Sex is love’s fast-forward button. If you’re normal, sooner or later, you’re going to fall in love with the person you’re sleeping with, or they’re going to fall in love with you, whether you like it or not. “Passionate love,” as Jonathan Haidt rightly observes in The Happiness Hypothesis (2006), “is a drug. Its symptoms overlap with those of heroin . . . and cocaine . . . . Passionate love alters the activity of several parts of the brain, including parts that are involved in the release of dopamine. Any experience that feels intensely good releases dopamine, and the dopamine link is crucial here because drugs that artificially raise dopamine levels, as do heroin and cocaine, put you at risk of addiction.” The feelings we develop for someone we’re sleeping with are powerful. This is largely a function of oxytocin, a hormone normally associated with mother-infant bonding. In most mammals, oxytocin is released solely during breastfeeding, where it helps to forge a powerful bond between mother and child. But in certain species, large quantities of oxytocin are also released during sex, where it helps to forge a powerful bond between lovers. In Blueprint (2019), Nicholas A. Christakis maintains that these modifications of the oxytocin reflex are nothing short of astounding: “a set of physiological experiences that originally evolved to facilitate mother-child bonding” have, in our species, evolved to facilitate and support pair-bonding. “The neural circuits that light up in a woman’s brain are similar whether she looks at her baby or her partner.” Evolution seems to have selected for human neediness. This explains the voracious nature of human sexuality. Unlike tigers, bears, and salamanders, who only have sex during the mating season, we have sex all year round. What’s more, we have a great deal of sex that’s clearly not going to result in pregnancy (e.g., gay sex, straight sex after menopause, etc.). Sex’s primary purpose has long since transcended procreation. Sexual desire renders us needy. It takes us out of ourselves and into the world, making hunters of us all. If the greatest friendships fall into our laps serendipitously, like the treasure you find buried in your own backyard, the greatest loves of our lives are like spoils we bring home from the field of battle.

Drawing on his unprecedented access to Grace Kelly, bestselling biographer Donald Spoto at last offers an intimate, honest, and authoritative portrait of one of Hollywood’s legendary actresses. In just seven years–from 1950 through 1956–Grace Kelly embarked on a whirlwind career that included roles in eleven movies. From the principled Amy Fowler Kane in High Noon to the thrill-seeking Frances Stevens of To Catch a Thief, Grace established herself as one of Hollywood’s most talented actresses and iconic beauties. Her astonishing career lasted until her retirement at age twenty-six, when she withdrew from stage and screen to marry a European monarch and became a modern, working princess and mother. Based on never-before-published or quoted interviews with Grace and those conducted over many years with her friends and colleagues–from costars James Stewart and Cary Grant to director Alfred Hitchcock–as well as many documents disclosed by her children for the first time, acclaimed biographer Donald Spoto explores the transformation of a convent schoolgirl to New York model, successful television actress, Oscar-winning movie star, and beloved royal. As the princess requested, Spoto waited twenty-five years after her death to write this biography. Now, with honesty and insight, High Society reveals the truth of Grace Kelly’s personal life, the men she loved, the men she didn’t, and what lay behind the façade of her fairy-tale life.

The sweet rhyming text in Mudpuppy's Love in the Wild Board Book highlights the many different types of love that can be found in the animal kingdom! This colorful celebration of love is based on scientists' observations of same-sex couples, adoption, non-binary gender expression and more. Author-illustrator Katy Tanis is currently earning a MA in Biology from Miami University of Ohio. Her graduate work, partnering with the Wildlife Conservation Society, explores the promotion of conservation biology through art. * 28 pages * Features rhyming text * Trim: 7 x 7", 18 x 18 cm * Greyboard contains 90% recycled paper. Printed with nontoxic inks. * All Mudpuppy products adhere to CPSIA, ASTM, and CE Safety Regulations

A box of 18 chocolates; each on carefully made, painstakingly wrapped and methodically packed. Each chocolate with a unique taste, each one representing a different story. In the box, sits a plethora of colours, a myriad of aspirations, a landscape of experiences. A Box of Chocolates is a collection of short stories that transports the reader into the lives of various individuals, trapped in different psycho-social situations, who require serendipity and a touch of the spiritual in order to obtain freedom. It travels across the fields of love, hatred, oppression, corruption, homosexuality, AIDS, rebellion, spiritualism, slavery, migration, life and ultimately death as it seeks to capture in one snapshot the reality of the helplessness of man when confronted with the unpredictable nature of Fate. Borrowing from Shakespeare "All the world is a stage. And all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and entrances; each man in his time plays many parts." This in itself captures the essence of this collection.

The story of Florence Lanthrop Page provides an opportunity for exporing larger historical questions of class, gender, and social milieu. It contributes to our knowledge of the influence of women in a social order which celebrated the achievements of men. Although she was self-effacing and "a paradigm of good manners" (virtues much admired by her second husband, Thomas Nelson Page), premature womanhood and economic emancipation brought out the decisive, capable, and independent aspects of her personality.