Showing titles in Media Studies

Hidden Occult Messages of Alice in Wonderland is an analysis written to explore potential links between occult ideas and philosophies and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass stories. The term "occult" is Latin for "hidden" and Isaac Weishaupt has been researching the Illuminati and secret language in entertainment for several years, so what is "hidden" for most is obvious to him.

Combining the deft social analysis of Where Good Ideas Come From with the optimistic arguments of Everything Bad Is Good for You, New York Times best-selling author Steven Johnson's Future Perfect makes the case that a new model of political change is on the rise, transforming everything from local governments to classrooms, from protest movements to health care. Johnson paints a compelling portrait of this new political worldview.

Ted Sorensen, JFK’s closest adviser, speech writer and friend, in his own words and final interview, brings us directly into the Oval Office as a member of Kennedy’s inner circle. This film reveals how essential Sorensen was to the administration, as Kennedy said: “My intellectual blood bank”. Not only with the epic speech “Ask not what your country can do for you - Ask what you can do for your country,” but as special counsel to the President.

In this candid and revealing audiobook, Mike Wallace tells the behind-the-scenes stories from his remarkable 60-year career. Here are intimate anecdotes, off-camera antics, never-before-told tales, and, most important, Wallace's insights about some unforgettable characters.

Soon to be a major motion picture starring Ben Kingsley and Theo James, the gripping true story of a young program coordinator at the United Nations who stumbles upon a conspiracy involving Iraq's oil reserves. "What made this episode in our collective history possible was not so much the lies we told one another, but the lies we told ourselves". Breaking a conspiracy of silence that had prevailed for years, Soussan sparked an unprecedented corruption probe into the Oil-for-Food program.

As consumers of art, and especially as fans, we have a host of tricky moral question to navigate: do the moral lives of artists affect the aesthetic quality of their work? In Drawing the Line, Erich Hatala Matthes argues that it doesn't matter whether we can separate the art from the artist, because we shouldn't. Matthes argues both that the lives of artists can play an important role in shaping our moral and aesthetic relationship to the artworks that we love and that these same artworks offer us powerful resources for grappling with the immorality of their creators.

Every year since 1954, a Bilderberg meeting has been held in an exclusive hotel in Europe or North America. Attendance is by invitation only and includes some of the most powerful and influential people in the Western world. Are Bilderbergers working toward a new world order? Are they part of the secret ruling elite known as the Illuminati? Are they even human? Let's look at the evidence and see if we can assess whether Bilderberg meetings really do have an impact on the way that the Western world is run.

In today's digitally driven world, disaster is only a click away. A rogue tweet can bring down a business; an army of trolls can run a celebrity off-line; and virtual harassment might cause real psychological damage. Shame Nation is the first book to both explore the fascinating phenomenon of online shaming and offer practical guidance and inspiring advice on how to prevent and protect against cyber blunders and faceless bullies. Author and acclaimed Internet safety expert Sue Scheff unveils all sides of an issue that is only becoming more relevant day.

We live in an age of connection, one that is accelerated by the Internet. This increasingly ubiquitous, immensely powerful technology often leads us to assume that as the number of people online grows, it inevitably leads to a smaller, more cosmopolitan world. We’ll understand more, we think. We’ll know more. We’ll engage more and share more with people from other cultures. In reality, it is easier to ship bottles of water from Fiji to Atlanta than it is to get news from Tokyo to New York.

Almost as soon as it appeared, the crossword puzzle became indispensable to our lives. Invented practically by accident in 1913, when a newspaper editor at the New York World was casting around for something to fill empty column space, it became a roaring commercial success almost overnight. Ever since then, the humble puzzle has been an essential ingredient of any newspaper worth its salt. But why, exactly, are the crossword’s satisfactions so sweet.

Ohio housewife Sherry Shriner grew to prominence as a social media cult leader, flourishing in the era of conspiracy theories and the 9/11 Truther movement. She preached the virtues of mysterious orgone energy and Christian prayer as defensive shields against the forces of darkness, including Lucifer and his demons; reptilian shape-shifters masquerading as human elites; the New World Order; cell phone towers; even hostile UFOs that flamed out over her home, visible only as shooting stars.

Low-level dishonesty is rife everywhere, in the form of exaggeration, selective use of facts, economy with the truth, careful drafting - from Trump and the Brexit debate to companies that tell us 'your call is important to us'. How did we get to a place where bullshit is not just rife but apparently so effective that it's become the communications strategy of our times? This brilliantly insightful book steps inside the panoply of deception employed in all walks of life and assesses how it has come to this.

In this most original examination of America's post-9/11 culture, Susan Faludi shines a light on the country's psychological response to the attacks on that terrible day. Turning her observational powers on the media, popular culture, and political life, Faludi unearths a barely acknowledged but bedrock societal drama shot through with baffling contradictions. Why, she asks, did our culture respond to an assault against American global dominance with a frenzied summons to restore "traditional" manhood, marriage, and maternity?

Why has punditry overtaken news, with so many media outlets pushing partisan agendas instead of information? Comedian Stephen Colbert's catchword "truthiness" has captured something essential about our age: that people are more comfortable with ideas that feel true, even if the evidence for those beliefs is thin.

Following on the heels of his national best seller A Treasury of Royal Scandals, Michael Farquhar turns his attention to matters a little closer to home. From the unhappy family relationships of prominent Americans to the feuds, smear campaigns, duels, and infamous sex scandals that have punctuated our history, we see our Founding Fathers and other American heroes in the course of their all-too-human events.

Did you know that American history is peppered with cases of human experimentation? Could you in your wildest dreams imagine that it was happening through the mid-1970s? That is in most of our lifetimes! I wish I could tell you that it's a load of crap, but the fact is...it's true. Supported by dozens of declassified documents and publications, horrible human testing can be corroborated throughout our history. Conspiracy Fact: Human Experimentation in the United States introduces you to a number of appalling cases involving the most vulnerable members of society.

For more than 30 years, humankind has known how to grow enough food to end chronic hunger worldwide. Yet while the Green Revolution succeeded in South America and Asia, it never got to Africa. More than 9 million people every year die of hunger, malnutrition, and related diseases every yearmost of them in Africa and most of them children. More die of hunger in Africa than from AIDS and malaria combined. Now, an impending global food crisis threatens to make things worse.

It was a program conceived in secret by a group of men. Some were doctors; others were military officers and government officials—all with top-secret security clearances. They called it the Similar Likeness Project, and it would serve as the foundation for an enigma that would soon become one of the greatest mysteries in history. The project’s carefully curated children would be secret weapons—trained, assessed, and groomed to perfection. If they were needed for a mission, they would be brought into the fold. If not, they would live a normal life without even knowing the difference.

The Facebook Narcissist is the first book dedicated to exploring the relationship between narcissism and social media. Lena Derhally, a licensed psychotherapist certified in Imago therapy, delves into how social media enhances individual and cultural narcissism and how it may create or exacerbate toxic narcissistic tendencies in people who use it. Social media is here to stay, but with education and awareness on how it makes us and the world more narcissistic, we can change the narrative and focus on the ways in which social media can be positive, and even improve the world.

There is more to the Bible than we ever imagined. It conceals profound mysteries and hidden secrets previously reserved for the initiated. For millennia, the world has revered the words of this ancient book and countless legions have died defending it. Even today, in the 21st century, heated debates are fought every day over the truth which lies within. But there is much more to this archaic document than meets the eye.