At OCD the losers are tormented. At Alpha Academy, they're sent home. Skye Hamilton has scored an invitation to the ultra-exclusive Alphas-only boarding school where beta is spelled LBR . What happens when the country's best, brightest, and hawtest begin clawing and scratching their way to the top?

Authentic Fakes explores the religious dimensions of American popular culture in unexpected places: baseball, the Human Genome Project, Coca-Cola, rock 'n' roll, the rhetoric of Ronald Reagan, the charisma of Jim Jones, Tupperware, and the free market, to name a few. Chidester travels through the cultural landscape and discovers the role that fakery—in the guise of frauds, charlatans, inventions, and simulations—plays in creating religious experience. His book is at once an incisive analysis of the relationship between religion and popular culture and a celebration of the myriad ways in which invention can stimulate the religious imagination. Moving beyond American borders, Chidester considers the religion of McDonald’s and Disney, the discourse of W.E.B. Du Bois and the American movement in Southern Africa, the messianic promise of Nelson Mandela’s 1990 tour to America, and more. He also looks at the creative possibilities of the Internet in such phenomena as Discordianism, the Holy Order of the Cheeseburger, and a range of similar inventions. Arguing throughout that religious fakes can do authentic religious work, and that American popular culture is the space of that creative labor, Chidester looks toward a future "pregnant with the possibilities of new kinds of authenticity."

How to be free from the pressure to pretend Have you ever felt like a faker? Facebook, Twitter and Instagram allow us to paint beautiful pictures of our lives. But many of us feel like fakers. If people really knew who we were, what would they think? Would they still care? What would life look like if we stopped pretending? This book not only explores that question, but provides the thrilling answer found in a short story told 2,000 years ago. This richly illustrated book for teens and older brings the power of this exciting story to bear on our modern lives.

In a work rich with colorful anecdotes about family, friends, and colleagues, Sheldon Morgenstern reflects on his childhood in Cleveland, Ohio, summers at the Brevard Music Festival, and years at Northwestern University. He recounts his experiences playing French horn in the Atlanta Symphony, studying conducting at the New England Conservatory, his long tenure as artistic director at the Eastern Music Festival at Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina, and performances as guest conductor with dozens of orchestras around the world. Morgenstern scrutinizes the reasons behind the increasing mediocrity of classical music and the precarious financial state of professional symphony orchestras, many of which have already declared bankruptcy. He sharply criticizes the NEA, the Canada Council, and other arts councils and political groups for the elimination of music education in nearly all public schools. He is also highly critical of Yo-Yo Ma, Shlomo Mintz, Daniel Barenboim, and other superstars who command extraordinary fees for sometimes second-rate performances but do little to teach young artists or to support struggling companies and festivals. He concludes by calling for strong actions that will ensure the economic survival of the arts without sacrificing excellence in performance. Filled with vivid behind-the-scenes descriptions and highlighting such well-known figures as Leonard Bernstein, Glenn Gould, Wynton Marsalis, and others, No Vivaldi in the Garage offers a refreshingly candid insider's perspective on the classical music scene.

Describing the components of lacrosse in a step-by-step fashion, author and coach Jim Hinkson clearly explains and illustrates the most effective ways of mastering individual skills for passing, catching, cradling, and checking, as well as tactics and strategies for winning team play. In addition, the book offers dozens of drills applicable to both coaches and players for refining these techniques and contains specific instruction for both the indoor and outdoor game. Written with precision by one of the world’s leading authorities on playing and coaching lacrosse and featuring numerous illuminating photographs and illustrations, Lacrosse Fundamentals is ideal for coaches, players, parents, and fans of the sport.

Winner of the History of Science Society's Watson Davis and Helen Miles Davis Prize in the History of Science. From the early exploits of Teddy Roosevelt in Africa to blockbuster films such as March of the Penguins, Gregg Mitman's Reel Nature reveals how changing values, scientific developments, and new technologies have come to shape American encounters with wildlife on and off the big screen. Whether crafted to elicit thrills or to educate audiences about the real-life drama of threatened wildlife, nature films then and now have had an enormous impact on how Americans see, think about, consume, and struggle to protect animals across the globe. For more information about the author go to: http://gmitman.com/

Deep Fakes: Algorithms and Society focuses on the use of artificial intelligence technologies to produce fictitious photorealistic audiovisual clips that are indistinguishable from traditional video media. For over a century, the indexical relationship of the photographic image, and its related media of film and video, to the scene of capture has served as a basis for truth claims. Historically, the iconicity of these images has featured a causal traceback to actual light rays in a particular time and space, which were fixed by chemical reactions or digital sensors to the resultant image. Today, photorealistic audiovisual media can be generated from deep learning networks that sever any connection to an actual event. Should society instantiate new regimes to manage this new challenge to our sense of reality and the traditional evidential capacities of the ‘mechanical image’? How do these images generate information disorder while also providing the basis for legitimate tools used in entertainment and creative industries? Scholars and students from many backgrounds, as well as policymakers, journalists and the general reading public, will find a multidisciplinary approach to questions posed by deep fake research from Communication, International Studies, Writing and Rhetoric.