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Welcome to essayist Kimberly Harrington's poetic and funny world of motherhood, womanhood, and humanhood, not necessarily in that order. It's a place of loud parenting, fierce loving, too much social media, and occasional inner monologues where timeless debates are resolved such as Pro/Con: Caving to PTO Bake Sale Pressure ("PRO: Skim the crappiest brownies for myself. CON: They're really crappy.") With accessibility and wit, she captures the emotions...
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An urgent, transformative guide to dealing with disasters from one of today's foremost thinkers in crisis management.
"The future may still be unpredictable, but nowadays, disasters are not. We live in a time of constant, consistent catastrophe, where things more often go wrong than they go right. So why do we still fumble when disaster hits? Why are we always one step behind? In The Devil Never Sleeps, Juliette Kayyem lays the groundwork for a...
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Tackles head-on the debate that has been raging on internet message boards and in academic journals. No longer limited by the fringe, race-based studies of intelligence have been discussed by thinkers such as Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson. If these studies were true, they would provide an intellectual justification for inequality and discrimination. Examining the latest research on how intelligence develops and laying out new discoveries in genetics,...
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"Honeybees are a crucial part of our food chain. As they gather nectar from flowers to make sweet honey, these bees also play an important role in pollination, helping some plants produce fruit. But large numbers of honeybees are disappearing every year ... and no one knows why. Is a fungus kill ing them? Could a poor diet be the cause? What about changes to bees' natural habitat? In this real-life science mystery, scientists and beekeepers are working...
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"We live in a culture that prizes memory--how much we can store, the quality of what's preserved, how we might better document and retain the moments of our life while fighting off the nightmare of losing all that we have experienced. But what if forgetfulness were seen not as something to fear--be it in the form of illness or simple absentmindedness--but rather as a blessing, a balm, a path to peace and rebirth? Lewis Hyde's A Primer for Forgetting...
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As women, we learn from an early age that our moods are a problem. To succeed in life, we are told, we must have it all under control: we have to tamp down our inherent shifts in favor of a more static way of being. But our bodies are wiser than we imagine. Moods are not an annoyance to be stuffed away, they are a finely-tuned feedback system that can tell us how best to manage our lives. Our changing moods let us know when our bodies are primed to...
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A Finnish journalist and naturalized American citizen compares and contrasts life in the U.S. with life in the Nordic region to encourage Americans to draw on practices from the Nordic way of life to create a fairer, happier, more secure, and less stressful society.
At a 2012 conference on social mobility, where experts discussed whether people worldwide were attaining a better life than their parents', Ed Miliband, the leader of the British Labour...
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"There is one central, non-controversial idea we're taught about morality--that self-sacrifice is a virtue. What if it's wrong? From childhood, we are told that serving the needs of others, rather than our own, is the essence of morality and the way to achieve social harmony. To be ethical--it is believed--is to be altruistic. Here, Peter Schwartz questions this notion. In Defense of Selfishness shows that what altruism demands is not that you respect...
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"A few years ago, Kris Carr's world was falling apart. Her father was dying, she had to pivot her business because of the pandemic, and she was on the verge of reaching her twenty-year milestone of living with an incurable Stage IV cancer diagnosis. While sitting in a CVS parking lot, she broke down, finally allowing herself to feel the massive stress and sadness she had been suppressing in order to seem strong for those around her, and for herself....
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"By the author of the award-winning To Be a Machine, a deeply considered look at the people and places in confrontation with the end of our days We're alive in a time of worst-case scenarios: The weather has gone uncanny, volatile. Our old post-war alliances are crumbling. Everywhere you look there's an omen, a joke whose punchline is the end of the world. How are we to live in the shadow of such a grim future? What does the world hold for our children?...
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"When the final gavel clapped in a rural southern courtroom in the summer of 1988, Willie J. Grimes, a gentle spirit with no record of violence, was shocked and devastated to be convicted of first-degree rape and sentenced to life imprisonment. Here is the story of this everyman and his extraordinary quarter-century-long journey to freedom, told in breathtaking and sympathetic detail, from the botched evidence and suspect testimony that led to his...
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"From the moment He arrived on the scene, Jesus posed a threat to the unjust, a threat to the oppressors, and a threat to every semblance of authority wielded by the kingdom of darkness. He invaded the world with love for the forgotten, hope for the hopeless, and freedom for the bound. His ideas were disruptive, subversive, and scandalous to the world around Him. Jesus was so dangerous, the powers that be killed Him. Today, our generation is seeing...
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"In 2012, Jonathan Gottschall received a strange letter from DARPA, the research and development arm of the United States Department of Defense. What could a military research program possibly want with a literary critic? The letter was an invitation to a conference for a new program called STORYNET, a plan to map how stories affect our brains and use that knowledge to craft narratives that could more effectively drive compliance with military initiatives....
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"In this vibrant, high-spirited history, medievalist Eleanor Janega turns to the Middle Ages to unfurl its suppositions about women and reveal what's shifted over time--and what hasn't. Enshrined medieval thinkers, almost always male, subscribed to classical Greek and Roman philosophy and Christian theology for their concepts of the sexes, deriding women as oversexed sinners, inherently lustful, insatiable, and weak. In contrast, drawing on accounts...
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Why abortion is a men's issue. By focusing on the role men play in unwanted pregnancy, Ejaculate Responsibly gets us out of the destructive loop centered on issues like when life begins and the injustice of legislating women's bodies and presents a powerfully fair and effective way out of the abortion impasse. Highly readable, funny, and unflinching, the book's 28 arguments walk readers through the basics of fertility (men are 50 times more fertile...
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"Dr. Judy Mikovits is a modern-day Rosalind Franklin, a brilliant researcher shaking up the old boys' club of science with her groundbreaking discoveries. And like many women who have trespassed into the world of men, she uncovered decades-old secrets that many would prefer to stay buried. From her doctoral thesis, which changed the treatment of HIV-AIDS, saving the lives of millions, including basketball great Magic Johnson, to her spectacular discovery...
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"From Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter Eli Saslow, a powerful portrait of a country grappling with the pandemic, told through voices of people from all across America The Covid-19 pandemic was a world-shattering event, affecting everyone in the nation. From its first ominous stirrings, renowned journalist Eli Saslow began interviewing a cross-section of Americans, capturing their experiences in real time: An exhausted and anguished...
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"The story of how Julian Van Winkle III, the caretaker of the most coveted cult Kentucky Bourbon whiskey in the world, fought to protect his family's heritage and preserve the taste of his forebears, in a world where authenticity, like his product, is in very short supply. As a journalist said of Pappy Van Winkle, "You could call it bourbon, or you could call it a $5,000 bottle of liquified, barrel-aged unobtanium." Julian Van Winkle, the third-generation...
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The ordinary world never made sense to Amanda, who grew up certain her friends and family would die or disappear if she quit watching them, compulsively treating every parting as a final good-bye. Shuttled between divorced parents, from a barefoot bohemian existence in Greenwich Village to a sanitized, stricter world uptown, this smart, sensitive little girl experienced life through the distorting lens of an undiagnosed panic disorder. Her darkly...
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"Straight off the slopes and into the spotlight, Heather Gay is known to dish God's honest truth. Whether as a businesswoman, mother, or television personality, Heather is unafraid to blaze a new trail; even if at the isolation of her family, friends, and church. Heather was born and bred Mormon. Growing up in Utah, not even the snow-capped mountains could draw attention from the state's most prominent resident: the Mormon Church. Between attending...