Consequential Strangers: Turning Everyday Encounters Into Life-Changing Moments

Consequential Strangers: Turning Everyday Encounters Into Life-Changing Moments
Author: Melinda Blau
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2009-08-24
Genre: Self-Help
ISBN: 9780393076899

“A mind-expanding and heart-opening book” (Daniel Goleman, author of Social Intelligence) that reveals the value of everyday interactions with people in our communities – and what we lose without them. Our barista, our mechanic, our coworker—they populate our days, but we often take them for granted. Yet these are the people who bring novelty and information into our lives, allow us to exercise different parts of ourselves, and open us up to new opportunities. In their unprecedented examination of people on the periphery, psychologist Karen Fingerman, who coined the term “consequential strangers,” collaborates with journalist Melinda Blau to expand on and make her own groundbreaking research come alive. Drawing as well from Blau’s more than two hundred interviews with specialists in psychology, sociology, marketing, and communication, the book presents compelling stories of individuals and institutions, past and present. A rich portrait of our social landscape—on and off the Internet—it presents the science of casual connection and chronicles the surprising impact that consequential strangers have on business, creativity, the work environment, our physical and mental health, and the strength of our communities.

Your Turn

Your Turn
Author: Julie Lythcott-Haims
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2021-04-06
Genre: Self-Help
ISBN: 1250137780

New York Times bestselling author Julie Lythcott-Haims is back with a groundbreakingly frank guide to being a grown-up What does it mean to be an adult? In the twentieth century, psychologists came up with five markers of adulthood: finish your education, get a job, leave home, marry, and have children. Since then, every generation has been held to those same markers. Yet so much has changed about the world and living in it since that sequence was formulated. All of those markers are choices, and they’re all valid, but any one person’s choices along those lines do not make them more or less an adult. A former Stanford dean of freshmen and undergraduate advising and author of the perennial bestseller How to Raise an Adult and of the lauded memoir Real American, Julie Lythcott-Haims has encountered hundreds of twentysomethings (and thirtysomethings, too), who, faced with those markers, feel they’re just playing the part of “adult,” while struggling with anxiety, stress, and general unease. In Your Turn, Julie offers compassion, personal experience, and practical strategies for living a more authentic adulthood, as well as inspiration through interviews with dozens of voices from the rich diversity of the human population who have successfully launched their adult lives. Being an adult, it turns out, is not about any particular checklist; it is, instead, a process, one you can get progressively better at over time—becoming more comfortable with uncertainty and gaining the knowhow to keep going. Once you begin to practice it, being an adult becomes the most complicated yet also the most abundantly rewarding and natural thing. And Julie Lythcott-Haims is here to help readers take their turn.

Zen and the Art of Navigating College

Zen and the Art of Navigating College
Author: Peter Klein
Publisher: Mascot Books
Total Pages: 129
Release: 2023-05-31
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1637555091

“A relevant book for our times. ... Educational and inspiring." —Readers' Favorite five-star review At its best, the college experience can be invaluable for doing the most important work of all—finding your purpose. At its worst, it can be an expensive distraction that indoctrinates you into an instant-gratification culture and prevents you from building a meaningful base not just for your career but for your life. Drawing upon the great thinkers of contemporary philosophy and psychology, this book reveals a revolutionary way to prepare for navigating the complexities and potential pitfalls of college, including: • How to look past the limited view of gifted but specialized academics • How to select courses that will help you get interviews with potential employers • How to develop a meaningful social and professional network, including outside the college community • How to take full advantage of college facilities and programs—including some you may not even be aware of Robert Pirsig’s classic book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance used metaphysical imagery to reveal a more holistic way to think about the world and our place in it. In that tradition, Zen and the Art of Navigating College is a first-of-its-kind handbook for being prepared to get what you really NEED from the college experience—a path to discovering a greater purpose and the tools to achieve it.

Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design

Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design
Author: Charles Montgomery
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2013-11-12
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1429969539

A globe-trotting, eye-opening exploration of how cities can—and do—make us happier people Charles Montgomery's Happy City will revolutionize the way we think about urban life. After decades of unchecked sprawl, more people than ever are moving back to the city. Dense urban living has been prescribed as a panacea for the environmental and resource crises of our time. But is it better or worse for our happiness? Are subways, sidewalks, and tower dwelling an improvement on the car-dependence of sprawl? The award-winning journalist Charles Montgomery finds answers to such questions at the intersection between urban design and the emerging science of happiness, and during an exhilarating journey through some of the world's most dynamic cities. He meets the visionary mayor who introduced a "sexy" lipstick-red bus to ease status anxiety in Bogotá; the architect who brought the lessons of medieval Tuscan hill towns to modern-day New York City; the activist who turned Paris's urban freeways into beaches; and an army of American suburbanites who have transformed their lives by hacking the design of their streets and neighborhoods. Full of rich historical detail and new insights from psychologists and Montgomery's own urban experiments, Happy City is an essential tool for understanding and improving our own communities. The message is as surprising as it is hopeful: by retrofitting our cities for happiness, we can tackle the urgent challenges of our age. The happy city, the green city, and the low-carbon city are the same place, and we can all help build it.

International Student Engagement

International Student Engagement
Author: Chris R. Glass
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 121
Release: 2023-07-03
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1000980499

This book responds to the growing calls among international educators, activists, and students themselves to pay closer attention to the qualitative dimensions of international students’ experiences at U.S. colleges and universities. This book outlines deep approaches to the academic and social integration of international students at U.S. colleges and universities. It describes concrete examples of strategies to enhance the international student experience across a wide range of institutional types, and explores actions that have enabled colleges and universities to create more inclusive, connected, and purposeful campus environments for international students. It fleshes out the effects of these actions through the first person narratives of international students themselves. It focuses on reinforcing an institution’s existing strengths and capacities to help academic leaders at these institutions to develop comprehensive strategies that will enable the creation of inclusive campus climates for international students.The book combines evidence derived from the national Global Perspective Inventory dataset, the experiences of institutions at the forefront in developing effective strategies, as well as first-person narrative experiences of international students to illustrate the real-life consequences of institutional policies, practice, and programs.One of the aims of this book is to take readers on a journey, from community colleges to liberal arts institutions to large public flagship research universities, from rural parts of the U.S.to highly-populated urban areas in order to raise questions about the impact of the surge of international students in these environments and about the corresponding challenges that confront senior administrators seeking to strengthen and deepen connections for the students. The book explores some of the actions that universities and colleges across the U.S. have taken to create more inclusive, connected, and purposeful campus environments for their international students, placing particular emphasis on the importance of tapping and reinforcing each institution’s existing strengths and capacities in the development of strategies that will enable it to create more inclusive campus climates for current and incoming international students, and engaging in active collaboration with all departments and offices across the campus, with the larger community, and most important, with the international student community itself.

Caring in Times of Precarity

Caring in Times of Precarity
Author: Chow Yiu Fai
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 347
Release: 2018-12-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3319768980

Caring in Times of Precarity draws together two key cultural observations: the increase in those living a single life, and the growing attraction of creative careers. Straddling this historical juncture, the book focuses on one particular group of ‘precariat’: single women in Shanghai in various forms of creative (self-)employment. While negotiating their share of the uncanny creative work ethos, these women also find themselves interpellated as shengnü (‘left-over women’) in a society configured by a mix of Confucian values, heterosexual ideals, and global images of womanhood. Following these women’s professional, social and intimate lives, the book refuses to see their singlehood and creative labour as problematic, and them as victims. It departs from dominant thinking on precarity, which foregrounds and critiques the contemporary need to be flexible, mobile, and spontaneous to the extent of (self-)exploitation, accepting insecurity. The book seeks to understand– empirically and specifically–women’s everyday struggles and pleasures. It highlights the up-close, everyday embodied, affective, and subjective experience in a particular Chinese city, with broader, global resonances well beyond China. Exploring the limits of the politics of precarity, the book proposes an ethics of care.

