Choosing the things you keep in your life and where you focus your energy is doable, and Gail Golden shows you how. Curating your life means selecting those activities that are most important, meaningful, and joyful for you and fiercely focusing your energy on those endeavors. It also means putting a whole bunch of stuff in the back room, to be reconsidered at another time. Curating your life means sorting your activities into three categories: The things you are not going to do, at least not right now The things you will be mediocre at The things you will be great at This is not simple. But the payoff is amazing. Living a well-curated life is doable. You get to succeed at the things that really matter to you, and you still get to enjoy life. Join Gail Golden on a tour of how to curate your life for success, happiness, and fulfillment.

Imagine what would happen if you spent 0.1% of your time adding value to the other 99.9%. Picture an environment where your experiences don't just happen to you, but are used to make big things happen for you. Could you harness an otherwise overwhelming world of endless information, gratifying moments, and dizzying possibilities? How much social currency could you create if you knew how to capture, organize, and share anything to improve everything? The open secret is that curating your entire existence - or Experience Curating as rising author Joel Zaslofsky calls it - is just as powerful today as it was 2,000 years ago. Experience Curating isn't just about Zaslofsky's unique FAOCAS framework and how to reap its rewards with your favorite tools. It's a three-part blueprint to achieve your own brand of success, complete with real-world case studies from Evernote, The Huffington Post, and even the Brothers Grimm.

Now that we ‘curate’ even lunch, what happens to the role of the connoisseur in contemporary culture?

It’s 1985 in a small factory town near Pittsburgh. Eight-year-old Karen’s parents are lifelong workers at the Anchor Glass plant, where one Saturday, an employee goes on a shooting spree, killing four supervisors, then himself. This event splits the young girl’s life open, and like her mother, she begins to seek comfort in obsessive rituals and superstitions. This beautifully evocative memoir chronicles the next fourteen years, as Karen moves through girlhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. It illuminates small-town factory life; explores a complicated mother-daughter bond; thoughtfully unfolds a smart, but insecure girl’s coming of age; achingly recounts her attempts to use sex to fit in; and ultimately uncovers the buried secret from her childhood—a medical file with an unbearable report. The Girl Factory deftly travels the intersections of memory and origin. Karen’s body remembers details her mind has tried to control. As the young woman mines her interior landscape for answers, certain questions persist. Where does memory live—in the body or the mind? And can you rewrite the story of your past?

From award-winning blogger Melissa Camara Wilkins, come and find a stunningly simple path to confidence and clarity. All you have to do is give yourself permission to show up as your gloriously imperfect self. Trying to fix yourself is exhausting. But being yourself - that is both possible and life-giving. The key is a simple heart-shift from chasing after perfection to learning to tell a truer story about ourselves, the world, and our place in it. Melissa Camara Wilkins invites you into her journey of discovering the profound simplicity of dropping the pretenses and allowing ourselves to be fully human - flaws and all. This is a story about making life simpler by letting go of who you think you're supposed to be and becoming who you really are. With wit and compassion, Melissa explores how to be present, show up as your real self, and get comfortable in your own skin by aligning the truth inside you with the life you live on the outside. Gain confidence with the freeing practices of dropping the mask, abandoning the experts, and understanding your real assignment. With refreshing honesty and insight, Melissa invites you to move from the either/or dichotomy into a spacious freedom of embracing the both/and - brave and scared, messy and real, gloriously imperfect and absolutely enough. This is your permission slip to be your whole, human self. For everyone who feels the pressure to fit in, measure up, and get it together, Permission Granted is a life-giving invitation to soul-level simplicity.

