How does life begin? What does it mean? What happens when we die? “All anyone can do is ask,” Lepore writes. “That's why any history of ideas about life and death has to be, like this book, a history of curiosity.” Lepore starts that history with the story of a seventeenth-century Englishman who had the idea that all life begins with an egg and ends it with an American who, in the 1970s, began freezing the dead. In between, life got longer, the stages of life multiplied, and matters of life and death moved from the library to the laboratory, from the humanities to the sciences. Lately, debates about life and death have determined the course of American politics. Each of these debates has a history. Investigating the surprising origins of the stuff of everyday life—from board games to breast pumps—Lepore argues that the age of discovery, Darwin, and the Space Age turned ideas about life on earth topsy-turvy. “New worlds were found,” she writes, and “old paradises were lost.” As much a meditation on the present as an excavation of the past, The Mansion of Happiness is delightful, learned, and altogether beguiling.

    Seeking to address the various challenges of off-camera lighting, professional photographers and advanced amateurs alike will find a range of confidence-building instruction, beginning with basic how’s and why’s of lighting for creative effect, the types of equipment available and instruction about their proper use, clear definitions of various technical concepts such as managing shutter speed and controlling flash exposure, using ambient light as well as natural sunlight during a shoot, and incorporating off-camera flash into a portrait session. Concluding this lesson plan is a look at five different real-life photo sessions, each employing a different flash technique. Here, photographers get a deeper understanding of each concept put into practice, marrying the elements of lighting with the natural elements presented by the shoot.

    Foreman on a deconstruction ship that specializes in demolishing belief outbreaks, Nul is prodded out of his complacency by a false murder charge, and sets off on a journey that takes him to the very brink of hope. A 232-page concoction of fiction and intrigue that delves into the bleak and bitter philosophical brew of Nihilist chic.

    In his 2016 New York Times op-ed piece "Death in Black and White," Michael Eric Dyson moved a nation. Now he continues to speak out in Tears We Cannot Stop―a provocative and deeply personal call for change. Dyson argues that if we are to make real racial progress we must face difficult truths, including being honest about how black grievance has been ignored, dismissed, or discounted.The time is at hand for reckoning with the past, recognizing the truth of the present, and moving together to redeem the nation for our future. If we don't act now, if you don't address race immediately, there very well may be no future.

    But many of those bicycles disappear into basements and garages when the warm months end, parked there by owners fearful of the cold, snow and ice that winter brings. But does it have to be that way?Canadian writer and journalist Tom Babin started questioning this dogma after being stuck in winter commuter traffic one dreary and cold December morning and dreaming about the happiness that bicycle commuting had brought him all summer long. So he did something about it. He pulled on some thermal underwear, dragged his bike down from the rafters of his garage and set out on a mission to answer a simple but beguiling question: is it possible to happily ride a bike in winter? That question took him places he never expected. Over years of trial and error, research and more than his share of snow and ice, he discovered an unknown history of biking for snow and ice, and a new generation designed to make riding in winter safe and fun. He unearthed the world's most bike-friendly winter city and some new approaches to winter cycling from places all over the world. He also looked inward, to discover how the modern world shapes our attitudes toward winter. And perhaps most importantly, he discovered the unique kind of bliss that can only come by pedalling through softly falling snow on a quiet winter night.

    The essays cover a wide range of topics, from magic and trance healing to cockfighting and seaweed farming. The author, who has lived on Bali for 28 years, is widely recognized as a self-taught guru of Balinese folk traditions.

    Detailing the lifestyles of each class, from the way they dress and where they live to their education and hobbies, Class is sure to entertain, enlighten, and occasionally enrage readers as they identify their own place in society and see how the other half lives.

     To find out the secret behind this turn of character, Tuvia Tenenbom, a Jew born in Israel, presented himself as a Jordanian and was able to gain entry into many refugee camps. Living in squalid conditions in airless rooms, and with barely edible food, the refugees begged Tuvia to help them get out of the camps. When not with the refugees, Tuvia traveled through the land and mingled with the local people who shared with him that they, the Germans, were the kindest people in Europe, far superior to the "inhumane” Jews. Tuvia Tenenbom's provocative re-enactment of the refugee reality in the middle of Europe, coupled with the rising anti-Semitism of the people who proclaim themselves to be kind, exposes the hypocrisy of the "Refugees Welcome" mantra chiming throughout the Western world. • • • Praise for Tuvia Tenenbom’s previous work: "Irresistibly fascinating, emotionally explosive ... seductive and engaging." The New York Times "Highly engaging and emotional, eminently readable, brutally honest.” Publishers Weekly “A Falstaffian reporter . . . Illuminating and alarming." The Wall Street Journal "Tenenbom’s hodgepodge of politics, zealotry and literary genres is fresh and audacious." The Village Voice "Hugely entertaining, terribly funny, sarcastic, engaging, powerful, accusatory, judgmental, good!" National Review

    This updated edition features new material.

