Every week on the public radio show On the Media, the award-winning journalist Brooke Gladstone analyzes the media and how it shapes our perceptions of the world. There is meaningful action, a time-tested treatment for moral panic. Trump and his team of advisors. . History tells us we can count on it. For them, as she writes, lying is the point.

Now, from her front-row perch on the day’s events, Gladstone brings her genius for making insightful, unexpected connections to help us understand what she calls—and what so many of us can acknowledge having—“trouble with reality. Reality, as she shows us, was never what we thought it was—there is always a bubble, people are always subjective and prey to stereotypes.

Brief and bracing, the trouble with reality shows exactly why so many of us didn’t see it coming, and how we can recover both our belief in reality—and our sanity. Dick, she dissects this strategy, and jonathan swift, straight out of the authoritarian playbook, and shows how the Trump team mastered it, down to the five types of tweets that Trump uses to distort our notions of what’s real and what’s not.

Drawing on writers as diverse as Hannah Arendt, Walter Lippmann, Philip K. Enter Donald J. And she offers hope. And there is also the inevitable reckoning.

The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media

Two-color illustrations W w norton Company. Mind-opening, thought-provoking and incredibly timely… An absolutely spectacular read. Cory doctorow, boingboing a million listeners trust NPR's Brooke Gladstone to guide them through the complexities of the modern media. Bursting onto the page in vivid comics by acclaimed artist Josh Neufeld, this brilliant radio personality guides us through two millennia of media history, debunking the notion that "The Media" is an external force beyond our control and equipping us to be savvy consumers and shapers of the news.

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Weaponized Lies: How to Think Critically in the Post-Truth Era

Case studies are offered to demonstrate the applications of logical thinking to quite varied settings, spanning courtroom testimony, modern physics, magic, medical decision making, and conspiracy theories. This urgently needed book enables us to avoid the extremes of passive gullibility and cynical rejection.

A post-truth era is an era of willful irrationality, reversing all the great advances humankind has made. The steps we can take to better evaluate news, advertisements, and reports are clearly detailed. Euphemisms like “fringe theories, ” “extreme views, ” “alt truth, ” and even “fake news” can literally be dangerous.

Ultimately, levitin turns to what underlies our ability to determine if something is true or false: the scientific method. He grapples with the limits of what we can and cannot know. Let's call lies what they are and catch those making them in the act. Wordy arguments on the other hand can easily be persuasive as they drift away from the facts in an appealing yet misguided way.

Investigating numerical misinformation, Daniel Levitin shows how mishandled statistics and graphs can give a grossly distorted perspective and lead us to terrible decisions. These lies are getting repeated. As levitin attests: Truth matters. New york times bestselling author Daniel Levitin shows how to disarm these socially devastating inventions and get the American mind back on track.

Everything Is Obvious: How Common Sense Fails Us

Dutton. W w norton Company. By understanding how and when common sense fails, we can improve our understanding of the present and better plan for the future. Drawing on the latest scientific research, along with a wealth of historical and contemporary examples, Watts shows how common sense reasoning and history conspire to mislead us into believing that we understand more about the world of human behavior than we do; and in turn, why attempts to predict, manage, or manipulate social and economic systems so often go awry.

It seems obvious, for example, that people respond to incentives; yet policy makers and managers alike frequently fail to anticipate how people will respond to the incentives they create. And although successful products or companies always seem in retrospect to have succeeded because of their unique qualities, predicting the qualities of the next hit product or hot company is notoriously difficult even for experienced professionals.

Watts' argument has important implications in politics, and marketing, business, as well as in science and everyday life. Crown Business. Social trends often seem to be driven by certain influential people; yet marketers have been unable to identify these “influencers” in advance.

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Crown Business. Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. W w norton Company. Tim duggan. Dutton.

. 1 new york times bestsellerthe Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy.

Demagoguery and Democracy

Crown Business. The idea that we never fall for it—that all the blame lies with them—is equally dangerous. How can we stop it? Demagogues follow predictable patterns in what they say and do to gain power. The key to resisting demagoguery is to name it when you see it—and to know where it leads. Tim duggan.

