Mostrando resultados por Editor "Princeton University Press" en Todas las categorías

What to Expect When You're Dead chronicles the ways ancient peoples answered questions such as: How to achieve a good death and afterlife? What's the best way to dispose of a body? Do the dead face a postmortem judgement—and where do they end up? Do the dead have bodies in the afterlife—and can they eat, drink, and have sex? And what can the living do to stay on good terms with the nonliving?

Why is the world the way it is? How did we get here? Does everything happen for a reason, or are some things left to chance? Philosophers and theologians have pondered these questions for millennia, but startling scientific discoveries over the past half century are revealing that we live in a world driven by chance. A Series of Fortunate Events tells the story of the awesome power of chance and how it is the surprising source of all the beauty and diversity in the living world.

In How Progress Ends, Carl Benedikt Frey challenges the conventional belief that economic and technological progress is inevitable. For most of human history, stagnation was the norm, and even today progress and prosperity in the world's largest, most advanced economies—the United States and China—have fallen short of expectations. To appreciate why we cannot depend on any AI-fueled great leap forward, Frey offers a remarkable and fascinating journey across the globe, spanning the past 1,000 years, to explain why some societies flourish and others fail in the wake of rapid technological change

Imagine this: You're walking past a shallow pond and spot a toddler thrashing around in the water, in obvious danger of drowning. You look around for her parents, but nobody is there. You're the only person who can save her and you must act immediately. But as you approach the pond you remember that you're wearing your most expensive shoes. Wading into the water will ruin them—and might make you late for a meeting. Should you let the child drown?

Mothers and fathers use their time differently, with women spending roughly twice as many hours on family labor as men. But what about the gendered differences in the ways women and men think? What's on Her Mind provides an illuminating look at the cognitive labor that families depend on and reveals why this essential aspect of family life is disproportionately handled by women—even in couples that aspire to practice equality.

Byzantium. The name evokes grandeur and exoticism—gold, cunning, and complexity. In this unique book, Judith Herrin unveils the riches of a quite different civilization. Avoiding a standard chronological account of the Byzantine Empire's millennium-long history, she identifies the fundamental questions about Byzantium—what it was, and what special significance it holds for us today.

A century ago, it was a given that a woman with a college degree had to choose between having a career and a family. Today, there are more female college graduates than ever before, and more women want to have a career and family, yet challenges persist at work and at home. This book traces how generations of women have responded to the problem of balancing career and family as the twentieth century experienced a sea change in gender equality, revealing why true equity for dual career couples remains frustratingly out of reach.

In 1868, celebrated Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner traveled to Fort Laramie to document the federal government's treaty negotiations with the Lakota and other tribes of the northern Plains. Gardner, known for his iconic portrait of Abraham Lincoln and his visceral pictures of the Confederate dead at Antietam, posed six federal peace commissioners with a young Native girl wrapped in a blanket. The hand-labeled prints carefully name each of the men, but the girl is never identified. .

Menstruation is something half the world does for a week at a time, for months and years on end, yet it remains largely misunderstood. Scientists once thought of an individual’s period as useless and some doctors still believe it’s unsafe for a menstruating person to swim in the ocean wearing a tampon. Period counters the false theories that have long defined the study of the uterus, exposing the eugenic history of gynecology while providing an intersectional feminist perspective on menstruation science.

Spread through the public in the form of popular stories, ideas can go viral and move markets - whether it's the belief that tech stocks can only go up or that housing prices never fall. Whether true or false, stories like these - transmitted by word of mouth, by the news media, and increasingly by social media - drive the economy by driving our decisions about how and where to invest, how much to spend and save, and more. But despite the obvious importance of such stories, most economists have paid little attention to them. Narrative Economics sets out to change that.

Fighting climate change, saving democracy, and eradicating poverty are urgent global challenges, yet the world's leaders continue to pursue outdated policies that focus on one while worsening the tradeoffs between each of them. Shared Prosperity in a Fractured World shows how the nations of the world can achieve all three objectives.

At the end of the fourth century, as the power of Rome faded and Constantinople became the seat of empire, a new capital city was rising in the West. Here, in Ravenna on the coast of Italy, Arian Goths and Catholic Romans competed to produce an unrivaled concentration of buildings and astonishing mosaics. For three centuries, the city attracted scholars, lawyers, craftsmen, and religious luminaries, becoming a true cultural and political capital.

The first complete history of Central Eurasia from ancient times to the present day, Empires of the Silk Road represents a fundamental rethinking of the origins, history, and significance of this major world region. Christopher Beckwith describes the rise and fall of the great Central Eurasian empires, including those of the Scythians, Attila the Hun, the Turks and Tibetans, and Genghis Khan and the Mongols.

The Joy of Science presents 8 short lessons on how to unlock the clarity, empowerment, and joy of thinking and living a little more scientifically. In this brief guide to leading a more rational life, acclaimed physicist Jim Al-Khalili invites listeners to engage with the world as scientists have been trained to do. The scientific method has served humankind well in its quest to see things as they really are, and underpinning the scientific method are core principles that can help us all navigate modern life more confidently.

Life expectancy in the United States has recently fallen for three years in a row - a reversal not seen since 1918 or in any other wealthy nation in modern times. In the past two decades, deaths of despair from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism have risen dramatically, and now claim hundreds of thousands of American lives each year - and they're still rising. Case and Deaton, known for first sounding the alarm about deaths of despair, explain the overwhelming surge in these deaths and shed light on the social and economic forces that are making life harder for the working class.

Valerie Tiberius introduces you to a way of thinking about your goals that enables you to reflect on them effectively throughout your life. She illustrates her approach with vivid examples, many of which are drawn from her own life, ranging from the silly to the serious, from shopping to navigating prejudice. Throughout, the book emphasizes the importance of interconnectedness, reminding us of the profound influence other people have on our lives, our goals, and how we should pursue them.

Minouche Shafik takes us through stages of life we all experience - raising children, getting educated, falling ill, working, growing old - and shows how a reordering of our societies is possible. Drawing on evidence and examples from around the world, she shows how every country can provide citizens with the basics to have a decent life and be able to contribute to society. But we owe each other more than this.

This book describes and explains the major events, personalities, conflicts, and convergences that have shaped the history of the Muslim world. The body of the work takes listeners from the origins of Islam to the eve of the nineteenth century, and an epilogue continues the story to the present day. Michael Cook thus provides a broad history of a civilization remarkable for both its unity and diversity.

Shining a light on the most profound insights revealed by modern physics, Jim Al-Khalili invites us all to understand what this crucially important science tells us about the universe and the nature of reality itself. Al-Khalili begins by introducing the fundamental concepts of space, time, energy, and matter, and then describes the three pillars of modern physics - quantum theory, relativity, and thermodynamics - showing how all three must come together if we are ever to have a full understanding of reality.

Conspiracy theories are as old as politics. But conspiracists today have introduced something new - conspiracy without theory. And the new conspiracism has moved from the fringes to the heart of government with the election of Donald Trump. In A Lot of People Are Saying, Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum reveal how the new conspiracism differs from classic conspiracy theory, why so few officials speak truth to conspiracy, and what needs to be done to resist it.