How do history museums and historic sites tell the richly diverse stories of the American people? What fascinates us most about American history? To help answer these questions, noted public historian Richard Rabinowitz examines the evolution of public history over the last half-century and highlights the new ways we have come to engage with our past. At the heart of this endeavor is what Rabinowitz calls "storyscapes--landscapes of engagement where individuals actively encounter stories of past lives. As storyscapes, museums become processes of narrative interplay rather than moribund storage bins of strange relics. Storyscapes bring to life even the most obscure people--making their skills of hands and minds "touchable," making their voices heard despite their absence from traditional archives, and making the dilemmas and triumphs of their lives accessible to us today. Rabinowitz's wealth of professional experience--creating over 500 history museums, exhibitions, and educational programs across the nation--shapes and informs the narrative. By weaving insights from learning theory, anthropology and geography, politics and finance, collections and preservation policy, and interpretive media, Rabinowitz reveals how the nation's best museums and historic sites allow visitors to confront their sense of time and place, memories of family and community, and definitions of self and the world while expanding their idea of where they stand in the flow of history.

Is your closet jam-packed and yet you have absolutely nothing to wear? Can you describe your personal style in one sentence? If someone grabbed a random piece from your closet right now, how likely is it that it would be something you love and wear regularly? With so many style and shopping options, it can be difficult to create a streamlined closet of pieces that can be worn easily and confidently. In The Curated Closet, style writer Anuschka Rees presents a fascinatingly strategic approach to identifying, refining, and expressing personal style and building the ideal wardrobe to match it, with style and shopping strategies that women can use every day. Using The Curated Closet method, you’ll learn to: • Shop smarter and more selectively • Make the most of your budget • Master outfit formulas and color palettes • Tweak your wardrobe for work • Assess garment fit and quality like a pro • Curate a closet of fewer, better pieces Including useful infographics, charts, and activities, as well as beautiful fashion photography, The Curated Closet is the ultimate practical guide to authentic and unique style.

Drawing on his own experiences and inspirations - from staging his first exhibition in his tiny Zurich kitchen in 1986 to encounters and conversations with artists, exhibition makers and thinkers alive and dead - Hans Ulrich Obrist's Ways of Curating looks to inspire all those engaged in the creation of culture. Moving from meetings with the artists who have inspired him (including Gerhard Richter and Gilbert and George) to the creation of the first public museums in the 18th century, recounting the practice of inspirational figures such as Diaghilev and Walter Hopps, skipping between exhibitions (his own and others), continents and centuries, Ways of Curating argues that curation is far from a static practice. Driven by curiosity, at its best it allows us to create the future.

An award-winning scholar and teacher explores how Shakespeare's greatest characters were built on a learned sense of empathy While exploring Shakespeare's plays with her students, Paula Marantz Cohen discovered that teaching and discussing his plays unlocked a surprising sense of compassion in the classroom. In this short and illuminating book, she shows how Shakespeare's genius lay with his ability to arouse empathy, even when his characters exist in alien contexts and behave in reprehensible ways. Cohen takes her readers through a selection of Shakespeare's most famous plays, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and The Merchant of Venice, to demonstrate the ways in which Shakespeare thought deeply and clearly about how we treat "the other." Cohen argues that only through close reading of Shakespeare can we fully appreciate his empathetic response to race, class, gender, and age. Wise, eloquent, and thoughtful, this book is a forceful argument for literature's power to champion what is best in us.

Transporting readers from derelict homesteads to imperiled harbors, postindustrial ruins to Cold War test sites, Curated Decay presents an unparalleled provocation to conventional thinking on the conservation of cultural heritage. Caitlin DeSilvey proposes rethinking the care of certain vulnerable sites in terms of ecology and entropy, and explains how we must adopt an ethical stance that allows us to collaborate with—rather than defend against—natural processes. Curated Decay chronicles DeSilvey’s travels to places where experiments in curated ruination and creative collapse are under way, or under consideration. It uses case studies from the United States, Europe, and elsewhere to explore how objects and structures produce meaning not only in their preservation and persistence, but also in their decay and disintegration. Through accessible and engaging discussion of specific places and their stories, it traces how cultural memory is generated in encounters with ephemeral artifacts and architectures. An interdisciplinary reframing of the concept of the ruin that combines historical and philosophical depth with attentive storytelling, Curated Decay represents the first attempt to apply new theories of materiality and ecology to the concerns of critical heritage studies.