Partisanship is a dirty word in American politics. If there is one issue on which almost everyone in our divided country seems to agree, it's the belief that the intense loyalty within the electorate toward Democrats and Republicans is the source of our democratic ills--division, dysfunction, distrust, and disinformation. The possibilities that responsible partisanship can offer were at the heart of an important intellectual tradition that flourished in the 1950s and 1960s, one which was institutionalized through a sweeping set of congressional reforms in the 1970s and 1980s.

In Defense of Partisanship reimagines what partisanship might look like going forward from today. A new era of party-oriented reforms has the potential to pay respect to the deep differences that divide us--simultaneously creating a more functional path on which two responsible political parties compete to shape policy while still being able to govern.

A problem of twelve arises when a small number of institutions acquire the means to exert outsized influence over the politics and economy of a nation.

The Big Four index funds of Vanguard, State Street, Fidelity, and BlackRock control more than twenty percent of the votes of S&P 500 companies--a concentration of power that's unprecedented in America. Then there's the rise of private equity funds such as the Big Four of Apollo, Blackstone, Carlyle and KKR, which has amassed $2.7 trillion of assets, and are eroding the legitimacy and accountability of American capitalism, not by controlling public companies, but by taking them over entirely, and removing them from public discourse and public scrutiny.

This quiet accumulation in the last few decades represents a dramatic transformation in how the American economy operates--a sea change that few of us have noticed and all of us need to consider. Harvard law professor John Coates forcefully calls our attention to what is sure to be one of the major political and economic issues of our time.

An exciting story about the Revolutionary War veterans who settled Kentucky, Ohio and Cincinnati when it was known as The Miami Slaughterhouse because of the savage depredations by the Miami and Shawnee tribes. Read about: ancient serpent-worshipers; how Cincinnati saved Texas in 1836; the secret Knights of the Golden Circle who plotted to create a slave empire; how Mad Anthony Wayne tamed the Northwest Territory and created Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin; the harrowing adventures of a young boy who was taken by the Shawnees.

Politics today doesn't look much like it did fifty years ago. Electorates that were once divided by economics--with blue-collar workers supporting leftwing parties while the wealthy trended right--are now more likely to split along cultural lines. Campaigns have gone high-tech, hoping to turn electioneering into a science. Meanwhile, a permanent class of political consultants has emerged, with teams of pollsters, message gurus, and field operatives. Taken together, all this amounts to a silent revolution that has transformed politics across much of the globe.

Left Adrift provides a new perspective on this transformation by following the lives of two political strategists who watched it unfold firsthand. Stan Greenberg and Doug Schoen were Zeligs of the international center-left, with an eerie talent for showing up at just the right moment to see history being made. But they could not stand each other. The mutual disdain was, partly, a result of professional jealousy, of decades spent nursing private grievances while competing for the same clients. But it grew out of a deeper conflict, a clash of political visions that raised fundamental questions about democracy itself. Left Adrift is about that battle--and the world it made.

God has entrusted to each of us a very special and powerful friend, our Guardian Angel. As a pure spirit, we cannot see him, but he is by our side day and night, always ready to help us, protect us, inspire us and guide us. Scripture, the saints, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church tell us about the wonderful role the Angels play in our lives. Don't miss the wonderful opportunity to make friends with him and call on him for divine intervention. Let him work in your favor! Don't leave him idle!

Angels love us dearly and never leave us alone! They know God's plan for our lives and they are so willing to help us realize it. How precious this is for us, since we are so easily confused.

This booklet will enrich your daily life tremendously! By reading these beautiful testimonies, joy will flow into your heart, and you will not be able to put it down! You will never feel lonely again once you come to know the Angels!

Germany should have been a global leader in combating climate change--its voters consider it a major issue and back the world's most powerful Green Party. Yet, Germany's climate policies have been disappointing. What happened?

In Climate Radicals, Cameron Abadi profiles the fascinating activists of Letzte Generation, known for gluing themselves to street intersections and throwing food on works of art; Ende Gelande, which demands the immediate phaseout of coal by occupying mines; and the German leaders of the global coalition Fridays for Future, which organizes school strikes (on Fridays) and many other large-scale demonstrations.

