Play Politics

Fair Play is a time- and anxiety-saving system that offers couples a completely new way to divvy up chores and responsibilities. Rodsky interviewed more than 500 men and women from all walks of life to figure out what the invisible work in a family actually entails and how to get it all done efficiently. With four easy-to-follow rules, 100 household tasks, and a series of conversation starters for you and your partner, Fair Play helps you prioritize what's important to your family and who should take the lead on every chore from laundry to homework to dinner.

We've all seen the happiness on the face of a child while playing in the school yard. Or the blissful abandon of a golden retriever racing across a lawn. This is the joy of play. By definition, play is purposeless, all-consuming, and fun. But as Dr. Stuart Brown illustrates, play is anything but trivial. It is a biological drive as integral to our health as sleep or nutrition. We are designed by nature to flourish through play.

Few television shows revolutionized comedy as profoundly or have had such an enormous and continued impact on our culture as In Living Color. Inspired by Richard Pryor, Carol Burnett, and Eddie Murphy, Keenen Ivory Wayans created a television series unlike any that had come before it. In Living Color shaped American culture in ways both seen and unseen. Now, Homey Don't Play That! reveals the complete, captivating story of how In Living Color overcame enormous odds to become a major, zeitgeist-seizing hit.

Revolutionary War officer Nathan Hale, one of America's first spies, said, "Any kind of service necessary to the public good becomes honorable by being necessary." A statue of Hale stands outside CIA headquarters, and the agency often cites his statement as one of its guiding principles. But who decides what is necessary for the public good, and is it really true that any kind of service is permissible for the public good? These questions are at the heart of James M. Olson's book, Fair Play: The Moral Dilemmas of Spying.

When Jon Acuff's book Soundtracks came out, one reaction surprised him. Parents across the country all said the same thing: "Do you have a version for teenagers? If I knew how to change my mindset when I was that age, my entire life would have been different." Why did they say that? Because truth grows like compound interest. Saving money when you're young has a bigger impact than it does when you save in your 40s. A single new soundtrack—Acuff's phrase for a repetitive thought—believed when you're 14 or 18 can change your whole life in the same way.

Macbeth is one of William Shakespeare's more brilliantly populated plays and remains among the most widely read. Award-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom investigates Macbeth's interiority and unthinkable actions with razor-sharp insight, agility, and compassion. He also explores his own personal relationship to the character. The book also becomes an extraordinarily moving argument for literature as a path to and a measure of our humanity.

Doing Time: For the prison writers whose work is included in this anthology, it means more than "serving a sentence"; it means staying alive and sane, preserving dignity, reinventing oneself, and somehow retaining one's humanity. For the last quarter century the prestigious writers' organization PEN has sponsored a contest for writers behind bars to help prisoners face these challenges. The contest honors the best short stories, plays, essays, and poems among hundreds submitted annually by men and women nationwide.

In his provocative new show, Bad Faith, celebrated solo artist Mike Daisey sinks his teeth into a harsh reality: Bad faith is becoming more rampant in today’s culture. From the president and our politics to climate and corporate rule, Daisey unpacks how bad faith - a twisted kind of deception - spreads, why people choose bad faith over goodwill, and how this growing epidemic impacts our lives.

It is 1962: the height of the Cold War and only months after the building of the Berlin Wall. Alec Leamas is a hard-working, hard-drinking British intelligence officer whose East Berlin network is in tatters. His agents are either on the run or dead, victims of the ruthlessly efficient East German counter-intelligence officer Hans-Dieter Mundt.

When We Walk By takes an urgent look at homelessness in America, showing us what we lose—in ourselves and as a society—when we choose to walk past and ignore our neighbors in shelters, insecure housing, or on the streets. And it brilliantly shows what we stand to gain when we embrace our humanity and move toward evidence-based people-first, community-driven solutions, offering social analysis, economic and political histories, and the real stories of unhoused people.

The United States has experienced its share of turmoil over the years. Although not particularly as war-torn or stricken with genocide and violent crime as other nations, over time, gun violence and terror attacks have become commonplace on American soil. Never before has the United States been subjected to widespread coordinated terrorist attacks, devastating enough to bring the entire nation to its knees. Until now.

James Scott taught us what's wrong with seeing like a state. Now, in his most accessible and personal book to date, the acclaimed social scientist makes the case for seeing like an anarchist. Inspired by the core anarchist faith in the possibilities of voluntary cooperation without hierarchy, Two Cheers for Anarchism is an engaging, high-spirited, and often very funny defense of an anarchist way of seeing - one that provides a unique and powerful perspective on everything from everyday social and political interactions to mass protests and revolutions.

Tackling the hottest topics of the times from Feminazis to Environmentalist Wackos, Rush Limbaugh is at his satirical best - the provocative conservative and the showman who is "documented to be almost always right 97.9% of the time" about The Way Things Ought To Be.

Life is boring: filled with meetings and traffic, errands and emails. Nothing we'd ever call fun. But what if we've gotten fun wrong? In Play Anything, visionary game designer and philosopher Ian Bogost shows how we can overcome our daily anxiety; transforming the boring, ordinary world around us into one of endless, playful possibilities. The key to this playful mindset lies in discovering the secret truth of fun and games.

In this classic evaluation of play that has become a “must-listen” for those in game design, Dutch philosopher Johan Huizinga defines play as the central activity in flourishing societies. Like civilization, play requires structure and participants willing to create within limits. Starting with Plato, Huizinga traces the contribution of Homo Ludens, or “man the player” through medieval times, the Renaissance, and into our modern civilization.

Smiley, wrestling with retirement and disillusionment, is summoned to a secret meeting with a member of the Cabinet Office. Evidence has emerged that the Circus has been infiltrated at the highest level by a Russian agent. 'Find the mole, George. Clean the stables. Do whatever is necessary.' Reluctantly Smiley agrees, and so embarks on a dark journey into his past a past filled with love, duplicity and betrayal.

In a world awash with voices claiming divine endorsement, many are led astray, lost in a sea of misinformation and doubt. The world is in turmoil and it's easy to feel lost. Countless believers are ensnared in a web of confusion—unsure about how to engage, vote, and pray in these tumultuous times. How does God see your nation? What is He truly saying? And importantly, are you ready to listen?

Play Money explores a remarkable new phenomenon that's just beginning to enter public consciousness: MMPORGs, or Massively MultiPlayer Online Role-Playing Games, in which hundreds of thousands of players operate fantasy characters in virtual environments the size of continents. With city-sized populations of nearly full-time players, these games generate their own cultures, governments, and social systems and, inevitably, their own economies, which spill over into the real world.

When her pedophile candidate crashes and burns Gia accepts that her life as a hotshot campaign manager is over. Given the profoundly corrupt candidate who is now a shoe-in to win, Logan challenges her to run for the office--something she swore she’d never do. When Logan refuses to take no for an answer, for better or worse, Gia concedes. Shocked at Gia’s entry into what he’d assumed would be a walk in the park campaign, her hapless political opponent brazenly labels Logan her sugar daddy. He ups the ante claiming that Gia sold her body to get his financial support. Given Logan’s ...

The Vagina Monologues is a moving, poignant and often hilarious play, which celebrates female sexuality in all its complexity and mystery. Originally drawn from a collection of interviews conducted by Eve Ensler, the Obie Award-winning play gives voice to some of the most intimate, rarely shared fantasies and fears of women from all walks of life.