"A hilarious examination of faux pas for readers of Allie Brosh's Hyperbole and a Half and Jenny Lawson's Let's Pretend This Never Happened Humankind is doomed. Especially you. It's already too late. From overstaying your welcome at a party, to leaving passive-aggressive post-its on your roommate's belongings, to letting your date know the extent of the internet reconnaissance you did on them--you're destined to embarrass yourself again and again. In You Blew It!, Josh Gondelman, comedian and co-creator of the "Modern Seinfeld" twitter account, teams up with Joe Berkowitz, an equally wry and ruthless social-observer, to dissect a range of painfully hilarious faux pas. Breaking down the code violations of modern culture--particularly our fervent, ridiculous addiction to technology--Gondelman and Berkowitz will keep you laughing as they explore how social blunders are simply part of the mystery that is you"--

"Hard-hitting critique of the Obama administration's failure in the Middle East, by a leading DC-based advocate President Barack Obama's first trip abroad in his second term took him to Israel and the Palestinian West Bank, where he despondently admitted to those waiting for words of encouragement, “It is a hard slog to work through all of these issues.” Contrast this gloomy assessment with Obama’s optimism on the second day of his first term, when he appointed former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell as his special envoy for Middle East peace, boldly asserting that his administration would “actively and aggressively seek a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians.” How is it that Obama’s active and aggressive search for progress has become mired in the status quo? Writer and political analyst Josh Ruebner charts Obama’s journey from optimism to frustration in the first hard-hitting investigation into why the president failed to make any progress on this critical issue, and how his unwillingness to challenge the Israel lobby has shattered hopes for peace. Written in a clear and accessible style by the advocacy director of a national peace organization and former Middle East analyst for the Congressional Research Service, Shattered Hopes offers an informed history of the Obama administration’s policies and maps out a true path forward for the United States to help achieve Israeli-Palestinian peace."

Jacob doesn't mean to disappoint his father, but he can't help thinking the most unthinkable (and very funny) thoughts about public school humiliation, his rebellious older brother's secrets and his in-home sex education with the live-in nanny. If only Jacob could confront his overbearing father and tell him he doesn't want to sing religious songs, attend EST classes or write the perfect thank you note. But of course he can't. That would be unthinkable.

It's time to start listening to Your Inner Skinny Losing weight isn't just about shedding pounds. The reality is you're battling obstacles way fatter than fat, stronger than muscle, and heavier than any other part of your body. You're up against roadblocks including low energy, little time, and the roaring, disorienting noise of countless diets telling you a thousand different things. Your inner skinny is the voice that cuts through the noise and ignores the nonsense. It's the voice that says it's not about low-carb, no-carb, low-fat gimmicks. It's the voice that tells you that dieting, while no doubt challenging, is simpler than you think. And with Your Inner Skinny , nutrition and health expert Joy Bauer helps you channel that voice into four productive, detailed steps: releasing your negative eating habits, relearning how to reprogram your appetite, reshaping your body into the one that you want, and revealing your success to the world. It's a diet plan that really works, with dozens of delicious recipes, lots of easy exercises, and a whole new you, waiting to be revealed! Your inner skinny will not be ignored! You are going to look and feel beautiful in a whole new way. This book was published in hardcover as Joy's Life Diet

"What is the contemporary legacy of Gramsci's notion of hegemony? How can universality be reformulated now that its spurious versions have been so thoroughly criticized?" "In this ground-breaking project, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek engage in a dialogue on central questions of contemporary philosophy and politics. Their essays, organized as three contributions each that respond to one another, range over the Hegelian legacy in contemporary critical theory, the theoretical dilemmas of multiculturalism, the universalism-versus-particularism debate, the strategies of the left in a globalized economy, and the relative merits of post-structuralism and Lacanian psychoanalysis for a critical social theory." "While the rigour and intelligence with which Butler, Laclau and Zizek approach their work is as formidable as one would expect, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality benefits additionally from their clear sense of energy and enjoyment in a revealing and often unpredictable exchange. Book jacket"--

Contains essays and dialogues in which philosophers Judith Butler, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Cornel West discuss the role of religion in public life.

Five anthologies target ages with birthday-party specificity. It's Fun to Be Five! (ages 5-7) and Now I Am Six! (ages 6-9) have eight stories each, by authors such as A.A. Milne and Rosemary Wells. It's Heaven to Be Seven (ages 7-10); It's Great to Be Eight (ages 7-10) and It's Fine to Be Nine (ages 8-11) each gather a dozen stories with black-and-white illustrations; authors include Judy Blume, Beverly Cleary and Roald Dahl.

