Infectious Ideas

Download or read book Infectious Ideas written by Jennifer Brier and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2009-11-01 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Viewing contemporary history from the perspective of the AIDS crisis, Jennifer Brier provides rich, new understandings of the United States' complex social and political trends in the post-1960s era. Brier describes how AIDS workers--in groups as disparate as the gay and lesbian press, AIDS service organizations, private philanthropies, and the State Department--influenced American politics, especially on issues such as gay and lesbian rights, reproductive health, racial justice, and health care policy, even in the face of the expansion of the New Right. Infectious Ideas places recent social, cultural, and political events in a new light, making an important contribution to our understanding of the United States at the end of the twentieth century.

Download or read book Infectious Ideas written by Justin K. Stearns and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Infectious Ideas is a comparative analysis of how Muslim and Christian scholars explained the transmission of disease in the premodern Mediterranean world. How did religious communities respond to and make sense of epidemic disease? To answer this, historian Justin K. Stearns looks at how Muslim and Christian communities conceived of contagion, focusing especially on the Iberian Peninsula in the aftermath of the Black Death. What Stearns discovers calls into question recent scholarship on Muslim and Christian reactions to the plague and leprosy. Stearns shows that rather than universally reject the concept of contagion, as most scholars have affirmed, Muslim scholars engaged in creative and rational attempts to understand it. He explores how Christian scholars used the metaphor of contagion to define proper and safe interactions with heretics, Jews, and Muslims, and how contagion itself denoted phenomena as distinct as the evil eye and the effects of corrupted air. Stearns argues that at the heart of the work of both Muslims and Christians, although their approaches differed, was a desire to protect the physical and spiritual health of their respective communities. Based on Stearns's analysis of Muslim and Christian legal, theological, historical, and medical texts in Arabic, Medieval Castilian, and Latin, Infectious Ideas is the first book to offer a comparative discussion of concepts of contagion in the premodern Mediterranean world.

Download or read book The Parasitic Mind written by Gad Saad and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Read this book, strengthen your resolve, and help us all return to reason." —JORDAN PETERSON The West’s commitment to freedom, reason, and true liberalism have become endangered by a series of viral forces in our society today. Renowned host of the popular YouTube show “The SAAD Truth”, Dr. Gad Saad exposes how an epidemic of idea pathogens are spreading like a virus and killing common sense in the West. Serving as a powerful follow-up to Jordan Peterson’s book 12 Rules for Life Dr. Saad unpacks what is really happening in progressive safe zones, why we need to be paying more attention to these trends, and what we must do to stop the spread of dangerous thinking. A professor at Concordia University who has witnessed this troubling epidemic first-hand, Dr. Saad dissects a multitude of these concerning forces (corrupt thought patterns, belief systems, attitudes, etc.) that have given rise to a stifling political correctness in our society and how these have created serious consequences that must be remedied–before it’s too late.

Download or read book Contagious written by Jonah Berger and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-05-03 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Upper Saddle River, N.J. : Creative Homeowner,

Download or read book Mental Immunity written by Andy Norman and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-05-18 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Mental Immunity is the perfect vaccine for the mind-viruses infecting our culture: alternative facts, fake news, and conspiracy thinking, to name a few.” —Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine and author of The Believing Brain Astonishingly irrational ideas are spreading. Covid denial persists in the face of overwhelming evidence. Anti-vaxxers compromise public health. Conspiracy thinking hijacks minds and incites mob violence. Toxic partisanship is cleaving nations, and climate denial has pushed our planet to the brink. Meanwhile, American Nazis march openly in the streets, and Flat Earth theory is back. What the heck is going on? And what can we do about it? In Mental Immunity, Andy Norman shows that these phenomena share a root cause. We live in a time when the so-called “right to your opinion” is thought to trump our responsibilities. The resulting ethos effectively compromises mental immune systems, allowing “mind parasites” to overrun them. Conspiracy theories, evidence-defying ideologies, garden-variety bad ideas: these are all species of mind parasite, and each of them employs clever strategies to circumvent mental immune systems. In fact, some of them compromise cultural immune systems—the things societies do to prevent bad ideas from spreading. Norman shows why all of this is more than mere analogy: minds and cultures really do have immune systems, and they really can break down. Fortunately, they can also be built up: strengthened against ideological corruption. He calls for a rigorous science of mental immune health—what he calls “cognitive immunology”—and explains how it could revolutionize our capacity for critical thinking. A practical guide to spotting and removing bad ideas, Mental Immunity is a stirring call to transcend our petty tribalisms, and a serious bid to bring humanity to its senses.

Download or read book Why Nations Fail written by Daron Acemoglu and published by Crown Currency. This book was released on 2013-09-17 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES AND WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER • From two winners of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, “who have demonstrated the importance of societal institutions for a country’s prosperity” “A wildly ambitious work that hopscotches through history and around the world to answer the very big question of why some countries get rich and others don’t.”—The New York Times FINALIST: Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, Financial Times, The Economist, BusinessWeek, Bloomberg, The Christian Science Monitor, The Plain Dealer Why are some nations rich and others poor, divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine? Is it culture, the weather, or geography that determines prosperity or poverty? As Why Nations Fail shows, none of these factors is either definitive or destiny. Drawing on fifteen years of original research, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson conclusively show that it is our man-made political and economic institutions that underlie economic success (or the lack of it). Korea, to take just one example, is a remarkably homogenous nation, yet the people of North Korea are among the poorest on earth while their brothers and sisters in South Korea are among the richest. The differences between the Koreas is due to the politics that created those two different institutional trajectories. Acemoglu and Robinson marshal extraordinary historical evidence from the Roman Empire, the Mayan city-states, the Soviet Union, the United States, and Africa to build a new theory of political economy with great relevance for the big questions of today, among them: • Will China’s economy continue to grow at such a high speed and ultimately overwhelm the West? • Are America’s best days behind it? Are we creating a vicious cycle that enriches and empowers a small minority? “This book will change the way people think about the wealth and poverty of nations . . . as ambitious as Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel.”—BusinessWeek

Download or read book Infectious Madness written by Harriet A. Washington and published by Little, Brown Spark. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking look at the connection between germs and mental illness, and how we can protect ourselves. Is it possible to catch autism or OCD the same way we catch the flu? Can a child's contact with cat litter lead to schizophrenia? In her eye-opening new book, National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author Harriet Washington reveals that we can in fact "catch" mental illness. In Infectious Madness, Washington presents the new germ theory, which posits not only that many instances of Alzheimer's, OCD, and schizophrenia are caused by viruses, prions, and bacteria, but also that with antibiotics, vaccinations, and other strategies, these cases can be easily prevented or treated. Packed with cutting-edge research and tantalizing mysteries, Infectious Madness is rich in science, characters, and practical advice on how to protect yourself and your children from exposure to infectious threats that could sabotage your mental and physical health.