At the height of the McCarthy era, an experimental theater troupe set up shop in a bar near the University of Chicago. Via word-of-mouth, astonished crowds packed the ad-hoc venue to see its unscripted, interactive, consciousness-raising style. From this unlikely seed grew the Second City, the massively influential comedy theater troupe, and its offshoots—the Groundlings, Upright Citizens Brigade, SNL, and a slew of others.   Sam Wasson charts the meteoric rise of improv in this richly reported, scene-driven narrative that, like its subject, moves fast and digs deep. He shows us the chance meeting at a train station between Mike Nichols and Elaine May. We hang out at the after-hours bar Dan Aykroyd opened so that friends like John Belushi, Bill Murray, and Gilda Radner would always have a home. We go behind the scenes of landmark entertainments from The Graduate to Caddyshack, The Forty-Year Old Virgin to The Colbert Report. Along the way, we commune with a host of pioneers—Mike Nichols and Harold Ramis, Dustin Hoffman, Chevy Chase, Steve Carell, Amy Poehler, Alan Arkin, Tina Fey, Judd Apatow, and many more. With signature verve and nuance, Wasson shows why improv deserves to be considered the great American art form of the last half-century—and the most influential one today.

    This is complexity. But too many leaders approach complexity the wrong way - they push their people harder and harder and tackle problems one at a time over months, sometimes even years, and nearly always in a linear fashion. It's like setting a pot of water on "low" and waiting for it to boil. To solve the seemingly intractable challenges that leaders bang their heads against for months - to get the metaphorical water to boil - you must generate a high amount of heat very quickly. In this book, the authors share their proven formula for dramatically shortening the process and solving an organization's toughest challenges in mere days.

    That often means working 40-hour-weeks and penny-pinching your whole life. How else could you save a cool $2 mil?Finance guru, former financial advisor, and Amazon bestselling author of Money Honey, Rachel Richards has one goal in mind: teaching you everything you need to know to become financially free earlier than you ever thought possible. At age 27, Rachel quit her job and retired, living off $10,000+ per month in passive income streams. Let her show you how to do it at any age—it's never too late.What is passive income? Passive income is earned with little to no ongoing work. It's no get-rich-quick scheme, but once your passive income exceeds your expenses, you are set for life. In a refreshingly realistic how-to guide, Rachel serves up 28 tried and true passive income stream models, helping you to: Achieve "Financial Independence, Retire Early" without penny-pinching Create consistent, long-term residual income (the non-multi-level-marketing way), so you can live life on your terms Have the flexibility to work when, where, and if you want Say "goodbye" to your 9-5, and create a life you totally love Eliminate your money stresses and fears Rachel supplements boatloads of research and personal expertise by interviewing well-known experts! You'll hear directly from big names such as HAL ELROD, BOBBY HOYT, DAVID OSBORN, HONORÉE CORDER, and more!Hal Elrod is the internationally bestselling author of The Miracle Morning™ Series, which has been translated into 37 languages and has impacted over 2,000,000 people's lives!Bobby Hoyt is a former high school band director and the founder of Millennial Money Man. He now makes six figures per month from his blog, online courses, and recurring revenue!David Osborn is a multi-millionaire real estate mogul who started out broke and unemployed at age 26, only to become one of the most successful real estate franchise owners in the world!Honorée Corder has written over 50 books. She teaches the You Must Write a Book Live Coaching Course and is an executive book coach!Doug Skipworth is the co-founder and principal broker at Crestcore Realty, which manages 2,500 properties in Tennessee. He personally owns hundreds of rentals!Thom Shepherd is a CMA of Texas Songwriter of the Year and has written five #1 singles!If you regularly feel the Sunday Scaries or always dread getting up for work in the morning, this book is for you. This book is for the college student already dreading the 9-5 life that waits him upon graduating; the couple who would rather spend their time doing what they want, instead of slaving away for their employers every day; and the single parent who is barely scraping by. Regardless of your WHY, passive income could be your HOW.

    This genre includes classics such as Ultima and The Bard's Tale as well as more modern games such as World of Warcraft and Guild Wars. Written in an engaging style for both the computer game enthusiast and the more casual computer game player, this book explores the history of the genre by telling the stories of the developers, games, and gamers who created it.

