On December 1, 1930, W K Kellogg replaced the three daily eight-hour shifts in his cereal plant with four six-hour shifts. By adding on a new shift he created jobs. When World War II ended, Kellogg's managers abandoned the six-hour shift and began to define progress as more work for more people. This book documents the struggle of workers.

From the duo behind the massively successful and award-winning podcast Stuff You Should Know comes an unexpected look at things you thought you knew. Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant started the podcast Stuff You Should Know back in 2008 because they were curious—curious about the world around them, curious about what they might have missed in their formal educations, and curious to dig deeper on stuff they thought they understood. As it turns out, they aren't the only curious ones. They've since amassed a rabid fan base, making Stuff You Should Know one of the most popular podcasts in the world. Armed with their inquisitive natures and a passion for sharing, they uncover the weird, fascinating, delightful, or unexpected elements of a wide variety of topics. The pair have now taken their near-boundless "whys" and "hows" from your earbuds to the pages of a book for the first time—featuring a completely new array of subjects that they’ve long wondered about and wanted to explore. Each chapter is further embellished with snappy visual material to allow for rabbit-hole tangents and digressions—including charts, illustrations, sidebars, and footnotes. Follow along as the two dig into the underlying stories of everything from the origin of Murphy beds, to the history of facial hair, to the psychology of being lost. Have you ever wondered about the world around you, and wished to see the magic in everyday things? Come get curious with Stuff You Should Know. With Josh and Chuck as your guide, there’s something interesting about everything (...except maybe jackhammers).

***2017 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist for Nonfiction*** "What's more American than Corn Flakes?" —Bing Crosby From the much admired medical historian (“Markel shows just how compelling the medical history can be”—Andrea Barrett) and author of An Anatomy of Addiction (“Absorbing, vivid”—Sherwin Nuland, The New York Times Book Review, front page)—the story of America’s empire builders: John and Will Kellogg. John Harvey Kellogg was one of America’s most beloved physicians; a best-selling author, lecturer, and health-magazine publisher; founder of the Battle Creek Sanitarium; and patron saint of the pursuit of wellness. His youngest brother, Will, was the founder of the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company, which revolutionized the mass production of food and what we eat for breakfast. In The Kelloggs, Howard Markel tells the sweeping saga of these two extraordinary men, whose lifelong competition and enmity toward one another changed America’s notion of health and wellness from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, and who helped change the course of American medicine, nutrition, wellness, and diet. The Kelloggs were of Puritan stock, a family that came to the shores of New England in the mid-seventeenth century, that became one of the biggest in the county, and then renounced it all for the religious calling of Ellen Harmon White, a self-proclaimed prophetess, and James White, whose new Seventh-day Adventist theology was based on Christian principles and sound body, mind, and hygiene rules—Ellen called it “health reform.” The Whites groomed the young John Kellogg for a central role in the Seventh-day Adventist Church and sent him to America’s finest Medical College. Kellogg’s main medical focus—and America’s number one malady: indigestion (Walt Whitman described it as “the great American evil”). Markel gives us the life and times of the Kellogg brothers of Battle Creek: Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and his world-famous Battle Creek Sanitarium medical center, spa, and grand hotel attracted thousands actively pursuing health and well-being. Among the guests: Mary Todd Lincoln, Amelia Earhart, Booker T. Washington, Johnny Weissmuller, Dale Carnegie, Sojourner Truth, Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and George Bernard Shaw. And the presidents he advised: Taft, Harding, Hoover, and Roosevelt, with first lady Eleanor. The brothers Kellogg experimented on malt, wheat, and corn meal, and, tinkering with special ovens and toasting devices, came up with a ready-to-eat, easily digested cereal they called Corn Flakes. As Markel chronicles the Kelloggs’ fascinating, Magnificent Ambersons–like ascent into the pantheon of American industrialists, we see the vast changes in American social mores that took shape in diet, health, medicine, philanthropy, and food manufacturing during seven decades—changing the lives of millions and helping to shape our industrial age.

Eliminate toxins from your diet and transform the way you feel in just 21 days with this national bestseller full of shopping lists, meal plans, and mouth-watering recipes. Did you know that your fast food fries contain a chemical used in Silly Putty? Or that a juicy peach sprayed heavily with pesticides could be triggering your body to store fat? When we go to the supermarket, we trust that all our groceries are safe to eat. But much of what we're putting into our bodies is either tainted with chemicals or processed in a way that makes us gain weight, feel sick, and age before our time. Luckily, Vani Hari -- aka the Food Babe -- has got your back. A food activist who has courageously put the heat on big food companies to disclose ingredients and remove toxic additives from their products, Hari has made it her life's mission to educate the world about how to live a clean, organic, healthy lifestyle in an overprocessed, contaminated-food world, and how to look and feel fabulous while doing it. In The Food Babe Way, Hari invites you to follow an easy and accessible plan that will transform the way you feel in three weeks. Learn how to: Remove unnatural chemicals from your diet Rid your body of toxins Lose weight without counting calories Restore your natural glow Including anecdotes of her own transformation along with easy-to-follow shopping lists, meal plans, and tantalizing recipes, The Food Babe Way will empower you to change your food, change your body, and change the world.