At Home in the City

At Home in the City
Author: Stacy Torres
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 366
Release: 2025-01-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0520963520

Uncovers how people aged 60 and older struggle, survive, and thrive in twenty-first-century urban America. To understand elders' experiences of aging in place, sociologist Stacy Torres spent five years with longtime New York City residents as they coped with health setbacks, depression, gentrification, financial struggles, the accumulated losses of neighbors, friends, and family, and other everyday challenges. The sensitive portrait Torres paints in At Home in the City moves us beyond stereotypes of older people as either rich and pampered or downtrodden and frail to capture the multilayered complexity of late life. These pages chronicle how a nondescript bakery in Manhattan served as a public living room, providing company to ease loneliness and a sympathetic ear to witness the monumental and mundane struggles of late life. Through years of careful observation, Torres peels away the layers of this oft-neglected social world and explores the constellation of relationships and experiences that Western culture often renders invisible or frames as a problem. At Home in the City strikes a realistic balance as it highlights how people find support, flex their resilience, and assert their importance in their communities in old age.

The Wisdom Whisperers

The Wisdom Whisperers
Author: Melinda Blau
Publisher: Church Publishing, Inc.
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2024-08-06
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 1640657142

From The New York Times bestselling co-author of Secrets of the Baby Whisperer, comes this poignant, hilarious, and deeply insightful exploration of how to make the most of life’s possibilities—at any age. In this deeply personal and heartwarming book, acclaimed journalist Melinda Blau confronts the stereotypes surrounding life's later chapters, drawing from unexpected friendships with the remarkable women she affectionately dubs "my old ladies." Through intimate storytelling and candid reflections, Blau peels back layers of societal judgment to uncover the hard-earned wisdom and resilience that come with the unfolding of years. From her relationship with Henrietta, a vibrant nonagenarian, Blau discovers that age is less a number and more the unexpected twists and turns of a life fully lived. Zelda, ever the free spirit, shows that the sparkle of youthful passion can persist well into later years—she's nailing tennis serves even in her 90s. And then there's Anne, a Holocaust survivor who proves that at 98, it's still not too late to pen your life story. Yet, Blau's book isn't simply a compilation of friendship tales. It's a wake-up call that encourages us to build meaningful connections across different phases of life. These bonds are mutually enriching, offering us valuable insights and a depth of understanding that is impossible to obtain from our contemporaries. At its heart, Wisdom Whisperers is about the boundless opportunities that unfold when we dare to look beyond age as a limiting factor.

The Lonely Hunter

The Lonely Hunter
Author: Aimée Lutkin
Publisher: Dial Press
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2022-02-08
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1984855891

When can we say we’ll be single forever—and that’s okay? One woman questions our society’s pathologizing of loneliness in this crackling, incisive blend of memoir and cultural reporting. “The Lonely Hunter challenged everything I assumed about the nature of loneliness and what it means to lead an authentic life.”—Doree Shafrir, author of Thanks for Waiting and Startup: A Novel ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2022—Cosmopolitan, She Reads One evening, thirtysomething writer Aimée Lutkin found herself at a dinner party surrounded by couples. When the conversation turned to her love life, Lutkin stated simply, “I don’t really know if I’m going to date anyone ever again. Some people are just alone forever.” Her friends rushed to assure her that love comes when you least expect it and to make recommendations for new dating apps. But Lutkin wondered, Why, when there are more unmarried adults than ever before, is there so much pressure to couple up? Why does everyone treat me as though my real life won’t start until I find a partner? Isn’t this my real life, the one I’m living right now? Is there something wrong with me, or is there something wrong with our culture? Over the course of the next year, Lutkin set out to answer these questions and to see if there really was some trick to escaping loneliness. She went on hundreds of dates; read the sociologists, authors, and relationship experts exploring singlehood and loneliness; dove into the wellness industrial complex; tossed it all aside to binge-watch Netflix and eat nachos; and probed the capitalist structures that make alternative family arrangements nearly impossible. Chock-full of razor-sharp observations and poignant moments of vulnerability, The Lonely Hunter is a stirring account of one woman’s experience of being alone and a revealing exposé of our culture’s deep biases against the uncoupled. Blazingly smart, insightful, and full of heart, this is a book for anyone determined to make, follow, and break their own rules.