Is the world really falling apart? Is the ideal of progress obsolete? Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker urges us to step back from the gory headlines and prophecies of doom, which play to our psychological biases. Instead, follow the data. In seventy-five graphs, Pinker shows that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise, not just in the West, but worldwide. This progress is not the result of some cosmic force. It is a gift of the Enlightenment: the conviction that reason and science can enhance human flourishing. Far from being a naïve hope, the Enlightenment, we now know, has worked. But more than ever, it needs a vigorous defense. The Enlightenment project swims against currents of human nature -- tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, magical thinking -- which demagogues are all too willing to exploit. Many commentators, committed to political, religious, or romantic ideologies, fight a rearguard action against it. The result is a corrosive fatalism and a willingness to wreck the precious institutions of liberal democracy and global cooperation. Pinker makes the case for reason, science, and humanism: the ideals we need to confront our problems and continue our progress.

Author of the New York Times bestseller Useful Idiots and popular columnist Mona Charen takes a close, reasoned look at the aggressive feminist agenda undermining the success and happiness of men and women across the country In this smart, deeply necessary critique, Mona Charen unpacks the ways feminism fails us at home, in the workplace, and in our personal relationships--by promising that we can have it all, do it all, and be it all. Here, she upends the feminist agenda and the liberal conversation surrounding women's issues by asking tough and crucial questions, such as: Did women's full equality require the total destruction of the nuclear family? Did it require a sexual revolution that would dismantle traditions of modesty, courtship, and fidelity that had characterized relations between the sexes for centuries? Did it cause the broken dating culture and the rape crisis on our college campuses? Did it require war between the sexes that would deem men the "enemy" of women? Have the strides of feminism made women happier in their home and work life. (The answer is No.) Sex Matters tracks the price we have paid for denying sex differences and stoking the war of the sexes--family breakdown, declining female happiness, aimlessness among men, and increasing inequality. Marshaling copious social science research as well as her own experience as a professional as well as a wife and mother, Mona Charen calls for a sexual ceasefire for the sake of women, men, and children.

Sociologist Michael Kimmel, one of the leading writers on men and masculinity, has spent hundreds of hours in the company of America's angry white men--from white supremacists to men's rights activists to young students--in pursuit of a comprehensive diagnosis of their fears, anxieties, and rage. Kimmel locates this increase in anger in the seismic economic, social, and political shifts that have transformed the American landscape: Downward mobility, increased racial and gender equality, and tenaciously clinging to an anachronistic ideology of masculinity has left many men feeling betrayed and bewildered. Raised to expect unparalleled social and economic privilege, white men are suffering today from what Kimmel calls "aggrieved entitlement": a sense that those benefits that white men believed were their due have been snatched away from them. The election of Donald Trump proved that angry white men can still change the course of history. Here, Kimmel argues that we must consider the rage of this "forgotten" group and create solutions that address the concerns of all Americans.

From political wunderkind and former army intelligence officer Jason Kander comes a haunting, powerful memoir about politics, PTSD, impossible choices--and how sometimes walking away from the chance of a lifetime can be the greatest decision of all.

"In the ten years since her beloved, groundbreaking Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, New York Times bestselling author Amy Krouse Rosenthal has been quietly at work on this modest but mighty magnum opus, creating a spectacular literary experience that is unprecedented, unforgettable, and explosively human. Amy Krouse Rosenthal has cultivated a distinct blend of nonlinear memoir, observational humor, wistful reflections, and interactive connections with readers. A decade after Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, she's back with a sublime new work, a timeless collection of insights, memories, and moments that are at once intimate and universal. Why the title Textbook Amy Krouse Rosenthal? Because each piece of prose is organized into classic subjects such as Social Studies, Music, and Language Arts. Because textbook would accurately describe a book with a first-of-its-kind interactive text messaging component. Because textbook is an expression meaning "quintessential"--Oh, that wordplay and unconventional format is so typical of her, so textbook AKR. Because if an author's previous book has the word encyclopedia in the title, following it up with a textbook would be rather nice. Textbook Amy Krouse Rosenthal speaks to the awe, bewilderment, and poignancy of being alive"--

When a country is covered in trash, what does that say about its culture? This passionate plea by The Oldie columnist Theodore Dalrymple is now published for the first time in paperback.

"How do we reckon with our losses? 'Animal Bodies' offers an unflinching examination of grief and personal loss-such as the death of parents, friends, and beloved pets, as well as broken marriages, lost friendships, and the loss of innocence and youth-and our collective grief caused by Covid-19, mass shootings, societal and gender inequities and violence, and environmental degradation"--

"For more than four decades, socially disadvantaged Israeli Mizrahim--descendants of Middle Eastern Jews--have continuously supported right-wing political parties. Sociologists, NGOs, and left-wing politicians tend to view Mizrahim as acting against their own interests, but Nissim Mizrachi locates the problem within the limitations of the liberal grammar with which their behavior is read. In Beyond Suspicion, Mizrachi turns the direction of inquiry upon itself, contrasting liberal grammar--which values autonomy, equality, and universal reason and morality--with the grammar of Mizrahi rootedness, in which the self is experienced through a web of relational commitments, temporal ties, and codes of collective identity. Recognizing rootedness as a fundamental need for belonging is necessary to understand both scholarly and political rifts in Israel and throughout the world"--