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Michele Gelfand

Powell's City of Books 1005 W Burnside Street, Portland, OR, United States

In Rule Makers, Rule Breakers (Scribner), celebrated social psychologist Michele Gelfand takes us on an epic journey through human cultures, offering a startling new view of the world and ourselves. With a mix of brilliantly conceived studies and surprising on-the-ground discoveries, she shows that much of the diversity in the way we think and act derives from a key difference – how tightly or loosely we adhere to social norms. Just as DNA affects everything from eye color to height, our tight-loose social coding influences much of what we do. Why are clocks in Germany so accurate while those in Brazil are frequently wrong? Why do New Zealand’s women have the highest number of sexual partners? Why are red and blue states really so divided?…

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Free

Drive-Thru Dreams

Powell's City of Books 1005 W Burnside Street, Portland, OR, United States

Most any honest person can own up to harboring at least one fast-food guilty pleasure. In Drive-Thru Dreams (Flatiron), Adam Chandler explores the inseparable link between fast food and American life for the past century. The dark underbelly of the industry's largest players has long been scrutinized and gutted, characterized as impersonal, greedy, corporate, and worse. But, in unexpected ways, fast food is also deeply personal and emblematic of a larger-than-life image of America. Drive-Thru Dreams tells an intimate and contemporary story of America – its humble beginning, its innovations and failures, its international charisma, and its regional identities – through its beloved roadside fare.

Free

Waking the Witch: Reflections on Women, Magic, and Power

Powell's City of Books 1005 W Burnside Street, Portland, OR, United States

In Waking the Witch (Gallery), podcast host and practicing witch Pam Grossman explores the cultural and historical impact of the world’s most magical icon. From the idea of the femme fatale in league with the devil to the bewitching pop culture archetypes in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and Harry Potter; from the spooky ladies in fairy tales and horror films to the rise of feminist covens and contemporary witchcraft, witches reflect the power and potential of women. Waking the Witch is a whip-smart and illuminating exploration of the world’s fascination with witches.

Free

Fatima Bhutto

Powell's City of Books 1005 W Burnside Street, Portland, OR, United States

A vast cultural movement is emerging from outside the Western world. Truly global in its range and allure, it is the biggest challenge yet to American mass-produced popular culture. New Kings of the World (Columbia Global Reports) is a book about the new arbiters of mass culture – India’s Bollywood films, Turkey's soap operas, or dizi, and South Korea's pop music. Fatima Bhutto's new book is an important dispatch from a new, multipolar order that is taking form before our eyes.

Free

Tamim Ansary

Powell's City of Books 1005 W Burnside Street, Portland, OR, United States

Tamim Ansary’s The Invention of Yesterday (PublicAffairs) is a sweeping global human history that describes the separate beginnings of the world's major cultural movements – Confucianism, Islam, Judeo-Christianity, and Nomadism – and the dramatic, sometimes ruinous, sometimes transformative effects of their ever closer intertwinement that is the defining feature of our world today.

Free

Lily Bernheimer author of The Shaping of Us

Passages Bookshop 1801 NW Upshur, Suite 660, Portland, OR, United States

Lily Bernheimer visits from the Bay Area to share with us her first book, The Shaping of Us, which explores how the built and natural worlds subtly influence our behavior, health, and personality. From caves to cathedrals to our current housing crisis and the dreaded open-plan office, Bernheimer demonstrates that for our well-being, we must reconnect with the power to shape the world around us. Only when people are involved in forming and nurturing our environments will they feel a greater sense of agency, community, and pride. Join us to learn more about how space makes us tick and how to fix the broken parts of our world. Lily Bernheimer is an environmental psychology author, consultant, and researcher. She is Founding Director of Space Works…

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Free

Christopher Ryan

Powell's City of Books 1005 W Burnside Street, Portland, OR, United States

In his new book, Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress (Avid Reader/Simon & Schuster), Christopher Ryan, bestselling coauthor of Sex at Dawn, explores the ways in which “progress” has perverted the way we live: how we eat, learn, feel, mate, parent, communicate, work, and die. Ryan makes the claim that we should start looking backwards to find our way into a better future.

Free

Reading: Drunk In China

Rose City Book Pub 1329 NE Fremont, Portland, OR, United States

Derek Sandhaus will launch his new book about Chinese alcohol and drinking culture, and discuss what it will take for the world to finally clink glasses with the Middle Kingdom.

Free

Lindy West

Powell's City of Books 1005 W Burnside Street, Portland, OR, United States

From the moment powerful men started falling to the #MeToo movement, the lamentations began: this is feminism gone too far, this is injustice, this is a witch hunt. In The Witches Are Coming (Hachette), Lindy West, firebrand author of the bestselling memoir and now critically acclaimed Hulu TV series Shrill, turns that refrain on its head. You think this is a witch hunt? Fine. You've got one. In a laugh-out-loud, incisive cultural critique, West extolls the world-changing magic of truth, urging readers to reckon with the dark lies at the heart of the American mythos, and unpacking the complicated, and sometimes tragic, politics of not being a white man in the 21st century. She tracks the misogyny and propaganda hidden (or not so hidden) in…

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Free

Keynote Lecture: Macarena Gomez-Barris

Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA) 511 Northwest Broadway St, Portland, OR, United States

Macarena Gomez-Barris is a cultural critic, author and Chairperson of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute. She is founder and Director of the Global South Center, a hub for critical inquiry, aesthetic praxis, and experimental forms of social living. Macarena works on cultural memory, race, queer and decolonial theory, and rethinking the anthropocene. She is author of The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives, a book that theorizes social life through five extractive scenes of ruinous capitalism upon Indigenous territories (Duke University Press, 2017). She is also author of Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Politics in the Américas (UC Press, 2018), Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (UC Press, 2009), and co-editor with Herman Gray of Towards a…

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