A memoir based on the author's New York Times "Modern Love" piece about her brush-off by an indie rock musician describes her haphazard Jewish upbringing and rocky misadventures in romantic enlightenment.

Julius Lester and Jerry Pinkney's warm, humorous retelling of a popular African-American folk ballad. When John Henry was born the birds, bears, rabbits, and even a unicorn came to see him. He grew so fast, he burst right through the porch roof, and laughed so loud, he scared the sun! Soon John Henry is swinging two huge sledgehammers to build roads, pulverizing boulders, and smashing rocks to smithereens. He's stronger than ten men and can dig through a mountain faster than a steam drill. Nothing can stop John Henry, and his courage stays with us forever. A Caldecott Honor Book * "This is a tall tale and heroic myth, a celebration of the human spirit . . . The story is told with rhythm and wit, humor and exageration, and with a heart-catching immediacy that connects the human and the natural world. " -- Booklist , starred review "Another winning collaboration from the master storyteller and gifted artist of Tales of Uncle Remus fame." -- School Library Journal "A great American hero comes fully to life in this epic retelling filled with glorious, detailed watercolors . . . This carefully crafted updating begs to be read aloud for its rich, rhythmic storytelling flow, and the suitably oversize illustrations amplify the text." -- Publishers Weekly

This newest book by Pulitzer Prize winner Justin Kaplan is a sparkling combination of biography, social history, architectural appreciation, and pure pleasure Endowed with the largest private fortunes of their day, two heirs of arch-capitalist John Jacob Astor battled with each other for social primacy. William Waldorf Astor (born 1848) and his cousin John Jacob Astor IV (born 1864) led incomparably privileged lives in the blaze of public attention. Novelist, sportsman, and inventor, John Jacob went down with the Titanic , after turbulent marital adventures and service in the Spanish-American War. Collector of art, antiquities, and stately homes, William Waldorf became a British subject and acquired the title of Viscount Astor. In New York during the 1890s and after, the two feuding Astors built monumental grand hotels, chief among them the original Waldorf-Astoria on lower Fifth Avenue. The Astor hotels transformed social behavior. Home of the chafing dish and the velvet rope, the Waldorf-Astoria drew the rich, famous, and fashionable. It was the setting for the most notorious society event of the era—a costume extravaganza put on by its hosts during a time of widespread need and unemployment. The celebrity-packed lobbies, public rooms, lavish suites, and exclusive restaurants of the grand hotels became distinctive theaters of modern life.

The relation between body and mind is one of the oldest riddles that has puzzled mankind. That material and mental events may interact is accepted even by the law: our mental capacity to concentrate on the task can be seriously reduced by drugs. Physical and chemical processes may act upon the mind; and when we are writing a difficult letter, our mind acts upon our body and, through a chain of physical events, upon the mind of the recipient of the letter. This is what the authors of this book call the 'interaction of mental and physical events'. We know very little about this interaction; and according to recent philosophical fashions this is explained by the alleged fact that we have brains but no thoughts. The authors of this book stress that they cannot solve the body mind problem; but they hope that they have been able to shed new light on it. Eccles especially with his theory that the brain is a detector and amplifier; a theory that has given rise to important new developments, including new and exciting experiments; and Popper with his highly controversial theory of 'World 3'. They show that certain fashionable solutions which have been offered fail to understand the seriousness of the problems of the emergence of life, or consciousness and of the creativity of our minds. In Part I, Popper discusses the philosophical issue between dualist or even pluralist interaction on the one side, and materialism and parallelism on the other. There is also a historical review of these issues. In Part II, Eccles examines the mind from the neurological standpoint: the structure of the brain and its functional performance under normal as well as abnormal circumstances. The result is a radical and intriguing hypothesis on the interaction between mental events and detailed neurological occurrences in the cerebral cortex. Part III, based on twelve recorded conversations, reflects the exciting exchange between the authors as they attempt to come to terms with their opinions.

oldest edition

Thrown together by circumstance, a goup of fathers in Tribeca, a sound engineer, a writer, a criminal, meet each morning at a local cafe after the school run. Over a year we learn about their dreams deferred, their secrets and mishaps as they confront terrible truths about ambition, wealth and sex.

