On any given day in America's news cycle, stories and images of disgraced politicians and celebrities solicit our moral indignation, their misdeeds fueling a lucrative economy of shame and scandal. Shame is one of the most coercive, painful, and intriguing of human emotions. Only in recent years has interest in shame extended beyond a focus on the subjective experience of this emotion and its psychological effects. The essays collected here consider the role of shame as cultural practice and examine ways that public shaming practices enforce conformity and group coherence. Addressing abortion, mental illness, suicide, immigration, and body image among other issues, this volume calls attention to the ways shaming practices create and police social boundaries; how shaming speech is endorsed, judged, or challenged by various groups; and the distinct ways that shame is encoded and embodied in a nation that prides itself on individualism, diversity, and exceptionalism. Examining shame through a prism of race, sexuality, ethnicity, and gender, these provocative essays offer a broader understanding of how America's discourse of shame helps to define its people as citizens, spectators, consumers, and moral actors.

On 8 March 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 took off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport bound for Beijing. Less than an hour after take-off, somewhere over the South China Sea the plane simply vanished. One eyewitness saw a burning object crash into the sea. But confusing radar signals trace tracked an aircraft taking an erratic course across the Malaysian peninsula, then on to the Andaman Sea. Did it crash there? Or did it fly on to land safely in disputed lands of Central Asia, or the top secret CIA 'black site' on Diego Garcia? Data from the Rolls Royce engines tracked by Inmarsat was said to indicate that it might have ditched in the furthest reaches of the South Indian Ocean. We know more about the surface of the moon than the bottom of the sea there. And the weather and currents are so bad, it may never be found. Convenient? Two years later, the Australians are still search - at the cost of billions - and have found nothing. But was the search in such a remote place part of a cover-up to distract the world's attention because the US Navy had, in fact, shot the plane down?Since the invention of radio, radar, satellite navigation and the internet, the world has become a smaller place. The answer must be out there. Or, perhaps, hidden within the pages of the secret files.

For nine years the popular website Futility Closet has collected arresting curiosities in history, literature, language, art, philosophy, and mathematics. This book presents the best of them: pipe-smoking robots, clairvoyant pennies, zoo jailbreaks, literary cannibals, corned beef in space, revolving squirrels, disappearing Scottish lighthouse keepers, reincarnated pussycats, dueling Churchills, horse spectacles, onrushing molasses, and hundreds more. Plus the obscure words, odd inventions, puzzles and paradoxes that have made the website a quirky favorite with millions of readers -- hundreds of examples of the marvelous, the diverting, and the strange, now in a portable format to occupy your idle hours.