A Seattle Stories novel A year after the sudden death of his longtime partner, Ben, Theo Anderson is still grieving. The last thing he's looking for is a new lover. But as Theo soon discovers, sometimes life has other plans. While Theo experiences a powerful physical attraction to fellow gym member Peter, it's his new online friend, Morgan, who provides the intellectual challenge to make him come alive. Morgan is witty, brave, and irreverent, and Theo is ready to take the plunge⦠until he discovers Morgan might be half his age. Theo's late partner was significantly olderâenough to strain Theo's relationship with his familyâand the potential of another relationship being cut short leaves him gunshy. Theo needs to lay Ben's memory to rest, reconcile with his family, and rekindle neglected friendships if he's to start afresh with a new lover. But Theo isn't the only one with a past. His biggest challenge, in living after Ben, might not be his to face.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR 'A dystopian odyssey through the dark authoritarian landscape of the modern world' The Times To be born American in the late twentieth century was to take the fact of a particular kind of American exceptionalism as granted – a state of nature arrived at after all else had failed. In the span of just thirty years, this assumption would come crashing down. After the fall, we must determine what it means to be American again. In 2017, as Ben Rhodes was helping Barack Obama begin his next chapter, the legacy they worked to build for eight years was being taken apart. To understand what was happening in America, Rhodes decided to look outwards. Over the next three years, he travelled to dozens of countries, meeting with politicians, activists, and dissidents confronting the same nationalism and authoritarianism that was tearing America apart. Along the way, a Russian opposition leader he spends time with is poisoned, the Hong Kong protesters he comes to know see their movement snuffed out, and America itself reaches the precipice of losing democracy before giving itself a second chance. After the Fall is a hugely ambitious and essential work of discovery. Throughout, Rhodes comes to realize how much America's fingerprints are on a world it helped to shape: through the excesses of the post-Cold War embrace of unbridled capitalism, post-9/11 nationalism and militarism, mania for technology and social media, and the racism that shaped the backlash to the Obama presidency. At the same time, he learns from a diverse set of characters – from Obama to rebels to a rising generation of leaders – how looking squarely at where America has gone wrong only makes it more essential to fight for what America is supposed to be – for itself, and for the entire world.

Ben Bernanke's swearing in as Federal Reserve chairman in 2006 marked the end of Alan Greenspan's long, legendary career. To date, the new chair has garnered mixed reviews. Business economists see him as the best-qualified successor to Greenspan, while many traders and investors worry that he's too academic for the job. Meanwhile, many ordinary Americans do not even know who he is. How will Bernanke's leadership affect the Fed's actions in the coming years? How will Bernanke build on Greenspan's success, but also put his own stamp on the Fed? What will all this imply for businesses and investors? In Ben Bernanke's Fed, Ethan Harris provides exceptional insights into these crucial issues. As a leading "Fed watch" economist, Harris draws on Bernanke's academic research, his speeches as a governor of the Fed, and his first two years on the job to shed light on: · How the Federal Reserve analyzes and manages the economy using a synthesis of classical and Keynesian theory · Bernanke's strategies for fighting inflation · The implications of the new chair's remarkably plain-spoken style · How Bernanke has cultivated diverse viewpoints but still builds consensus within the Fed Engaging and discerning, this book demystifies the man who has stepped into what many describe as the second most powerful job in America.

It is a peculiar moment for art, as it becomes both increasingly rarefied and associated with elite lifestyle culture, while simultaneously ubiquitous, with the boom of "creative" industries and the proliferation of new technologies for making art. In these important essays, Ben Davis covers everything from Instagram to artificial intelligence, eco-art to cultural appropriation. Critical, insightful, and hopeful even in the face of the apocalyptic, this is a must read for those looking to understand the current art world, as well as the role of the artist in the world today.

A polemical analysis of the politics and economics of today's vernacular photographic cultures. In Photography After Capitalism, Benedict Burbridge makes the case for a radically expanded conception of photography, encompassing the types of labor too often obscured by black-boxed technologies, slick platform interfaces, and the compulsion to display lives to others. His lively and polemical analysis of today's vernacular photographic cultures shines new light on the hidden work of smartphone assembly teams, digital content moderators, Street View car drivers, Google “Scan-Ops,”low-paid gallery interns, homeless participant photographers, and the photo-sharing masses. Bringing together cultural criticism, social history, and political philosophy, Burbridge examines how representations of our photographic lives—in advertising, journalism, scholarship and, particularly, contemporary art—shape a sense of what photography is and the social relations that comprise it. More precisely, he focuses on how different critical and creative strategies—from the appropriation of social media imagery to performative traversals of the network, from documentaries about secretive manual labor to science fiction fantasies of future sabotage—affect our understanding of photography's interactions with political and economic systems. Drawing insight and inspiration from recent analyses of digital labour, community economies and post-capitalism, Burbridge harnesses the ubiquity of photography to cognitively map contemporary capitalism in search of its weak spots and levers, sites of resistance, and opportunities to build better worlds.

