A significant number of Americans spend their weekends at UFO conventions hearing whispers of government cover-ups, at New Age gatherings learning the keys to enlightenment, or ambling around historical downtowns learning about resident ghosts in tourist-targeted "ghost walks". They have been fed a steady diet of fictional shows with paranormal themes such as The X-Files, Supernatural, and Medium, shows that may seek to simply entertain, but also serve to disseminate paranormal beliefs. The public hunger for the paranormal seems insatiable. Paranormal America provides the definitive portrait of Americans who believe in or have experienced such phenomena as ghosts, Bigfoot, UFOs, psychic phenomena, astrology, and the power of mediums. However, unlike many books on the paranormal, this volume does not focus on proving or disproving the paranormal, but rather on understanding the people who believe and how those beliefs shape their lives. Drawing on the Baylor Religion Survey-a multi-year national random sample of American religious values, practices, and behaviors-as well as extensive fieldwork including joining hunts for Bigfoot and spending the night in a haunted house, authors Christopher Bader, F. Carson Mencken, and Joseph Baker shed light on what the various types of paranormal experiences, beliefs, and activities claimed by Americans are; whether holding an unconventional belief, such as believing in Bigfoot, means that one is unconventional in other attitudes and behaviors; who has such experiences and beliefs and how they differ from other Americans; and if we can expect major religions to emerge from the paranormal. Brimming with engaging personal stories and provocative findings, Paranormal America is an entertaining yet authoritative look at a growing segment of American religious culture.

In the spirit of Schott's Miscellany, The Magic of Reality, and The Dangerous Book for Boys comes Can a Bee Sting a Bee?--a smart, illuminating, essential, and utterly delightful handbook for perplexed parents and their curious children. Author Gemma Elwin Harris has lovingly compiled weighty questions from precocious grade school children--queries that have long dumbfounded even intelligent adults--and she's gathered together a notable crew of scientists, specialists, philosophers, and writers to answer them.

Authors Mary Roach and Phillip Pullman, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, chef Gordon Ramsay, adventurist Bear Gryllis, and linguist Noam Chomsky are among the top experts responding to the Big Questions from Little People, ("Do animals have feelings?," "Why can't I tickle myself?," "Who is God?") with well-known comedians, columnists, and raconteurs offering hilarious alternative answers. Miles above your average general knowledge and trivia collections, this charming compendium is a book fans of the E.H. Gombrich classic, A Little History of the World, will adore.

Fake News in Digital Cultures presents a new approach to understanding disinformation and misinformation in contemporary digital communication, arguing that fake news is not an alien phenomenon undertaken by bad actors, but a logical outcome of contemporary digital and popular culture, conceptual changes meaning and truth, and shifts in the social practice of trust, attitude and creativity. Looking not to the problems of the present era but towards the continuing development of a future digital media ecology, the authors explore the emergence of practices of deliberate disinformation. This includes the circulation of misleading content or misinformation, the development of new technological applications such as the deepfake, and how they intersect with conspiracy theories, populism, global crises, popular disenfranchisement, and new practices of regulating misleading content and promoting new media and digital literacies.

Misogyny is a hot topic, yet it's often misunderstood. What is misogyny, exactly? Who deserves to be called a misogynist? How does misogyny contrast with sexism, and why is it prone to persist - or increase - even when sexist gender roles are waning? This book is an exploration of misogyny in public life and politics, by the moral philosopher and writer Kate Manne. It argues that misogyny should not be understood primarily in terms of the hatred or hostility some men feel toward all or most women. Rather, it's primarily about controlling, policing, punishing, and exiling the "bad" women who challenge male dominance. And it's compatible with rewarding "the good ones," and singling out other women to serve as warnings to those who are out of order. It's also common for women to serve as scapegoats, be burned as witches, and treated as pariahs. Manne examines recent and current events such as the Isla Vista killings by Elliot Rodger, the case of the convicted serial rapist Daniel Holtzclaw, who preyed on African-American women as a police officer in Oklahoma City, Rush Limbaugh's diatribe against Sandra Fluke, and the "misogyny speech" of Julia Gillard, then Prime Minister of Australia, which went viral on YouTube. The book shows how these events, among others, set the stage for the 2016 US presidential election. Not only was the misogyny leveled against Hillary Clinton predictable in both quantity and quality, Manne argues it was predictable that many people would be prepared to forgive and forget regarding Donald Trump's history of sexual assault and harassment. For this, Manne argues, is misogyny's oft-overlooked and equally pernicious underbelly: exonerating or showing "himpathy" for the comparatively privileged men who dominate, threaten, and silence women.

A Mayan Priest Reveals What the 2012 Prophecy Really Means for Your Life

Written at the request of the Mayan Elders, by a member of the Guatemalan Elders Council and Mayan priest Carlos Barrios, The Book of Destiny is a tool to help people understand their life purpose and to use this profound knowledge to make the best of their time on earth.

According to the Mayan Elders, at the moment of birth every human being is given a destiny. Our life challenge is to develop ourselves and our skills in order to fulfill this destiny, thus fueling our individual contribution to the planet. At the heart of The Book of Destiny is the sacred Mayan Calendar, an extraordinary tool that allows readers to discover this destiny, along with their special Mayan symbol, origin, and protection spirits that accompany them through life.