    Our governments are corrupt and the opposing parties pointlessly similar. Our culture is filled with vacuity and pap, and we are told there’s nothing we can do: “It’s just the way things are.”   In this book, Russell Brand hilariously lacerates the straw men and paper tigers of our conformist times and presents, with the help of experts as diverse as Thomas Piketty and George Orwell, a vision for a fairer, sexier society that’s fun and inclusive.   You have been lied to, told there’s no alternative, no choice, and that you don’t deserve any better. Brand destroys this illusory facade as amusingly and deftly as he annihilates Morning Joe anchors, Fox News fascists, and BBC stalwarts.   This book makes revolution not only possible but inevitable and fun.

    In this classic book, Madeleine L'Engle addresses the questions, What makes art Christian? What does it mean to be a Christian artist? What is the relationship between faith and art? Through L'Engle's beautiful and insightful essay, readers will find themselves called to what the author views as the prime tasks of an artist: to listen, to remain aware, and to respond to creation through one's own art.

    It has found adherents in Silicon Valley billionaires Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis. Google has entered the picture, establishing a bio-tech subsidiary aimed at solving the problem of aging.In To Be a Machine, journalist Mark O'Connell takes a headlong dive into this burgeoning movement. He travels to the laboratories, conferences, and basements of today's foremost transhumanists, where he's presented with the staggering possibilities and moral quandaries of new technologies like mind uploading, artificial superintelligence, cryonics, and device implants.A contributor to Slate, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine, O'Connell serves as a sharp and lively guide to the outer limits of technology in the twenty first century. In investigating what it means to be a machine, he offers a surprising, singular meditation on what it means to be human."

    The guru of Sixties radicals, Alinsky urged his followers to be flexible and opportunistic and say anything to get power, which they can then use to radically change existing social and economic institutions. In this insightful new booklet, Horowitz discusses Alinsky’s work in the 60s—and his advice to radicals to seize any weapon to advance their cause. This became the philosophy of Alinskyite organizations such as ACORN and influenced the future President who came up through the Chicago network created by Alinsky’s network. After analyzing Saul Alinsky’s work and pointing out that the godfather of “social organizing” created “ not salvation but chaos,” Horowitz then he asks the crucial question: “And presidential disciples of Alinsky, what will they create?”

    When he’s awake, he gives vent to some of the most heartfelt, political and anger-fueled prose to power its way to the public sphere since Hunter S. Thompson smashed a typewriter’s keys.Welcome to Hell World is an unexpurgated selection of Luke O’Neil’s finest rants, near-poetic rhapsodies, and investigatory journalism. Racism, sexism, immigration, unemployment, Marcus Aurelius, opioid addiction, Iraq: all are processed through the O’Neil grinder. He details failings in his own life and in those he observes around him: and the result is a book that is at once intensely confessional and an energetic, unforgettable condemnation of American mores.Welcome to Hell World is, in the author’s words, a “fever dream nightmare of reporting and personal essays from one of the lowest periods in our country in recent memory.” It is also a burning example of some of the best writing you’re likely to read anywhere.____________________________________________________________________________"Luke O’Neil is not on staff. " — The Boston Globe"Unbelievable." —Ben Shapiro"The Left’s new low." —Tucker Carlson"A widely read, offbeat newsletter… " —Mike Isaac, The New York Times"Luke O’Neil is one of the few writers who faces our grim reality the way it is, and not the way we wish it was. Compiling Hell World is a sin-eater’s task, and we are indebted to him for doing it.”—Dan Ozzi, co-author of Tranny"One of my favorite things I read all year…” —Frida Garza, Jezebel’s The Best Political Writing 2018"Welcome to Hell World is a distress call from a place where hope still exists, dispatched by a man who clearly sees the insanity of life in America and believes it doesn’t have to be this way.” —Keith Buckley of Every Time I Die, author of Watch"Luke O’Neil is like no other journalist working today, fusing original reporting with memoir and frequently-profane observational humor to create what feels like a new type of truth-telling: precise, fucked-up, infuriating, and, somehow, beautiful. ...This is what it looks like when a gifted writer finds his voice.” —Hamish McKenzie, co-founder of Substack and author of Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil

    It ultimately challenges the cultural assumptions of both conservatives and traditional liberals. 47 photographs.