    For the majority of Americans living a sedentary lifestyle (from the card-carrying couch potatoes to the 86% of American workers who sit all day at their job) comes a comprehensive guide to the most accessible form of yoga…Chair yoga! - Desk-bound? You can do chair yoga!- Have limited range of motion? You can do chair yoga!- Never done yoga before? You can do chair yoga!- Don’t own a pair of stretchy pants? You can do chair yoga!- Own plenty of athleisure or loungewear, but haven’t moved much in weeks/months/years? You can do chair yoga!Chair yoga is exactly what it sounds like: exercises you can do sitting down. In Chair Yoga, celebrity yoga instructor Kristin McGee takes you through 100 yoga poses and exercises that are easy enough for all levels and will help readers stay active, alert, and healthy. Divided into chapters organized by body part (say goodbye to back pain and hello to better posture), each exercise includes step-by-step instructions and easy-to-follow photos. Plus, bonus chapters on 5-, 10-, and 15-minute routines help readers put it all together and find the time to perform these exercises. Now with Chair Yoga, anyone can benefit from just a few moves a day—and garner the remarkable physical and mental health rewards. “Kristin’s classes strike a perfect balance of effort and letting go, seriousness and lightheartedness, movement and stillness. She is among the best teachers in the city and I consider myself lucky to be among her students.”—Ellie Krieger

    With a friendly voice and step-by-step instructions, this book offers everything you need to start enjoying yoga’s calming and strengthening effects on your life. • Complete beginner’s guide to getting started with yoga • Simple instructions for the 35 essential yoga poses • Full-color yoga illustrations • 5 restorative yoga meditations • Nutrition tips to complement your yoga practice • Guide to building your own yoga sequences Take a deep breath. Yoga for Beginners will do the rest.

    But, like many skilled trades, the sign industry has been overrun by the techno-fueled promise of quicker and cheaper. The resulting proliferation of computer-designed, die-cut vinyl lettering and inkjet printers has ushered a creeping sameness into our visual landscape. Fortunately, there is a growing trend to seek out traditional sign painters and a renaissance in the trade. In 2010 filmmakers Faythe Levine, coauthor of Handmade Nation, and Sam Macon began documenting these dedicated practitioners, their time-honored methods, and their appreciation for quality and craftsmanship. Sign Painters, the first anecdotal history of the craft, features stories and photographs of more than two dozen sign painters working in cities throughout the United States.

      With outrageous and uncensored profiles of everyone from D. W. Griffith to Quentin Tarantino, Secret Lives of Great Filmmakers reveals the little-known secrets of all your favorite directors. Why did Charlie Chaplin refuse to bathe for weeks at a time? Was Alfred Hitchcock really missing a belly button?  Is Walt Disney’s corpse preserved in a state of suspended animation? And why on earth did Francis Ford Coppola direct a 3-D pornographic movie? The legends of the silver screen will never be the same!

    From Zen and Vipassana to walking meditations and body scans, the simple practices outlined in Practical Meditation for Beginners make it easy to build an ongoing meditation routine that is best for you.Written by experienced meditation teacher Benjamin Decker, Practical Meditation for Beginners offers a clear 10-day program for learning 10 different meditation techniques—one for each day of the program. Newcomers and experienced meditators alike will enjoy the ease and variety presented in Practical Meditation for Beginners.In the pages of Practical Meditation for Beginners you’ll find: Logical chapter organization that sets a daily structure for building your meditation skill set Step-by-step instructions to help you fully engage in each of the 10 techniques Thoughtful writing prompts for recording daily insights in your Meditation Notebook Accessible and effective, Practical Meditation for Beginners is a true how-to guide that will empower you to meditate with confidence right away.

    You’ll discover how to navigate this new community, and find the best resources for learning the tools and skills you need to be a dynamic maker in your own right.Lang reveals how he became a pro maker after losing his job, and how the experience helped him start OpenROV—a DIY community and product line focused on open source undersea exploration. It all happened once he became an active member of the Maker culture. Ready to take the plunge into the next Industrial Revolution? This guide provides a clear and inspiring roadmap.* Take an eye-opening journey from unskilled observer to engaged maker-entrepreneur* Enter the Maker community to connect with experts and pick up new skills* Use a template for building a maker-based entrepreneurial lifestyle* Learn from the organizer of the first-ever Maker Startup Weekend* Be prepared for exciting careers of the future