In 1963, Daisy Zick was stabbed twenty-seven times at her home in Battle Creek, Michigan—and locals are still talking about the unsolved case today. On a bitterly cold morning in January 1963, Daisy Zick was brutally murdered in her Battle Creek, Michigan, home. No fewer than three witnesses caught a glimpse of the killer, yet today, it remains one of the state’s most sensational unsolved crimes. The act of pure savagery rocked the community, as well as the Kellogg Company where Zick worked. Here, Blaine Pardoe offers a detailed chronicle of this shocking and mysterious crime. With long-sealed police files and interviews with the surviving investigators, the true story of the investigation can finally be told. Who were the key suspects? What evidence do the police still have on this cold case more than fifty years later? Just how close did this murder come to being solved? Is the killer still alive? These questions and more are masterfully brought to the forefront for true crime fans and armchair detectives.

Blends history and memoir in an account that in alternating chapters explores the author's quest to understand the impact of his brothers on his life and the complex relationships between iconic brothers, including the Thoreaus, the Van Goghs, and the Marxes.

"An extraordinarily informative scholarly history of the debate over working hours from 1920 to 1940." --New York Times Book Review For more than a century preceding the Great Depression, work hours were steadily reduced. Intellectuals, labor leaders, politicians, and workers saw this reduction in work as authentic progress and the resulting increase in leisure time as a cultural advance. Benjamin Hunnicutt examines the period from 1920 to 1940 during which the shorter hour movement ended and the drive for economic expansion through increased work took over. He traces the political, intellectual, and social dialogues that changed the American concept of progress from dreams of more leisure in which to pursue the higher things in life to an obsession with the importance of work and wage-earning. During the 1920s with the development of advertising, the "gospel of consumption" began to replace the goal of leisure time with a list of things to buy. Business, which increasingly viewed shorter hours as a threat to economic growth, persuaded the worker that more work brought more tangible rewards. The Great Depression shook the newly proclaimed gospel as well as everyone's faith in progress. Although work-sharing became a temporary solution to the shortage of jobs and massive unemployment, when faced with legislation that would limit the work week to thirty hours, Roosevelt and his New Deal advisors adopted the gospel of consumption's tests for progress and created more work by government action. The New Deal campaigned for the right to work a full time job--and won. "Work Without End presents a compelling history of the rise and fall of the 40-hour work week, explains bow Americans became trapped in a prison of work that allows little room for family, bobbies or civic participation and suggests bow they can free themselves from relentless overwork. [This book] is a sober reconsideration of a topic that is critical to America's future. It suggests that progress doesn't mean much if there is not time for love as well as work, and liberation is an empty achievement if the work it frees one to do is truly without end." --The Washington Post "Hunnicutt, with this excellent book, becomes the first United States historian to examine fully why this momentous change occurred." --The Journal of American History "Hunnicutt's achievement is to ask the questions, and to provide the first extended answer which takes in the full array of economic, social, and political forces behind the ‘end of shorter hours' in the crucial first half of the twentieth century." --Journal of Economic History "This thoroughly documented history [is] a valuable book well worth reading." --Libertarian Labor Review "This is an important book in the emerging debate about alternatives to full employment. Hunnicutt is a skilled historian who is on to an important issue, writes well, and can bring many different kinds of historical sources to bear on the problem." --Fred Block, University of Pennsylvania "Work Without End is a disturbing but impressive indictment of both big business and the New Deal program of Franklin D. Roosevelt.... Hunnicutt presents an unusual but persuasive description of a successful conspiracy to deprive American workers of their vision of a shorter-hours work week and the individual and societal liberation which would flow from it." --Labor Studies Journal

A celebration of the brave, drunken pioneers who built our civilization one seemingly bad decision at a time, A Brief History of Vice explores a side of the past that mainstream history books prefer to hide. History has never been more fun—or more intoxicating. Guns, germs, and steel might have transformed us from hunter-gatherers into modern man, but booze, sex, trash talk, and tripping built our civilization. Cracked editor Robert Evans brings his signature dogged research and lively insight to uncover the many and magnificent ways vice has influenced history, from the prostitute-turned-empress who scored a major victory for women’s rights to the beer that helped create—and destroy—South America's first empire. And Evans goes deeper than simply writing about ancient debauchery; he recreates some of history's most enjoyable (and most painful) vices and includes guides so you can follow along at home. You’ll learn how to: • Trip like a Greek philosopher. • Rave like your Stone Age ancestors. • Get drunk like a Sumerian. • Smoke a nose pipe like a pre–Columbian Native American. “Mixing science, humor, and grossly irresponsible self-experimentation, Evans paints a vivid picture of how bad habits built the world we know and love.”—David Wong, author of John Dies at the End