“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.

Self-Help.

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.

“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.

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.

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 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.