Abadi finds that the groups' uncompromising stances and outrage over narrowly defined policy failures have led them to extreme acts of publicity that feed their sense of urgency. In contrast, Joe Biden's American Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 represents the most significant move toward green energy in US history. The law did not impress groups like Letzte Generation, but Climate Radicals shows that old-fashioned political compromise and incremental progress might be the only way for governments to fight climate change.

Should we welcome the end of humanity?

In this blistering book about the history of an idea, one of our leading critics draws on his dazzling range and calls our attention to a seemingly inconceivable topic that is being seriously discussed: that the end of humanity's reign on earth is imminent, and that we should welcome it. Kirsch journeys through literature, philosophy, science, and popular culture, to identify two strands of thinking: Anthropocene antihumanism says that our climate destruction has doomed humanity and we should welcome our extinction, while Transhumanism believes that genetic engineering and artificial intelligence will lead to new forms of life superior to humans.

Kirsch's introduction of thinkers and writers from Roger Hallam to Jane Bennett, David Benatar to Nick Bostrom, Patricia MacCormack to Ray Kurzweil, Ian McEwan to Richard Powers, will make you see the current moment in a new light. The revolt against humanity has already spread beyond the fringes of the intellectual world, and it can transform politics and society in profound ways--if it hasn't already.

In 30 Days to Confident-a 30 Day Confidence Challenge for Female Athletes, Coach Christen Shefchunas guides you on a journey into how to build confidence, to trust that confidence, and then to use it to be successful in sport and in life. You will explore subjects like fear, comparison, perfectionism, body image, and other distractions that can hold you back from being your best and achieving your goals.

Each day over the course of a month, Coach Christen and 30 Days to Confident will give you:

- a short story or lesson

- questions for you to consider

- pages to journal your answers and thoughts

Take the challenge, dare to do the work, and find REAL CONFIDENCE-not just in sports, but in every area of your life. You are worth it.

In 2018, the United States Supreme Court opened the floodgates for states to legalize betting on sports. Eager for revenue, almost forty states have done so. The result is the explosive growth of an industry dominated by companies like FanDuel and DraftKings. One out of every five American adults gambled on sports in 2023, amounting to $121 billion, more than they spent on movies and video games combined.

The rise of online sports gambling--the immediacy of betting with your phone, the ability of the companies to target users, the dynamic pricing and offers based on how good or bad of a gambler you are--has produced a public health crisis marked by addiction and far too many people, particularly young men, gambling more than they can afford to lose. Under intense lobbying from the gaming industry, states have created a system built around profit for sportsbooks, not the well-being of players.

In Losing Big, historian Jonathan D. Cohen lays out the astonishing emergence of online sports gambling, from sportsbook executives drafting legislation to an addicted gambler confessing their $300,000 losses. Sports gambling is here to stay, and the stakes could not be higher. Losing Big explains how this brewing crisis came to be, and how it can be addressed before new generations get hooked.

Losing Big demonstrates how legalized sports betting became a gigantic business, a ceaselessly annoying marketing presence, and a genuine danger to hundreds of thousands of people. --Daniel Okrent, author and inventor of Rotisserie League Baseball

Its capabilities unrivaled and its global reach unmatched, America's military is the envy of the world. Yet, to those in the know, like retired Marine Major General Arnold Punaro, a former Staff Director of the Senate Armed Services Committee, there is compelling need for improvement in its support elements. From the glacial pace of acquisitions to the spiraling growth of the defense agencies to the fully-burdened costs of the All-Volunteer Force, the Department of Defense's non-warfighting elements are not getting enough bang for the buck. Every recent Secretary of Defense has pushed business-minded reforms as a high priority, citing the need to convert overhead to warfighting capacity.

Despite substantial increases in defense spending over the last decades, the number of warfighters is still declining. The Ever-Shrinking Fighting Force lays out, in clear and compelling detail, the major factors that contribute to this adverse trend that has outlasted efforts to reverse it by strong Defense Secretaries and even Presidents.

