We secretly want to know: could it happen to me? Amanda Montell’s argument is that, on some level, it already has . . .Our culture tends to provide pretty flimsy answers to questions of cult influence, mostly having to do with vague talk of “brainwashing.” But the true answer has nothing to do with freaky mind-control wizardry or Kool-Aid. In Cultish, Montell argues that the key to manufacturing intense ideology, community, and us/them attitudes all comes down to language. In both positive ways and shadowy ones, cultish language is something we hear—and are influenced by—every single day.Through juicy storytelling and cutting original research, Montell exposes the verbal elements that make a wide spectrum of communities “cultish,” revealing how they affect followers of groups as notorious as Heaven’s Gate, but also how they pervade our modern start-ups, Peloton leaderboards, and Instagram feeds. Incisive and darkly funny, this enrapturing take on the curious social science of power and belief will make you hear the fanatical language of “cultish” everywhere.

    A Brahman Congress leader suggests that a Dalit chief minister be raped and paid compensation. In his 1916 paper Castes in India , the 25-year-old Ambedkar offered the insight that the caste system thrives by its control of women, and that caste is a product of sustained endogamy. Since then, till the time he piloted the Hindu Code Bill, seeking to radicalise women s rights in the 1950s, Ambedkar deployed a range of arguments to make his case against Brahmanism and its twin, patriarchy. While Ambedkar s original insights have been neglected by sociologists, political theorists and even feminists, they have been kept alive, celebrated and memorialised by Dalit musical troupes and booklets in Maharashtra. Sharmila Rege, in this compelling selection of Ambedkar s writings on the theme of Brahmanical patriarchy, illuminates for us his unprecedented sociological observations. Rege demonstrates how and why Ambedkar laid the base for what was, properly speaking, a feminist take on caste.

    An accessible look at how the government promoted the housing bubble that it is now using for its own ends.

    Here, a reprinting of the seminal underground essay by Bob Black.

    He listened to Glenn Beck. He read Ann Coulter. He watched Fox News. He was an evangelical Christian once tethered to right-wing media, which constantly warned of an attack on American values by liberals and secular humanists. Today, Seth is a liberal and secular humanist. This book explores the Fox News culture, which both reflects and informs American conservatism, shaping public opinion on important issues like religion, government, race, foreign policy, war, protest, LGBT rights, and the Constitution. It's an exposé of conservative media's "closed systems" which constantly feed on (and feed into) public outrage, ignorance, bigotry, and fear. It's also the story of one man's personal journey into a larger and better world.

     It was the spring of 1987, and crack cocaine had turned whole swaths of Detroit into veritable combat zones. The city thought it had seen everything—until one evening that May, when the police arrested a 17-year-old kid named Rick Wershe. They called him White Boy Rick. In a city known for its fraught racial divide, Wershe had somehow joined the ranks of the drug kingpins on the predominantly black East Side before he was old enough to shave. He flew in kilos of cocaine from Miami and drove a white Jeep with THE SNOWMAN emblazoned across the back. An incredulous judge once compared him to the gangster “Baby Face” Nelson. He seemed more an urban legend than a real person—and then his story got even stranger. Years later, while he was in prison for cocaine possession, Wershe claimed he had been working with the FBI since he was 14. Was one of Detroit’s most notorious criminals also one of the feds’ most valuable informants in the city? Journalist Evan Hughes set out to untangle fact from fiction in Wershe’s improbable story, tracking down the dealers, cops, and federal agents who shared the streets with him and eventually meeting Wershe himself at the rural Michigan prison where he remains incarcerated. The Trials of White Boy Rick is a gripping true-crime saga of hidden motives and betrayed trust—and reveals never-before-reported information suggesting why Wershe is still behind bars. Praise for "The Trials of White Boy Rick" “For anyone who lived in Detroit in the ’80s, the drug dealer known as White Boy Rick remains legend. But the true story of Rick’s epic rise and fall, as exhaustively reported by Evan Hughes, reads like a lost Elmore Leonard story. Essential, infuriating, wildly entertaining. Free Richard Wershe now!” —Mark Binelli, Rolling Stone staff writer and author of Detroit City Is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis “Highly recommend new Evan Hughes opus from The Atavist. Crooked cops. White Boy Rick. An Ellroy novella set in Detroit.” —Patrick Radden Keefe, The New Yorker staff writer “Holy crap, this Evan Hughes story in The Atavist is mind-blowing.” —Wil S. Hylton, writer for The New York Times Magazine and New York. “Worth every nickel.” —Don Van Natta Jr., ESPN and ESPN The Magazine “This astonishing Evan Hughes piece on Detroit is Pulitzer Prize-caliber reporting and writing.” —Michael Lindgren, book reviewer for The Washington Post

    

    This stirring speech has been broadcast nationally on radio and television and published in Quarterly Essay 44. At a moment when the ferment of Tahrir Square has spread around the world to unsettle the status quo, Flanagan’s provocative ideas resonate with a new mood and a new questioning. Above all, Flanagan says, we need to take our compass more from ourselves and less from the powerful if we are to find hope. "We need to look the disease of Australia in the eye, the disease of conformity that is ill preparing us for the future. Does Australia still have the courage and largeness it once had when it pioneered the secret ballot and universal suffrage? Or will it simply become the United Arab Emirates of the West, content to roll on for a decade or two more glossing over its fundamental problems while brown coal and fracked gas keep the country afloat?" – Richard Flanagan

    

    The new edition of this leading gives students an understanding and appreciation of different cultures and helps them develop practical skills for improving their communication with people from other cultures. It's renowned for being the only text on the market to consistently emphasize religion and history as key variables in intercultural communication. Packed with the latest research and filled with numerous, compelling examples that force students to examine their own assumptions and cultural biases, this book helps students understand the subtle and profound ways culture affects communication. The book is divided into four interrelated parts: Part I introduces the study of communication and culture; Part II focuses on the ability of culture to shape and modify our view of reality; Part III puts the theory of intercultural communication into practice; and Part IV converts knowledge into action.

