place is work, and your third place is where you go to socialize and build friendships. Yet, for several reasons, many people today find themselves without a third place of their own. At a time when our nation is facing an epidemic of loneliness and communities are suffering from a loss of trust, low levels of engagement, despair, and political polarization, what if the answer to many of our problems lies in a simple idea? What if we just need to pay attention to the places where we find ourselves?

Rick Kyte combines storytelling, social science, and philosophy to explore:

• What makes a third place
• Factors that create and support vibrant communities
• The role of hospitality in creating belonging and social connection
• How third places foster friendships and bind us to others in our community
• What it takes to find and create a third place of your own

Rick Kyte's insight into the vital human experience of connection and friendship is both scholarly and inspiring. The next time I visit my favorite coffee shop, I'm leaving my laptop at home. It's time to look outward and engage more fully with others in our third places. --Amy Dickinson, Ask Amy advice columnist and author of The Mighty Queens of Freeville

FEATURED IN VOX AND THE ASK AMY COLUMN

Beauty today is a paradox. The cult of beauty is ubiquitous but it has lost its transcendence and become little more than an aspect of consumerism, the aesthetic dimension of capitalism. The sublime and unsettling aspects of beauty have given way to corporeal pleasures and 'likes', resulting in a kind of 'pornography' of beauty.

In this book, cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han reinvigorates aesthetic theory for our digital age. He interrogates our preoccupation with all things slick and smooth, from Jeff Koon's sculptures and the iPhone to Brazilian waxing. Reaching far deeper than our superficial reactions to viral videos and memes, Han reclaims beauty, showing how it manifests itself as truth, temptation and even disaster.

This wide-ranging and profound exploration of beauty, encompassing ethical and political considerations as well as aesthetic, will appeal to all those interested in cultural and aesthetic theory, philosophy and digital media.

Behind our current caregiving crisis, in which a broken system has left parents and caregivers exhausted, sits a fierce addiction to independence. But what would happen if we started to appreciate dependency, and the deep meaning of one person caring for another? If we start to care about care?

With a curiosity and desire to understand more fully one of humanity's most profound and essential relationships, journalist Elissa Strauss she interrogates our societal obsession with going it alone and poses a challenge to let ourselves be transformed by the act of caregiving. When You Care weaves historical anecdotes and science with conversations with parents and caregivers to the young, old, disabled, ill, and more, revealing a rich array of insights about how care shapes us on the inside and the outside, for the better.

Care is a long-ignored force in our collective and political lives, as well as a deeply philosophical, spiritual, and psychologically potent experience. Moreso, an embrace of care by both women and men will lead to a more gender equitable future and help us reimagine what it means to be productive and live a meaningful life. A deeply researched--and deeply felt--exploration of the beautiful truth about care: that we find, feed, and know ourselves through our relationships (Judith Warner, New York Times bestselling author).

The Tavistock Institute for Human Relations has had a profound effect on the moral, spiritual, cultural, political and economic policies of the United States of America and Great Britain. It has been at the forefront of the attack on the American Constitution. No group produced more propaganda to encourage the United States to participate in the First World War at a time when the majority of the American people were opposed to it.

The same tactics were used by Tavistock's social scientists to get the US into World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Serbia and the two wars against Iraq. Tavistock began as a propaganda creation and dissemination organisation at Wellington House, London, in the run-up to the First World War, what Toynbee called 'that black hole of disinformation'. On another occasion, Toynbee described Wellington House as a 'factory of lies'. From somewhat rudimentary beginnings, Wellington House became the Tavistock Institute and shaped the destinies of Germany, Russia, Britain and the United States in a very controversial way. The people of these nations did not know that they were being 'brainwashed'. The origins of 'mind control', 'inner directional conditioning' and mass 'brainwashing' are explained in an easy-to-understand book written with great authority.

The fall of the Catholic dynasties, the Bolshevik revolution, the First and Second World Wars which saw the destruction of ancient alliances and frontiers, the convulsions of religion, the decline of morality, the destruction of family life, the collapse of the economic and political processes, the decadence in music and art can all be attributed to the mass indoctrination (mass brainwashing) practised by the social scientists of the Tavistock Institute. Among the members of the Tavistock faculty was Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud's nephew. It is said that Herr Goebbels, the Propaganda Minister of the German Third Reich, used methods devised by Bernays as well as those of Willy Munzenberg, whose extraordinary career is recounted in this book about the past, present and future. Without Tavistock, there would have been no First and Second World Wars, no Bolshevik revolution, no wars in Korea, Vietnam, Serbia and Iraq. Without Tavistock, the United States would not be hurtling down the road to dissolution and collapse.

How moving from transactional to transformational relationships and organizations can save our democracy, nurture our connections, and make us happier and healthier.

Powerful institutions, from schools to tech and social media companies, create breeding grounds for isolation by failing to invest in relational work. This obstacle stands in the way of our fight for racial equity, economic justice, and climate resilience.