Drawing on his half-century of experience in national security, Gen. Punaro offers a no-nonsense look at the inefficiencies that have plagued the Pentagon's creeping bureaucracy for decades. With calls for defense reform emanating from both the executive and legislative branches, this timely book provides a road map for thoughtful and balanced improvements.

We live in an age of extreme corporate concentration, in which global industries are controlled by just a few giant firms--big banks, big pharma, and big tech, just to name a few. But concern over what Louis Brandeis called the curse of bigness can no longer remain the province of specialist lawyers and economists, for it has spilled over into policy and politics, even threatening democracy itself. History suggests that tolerance of inequality and failing to control excessive corporate power may prompt the rise of populism, nationalism, extremist politicians, and fascist regimes. In short, as Wu warns, we are in grave danger of repeating the signature errors of the twentieth century.

In The Curse of Bigness, Tim Wu explains how figures like Brandeis and Theodore Roosevelt first confronted the democratic threats posed by the great trusts of the Gilded Age--but the lessons of the Progressive Era were forgotten in the last 40 years. He calls for recovering the lost tenets of the trustbusting age as part of a broader revival of American progressive ideas as we confront the fallout of persistent and extreme economic inequality.

A decade after The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns, which Politico called Moneyball for politics, journalist Sasha Issenberg returns to the cutting edge of political innovation to reveal how campaigns are navigating the era's most pressing challenge: how to win in a world awash in lies.

The Lie Detectives is a lively and deep secret history of Democratic politics in the Trump years. Our main character, Jiore Craig, is a young but battle-hardened veteran of the misinformation wars, and she leads a memorable cast including LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, whose emergence as one of the American left's biggest donors has forced his adviser Dmitri Mehlhorn into the role of moral compass for a movement still wrestling with whether it should counter fake news by producing its own, and David Goldstein and Jehmu Greene, who are confronting the Big Lie, in the vernacular of online conspiracy theories, with gifs, memes, and ugly graphics of their own.

The Lie Detectives presents a vivid snapshot of a political class trying to come to terms with an exploding social media landscape and using every weapon in its arsenal to counter the biggest threat it has ever faced to its way of doing business and winning power.

Cora Atherton wants nothing more than to finally fall in love-real love, not the unrequited sort. When she is invited to attend a house party without her disapproving, overbearing mother, Cora leaps at the chance, desperate to make a match of her own. That is, until she finds that Oliver Cartwell is also attending the party. Oliver, the boy she has loved since she was a girl and the man she is determined to forget.

A house party in the country is just what Oliver needs to distract himself from the shadows of his past. When he discovers that Cora, his sister's best friend, is in need of a little matchmaking, he resolves to help her in her search for a husband. He quickly learns that no man is good enough for her, least of all himself. Why, then, does he find himself fighting his attraction to gentle, beautiful Cora at every step?

As the two draw closer together, Cora is forced to confront the feelings that have tortured her for years. With her future on the line and a deadline fast approaching, can she trust that flirtatious Oliver has changed for the better-or will he leave her heart in pieces once again?

Book two in The Cartwells series, To Charm a Lady is a sweet and clean Regency romance.

Certain aptitudes are emerging among women across the globe at this time. These unusual propensities come directly from the priestess archetype template. They involve an understanding of deep mysteries that span the unseen elements, energetic and spiritual laws, conscious time travel, various dimensional realities and planes of existence. They connect us deeply with who we really are as humans and beyond, our purpose, and the technologies that we carry within us. Not all women are gifted psychics. Not all are intended mystics. This book opens a portal to priestesshood unlike any other so that these aptitudes may awaken, activate, and cultivate in alignment with y/our mission on Earth.

What's Prison For? examines the incarceration part of mass incarceration. What happens inside prisons and jails, where nearly two million Americans are held? Bill Keller, one of America's most accomplished journalists, has spent years immersed in the subject. He argues that the most important role of prisons is preparing incarcerated people to be good neighbors and good citizens when they return to society, as the overwhelming majority will.

Keller takes us inside the walls of our prisons, where we meet men and women who have found purpose while in state custody; American corrections officials who have set out to learn from Europe's state-of-the-art prison campuses; a rehab unit within a Pennsylvania prison, dubbed Little Scandinavia, where lifers serve as mentors; a college behind bars in San Quentin; a women's prison that helps imprisoned mothers bond with their children; and Keller's own classroom at Sing Sing.