    For decades the GOP has seen itself in an uncompromising struggle against a New America that is increasingly secular, racially diverse, and fueled by immigration. It has fought non-traditional family structures, ripped huge holes in the social safety net, tried to stop women from being independent, and pitted aging rural Evangelicals against the younger, more dynamic cities.Since the 2010 election put the Tea Party in control of the GOP, the party has condemned America to years of fury, polarization and broken government. The election of Donald Trump enabled the Republicans to make things even worse. All seemed lost.But the Republicans have set themselves up for a shattering defeat.In RIP GOP, Stanley Greenberg argues that the 2016 election hurried the party's imminent demise. Using amazing insights from his focus groups with real people and surprising revelations from his own polls, Greenberg shows why the GOP is losing its defining battle. He explores why the 2018 election, when the New America fought back, was no fluke. And he predicts that in 2020 the party of Lincoln will be left to the survivors, opening America up to a new era of renewal and progress.

    And as Kitchener follows each member of the group, it becomes harder to reduce them to stereotypes, harder either to defend or to judge their choices. Kitchener navigates expertly between the very personal and the wider sociological perspectives as she outlines a chronological year in the lives of all five women, illuminating and clarifying each one of their choices, victories, and foibles.Both a broad and an intensely individual exploration, Post Grad is a portrait of the shifting environment of that important year after graduation, as well as an intimate look at how a select group of very different individuals handles its challenges—navigating family tensions, relationships, jobs, and that ever-elusive notion of independence.

    Otherwise calm, rational, and intelligent people go into extended rants about an industry that seems to grow more inhuman and unhelpful with every phone call we make. And Americans make more than 43 billion customer service calls each year. Whether it's the interminable hold times, the outsourced agents who can't speak English, or the multitude of buttons to press and automated voices to listen to before reaching someone with a measurable pulse -- who hasn't felt exasperated at the abuse, neglect, and wasted time we experience when all we want is help, and maybe a little human kindness?Your Call Is (Not That) Important to Us is journalist Emily Yellin's engaging, funny, and far-reaching exploration of the multibillion-dollar customer service industry and its surprising inner-workings. Yellin reveals the real human beings and often surreal corporate policies lurking behind its aggravating façade. After reading this first-ever investigation of the customer service world, you'll never view your call-center encounters in quite the same way.Since customer service has a role in just about every industry on earth, Yellin travels the country and the world, meeting a wide range of customer service reps, corporate decision makers, industry watchers, and Internet-based consumer activists. She spends time at outsourced call centers for Office Depot in Argentina and Microsoft in Egypt. She gets to know the Mormon wives who answer JetBlue's customer service calls from their homes in Salt Lake City, and listens in on calls from around the globe at a FedEx customer service center in Memphis. She meets with the creators of the yearly Customer Rage Study, customer experience specialists at Credit Suisse in Zurich, the founder and CEO of FedEx, and the CEO of the rising Internet retailer Zappos.com. Yellin finds out which country complains about service the most (Sweden), interviews an actress who provides the voice for automated answering systems at many big corporations, and talks to the people who run a website (GetHuman.com that posts codes for bypassing automated voices and getting to an actual human being at more than five hundred major companies.Yellin weaves her vast reporting into an entertaining narrative that sheds light on the complex forces that create our infuriating experiences. She chronicles how the Internet and global competition are forcing businesses to take their customers' needs more seriously and offers hope from people inside and outside the globalized corporate world fighting to make customer service better for us all.Your Call Is (Not That) Important to Us cuts through corporate jargon and consumer distress to provide an eye-opening and animated account of the way companies treat their customers, how customers treat the people who serve them, and how technology, globalization, class, race, gender, and culture influence these interactions. Frustrated customers, smart executives, and dedicated customer service reps alike will find this lively examination of the crossroads of world commerce -- the point where businesses and their customers meet -- illuminating and essential.

    Covering such topics as fish and chips, roast beef, avocados, tripe, fish knives and the surprising origins of breakfast, Scoff reveals how in Britain we have become experts at using eating habits to make judgements about social background.Bringing together evidence from cookbooks, literature, artworks and social records from 1066 to the present, Vogler traces the changing fortunes of the food we encounter today, and unpicks the aspirations and prejudices of the people who have shaped our cuisine for better or worse.

    The Curse of Brink's-Mat reveals the pulse-racing full story of the crime itself before moving to its chilling aftermath, which still reverberates to this day. The heist made the careers of many of the underworld's biggest names, and changed the face of British crime forever but in the years that followed the robbery, many of those involved, innocent and guilty alike have been sent to an early grave. Two decades on, the death toll is still rising. Nobody knows more about that extraordinary morning's events than Wensley Clarkson. Nobody is better placed to track the vicious, violent and unexpected waves that followed in its wake or bring to life its cast of larger-than-life characters. From small-time crime in south-east London, to ‘the heist of the century' and its bloody consequences, Wensley Clarkson's The Curse of Brink's-Mat is an epic tale of villainy, gold and revenge.