    You were confident when you said no, but now you can't stop thinking about it, and you start feeling worse.You have FOMO, or, Fear of Missing Out.Coined in a Harvard Business School article, FOMO has become a global term to describe the decimating anxiety when thinking other people are having better, more fulfilling, experiences than you are. It's a natural, biological response, but that doesn't make it feel any better. Amplified by the rise of social media, #FOMO has become a cultural crisis--so what's the cure?Patrick McGinnis, creator of the term FOMO, has been thinking about it for seventeen years--and he has a solution: decision-making. Learning to weigh the costs and benefits of your choices, prioritizing your decisions, and listening to your gut are central to silencing FOMO and its lesser-known cousin, FOBO: Fear of a Better Option. After all, don't you want to feel comfortable and confident in your decisions?Written with self-evaluations throughout the book, Fear of Missing Out: Practical Decision Making in a World of Overwhelming Choice helps you ascertain and eliminate the parts of your life that are causing more anxiety than happiness.So give this a read, and then go to that party, start that new book, create a new goal--or don't. Make that decision, and be confident in it: it's the first of many of its kind.

    And there’s much to love: hundreds of gloriously pungent varieties—crumbly, creamy, buttery, even shot through with bottle-green mold. So many varieties, in fact, that the aspiring gourmand may wonder: How does one make sense of it all?In The Whole Fromage, Kathe Lison sets out to learn what makes French cheese so remarkable—why France is the “Cheese Mother Ship,” in the words of one American expert. Her journey takes her to cheese caves tucked within the craggy volcanic rock of Auvergne, to a centuries-old monastery in the French Alps, and to the farmlands that keep cheesemaking traditions alive. She meets the dairy scientists, shepherds, and affineurs who make up the world of modern French cheese, and whose lifestyles and philosophies are as varied and flavorful as the delicacies they produce. Most delicious of all, she meets the cheeses themselves—from spruce-wrapped Mont d’Or, so gooey it’s best eaten with a spoon; to luminous Beaufort, redolent of Alpine grasses and wildflowers, a single round of which can weigh as much as a Saint Bernard; to Camembert, invented in Normandy but beloved and imitated across the world.With writing as piquant and rich as a well-aged Roquefort, as charming as a tender springtime chèvre, and yet as unsentimental as a stinky Maroilles, The Whole Fromage is a tasty exploration of one of the great culinary treasures of France.

    It directly translates the revolution in neuroscience that has occurred over the last 40 years into practical new techniques for effective persuasion.Whether your goal is to persuade one person—a husband, child, or boss—or the millions who might purchase an Apple Watch or a Budweiser, 7 Secrets of Persuasion will show you how to:*Unearth the motivation that actually changes a behavior like smoking, voting, or buying, even if the person(s) doesn’t know why they do what they do.*Tap into the mental process that gives religious symbols, political symbols, and commercial logos their power.*Make a promise that is delayed, uncertain, and rational more compelling by making it immediate, certain, and emotional.*Transform your candidate, service, or product into the one people want to buy by utilizing what psychologists call the “fundamental attribution error.”