In Relationality, leading asexuality and relationship activist David Jay brings clarity to the crisis with a fresh perspective that expands upon the fundamental idea that all entities in the universe are connected. Jay draws from a range of vivid personal experiences, including his time spent helping tech workers and policymakers reform social media.

This book is for people who believe in the power of relationships and want to see increased investment in relational work. Its scientifically grounded framework will help readers foster conversations about relational work, establish conditions for relationships to thrive, and quantify the impact of them.

Equipping professionals and activists involved in nonprofit, political, and other types of relational work with the knowledge they need to fight for and utilize resources, Relationality shares valuable insight on:

• The history of why institutions fail to invest in relationships
• Reimagining ROI calculations to account for relational work
• Using tools of prediction and emergence theory to build communities
• How stories and data about relationships can help us direct resources toward relational work
• Relational economics and the redistribution of wealth

The utilization--and weaponization--of charm in contemporary global politics

Politics is a site of performance, and contemporary politicians often perform the role of a regular person--perhaps someone we would like to have a beer with. They win elections not because of the elevated rhetorical performances we often associate with charisma (ask not what your country can do for you), but because of something more ordinary and relatable. The everyday magic spell that politicians cast using mass and social media is what sociologist Julia Sonnevend calls charm. In this engaging and enlightening book, Sonnevend explores charm (and the related charm offensive) as a keyword of contemporary global politics. Successful political leaders deploy this form of personal magnetism--which relies on proximity to political tribes and manifests across a variety of media platforms--to appear authentic and accessible in their quest for power.

Sonnevend examines the mediated self-representations of a set of liberal, illiberal, and authoritarian political leaders, past and present: New Zealand's Jacinda Ardern, Hungary's Viktor Orbán, Iran's Mohammad Javad Zarif, North Korea's Kim Jong-un, and Germany's Angela Merkel. She considers how charm (or the lack of it) is wielded as a political tool, and the ways charm is weaponized to shape the international image of a country, potentially influencing decisions about military aid, trade, and even tourism. Sonnevend argues that charm will shape the future of democracy worldwide, as political values will be increasingly embodied by mediated personalities. These figures will rise and fall, often fading into irrelevance; but if we do not understand charm's political power, we cannot grasp today's fragile political moment.

Thinking Systematics (TSS) is conceived as a toolkit for the mind -- designed to improve how we think about the world, analyze information and pursue our goals. Smith and Hayslip make a compelling argument that individual thinking and collective decision making are being systematically constrained within limits imposed by outmoded forms of cognition and the determination of privileged elites to perpetuate an unsustainable status quo. The dialectical reasoning advocated in this wide-ranging book aims to overcome those limits and to allow a much more profound understanding of the human condition in the 21st century.

Mainstream problem-solving focuses almost exclusively on scientific/technological fixes on one side and moral/cultural remedies on the other. But to comprehend our world adequately far more serious attention must be given to the specifically social, economic and political arrangements shaping our lives. Once embraced by growing numbers of people, TSS strategies, methods and habits of thought can contribute significantly to a new common sense -- one adequate to meeting the immense challenges facing humanity in our era.

A total departure from previous writing about television, this book is the first ever to advocate that the medium is not reformable. Its problems are inherent in the technology itself and are so dangerous -- to personal health and sanity, to the environment, and to democratic processes -- that TV ought to be eliminated forever.

Weaving personal experiences through meticulous research, the author ranges widely over aspects of television that have rarely been examined and never before joined together, allowing an entirely new, frightening image to emerge. The idea that all technologies are neutral, benign instruments that can be used well or badly, is thrown open to profound doubt. Speaking of TV reform is, in the words of the author, as absurd as speaking of the reform of a technology such as guns.

A sweeping critique of how digital capitalism is reformatting our world.

We now live in an ordinal society. Nearly every aspect of our lives is measured, ranked, and processed into discrete, standardized units of digital information. Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy argue that technologies of information management, fueled by the abundance of personal data and the infrastructure of the internet, transform how we relate to ourselves and to each other through the market, the public sphere, and the state.

The personal data we give in exchange for convenient tools like Gmail and Instagram provides the raw material for predictions about everything from our purchasing power to our character. The Ordinal Society shows how these algorithmic predictions influence people's life chances and generate new forms of capital and social expectation: nobody wants to ride with an unrated cab driver anymore or rent to a tenant without a risk score. As members of this society embrace ranking and measurement in their daily lives, new forms of social competition and moral judgment arise. Familiar structures of social advantage are recycled into measures of merit that produce insidious kinds of social inequality.

While we obsess over order and difference--and the logic of ordinality digs deeper into our behaviors, bodies, and minds--what will hold us together? Fourcade and Healy warn that, even though algorithms and systems of rationalized calculation have inspired backlash, they are also appealing in ways that make them hard to relinquish.

In this thought-provoking volume, leading scholars address the multifaceted concept of agency, dissecting its significance, applications, and challenges across various domains, and situate agency in changing socio-historical contexts in which individuals as members of larger groups try to reconcile guiding norms and values with the material conditions of their lives.