In this true, compelling account of perseverance and hope from Seahawks Coach Pete Carroll's assistant, a young journalist walks on to a top-ranked USC football team and, guided by his faith, shares God's love, launching him on an unexpected journey with an amazing outcome. Had anyone told Ben Malcolmson that he'd someday be a wide receiver on the national champion USC football team--after not playing football since an unfortunate fifth-grade Pop Warner experience--he would have called them crazy. As a reporter for The Daily Trojan, in the spirit of George Plimpton, he participated in walk-on tryouts for the team and was dumbfounded to find himself listed on the roster. His position on the team never amounted to much in a game-time contribution, but Ben felt strongly that his faith was inextricably linked to his purpose. He felt called to anonymously place Bibles in each USC teammate locker on Christmas Eve--to resounding indifference and rejection from his friends. It wasn't until three years later, when his role at USC had led to a role with Coach Pete Carroll at the Seahawks organization, that an old friend connected with Ben and told him that one of the Bibles had captivated the heart of a teammate in the three days before his death. With a humble spirit dedicated to consistent acts of discipleship, Ben Malcolmson is an authentic voice for the power of simple obedience and trust, for what can happen when a believer allows God to work in a life. Walk On is the result of God using his faithful people to work in the lives of others.

“I find it hard even now to get into focus all these horrors, my mind is really quite incapable of taking in everything I saw because it was all so completely foreign to everything I had previously believed or thought possible.” British Major Ben Barnett’s words echoed the sentiments shared by medical students, Allied soldiers, members of the clergy, ambulance drivers, and relief workers who found themselves utterly unprepared to comprehend, much less tend to, the indescribable trauma of those who survived at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The liberation of Bergen-Belsen by the British in April 1945 was a defining point in history: the moment the world finally became inescapably aware of the Holocaust. But what happened after Belsen was liberated is still a matter of dispute. Was it an epic of medical heroism or the culmination of thirteen years of indifference to the fate of Europe’s Jews? This startling investigation by acclaimed documentary filmmaker and historian Ben Shephard draws on an extraordinary range of materials–contemporary diaries, military documents, and survivors’ testimonies–to reconstruct six weeks at Belsen beginning on April 15, 1945, and reveals what actually caused the post-liberation deaths of nearly 14,000 concentration camp inmates who might otherwise have lived. Why did it take almost two weeks to organize a proper medical response? Why were the medical teams sent to Belsen so poorly equipped? Why, when specialists did arrive, did they get so much of the medicine plain wrong? For the first time, Shephard explores the humanitarian and medical issues surrounding the liberation of the camp and provides a detailed, illuminating account that is far more complex than had been previously revealed. This gripping book confronts the terrifying aftermath of war with questions that still haunt us today.

One of The New York Times's 100 notable books of 2021 "[George Packer's] account of America’s decline into destructive tribalism is always illuminating and often dazzling." —William Galston, The Washington Post Acclaimed National Book Award-winning author George Packer diagnoses America’s descent into a failed state, and envisions a path toward overcoming our injustices, paralyses, and divides In the year 2020, Americans suffered one rude blow after another to their health, livelihoods, and collective self-esteem. A ruthless pandemic, an inept and malign government response, polarizing protests, and an election marred by conspiracy theories left many citizens in despair about their country and its democratic experiment. With pitiless precision, the year exposed the nation’s underlying conditions—discredited elites, weakened institutions, blatant inequalities—and how difficult they are to remedy. In Last Best Hope, George Packer traces the shocks back to their sources. He explores the four narratives that now dominate American life: Free America, which imagines a nation of separate individuals and serves the interests of corporations and the wealthy; Smart America, the world view of Silicon Valley and the professional elite; Real America, the white Christian nationalism of the heartland; and Just America, which sees citizens as members of identity groups that inflict or suffer oppression. In lively and biting prose, Packer shows that none of these narratives can sustain a democracy. To point a more hopeful way forward, he looks for a common American identity and finds it in the passion for equality—the “hidden code”—that Americans of diverse persuasions have held for centuries. Today, we are challenged again to fight for equality and renew what Alexis de Tocqueville called “the art” of self-government. In its strong voice and trenchant analysis, Last Best Hope is an essential contribution to the literature of national renewal.

From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity. Benjamin argues that automation, far from being a sinister story of racist programmers scheming on the dark web, has the potential to hide, speed up, and deepen discrimination while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to the racism of a previous era. Presenting the concept of the “New Jim Code,” she shows how a range of discriminatory designs encode inequity by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies; by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions; or by aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite. Moreover, she makes a compelling case for race itself as a kind of technology, designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice in the architecture of everyday life. This illuminating guide provides conceptual tools for decoding tech promises with sociologically informed skepticism. In doing so, it challenges us to question not only the technologies we are sold but also the ones we ourselves manufacture. Visit the book's free Discussion Guide: www.dropbox.com

A simple guide to a smarter strategy for the individual investor A Wealth of Common Sense sheds a refreshing light on investing, and shows you how a simplicity-based framework can lead to better investment decisions. The financial market is a complex system, but that doesn't mean it requires a complex strategy; in fact, this false premise is the driving force behind many investors' market "mistakes." Information is important, but understanding and perspective are the keys to better decision-making. This book describes the proper way to view the markets and your portfolio, and show you the simple strategies that make investing more profitable, less confusing, and less time-consuming. Without the burden of short-term performance benchmarks, individual investors have the advantage of focusing on the long view, and the freedom to construct the kind of portfolio that will serve their investment goals best. This book proves how complex strategies essentially waste these advantages, and provides an alternative game plan for those ready to simplify. Complexity is often used as a mechanism for talking investors into unnecessary purchases, when all most need is a deeper understanding of conventional options. This book explains which issues you actually should pay attention to, and which ones are simply used for an illusion of intelligence and control. Keep up with—or beat—professional money managers Exploit stock market volatility to your utmost advantage Learn where advisors and consultants fit into smart strategy Build a portfolio that makes sense for your particular situation You don't have to outsmart the market if you can simply outperform it. Cut through the confusion and noise and focus on what actually matters. A Wealth of Common Sense clears the air, and gives you the insight you need to become a smarter, more successful investor.