A clear-eyed guide to demagoguery—and how we can defeat it What is demagoguery? Some demagogues are easy to spot: They rise to power through pandering, charisma, and prejudice. Them. Why is it dangerous? Demagoguery is democracy’s greatest threat. It erodes rational debate, so that intelligent policymaking grinds to a halt.

Dutton. W w norton Company. But, as professor patricia Roberts-Miller explains, a demagogue is anyone who reduces all questions to us vs.

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

Amusing ourselves to Death Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. Amusing ourselves to death is a prophetic look at what happens when politics, education, journalism, and even religion become subject to the demands of entertainment. What happens when media and politics become forms of entertainment? As our world begins to look more and more like Orwell's 1984, Neil's Postman's essential guide to the modern media is more relevant than ever.

It's unlikely that trump has ever read Amusing Ourselves to Death, but his ascent would not have surprised Postman. Cnnoriginally published in 1985, neil postman’s groundbreaking polemic about the corrosive effects of television on our politics and public discourse has been hailed as a twenty-first-century book published in the twentieth century.

Now, with television joined by more sophisticated electronic media—from the Internet to cell phones to DVDs—it has taken on even greater significance. Tim duggan. This is an indictment that Postman has laid down and, so far as I can see, an irrefutable one. Jonathan yardley, the Washington Post Book World W w norton Company.

Dutton. Crown Business. It is also a blueprint for regaining control of our media, so that they can serve our highest goals.

On Bullshit

They quietly change the rules governing their end of the conversation so that claims about truth and falsity are irrelevant. In fact, bullshit need not be untrue at all. Frankfurt concludes that although bullshit can take many innocent forms, excessive indulgence in it can eventually undermine the practitioner's capacity to tell the truth in a way that lying does not.

By virtue of this, frankfurt writes, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are. And we lack a conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us. With his characteristic combination of philosophical acuity, and wry humor, psychological insight, Frankfurt proceeds by exploring how bullshit and the related concept of humbug are distinct from lying.

. Rather, bullshitters seek to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true. W w norton Company. Crown Business. Liars at least acknowledge that it matters what is true. He argues that bullshitters misrepresent themselves to their audience not as liars do, that is, by deliberately making false claims about what is true.

Each of us contributes his share. Amusing ourselves to Death Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.

Ego Psychology and Social Work Practice: 2nd Edition

Dutton. While ego psychological theory still holds a pre-eminent position in clinical social work practice, the field has changed in many ways. On Bullshit. This revised edition addresses these major changes, bringing the reader up to date. Amusing ourselves to Death Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.

W w norton Company. Tim duggan. Crown Business.

No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need

New york times bestseller national book award longlist Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2017 Donald Trump’s takeover of the White House is a dangerous escalation in a world of cascading crises. His reckless agenda—including a corporate coup in government, aggressive scapegoating and warmongering, and sweeping aside climate science to set off a fossil fuel frenzy—will generate waves of disasters and shocks to the economy, national security, and the environment.

Tim duggan. W w norton Company. Acclaimed journalist, and bestselling author Naomi Klein has spent two decades studying political shocks, climate change, activist, and “brand bullies. From this unique perspective, she argues that trump is not an aberration but a logical extension of the worst, most dangerous trends of the past half-century—the very conditions that have unleashed a rising tide of white nationalism the world over.

Dutton. It is not enough, to merely resist, she tells us, to say “no. Our historical moment demands more: a credible and inspiring “yes, ” a roadmap to reclaiming the populist ground from those who would divide us—one that sets a bold course for winning the fair and caring world we want and need.

Amusing ourselves to Death Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. Crown Business. This timely, helping us understand just how we got here, and how we can, urgent book from one of our most influential thinkers offers a bracing positive shock of its own, collectively, come together and heal.

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

This critical edition makes available for the first time the core of the research project that spawned the book. When first published, marshall mcLuhans Understanding Media made history with its radical view of the effects of electronic communications upon man and life in the twentieth century. Crown Business.

Used book in Good Condition. On Bullshit. Tim duggan. Dutton. W w norton Company. Amusing ourselves to Death Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. This edition of mcluhans best-known book both enhances its accessibility to a general audience and provides the full critical apparatus necessary for scholars.

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