    To cover is to downplay a disfavored trait so as to blend into the mainstream. Because all of us possess stigmatized attributes, we all encounter pressure to cover in our daily lives. Given its pervasiveness, we may experience this pressure to be a simple fact of social life.Against conventional understanding, Kenji Yoshino argues that the demand to cover can pose a hidden threat to our civil rights. Though we have come to some consensus against penalizing people for differences based on race, sex, sexual orientation, religion, and disability, we still routinely deny equal treatment to people who refuse to downplay differences along these lines. Racial minorities are pressed to “act white” by changing their names, languages, or cultural practices. Women are told to “play like men” at work. Gays are asked not to engage in public displays of same-sex affection. The devout are instructed to minimize expressions of faith, and individuals with disabilities are urged to conceal the paraphernalia that permit them to function. In a wide-ranging analysis, Yoshino demonstrates that American civil rights law has generally ignored the threat posed by these covering demands. With passion and rigor, he shows that the work of civil rights will not be complete until it attends to the harms of coerced conformity. At the same time, Yoshino is responsive to the American exasperation with identity politics, which often seems like an endless parade of groups asking for state and social solicitude. He observes that the ubiquity of the covering demand provides an opportunity to lift civil rights into a higher, more universal register. Since we all experience the covering demand, we can all make common cause around a new civil rights paradigm based on our desire for authenticity–a desire that brings us together rather than driving us apart. Yoshino’s argument draws deeply on his personal experiences as a gay Asian American. He follows the Romantics in his belief that if a human life is described with enough particularity, the universal will speak through it. The result is a work that combines one of the most moving memoirs written in years with a landmark manifesto on the civil rights of the future. “This brilliantly argued and engaging book does two things at once, and it does them both astonishingly well. First, it's a finely grained memoir of young man’s struggles to come to terms with his sexuality, and second, it's a powerful argument for a whole new way of thinking about civil rights and how our society deals with difference. This book challenges us all to confront our own unacknowledged biases, and it demands that we take seriously the idea that there are many different ways to be human. Kenji Yoshino is the face and the voice of the new civil rights.” -Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed“Kenji Yoshino has not only given us an important, compelling new way to understand civil rights law, a major accomplishment in itself, but with great bravery and honesty, he has forged his argument from the cauldron of his own experience. In clear, lyrical prose, Covering quite literally brings the law to life. The result is a book about our public and private selves as convincing to the spirit as it is to the mind.” -Adam Haslett, author of You Are Not A Stranger Here“Kenji Yoshino's work is often moving and always clarifying. Covering elaborates an original, arresting account of identity and authenticity in American culture.”-Anthony Appiah, author of The Ethics of Identity and Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor Of Philosophy at Princeton University“This stunning book introduces three faces of the remarkable Kenji Yoshino: a writer of poetic beauty; a soul of rare reflectivity and decency; and a brilliant lawyer and scholar, passionately committed to uncovering human rights. Like W.E.B. DuBois's The Souls of Black Folk and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, this book fearlessly blends gripping narrative with insightful analysis to further the cause of human emancipation. And like those classics, it should explode into America's consciousness.”-Harold Hongju Koh Dean, Yale Law School and former Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights“Covering is a magnificent work - so eloquently and powerfully written I literally could not put it down. Sweeping in breadth, brilliantly argued, and filled with insight, humor, and erudition, it offers a fundamentally new perspective on civil rights and discrimination law. This extraordinary book is many things at once: an intensely moving personal memoir; a breathtaking historical and cultural synthesis of assimilation and American equality law; an explosive new paradigm for transcending the morass of identity politics; and in parts, pure poetry. No one interested in civil rights, sexuality, discrimination - or simply human flourishing - can afford to miss it.” -Amy Chua, author of World on Fire“In this stunning, original book, Kenji Yoshino demonstrates that the struggle for gay rights is not only a struggle to liberate gays---it is a struggle to free all of us, straight and gay, male and female, white and black, from the pressures and temptations to cover vital aspects of ourselves and deprive ourselves and others of our full humanity. Yoshino is both poet and lawyer, and by joining an exquisitely observed personal memoir with a historical analysis of civil rights, he shows why gay rights is so controversial at present, why “covering” is the issue of contention, and why the “covering demand,” universal in application, is the civil rights issue of our time. This is a beautifully written, brilliant and hopeful book, offering a new understanding of what is at stake in our fight for human rights.” -Carol Gilligan, author of In a Different Voice

    Readers find the Vanilla Bean blog while hunting for the perfect chocolate cake or cinnamon roll recipe, or another everyday favorite. They stay for founder Sarah Kieffer's simple approach to home baking, the utterly transporting, dreamlike quality of her photography, and her evocative storytelling. Most of all, the Vanilla Bean blog celebrates the soulfulness of baking.Kieffer mastered the art of home baking while working in tiny kitchens in the back of coffeehouses and bakeries in Minnesota. She began the Vanilla Bean blog to create a culinary heritage for her family, but soon became passionate about making the joys of baking accessible for all. With recipes that help simplify the process behind complicated techniques, Vanilla Bean has built a dedicated following of several hundred thousand loyal readers and won several awards, including the Reader's Choice Award for best baking blog from Saveur.The Vanilla Bean Baking Book is Kieffer's debut cookbook, with 100 delicious tried-and-true recipes for the home baker. From everyday favorites such as Lemon Bread and Peanut Butter Cookies to inventive twists on classics such as Burnt Honey Buttercream Cake with Chocolate, Coffee Blondies, and Apple-Blackberry Turnovers, these irresistible treats will delight and inspire.