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Describes the author's deep friendship with a mysterious intellectual who introduced her to the culture and people of El Salvador in the 1970s, a tumultuous period in the country's history, inspiring her work as an unlikely activist.

Do you know what you want to do when you grow up? Why not work as a babysitter . . . for sloths? Or become a farmer . . . of corpses? You might even grow up to be someone who gets paid to actually sleep on the job! From taste testers to dinosaur dusters, there are all kinds of incredible jobs that you've probably never heard of — and one of them might be just right for you!

Ampiaw challenges old beliefs and brings new understanding to some fundamental doctrines of the Bible. (Christian)

God Has You in His Plans Have you ever gone through something and it made you feel like you were outside the will of God? Have you ever fasted and prayed and your situations or issues never changed? Have you ever been mad at God? Well, today I pray that all your questions will be answered, now that you have this book in your hands, because I believe that it will show you that you have been in God's plans from the very beginning. The reason those things happen to you and the reason your fasting and prayers seemed like they haven't changed anything is not because they don't work but because God was in the process of "fashioning you into a useful vessel," and if you don't understand that there is a time for everything in life and that those times are in God's hands, you'll always feel like you're not a part of God's will. www.minoradjustments.org

2019 National Book Award Finalist "Reading it will change you, perhaps forever.” —San Francisco Chronicle “Astonishing, powerful, so important at this time.” --Margaret Atwood What You Have Heard is True is a devastating, lyrical, and visionary memoir about a young woman's brave choice to engage with horror in order to help others. Written by one of the most gifted poets of her generation, this is the story of a woman's radical act of empathy, and her fateful encounter with an intriguing man who changes the course of her life. Carolyn Forché is twenty-seven when the mysterious stranger appears on her doorstep. The relative of a friend, he is a charming polymath with a mind as seemingly disordered as it is brilliant. She's heard rumors from her friend about who he might be: a lone wolf, a communist, a CIA operative, a sharpshooter, a revolutionary, a small coffee farmer, but according to her, no one seemed to know for certain. He has driven from El Salvador to invite Forché to visit and learn about his country. Captivated for reasons she doesn't fully understand, she accepts and becomes enmeshed in something beyond her comprehension. Together they meet with high-ranking military officers, impoverished farm workers, and clergy desperately trying to assist the poor and keep the peace. These encounters are a part of his plan to educate her, but also to learn for himself just how close the country is to war. As priests and farm-workers are murdered and protest marches attacked, he is determined to save his country, and Forché is swept up in his work and in the lives of his friends. Pursued by death squads and sheltering in safe houses, the two forge a rich friendship, as she attempts to make sense of what she's experiencing and establish a moral foothold amidst profound suffering. This is the powerful story of a poet's experience in a country on the verge of war, and a journey toward social conscience in a perilous time.

Short biographies of 44 people well-known in the 1850s.

“Finally I understand what it is I’ve been laughing at all these years.”—Jimmy Kimmel From the best-selling author of Why Does the World Exist? comes this outrageous, uproarious compendium of absurdity, filth, racy paradox, and gratuitous offensiveness—just the kind of mature philosophical reflection readers have come to expect from the ever-entertaining Jim Holt. Indeed, Stop Me If You’ve Heard This is the first book to trace the evolution of the joke all the way from the standup comics of ancient Athens to the comedy-club Seinfelds of today. After exploring humor’s history in Part One, Holt delves into philosophy in Part Two: Wall Street jokes; jokes about rednecks and atheists, bulimics and politicians; jokes you missed if you didn’t go to a Catholic girls’ school; jokes about logic and existence itself . . . all became fodder for the grand theories of Aristotle, Kant, Freud, and Wittgenstein in this heady mix of the high and low, of the ribald and profound, from America’s most beloved philosophical pundit.