The first anthology to investigate cultural production of lesbian sexuality The question of whether lesbians have sex, how they have sex, and when they began having sex has long obsessively preoccupied the heterosexual imagination. Today, discussions of lesbian sex abound with such terms as romantic friendships, stealth lesbians, and genitally sexual. As we approach the end of the twentieth century, lesbian sexuality remains hotly contested ground. What exactly qualifies as lesbian sex? What is the relationship, if any, between lesbian erotica and heterosexual pornography? How did the issue of sex in lesbian communities come to be such a fiercely debated subject? Lesbian Erotics is the first anthology to investigate the cultural production of sexually charged images of lesbians in film, law, literature, and popular culture in general. The contributors address an enormous range of sexualities and fora in which these sexualities flourish. In her chapter, Not Tonight, Dear, I'm Deconstructing a Headache: Confessions of a Lesbian Sex Therapist , Marny Hall illustrates how difficult some women find it to maintain erotic tension in lesbian relationships. Elizabeth Meese grapples with increasingly complex sexual identities in cyperspace. Kitty Tsui, cover model for On Our Backs , relays how she developed her own body into an art form in order to combat stereotypes of passive and invisible Asian women. This work, as Karla Jay writes in the introduction, invites readers to consider the implications, variations, and complexities of lesbian erotics. In the end, it is our sexual lives that mark us as outlaws. Therefore, we need to investigate and engage representations of our sexuality to define for ourselves, if we so choose, the scope, shape, and permutations of lesbian erotics.

On the first night of Hanukkah, a mother tells her family and a young guest the story of the holiday's origin.

William's mother knows him so well that she can distinguish him from everyone else in the world--even if he were a horse or a songbird or a mouse or a pig.

A POWERFUL ARGUMENT FOR ABORTION AS A MORAL RIGHT AND SOCIAL GOOD BY A NOTED FEMINIST AND LONGTIME COLUMNIST FOR THE NATION Forty years after the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling, "abortion" is still a word that is said with outright hostility by many, despite the fact that one in three American women will have terminated at least one pregnancy by menopause. Even those who support a woman's right to an abortion often qualify their support by saying abortion is a "bad thing," an "agonizing decision," making the medical procedure so remote and radioactive that it takes it out of the world of the everyday, turning an act that is normal and necessary into something shameful and secretive. Meanwhile, with each passing day, the rights upheld by the Supreme Court are being systematically eroded by state laws designed to end abortion outright. In this urgent, controversial book, Katha Pollitt reframes abortion as a common part of a woman's reproductive life, one that should be accepted as a moral right with positive social implications. In Pro , Pollitt takes on the personhood argument, reaffirms the priority of a woman's life and health, and discusses why terminating a pregnancy can be a force for good for women, families, and society. It is time, Pollitt argues, that we reclaim the lives and the rights of women and mothers.

In 2009, the Good News Club came to the public elementary school where journalist Katherine Stewart sent her children. The Club bills itself as an after-school Bible study, but Stewart soon discovered that its real mission is to convert children to fundamentalist Christianity. Astonished to discover that the Supreme Court had deemed this religious activity legal in public schools, Stewart began an investigative journey to dozens of cities across the nation to document the impact. As Stewart makes chillingly clear, the rapidly expanding network of Good News Clubs represents just one of a range of initiatives intended to insert religious values into public schools. Although they often appear to be spontaneous, local events, they are in fact organized and funded at a national level. Taken together, they represent a new strategy of the Religious Right in its long-running aim to "take back America," undermining our public education system and secular democracy itself.

Now available in trade paper! New York Times bestselling author Kathie Lee Gifford reveals heartwarming, entertaining conversations between people and personalities who both agree and disagree about who Jesus is, his role throughout history, and his presence in our lives today. For decades Kathie Lee has had deep conversations about her faith with anyone who is interested in talking about it. What she discovered early on is most people are very willing to talk about Jesus: atheists, agnostics, Scientologists, Jews, broken-hearted Catholics, confused Baptists, Pentecostals, Sikhs, Buddhists, and Hindus alike. While some of the people Kathie Lee has spoken with do not share her belief that Jesus is the Messiah--as prophesied for centuries by prophets in the Hebrew scriptures--they nonetheless have a universal fascination with Him. This singular man who lived more than two thousand years ago, and never traveled more than one hundred miles from where He was born, managed to change the entire world. Even the way we delineate history (BC/AD) comes from His short thirty-three years of life. In The Jesus I Know, Kathie Lee shares cherished conversations that she's had with others who find Jesus to be an ancient historical figure who somehow continues to be an undeniably magnetic, relevant presence in the modern world. Those conversations include actors like Kristin Chenoweth and Cynthia Garrett, with stories of Craig Ferguson and Kevin Costner, newsmakers and news personalities like Kris Jenner, Megyn Kelly, Jason Kennedy, and Janice Dean, performers like Chynna Phillips Baldwin, Brian Welch, Jimmie Allen, and Jimmy Wayne, hitmakers like Louis York and David Pomeranz, as well as those coming from other faith traditions. Using Kathie Lee's favorite Scripture passages as scaffolding, these thought-provoking exchanges will bring His teachings to life before your very eyes.