It is the first truly balanced research-based analysis on the games and gamers, addressing both the positive and negative aspects of habitual playing by drawing on significant recent studies and established motivational theory.Filled with examples from popular games and the real experiences of gamers themselves, Glued to Games gets to the heart of gaming's powerful psychological and emotional allure--the benefits as well as the dangers. It gives everyone from researchers to parents to gamers themselves a clearer understanding the psychology of gaming, while offering prescriptions for healthier, more enjoyable games and gaming experiences.

    Written in response to great demand from both the medical and psychological communities, as well as from her own devoted readers, Dr. Weekes’s revolutionary approach to treating nervous tension is sympathetic, medically sound, and quite possibly one of the most successful step-by-step guides to mental health available.

    Mara Altman's volatile and apprehensive relationship with her body has led her to wonder about a lot of stuff over the years. Like, who decided that women shouldn't have body hair? And how sweaty is too sweaty? Also, why is breast cleavage sexy but camel toe revolting? Isn't it all just cleavage? These questions and others like them have led to the comforting and sometimes smelly revelations that constitute Gross Anatomy, an essay collection about what it's like to operate the bags of meat we call our bodies.Divided into two sections, "The Top Half" and "The Bottom Half," with cartoons scattered throughout, Altman's book takes the reader on a wild and relatable journey from head to toe—as she attempts to strike up a peace accord with our grody bits.With a combination of personal anecdotes and fascinating research, Gross Anatomy holds up a magnifying glass to our beliefs, practices, biases, and body parts and shows us the naked truth: that there is greatness in our grossness.

    Carmine Sarracino and Kevin Scott argue that porn has seeped into and been absorbed by every defining aspect of our culture: language, entertainment, fashion, advertising, sexual behavior, even politics. Cultural absorption is so complete that we no longer have to purchase pornography to get porn because we increasingly live porn on a daily basis.In tracing porn's transformation-from the Civil War to the golden age of comic books in the 1940s and 1950s to the adult film industry's golden decade of the 1970s and up to today-the authors illustrate that what began in the dark alleys of American life has now emerged as an unapologetic multibillion-dollar industry. In this astonishingly comprehensive book, Sarracino and Scott profile such "porn exemplars"-those who have been pivotal to the mainstreaming of porn-as Russ Meyer, Snoop Dogg, Jenna Jameson, and Paris Hilton; they document how mainstream advertising uses porn culture to sell commercial goods now to an even younger, "tween" audience; and they pose crucial questions: How has porn shaped the way we view our own and others' bodies? Sarracino and Scott examine porned advertising of everything from Clinique to Orbit gum to Old Spice. How has porn influenced our relationships and how do current sexual behaviors, such as the "hookup," mimic porn? The authors look to MySpace and Craigslist for answers. And how does porn shape our identity, as individuals and as a nation? Sarracino and Scott argue that the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib exposed our porned sensibilities.Not an anti-porn diatribe, The Porning of America is resolutely pro-sex. Sarracino and Scott contend that, to make the most of our hard-won sexual freedom, we must thoughtfully-and honestly-evaluate what might be liberating about porn as well as what might be damaging. Nuanced, timely, and urgent, The Porning of America will change how you see the world around you.

    Continuously in print since 1932, Ortega's vision of Western culture as sinking to its lowest common denominator and drifting toward chaos brought its author international fame and has remained one of the influential books of the 20th century.

    Written in short, carefully numbered paragraphs of extreme brilliance, it captured the imagination of a generation of philosophers. For Wittgenstein, logic was something we use to conquer a reality which is in itself both elusive and unobtainable. He famously summarized the book in the following words: 'What can be said at all can be said clearly; and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.' David Pears and Brian McGuinness received the highest praise for their meticulous translation. The work is prefaced by Bertrand Russell's original introduction to the first English edition.

    It is without question Schopenhauer's greatest work. Conceived and published before the philosopher was 30 and expanded 25 years later, it is the summation of a lifetime of thought.For 70 years, the only unabridged English translation of this work was the Haldane-Kemp collaboration. In 1958, a new translation by E. F. J. Payne appeared that decisively supplanted the older one. Payne's translation is superior because it corrects nearly 1,000 errors and omissions in the Haldane-Kemp translation, and it is based on the definitive 1937 German edition of Schopenhauer's work prepared by Dr. Arthur Hübscher. Payne's edition is the first to translate into English the text's many quotations in half a dozen languages. It is thus the most useful edition for the student or teacher.

