On any given day in America's news cycle, stories and images of disgraced politicians and celebrities solicit our moral indignation, their misdeeds fueling a lucrative economy of shame and scandal. Shame is one of the most coercive, painful, and intriguing of human emotions. Only in recent years has interest in shame extended beyond a focus on the subjective experience of this emotion and its psychological effects. The essays collected here consider...

Quips and quotes from one of Mad Men's sharpest wits. Multiple Emmy winner Mad Men continues to captivate viewers around the world with its brilliant portrayal of the 1960s and its stylish characters, including the dashing advertising mogul Roger Sterling, who's acquired a reputation for his quips, barbs, and witticisms over the show's many season. This book, presented as Roger's memoir during the fourth season of Mad Men, is an entertaining collection...

"Vampires. Why do we care? In these pages you will find what is very simply, the most literate, imaginative, and just plain fascinating answer to that question ever written." -Whitley StrieberIn a culture that does not do death particularly well, we are obsessed with mortality. Margot Adler writes, "Vampires let us play with death and the issue of mortality. They let us ponder what it would mean to be truly long lived. Would the long view allow us...

Accurately details the history of laughing gas through to modern times (including historical ramblings & jest), and delves into the medical side of things – in a light-hearted manner. Finally, while it never promotes nor condones the use of this fascinating substance and clearly highlights the serious dangers of its consumption, Laughing Gas suggests scientifically based means of ameliorating – preventing – the known negative possible effects...

Without wings, without a tail, without a trunk, without claws, without fangs, without poison, without spikes, without horns, without a shell, without agility, only through intelligence could man overcome other animal species in the struggle for life; but, on the other hand, intelligence was itself a weapon or a power capable of developing indefinitely, rising higher than birds and falling lower than reptiles.

From $10,000 tweets to making money in the afterlife, a recovering gossip columnist explores the business lessons that power the Hollywood Industrial Complex. Why do celebrities get paid so much more than regular people to do a job that seems to afford them the same amount of leisure time as most retirees? What do Bush-era economics have to do with the rise of Kim Kardashian? How do the laws of supply and demand explain why the stars of Teen Mom are...

An amusing and erudite anatomy of modern friendship from the New York Times bestselling author of Snobbery. Is it possible to have too many friends? Is your spouse supposed to be your best friend? How far should you go to help a friend in need? And how do you end a friendship that has run its course? In a wickedly entertaining anatomy of friendship in its contemporary guises, Joseph Epstein uncovers the rich and surprising truths about our favored...

Acid Dreams is the complete social history of LSD and the counterculture it helped to define in the sixties. Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain's exhaustively researched and astonishing account-part of it gleaned from secret government files-tells how the CIA became obsessed with LSD as an espionage weapon during the early 1950s and launched a massive covert research program, in which countless unwitting citizens were used as guinea pigs. Though the CIA...

You're standing at an ATM. It can't access account information but allows unlimited withdrawals. Do you take more than your balance? David Callahan thinks most of us would. While there have always been those who cut corners, he shows that cheating on every level-from the highly publicized corporate scandals to Little League fraud-has risen dramatically in the last two decades. Why all the cheating? Why now? Callahan pins the blame on the dog-eat-dog...

The Midway Chronicles is the amazing behind-the-scenes story of one of the greatest video game studios of all time – Midway Games. Led by the “godfather of video games” Eugene Jarvis, the company pioneered the concept of live action gaming, kickstarting a new arcade boom and grossing billions of dollars in the process with massive hits like Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam – franchises still popular today. Through intimate and often hilarious interviews...