‘If you want to know anything about how music surfaces today, how to find it, or how to create it, you will find what you need right here.’ Joseph Menn, Washington Post writer For the first time in history, almost every song ever recorded is available instantly. Everywhere. This book charts what music’s dazzling digital revolution really means for fans and artists. As a former data guru at the world’s biggest streaming service, Spotify, Glenn McDonald reveals: What the tech giants know about you How they serve up your next song Whether fans can cheat the algorithm Whether jazz is dead and ASMR is the new punk Your chances of becoming a rock star Having analysed the streams of 500 million people, McDonald explores what the data tells us about music and about ourselves, from the secrets of russelåter in Norway to Christmas in the Philippines. Statistically, you have not yet heard your lifetime’s favourite song. This book will take you on a voyage of discovery through music’s fast-flowing new waters. 10 bonus playlists of wonder included! About the Author Glenn McDonald is expertly placed to provide a comprehensive picture of the global music industry in the 2020s. Growing up in 198Os and 1990s America, he was an obsessive collector of physical music – CDs and vinyl albums. But he soon realised the revolutionary power of digital media to make songs more widely accessible. He started doing data work at the US music-intelligence startup The Echo Nest, which was soon acquired by Spotify. He became Spotify's 'Data Alchemist.' His website Every Noise at Once (everynoise.com) is an unprecedented computational map of the world’s music genres. Reviews 'If you want to know anything about how music surfaces today, how to find it, or how to create it, you will find what you need right here. And you will be highly entertained and amused in the process.' – Joseph Menn, Washington Post staff writer and author of All the Rave: The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning's Napster. 'We used to sell CDs by the weight of pallets, thanks to streaming we know how our content is consumed. In this immersive book, Glenn has demonstrated what we can do with this knowledge, so other industries facing their Napster Moment can learn from his unrivalled first mover advantage' – Will Page, author of Pivot and former Chief Economist of Spotify 'I'd say that reading this book is the next best thing to having an in-depth, impassioned, hours-long fika with Glenn McDonald about music and culture and all of the most burning topics of our time... but, I'd be lying. It's even better. This book is a true behind-the-scenes examination of our culture and our industry from the perspective of someone who was in the thick of it from the beginning. It's a history of the streaming era, written by someone who made history in the streaming era." Meg Tarquinio, PhD, Spotify/Twitch/Nettwerk Music Group 'Throughout McDonald's book, personal anecdotes and his own love of music spill out in witty, conversational prose. Even chapters that delve into streaming's complex finances – unsurprisingly, your £15 monthly fee does not go directly to your favourite artist, but is split between that month's "most streamed," meaning that megastars such as Swift and Ed Sheeran stay at the top of the pyramid – are told in layman's terms.' Poppie Platt, The Daily Telegraph Extract CHAPTER 9. MERCENARIES AND FAN ARMIES Where there's an 'economic system,' there's probably fraud. This is not a proud truth to admit about humanity, but it seems to me to have been consistently historically true. Money is supposed to be a bookkeeping mechanism, but it becomes a goal. Fraud and cheating existed in the music business, like any business, long before streaming happened. Back when charts were based on people reporting sales numbers on phone calls, those people could be bribed to say different numbers. Radio DJs could be paid to pretend they were playing a song more because they just liked it. Accounting could be manipulated. Streaming doesn’t necessarily make cheating easier, overall, but it definitely makes it more accessible to introverts. Instead of making phone calls, you can write computer programs that pretend to be streaming-music listeners. Piracy maintains a certain dastardly allure. Streaming music fraud is not, to be brutally honest, the most glamorous or profitable form of dastrardry. Streaming rewards accumulate in tiny micro-transactions, and the software necessary to laboriously accumulate micro-royalties illegitimately isn’t any easier to write than legal software for which you can get paid normal salaries. It only really scales if you become a service-provider selling fraud as a service, and then you’re a business with business problems, instead of a pirate with a rakish eye-patch and the sea air in your hair. If you want to cheat your way to riches, you’re better off trying to do it in junk stocks or cryptocurrencies, where there’s way too much money sloshing around and the distinction between “legitimate” behavior and cheating is fuzzy. So you might have thought that fraud wouldn’t be a big issue in streaming... Buy the book and carry on reading