From sociological analyses to political explorations, the chapters traverse a rich landscape of ideas. The volume's centerpiece (Part I) are two essays by lead authors Axel van den Berg, a prominent Canadian social theorist at McGill University in Montreal, and Emre Amasyalı, a sociologist at Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals (IBEI), along with responses by other prominent social theorists provide reactions to and assessments of the two pieces, with a reply to critics by the authors. The second and third parts do not address the concept of agency explicitly, but they do provide treatments of the larger context in which the phenomenon is situated. Part Two includes an analysis of the relevance of the category of social class via Erik Olin Wright's reception of Max Weber and a reconstruction of how the idea of a guaranteed minimum (or basic) income can be traced alongside the history of social theory, beginning with Hegel. Part Three reflect on political transformations that have manifested in the United States in recent years, which are having a bearing on the reality of agency, and on opportunities to create documentaries in order to relay social-theoretical ideas and concepts to larger audiences.

The Future of Agency ignites intellectual curiosity, challenges assumptions, and redefines our understanding of human agency and its ever-evolving role in our complex world.

Deeply moving, frequently eloquent and extraordinarily incisive.--The Washington Post

Every so often, you meet people who radiate joy--who seem to know why they were put on this earth, who glow with a kind of inner light. Life, for these people, has often followed what we might think of as a two-mountain shape. They get out of school, they start a career, and they begin climbing the mountain they thought they were meant to climb. Their goals on this first mountain are the ones our culture endorses: to be a success, to make your mark, to experience personal happiness. But when they get to the top of that mountain, something happens. They look around and find the view . . . unsatisfying. They realize: This wasn't my mountain after all. There's another, bigger mountain out there that is actually my mountain.

And so they embark on a new journey. On the second mountain, life moves from self-centered to other-centered. They want the things that are truly worth wanting, not the things other people tell them to want. They embrace a life of interdependence, not independence. They surrender to a life of commitment.

In The Second Mountain, David Brooks explores the four commitments that define a life of meaning and purpose: to a spouse and family, to a vocation, to a philosophy or faith, and to a community. Our personal fulfillment depends on how well we choose and execute these commitments. Brooks looks at a range of people who have lived joyous, committed lives, and who have embraced the necessity and beauty of dependence. He gathers their wisdom on how to choose a partner, how to pick a vocation, how to live out a philosophy, and how we can begin to integrate our commitments into one overriding purpose.

In short, this book is meant to help us all lead more meaningful lives. But it's also a provocative social commentary. We live in a society, Brooks argues, that celebrates freedom, that tells us to be true to ourselves, at the expense of surrendering to a cause, rooting ourselves in a neighborhood, binding ourselves to others by social solidarity and love. We have taken individualism to the extreme--and in the process we have torn the social fabric in a thousand different ways. The path to repair is through making deeper commitments. In The Second Mountain, Brooks shows what can happen when we put commitment-making at the center of our lives.

Told in a series of essays that balance memoir with fieldwork, Heaven Is a Place on Earth is an idiosyncratic study of American utopian experiments--from the Shakers to the radical faerie communes of Short Mountain to the Bronx rebuilding movement--through the lens of one woman's quest to create a more communal life in a time of unending economic and social precarity.

When Adrian Shirk's father-in-law has a stroke and loses his ability to speak and walk, she and her husband--both adjuncts in their midtwenties--become his primary caretakers. The stress of these new responsibilities, coupled with navigating America's broken health-care system and ordinary twenty-first-century financial insecurity, propels Shirk into an odyssey through the history and present of American utopian experiments in the hope that they might offer a way forward.

Along the way, Shirk seeks solace in her own community of friends, artists, and theologians. They try to imagine a different kind of life, examining what might be replicable within the histories of utopia-making, and what might be doomed. Rather than no place, Shirk reframes utopia as something that, according to the laws of capital and conquest, shouldn't be able to exist--but does anyway, if only for a moment.

Understand how society works--and how to make it better

It's impossible to exist in the contemporary world without being aware that powerful social forces, ideas, and movements--#MeToo, climate change, and Black Lives Matter to name just a few--are having far-reaching impacts on how we think and live. But why are they happening? And what are their likely effects? The new edition of Sociology For Dummies gives you the tools to step back from your personal experience and study these questions objectively, testing the observable phenomena of the human world against established theories and making usable sense of the results.

In a friendly, jargon-free style, sociologist and broadcaster Jay Gabler introduces you to sociology's history and basic methods, and--once you have your sociological lens adjusted--makes it clear how to survey the big questions of culture, gender, ethnicity, religion, politics, and crime with new eyes. You'll find everything you need to succeed in an introductory sociology class, as well as to apply sociological ideas to give you extra insight into your personal and professional life.

• Get a working knowledge of Sociology 101
• Understand how human communities work
• Engage more deeply with debates on social justice, healthcare, and more
• Interpret and use sociological methods and research

Whether you're studying sociology at school or just want to gain deeper insight into our collective life, Sociology For Dummies gives you the tools to understand the mechanisms of the human world--and the knowledge to influence how they work for the better.