The evolutionary psychology behind human inconsistency We're all hypocrites. Why? Hypocrisy is the natural state of the human mind. Robert Kurzban shows us that the key to understanding our behavioral inconsistencies lies in understanding the mind's design. The human mind consists of many specialized units designed by the process of evolution by natural selection. While these modules sometimes work together seamlessly, they don't always, resulting in impossibly contradictory beliefs, vacillations between patience and impulsiveness, violations of our supposed moral principles, and overinflated views of ourselves. This modular, evolutionary psychological view of the mind undermines deeply held intuitions about ourselves, as well as a range of scientific theories that require a "self" with consistent beliefs and preferences. Modularity suggests that there is no "I." Instead, each of us is a contentious "we"--a collection of discrete but interacting systems whose constant conflicts shape our interactions with one another and our experience of the world. In clear language, full of wit and rich in examples, Kurzban explains the roots and implications of our inconsistent minds, and why it is perfectly natural to believe that everyone else is a hypocrite.

The Happy Hypocrite? Tolstoyevsky is, ideally, like a room full of high-spirited people playing a game, trying to do or say some nonsense, folding embarrassment and losses in translation into part of the exchange. The main portion of the journal is made up of responses to an open call; submissions picked up on cues within two short stories:?Moles & Mice? by Candice Lin, and?Tolstoyevksy?, written by Virginija Januskeviciute about a hospitable man with a house full of books who exclaimed?Oh I have read all your Tolstoyevskys!? when asked what he had read.

Presenting: a reprint in entirety of A Great Book Primer: Essays on Liberal Education, the Uses of Reading and the Rules of Reading, published by the Great Books Foundation, Chicago (1955). Seemingly useless when divorced from the complete series of Great Books, this primer exists as both an archaic set of rules, and open-ended set of possibilities. In this spirit the editing process happens outside the journal in the form of a parley-based art writing festival at the Whitechapel Gallery, London in August 2009, with new commissions selected from invitation and open submission.

A takedown of the GOP’s deceitful propaganda machine from the blogger of Salon’s Unclaimed Territory and the author of the New York Times bestsellers How Would a Patriot Act? and A Tragic Legacy. Ever since the cowboy image of Ronald Reagan was sold to Americans, the Republican Party has used the same John Wayne imagery to support its candidates and take elections. We all know how they govern, but the right-wing propaganda machine is very adept at hijacking debate and marketing their candidates as effectively as the Marlboro Man. For example: Myth: The Republican nominee is an upstanding, regular guy who shares the values of the common man. Reality: He divorced his first wife in order to marry a young multimillionaire heiress whose family then funded his political career. Myth: Republicans are strong on defense and will keep us safe. Reality: They prey on fears, and their endless wars make America far less secure. Myth: Republicans are the party of fiscal restraint and small, limited government. Reality: Soaring deficits, unchecked presidential power, and an increasingly invasive surveillance state are par for their course. The first book to dissect the Republican Cult of Personality and leave it openly exposed in its unabashed, shameful depravity, Great American Hypocrites is a deeply necessary call-out to Democrats to attack the GOP with their competitor’s very own weapons. Praise for Great American Hypocrites “Intelligent, insightful.” —Daily Kos “Glenn Greenwald has done it again.” —Alan Colmes “Glenn Greenwald is a treasure.” —BuzzFlash

From The New Yorker's most entertaining and acerbic wit comes a controversial reassessment of the rituals and events that shape women's lives: weddings, sex, housekeeping, and motherhood.

In the magical kingdom of Evergreen, beautiful Princess Elena is suddenly whisked away by an old woman. Undefeated champion Gallant and shy bookworm Earnest go on a quest to find “the greatest treasure in the land” so one of them can save and marry the princess. Along the way, Earnest and Gallant realize “the greatest treasure in the land” is not what they expected. This is a 28-page, full-color, illustrated children's adventure picture book with a same-sex marriage.

FAMOUS MORAL STORIES FROM PANCHTANTRA

Gonda, a new book by Ursula Mayer and Maria Fusco, experiments in cinematic and linguistic registers through polyphonic monologue. Taking the form of a ciné-roman, the book is based on Mayer's 16mm film of the same name, with a screenplay written by Maria Fusco and commissioned by Film London. Gonda is informed by Ayn Rand's 1934 play Ideal. In the play's script, controversial Russian American writer and philosopher Rand lays out her philosophical system of "Objectivism" with its stubbornly anti-altruistic and individualistic position. As a critical counter to Rand, Gonda creates kaleidoscopic printed spaces in which image and text shift roles to affect presupposed ideals of identity and existence. Noting how the cinematic image actually gazes back on us, the book utilizes highly stylized and precisely composed full-color imagery, and features Dutch transgender model Valentijn de Hingh. The screenplay, printed in full in this book, is developed from a series of interdisciplinary workshops where academics, curators, critics, and writers considered the possibilities of writing through or by rather than about Rand's play. The screenplay's key textual reference is the production structure of Félix Guattari's unrealized 1986 Project for a Film by Kafka, in which Guattari proposed a made-for-television mini-series inspired by episodes in Kafka's writings and life. Gonda cannibalizes original writing and transcribed workshop material together with five letter-based passages from Ideal, nudging them into alternative personal pronouns, to make Gonda a book of voices. Ursula Mayer is an Austrian artist based in London. Working predominantly with film, performance, and photography, her work has been recently shown in the Baltic Triennial, Vilnius; Whitechapel Gallery, London; and Performa, New York. Maria Fusco is a Northern Irish writer, critic, and editor based in London. She is director of art writing at Goldsmiths, University of London, and editor of the journal The Happy Hypocrite. Her book of short stories, The Mechanical Copula, was published by Sternberg Press in 2010.