front cover of Cool Rules
Cool Rules
Anatomy of an Attitude
Dick Pountain and David Robins
Reaktion Books, 2000
Cool Rules introduces the reader to a new cultural category. While the authors do not claim to have discovered Cool, they believe they are the first to attempt a serious, systematic analysis of Cool's history, psychology, and importance.

The contemporary Cool attitude is barely 50 years old, but its roots are older than that. Cool Rules traces Cool's ancient origins in European, Asian, and African cultures, its prominence in the African-American jazz scene of the 1940s, and its pivotal position within the radical subcultures of the 1950s and '60s. Pountain and Robins examine various art movements, music, cinema, and literature, moving from the dandies and flâneurs of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through to the expropriation of a whole cultural and psychological tradition by the media in the 1980s and '90s. What began as a rebellious posture adopted by minorities mutated to become mainstream itself. Cool is now primarily about consumption, as cynical advertisers have seized on it to create a constantly updated bricolage of styles and entertainments designed to affect the way people think about themselves and their society.
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Gabriel Tarde On Communication and Social Influence
Selected Papers
Gabriel Tarde
University of Chicago Press, 1969

Gabriel Tarde ranks as one of the most outstanding sociologists of nineteenth-century France, though not as well known by English readers as his peers Comte and Durkheim. This book makes available Tarde’s most important work and demonstrates his continuing relevance to a new generation of students and thinkers.

Tarde’s landmark research and empirical analysis drew upon collective behavior, mass communications, and civic opinion as elements to be explained within the context of broader social patterns. Unlike the mass society theorists that followed in his wake, Tarde integrated his discussions of societal change at the macrosocietal and individual levels, anticipating later twentieth-century thinkers who fused the studies of mass communications and public opinion research.

Terry N. Clark’s introduction, considered the premier guide to Tarde’s opus, accompanies this important work, reprinted here for the first time in forty years.

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An Influencer's World
A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Social Media Influencers and Creators
Caroline Baker
University of Iowa Press, 2023
What is the influencer lifestyle? How do influencers win their fight for relevance and create a brand that catches fire, while still leading an authentic, healthy life? Influencing is a business built around likes and hate, which can take a huge psychological toll on those who choose to play the game. An Influencer’s World pulls back the curtain and shines a light on the often-misunderstood realities of this dynamic industry. Featuring dozens of interviews with trending influencers, CEOs, leading industry insiders, brands, mental health professionals, and celebrities, this book provides an unconventional look at both the business side of influencing and the personal lives of influencers and creators.

INTERVIEWEES INCLUDE:
Isabella Avila (17.7m on TikTok)
Jacques Bastien (cofounder, SHADE)
Mark Cuban (8.6m on Twitter)
Mary Fitzgerald (1.8m on Instagram)
GloZell Green (4.6m on YouTube)
Tim Karsliyev (1.7m on Instagram)
Kevin Kreider (431k on Instagram)
Max Levine (cofounder, Amp Studios)
Cindy Pham (468k on YouTube)
Michael Schweiger (CEO, Central Entertainment Group)
LaToya Shambo (CEO/founder, Black Girl Digital)
Joshua Suarez (14.4m on TikTok)
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An Interpretation of Desire
Essays in the Study of Sexuality
John Gagnon
University of Chicago Press, 2003
An Interpretation of Desire offers a bracing collection of major essays by John Gagnon, one of the leading and most inspiring figures in sexual research. Spanning his work from the 1970s, when he explored the idea that sexuality is mediated through social processes and categories—thus paving the way for Foucault—and then extending through his turn to issues of desire during the 1990s, these essays constitute an essential entrée to the study of sexuality in the twentieth century.

Gagnon may be best known as the coauthor of Sexual Conduct—a book that introduced the seminal concept of sexual scripting—and as one of the coauthors of The Social Organization of Sexuality, a foundational work that is widely considered to be the most important study of human sexual behavior since the Kinsey report. The essays collected here first trace the influence of scripting theory on Gagnon, outlining the radical departure he took from the dominant biological and psychiatric models of sex research. The volume then turns to more recent essays that consider such vexed issues as homosexuality, the theories of Sigmund Freud, HIV, hazardous sex, and the social aspects of sexually transmitted diseases.
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Museum Politics
Power Plays At The Exhibition
Timothy W. Luke
University of Minnesota Press, 2002
The first sustained critique of the ways museum exhibits shape cultural assumptions and political values. Each year the more than seven thousand museums in the United States attract more attendees than either movies or sports. Yet until recently, museums have escaped serious political analysis. The past decade, however, has witnessed a series of unusually acrimonious debates about the social, political, and moral implications of museum exhibitions as varied as the Enola Gay display at the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum and the Sensation exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. In this important volume, Timothy W. Luke explores museums' power to shape collective values and social understandings, and argues persuasively that museum exhibitions have a profound effect on the body politic. Through discussions of topics ranging from how the National Holocaust Museum and the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles have interpreted the Holocaust to the ways in which the American Museum of Natural History, the Missouri Botanical Gardens, and Tucson's Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum have depicted the natural world, Luke exposes the processes through which museums challenge but more often affirm key cultural and social realities. Timothy W. Luke is University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.
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Private Truths, Public Lies
The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification
Timur Kuran
Harvard University Press, 1995

Preference falsification, according to the economist Timur Kuran, is the act of misrepresenting one's wants under perceived social pressures. It happens frequently in everyday life, such as when we tell the host of a dinner party that we are enjoying the food when we actually find it bland. In Private Truths, Public Lies Kuran argues convincingly that the phenomenon not only is ubiquitous but has huge social and political consequences. Drawing on diverse intellectual traditions, including those rooted in economics, psychology, sociology, and political science, Kuran provides a unified theory of how preference falsification shapes collective decisions, orients structural change, sustains social stability, distorts human knowledge, and conceals political possibilities.

A common effect of preference falsification is the preservation of widely disliked structures. Another is the conferment of an aura of stability on structures vulnerable to sudden collapse. When the support of a policy, tradition, or regime is largely contrived, a minor event may activate a bandwagon that generates massive yet unanticipated change.

In distorting public opinion, preference falsification also corrupts public discourse and, hence, human knowledge. So structures held in place by preference falsification may, if the condition lasts long enough, achieve increasingly genuine acceptance. The book demonstrates how human knowledge and social structures co-evolve in complex and imperfectly predictable ways, without any guarantee of social efficiency.

Private Truths, Public Lies uses its theoretical argument to illuminate an array of puzzling social phenomena. They include the unexpected fall of communism, the paucity, until recently, of open opposition to affirmative action in the United States, and the durability of the beliefs that have sustained India's caste system.

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The Reading-Writing Connection
Edited by Nancy Nelson and Robert C. Calfee
University of Chicago Press, 1998
This volume shows that the separation of the teaching of reading and writing has been a dominant feature of educational practice at the elementary and secondary levels since colonial times. The editors identify current movements in education that have fostered connections between reading and writing as well as those that tend to push them apart.

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