The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet
by Daniel J. Solove
Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad
Decisions, and Hurtful Acts
by Carol Tavris, Elliot Aronson
Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
(Hardcover)
by Dan Ariely
Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future (Hardcover)
by Jeff Goodell
The Cult of Pharmacology: How America Became the World's Most Troubled Drug
Culture
by Richard DeGrandpre
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The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet
by Daniel J. Solove
Book Description
Teeming with chatrooms, online discussion groups, and blogs, the Internet
offers previously unimagined opportunities for personal expression and
communication. But there's a dark side to the story. A trail of information
fragments about us is forever preserved on the Internet, instantly available
in a Google search. A permanent chronicle of our private lives—often of
dubious reliability and sometimes totally false—will follow us wherever we
go, accessible to friends, strangers, dates, employers, neighbors,
relatives, and anyone else who cares to look. This engrossing book, brimming
with amazing examples of gossip, slander, and rumor on the Internet,
explores the profound implications of the online collision between free
speech and privacy.
Daniel Solove, an authority on information privacy law, offers a fascinating
account of how the Internet is transforming gossip, the way we shame others,
and our ability to protect our own reputations. Focusing on blogs, Internet
communities, cybermobs, and other current trends, he shows that, ironically,
the unconstrained flow of information on the Internet may impede
opportunities for self-development and freedom. Long-standing notions of
privacy need review, the author contends: unless we establish a balance
between privacy and free speech, we may discover that the freedom of the
Internet makes us less free.
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Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad
Decisions, and Hurtful Acts
by Carol Tavris, Elliot Aronson
Warren Bennis:
"This book casts a bright and penetrating light on how and why
nation-states, organizations, and individuals get into malignant messes. But
it also shows how they (NOT us) cluelessly keep repeating these offensive,
sometimes criminal acts. Tavris and Aronson don''t let any of us off the
hook but they do teach us how to avoid hanging ourselves on that hook again
and again. One of the most needed and important books for our time."
David Callahan:
"To err is human, to rationalize even more so. Now, thanks to this brilliant
book, we can finally see how and why even the best meaning people may
justify terrible behavior. Mistakes Were Made will not turn us into angels,
but it is hard to think of a better -- or more readable -- guide to the
mind''s most devilish tricks."
Michael Shermer:
"Please, somebody, get a copy of this book to the President and his cabinet
right away. Read it aloud into the Congressional Record. If this book
doesn''t change the way we think about our mistakes, then we''re all
doomed."
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Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
(Hardcover)
by Dan Ariely
From Publishers Weekly
Irrational behavior is a part of human nature, but as MIT professor Ariely
has discovered in 20 years of researching behavioral economics, people tend
to behave irrationally in a predictable fashion. Drawing on psychology and
economics, behavioral economics can show us why cautious people make poor
decisions about sex when aroused, why patients get greater relief from a
more expensive drug over its cheaper counterpart and why honest people may
steal office supplies or communal food, but not money. According to Ariely,
our understanding of economics, now based on the assumption of a rational
subject, should, in fact, be based on our systematic, unsurprising
irrationality. Ariely argues that greater understanding of previously
ignored or misunderstood forces (emotions, relativity and social norms) that
influence our economic behavior brings a variety of opportunities for
reexamining individual motivation and consumer choice, as well as economic
and educational policy. Ariely's intelligent, exuberant style and
thought-provoking arguments make for a fascinating, eye-opening read.
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Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future (Hardcover)
by Jeff Goodell
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. After a generation out of the spotlight, coal has reasserted
its centrality: the United States "burn[s] more than a billion tons" per
year, and since 9/11 and the Iraq war, independence from foreign oil has
become positively patriotic. Rolling Stone contributing editor Goodell's
last book, the bestselling Our Story, was about a mine accident, which
clearly made a deep impression on him. Our reliance on coal—the unspoken
foundation of our "information" economy—has, Goodell says, led to an "empire
of denial" that blocks us from the investments necessary to find alternative
energy sources that could eventually save us from fossil fuel. Goodell's
description of the mining-related deaths, the widespread health consequences
of burning coal and the impact on our planet's increasingly fragile
ecosystem make for compelling reading, but such commonplace facts are not
what lift this book out of the ordinary. That distinction belongs to
Goodell's fieldwork, which takes him to Atlanta, West Virginia, Wyoming,
China and beyond—though he also has a fine grasp of the less tangible
niceties of the industry. Goodell understands how mines, corporate
boardrooms, commodity markets and legislative chambers interrelate to induce
a national inertia. Goodell has a talent for pithy argument—and the book
fairly crackles with informed conviction.
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The Cult of Pharmacology: How America Became the World's Most Troubled Drug
Culture
by Richard DeGrandpre
"The Cult of Pharmacology delivers important messages about the bias and
irrationality behind drug policy and our approach to drug use, messages that
both clinicians and the general public should hear."
--Walter A. Brown, Journal of the American Medical Association
"The crush of counterintuitive research DeGrandpre heaps upon us is meant to
confound, demonstrating that drugs are a technology like any other: amoral,
contextual and wholly imbued by the values of its end-users."
--Ben Gore, The Brooklyn Rail
"[W]ell researched and documented and full of interesting facts. For many
readers it will produce a whole new perspective that will have an impact
when they reach for the prescription pad or a cup of coffee or disparage the
drug user on the street."
--Allen Shaughnessy, British Medical Journal