The Secrets of Life series is written for everyone who, frankly, needs a spot of cheering up, and will provide conversation starters for years after reading! O'Connor's easy-going, conversational style brings an outsider's questioning eye to the great forces behind life. The third in the four-part series explains how game theory developed, and why it came to show us not only how humans arrive at their decisions, but why so much of the apparently bizarre behaviour of the natural world has the same mathematical logic to it. Instead of the confusion and chaos one might expect in life, O'Connor shows that there are profound reasons behind the choices organisms make when they interact, and how we humans refined this process through the addition of our intelligence and language skills. Starting with the mind-blowing new ways of thinking that Adam Smith opened the world's eyes to, the book progresses to the 20th century-and shows how there's a coherent rationale behind our thought processes-and how this was gradually revealed by scientists at a time when the very future of the world was at stake. As O'Connor unfolds the story in Why Do We All Behave In The Way We Do?, it becomes ever clearer how cooperation has evolved to be the critical force at every level of life. It was what built our world, and it would settle so deeply into the hardwiring of living things that it would eventually become instinctive and innate in us. Perhaps most pleasingly, game theory explains how the benefits of collaboration are bound to ratchet upwards-and how this will inevitably lead to ever-increasing levels of moral behaviour in our societies. It is so often an accepted fact that bad people will win. And yet, as Book Three so clearly explains, collaborative societies are bound to grow, that it's rational to forgive to overcome vendettas and feuds, and that nice folks will always win in life by coming second. Example questions posed (and answered) in Book Three - Why Do All We Behave In The Way We Do? What's Game Theory - and why is it so critical to understanding how to make the right decisions? Why, if humans are so convinced that most of us are bad, are we concerned about being fair in our lives? Why do we value trust so highly? What are the reasons for our surprising wish to care for each other? Why do we share things, even though we might not have to? How did a failed robbery explain human nature? Why can it be rational to be irrational? And why is life like a poker game?

New Lands was the second nonfiction book of the author Charles Fort, written in 1925. It deals primarily with astronomical anomalies. Fort expands in this book on his theory about the Super-Sargasso Sea - a place where earthly things supposedly materialize in order to rain down on Earth - as well as developing an idea that there are continents above the skies of Earth. As evidence, he cites a number of anomalous phenomena, including strange "mirages" of land masses, groups of people, and animals in the skies. He also continues his attacks on scientific dogma, citing a number of mysterious stars and planets that scientists failed to account for.

Exploring how technological apparatuses "capture" invisible worlds, this book looks at how spirits, UFOs, discarnate entities, spectral energies, atmospheric forces and particles are mattered into existence by human minds. Technological and scientific discourse has always been central to the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century spiritualist quest for legitimacy, but as this book shows, machines, people, and invisible beings are much more ontologically entangled in their definitions and constitution than we would expect. The book shows this entanglement through a series of contemporary case studies where the realm of the invisible arises through technological engagement, and where the paranormal intertwines with modern technology.

The Secrets of Life series is written for everyone who, frankly, needs a spot of cheering up, and will provide conversation starters for years after reading! O'Connor's easy- going, conversational style brings an outsider's questioning eye to the great forces behind life. The first book in the four-part series contends that if we set received wisdom to one side and really dig into the facts, there are actually very few 'secrets' in life. Instead, suggesting it's possible to see that from the split second of Big Bang, right up to our present attempts to make the world a better place, everything that's alive has been trying to find strategies to survive the iron Laws of Thermodynamics, to work together to make more from less, and to overcome the constant threat of destructive, entropic forces. How Did Life End Up With Us? delves into explanations as to the reasons behind why cooperation is the strongest force in life, and why altruism is the proof for the 'gene-based theory of evolution'. O'Connor reveals that from the point that life first sparked off some 3.8 billion years ago, every living thing has descended from the original cell by taking blind mutational and genetic 'decisions'. Through The Secrets of Life series, aimed at general readers like himself, O'Connor recognises that life may appear as an endless and violent conflict, yet under the obvious requirement to take one another's energy, there's always been a deeper current that's driving living things to higher and higher levels of cooperation. In other words, the future isn't quite as bleak as you may believe! Example questions posed (and answered) in Book One - How Did Life End Up With Us? Why are mutations like a gambling scam? And why, if DNA is just a bunch of chemical elements, does it behave like a sophisticated hedge fund manager? If DNA is so brilliant at replicating things, then why does the reproduction process make so many mistakes? Why does everything have to die? How were the Beatles witnesses to one of the great scientific breakthroughs? Is natural selection enough to explain evolution?

Does our universe exist inside of a computer? Have the strange phenomena of quantum physics finally been explained? Not IMPOSSIBLE demonstrates that the surprising answer may be Yes But the material world is real we insist, knocking on wood. How can this all be just information inside of a computer? Surely that's impossible Climb aboard as computer science and AI researcher, G. Wells Hanson, takes us on the seemingly impossible journey from our universe, into the depths of a computerized universe. As you ride, your fingers are pried loose from your current ideas of reality. Watch as your material world slowly begins to fade. You will travel through the machinery of the worlds of human thinking, quantum reality, the brain, and the mind. Finally, you enter a universe programmed within a computer, where the strange phenomena that appear there provides an explanation for the mysterious quantum physics that has puzzled humankind for a century. Shaun Holmes, MA, and high school math teacher, describes the book as ...an intellectual thrill-ride that takes us from our everyday world, to a place where I question my very existence...and there's no going back