    The book is an analysis of physical suffering and its relation to the numerous vocabularies and cultural forces--literary, political, philosophical, medical, religious--that confront it. Elaine Scarry bases her study on a wide range of sources: literature and art, medical case histories, documents on torture compiled by Amnesty International, legal transcripts of personal injury trials, and military and strategic writings by such figures as Clausewitz, Churchill, Liddell Hart, and Kissinger, She weaves these into her discussion with an eloquence, humanity, and insight that recall the writings of Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre. Scarry begins with the fact of pain's inexpressibility. Not only is physical pain enormously difficult to describe in words--confronted with it, Virginia Woolf once noted, "language runs dry"--it also actively destroys language, reducing sufferers in the most extreme instances to an inarticulate state of cries and moans. Scarry analyzes the political ramifications of deliberately inflicted pain, specifically in the cases of torture and warfare, and shows how to be fictive. From these actions of "unmaking" Scarry turns finally to the actions of "making"--the examples of artistic and cultural creation that work against pain and the debased uses that are made of it. Challenging and inventive, The Body in Pain is landmark work that promises to spark widespread debate.

    Moving away from the Marxist/Freudian approaches that had concerned him earlier, Baudrillard developed in this book a theory of contemporary culture that relies on displacing economic notions of cultural production with notions of cultural expenditure.Baudrillard uses the concepts of the simulacra—the copy without an original—and simulation. These terms are crucial to an understanding of the postmodern, to the extent that they address the concept of mass reproduction and reproduceability that characterizes our electronic media culture.Baudrillard's book represents a unique and original effort to rethink cultural theory from the perspective of a new concept of cultural materialism, one that radically redefines postmodern formulations of the body.Sheila Glaser is an editor at Artforum magazine.

    At higher levels, testosterone causes destructive male behavior, the two most terrible kinds being: 1. War. 2. Do-it-yourself projects.

    Essentially, you make an initial guess, and then get more data to improve it. Bayes Theorem, or Bayes Rule, has a ton of real world applications, from estimating your risk of a heart attack to making recommendations on Netflix But It Isn't That Complicated This book is a short introduction to Bayes Theorem. It is only 15 pages long, and is intended to show you how Bayes Theorem works as quickly as possible. The examples are intentionally kept simple to focus solely on Bayes Theorem without requiring that the reader know complicated probability distributions. If you want to learn the basics of Bayes Theorem as quickly as possible, with some easy to duplicate examples, this is a good book for you.

    As Pluckrose and Lindsay warn, the unchecked proliferation of these anti-Enlightenment beliefs present a threat not only to liberal democracy but also to modernity itself. While acknowledging the need to challenge the complacency of those who think a just society has been fully achieved, Pluckrose and Lindsay break down how this often-radical activist scholarship does far more harm than good, not least to those marginalized communities it claims to champion. They also detail its alarmingly inconsistent and illiberal ethics. Only through a proper understanding of the evolution of these ideas, they conclude, can those who value science, reason, and consistently liberal ethics successfully challenge this harmful and authoritarian orthodoxy—in the academy, in culture, and beyond.

    They are told that in the name of sexual consent and feminist empowerment, they must proclaim their desires clearly and confidently. Sex researchers tell us that women don't know what they want. And men are on hand to persuade women that what they want is, in fact, exactly what men want. In this environment, how can women possibly know what they want—and how can they be expected to?In this elegantly written, searching book Katherine Angel surveys medical and psychoanalytic understandings of female desire, from Freud to Kinsey to present-day science; MeToo-era debates over consent, assault, and feminism; and popular culture, TV, and film to challenge our assumptions about female desire. Why, she asks, do we expect desire to be easily understood? Why is there not space for the unsure, the tentative, the maybe, the let's just see? In contrast to the endless exhortation to know what we want, Angel proposes that sex can be a conversation, requiring insight, interaction, and mutual vulnerability—a shared collaboration into the unknown.In this crucial moment of renewed attention to violence and power, Angel urges that we remake our thinking about sex, pleasure, and autonomy without any illusions of perfect self-knowledge. Only then will we bring about Michel Foucault's sardonic promise, in 1976, that "tomorrow sex will be good again."

    Evangelical luminary James Dobson frets that Christians will be arrested for thought crimes and people will be allowed to marry donkeys. Protesters in knickers and colonial-style hats march on Washington with signs that order Hitler-like caricatures of President Obama to return to Kenya. As madness reigns, pundits, politicians, and cab drivers debate the source of the hysteria. Some blame ignorance; some blame racism; some blame the economy. After poring over mountains of political screeds and heedlessly subjecting himself to countless hours of Fox News, author Michael Wolraich discovered the secret formula that turns ordinary men and women into fire-breathing, smoke-blowing, right wing maniacs. It’s “persecution politics” . . again.In Blowing Smoke, Wolraich documents, dissects, and deconstructs the myths that underlie the right’s growing reliance on the politics of persecution, from Joe McCarthy to the Tea Party movement. In the process, he delivers an original and compelling hypothesis with penetrating insight and blistering wit.At turns hilarious, disturbing, and edifying, Blowing Smoke is a must-read account of modern American politics.

    Promising to deepen and broaden the reader's perspective on his or her own life experiences, Moore draws on his own life as a therapist practicing "care of the soul," as well as his studies of the world's religions and his work in music and art, to create this inspirational guide that examines the connections between spirituality and the problems of individuals and society.