Stop Staring At Screens

Technology was designed to make our lives easier, and yet it's one of the biggest drivers of family rifts and stress. Making healthy and realistic decisions about when and where you really need technology can be tricky but is essential for restoring harmony in your home. Stop Staring at Screens has the answers you need. * Find sanity-saving solutions and practical tips * Follow diagnostic quizzes * Identify key triggers * Address common issues * Learn what works best for you and your family

Walk down any street, stroll through any park, step into a bar or restaurant, and everyone is glued to their mobile devices. Many of us struggle with the near-constant urge to check our phones—the average person interacts with their device more than 2,600 times a day—and this dependence is affecting our relationships, our work, and our quality of life. It seems the technology that was supposed to connect us has tipped us in the other direction, creating unnecessary stress and distance in our lives. Off: Your Digital Detox for a Better Life isn’t about reverting to a tech-free way of life—it’s about balance. Digital entrepreneur Tanya Goodin offers a guide that will free up hours of your time and lead you back to the pastimes (and people) you love. Learn to cultivate a healthier relationship with your digital devices by adopting simple practices that encourage mindfulness, deeper connection to others, more restful sleep, and increased creativity. Illustrated with serene and inspiring photography, Off will help you free yourself from technology and be more present in your own life.

What are you willing to lose for a connected life? Digital detox expert Tanya Goodin explores the cost that our digital life inflicts on our offline existence, and offers a toolkit to anyone who has lost their way. Whether you are dealing with a partner who is mindlessly scrolling rather than listening to you (phubbing), flooding social media with your child’s image (sharenting), or panicking whenever you misplace your phone (nomophobia), learn how to recognise and label harmful habits– both of yourself and others – and find actionable answers in this book. The collision of our online and offline worlds has left us more dependent on technology than ever before, and even more desperate to log off. My Brain Has Too Many Tabs Open is your key to finding digital balance and addressing strange new social norms. Complete with diagnostic guides to tell-tale signs and a manifesto for improved digital citizenship, this habit-improving bible offers the conversation-starting vocabulary we so desperately need to understand and untangle our relationship with technology for a more humane world. Among the scenarios included are: Doomscrolling – endlessly consuming doom-and-gloom news, a habit perpetuated by attention-seeking algorithms that triggers anxiety and depression; Comparison Culture – 52% of teens feel less confident because of feeling inadequate when comparing their social media profiles with other people’s; Vampire Shoppers – dead-of-night, sleepless shoppers who spend a third more than daytime shoppers, and range from nocturnal gamers to exhausted parents; Digital Legacies – before the end of the century there could be 4.9 billion deceased internet users, yet only 7% of us want our online profiles maintained after death; Cyberchondria – Dr Google is causing a wave of misdiagnoses from anxious searchers, with 35% of all US adults among this number; Clicktivism – also known as slacktivism, is virtue signalling through performative alignment with online causes, but can it ever amount to meaningful change? Both a wake-up call and a user’s guide, My Brain Has Too Many Tabs Open is your key to finding digital balance.

"If you want to understand the strange workings of the human body, and the future of medicine, you must read this illuminating, engaging book." —Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Gene In 2014, James Hamblin launched a series of videos for The Atlantic called "If Our Bodies Could Talk." With it, the doctor-turned-journalist established himself as a seriously entertaining authority in the field of health. Now, in illuminating and genuinely funny prose, Hamblin explores the human stories behind health questions that never seem to go away—and which tend to be mischaracterized and oversimplified by marketing and news media. He covers topics such as sleep, aging, diet, and much more: • Can I “boost” my immune system? • Does caffeine make me live longer? • Do we still not know if cell phones cause cancer? • How much sleep do I actually need? • Is there any harm in taking a multivitamin? • Is life long enough? In considering these questions, Hamblin draws from his own medical training as well from hundreds of interviews with distinguished scientists and medical practitioners. He translates the (traditionally boring) textbook of human anatomy and physiology into accessible, engaging, socially contextualized, up-to-the-moment answers. They offer clarity, examine the limits of our certainty, and ultimately help readers worry less about things that don’t really matter. If Our Bodies Could Talk is a comprehensive, illustrated guide that entertains and educates in equal doses.

Two people search for connection in a world of fractured identities and aliases, global finance, big data, intelligence bureaucracies, algorithmic logic, and terror. Jeremy Jordan and Alexandra Chen hope to make a quiet home together but struggle to find a space safe from their personal secrets. For Jeremy, this means leaving behind his former life as an intelligence operative during The Troubles in Northern Ireland. For Alexandra, a high-powered job in image management for whole countries cannot prepare her for her missing brother’s sudden reappearance. In a culture of limitless surveillance, Jeremy and Alexandra will go to great lengths to protect what is closest to them. Spanning decades and continents, their saga brings them into contact with a down-and-out online journalist, shadowy security professionals, and jockeying technology experts, each of whom has a different understanding of whether information really protects us, and how we might build a world worth trusting in our paranoid age.

In his wonderfully deadpan instruction manual for our increasingly device-focused lives, illustrator Son of Alan taps into the strange truth of our obsession with the tiny screen. Revealing how ludicrous we've all become, and what wonders lie in stall for us mere inches from our faces, this book will make you want to reclaim your life, your friends, and your family from the tyranny of the backlit screen. Without nagging or preaching, this book uses hilarious but simple illustrations to highlight our universal (and ridiculous) dependence on the cell phone. In Stop Looking at Your Phone, device-driven readers will receive a much needed reminder of the possibilities life offers beyond the digitally enhanced screen.

An examination of the meaning of meaninglessness: why it matters that nothing matters. When someone is labeled a nihilist, it's not usually meant as a compliment. Most of us associate nihilism with destructiveness and violence. Nihilism means, literally, “an ideology of nothing. “ Is nihilism, then, believing in nothing? Or is it the belief that life is nothing? Or the belief that the beliefs we have amount to nothing? If we can learn to recognize the many varieties of nihilism, Nolen Gertz writes, then we can learn to distinguish what is meaningful from what is meaningless. In this addition to the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Gertz traces the history of nihilism in Western philosophy from Socrates through Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre. Although the term “nihilism” was first used by Friedrich Jacobi to criticize the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, Gertz shows that the concept can illuminate the thinking of Socrates, Descartes, and others. It is Nietzsche, however, who is most associated with nihilism, and Gertz focuses on Nietzsche's thought. Gertz goes on to consider what is not nihilism—pessimism, cynicism, and apathy—and why; he explores theories of nihilism, including those associated with Existentialism and Postmodernism; he considers nihilism as a way of understanding aspects of everyday life, calling on Adorno, Arendt, Marx, and prestige television, among other sources; and he reflects on the future of nihilism. We need to understand nihilism not only from an individual perspective, Gertz tells us, but also from a political one.

A guide to using play routines to build and accelerate a child's communication skills. Includes instructions and examples, language stimulation tips, techniques, and strategies, charts to monitor progress, ways to incorporate speech development activities into daily routines, etc.