Surprising in its optimism, What's Prison For? is an indispensable guide on how to improve our prison system, and a powerful argument that the status quo is a shameful waste of human potential.

Investigative reporter Katie Worth reviewed scores of textbooks, built a 50-state database, and traveled to a dozen communities to talk to children and teachers about what is being taught, and found a red-blue divide in climate education. More than one-third of young adults believe that climate change is not man-made, and science instructors are being contradicted by history teachers who tell children not to worry about it.

Who has tried to influence what children learn, and how successful have they been? Worth connects the dots on oil corporations, state legislatures, school boards, libertarian thinktanks, conservative lobbyists, and textbook publishers, all of whom have learned from the fight over evolution and tobacco, and are now sowing uncertainty, confusion, and distrust about climate science, with the result that four in five Americans today don't think there is a scientific consensus on global warming. In the words of a top climate educator, We are the only country in the world that has had a multi-decade, multi-billion dollar deny-delay-confuse campaign. Miseducation is the alarming story of how climate denialism was implanted in millions of school children.

Marigold Cartwell has only one goal: to defeat her long-time rival on the archery field. She knows she can outshoot irritating, cynical Tristan Gates, but the local bowmen's society-the one he belongs to-refuses to allow women to compete. Spurred on by their rejection, Marigold decides to start a new society. Naturally, it has only one rule: no men.

Tristan Gates is used to Marigold Cartwell always getting her way, so he is far from surprised when she forms her own society. He knows how relentless she can be, something he learned firsthand facing her at the targets. But Tristan has enough worries of his own, what with his bachelor uncle falling in love with a fortune hunter. He has no time to entertain Marigold's ambitions.

However, after a visit to the seashore ends in disaster-and scandal-Marigold and Tristan soon realize how little they know about each other. The strained tension between them quickly turns to simmering attraction, but an important archery competition looms ahead. Lines are drawn all around them, with Marigold and Tristan on opposite sides, and neither can afford to lose. Yet winning might be the very thing to tear them apart.

Book one in The Cartwells series, A Game of Hearts is a sweet and clean Regency romance.

Since Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine, some one million Russians have fled the country and gone into exile. Motivated by opposition to the war, by guilt for their country's deeds, by personal hatred for the Tsar-like Putin, and by a vision of a better Russia, shorn of autocracy, the exiles have mounted an organized resistance to Putin's rule.

The resistance includes followers of Putin opponent Alexei Navalny, dissident Russian Orthodox priests, and journalists feeding Russians back home the kind of coverage that Kremlin-controlled media censors. Most aggressively, some exiles are actively aiding the Ukrainian fight against Russia's armed forces in hopes of hastening Russia's defeat and Putin's demise.

Based on travels to exile communities in Armenia and Georgia, as well as extensive interviews with exiles living in England, France, Germany, Switzerland, and the United States, Paul Starobin, a veteran analyst of Russia, takes the measure of this rebellion--and its potential to fix a nation plagued by revanchist imperial dreams. Putin's Exiles is an indispensable work for anyone trying to understand Russia today--to go beyond Putin's propaganda and the tightly controlled narrative inside the country and look outside its borders to the diaspora of Russian exiles, who are imagining and fighting for the future of their country.

I have no interest in living my life like a China doll.

McKenzie Coan is an elite athlete. A world champion. A Paralympic gold medalist. A world record holder.

And she's not done yet.

In Breaking Free, McKenzie tells how she finds strength through swimming, despite the limited expectations placed on her by having osteogenesis imperfecta, or brittle bone disease. With her graceful freestyle stroke and never-quit attitude, McKenzie breaks through the barriers of disability and lives a life of hope on the Paralympic stage and beyond.

Keep going. It is so worth it. I've had my hard moments in the pool before, too, but keep going. A champion's mindset isn't always about breaking records and winning gold medals. What makes a champion is going out on your lowest day or on the day that you fail or the day that you lose and still giving your all, still giving your best and refusing to quit.