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.

No American leader has accomplished more for his state than Governor Ron DeSantis. Now, he reveals how he did it. He played baseball for Yale, graduated with honors from Harvard Law School, and served in Iraq and in the halls of Congress. But in all these places, Ron DeSantis learned the same lesson: He didn't want to be part of the leftist elite. His heart was always for the people of Florida, one of the most diverse and culturally rich states in the union. Since becoming governor of the sunshine state, he has fought -and won-battle after battle, defeating not just opposition from the political left, but a barrage of hostile media coverage proclaiming the end of the world. When he implemented evidence-based and freedom-focused COVID-19 policies, the press launched a smear campaign against him, yet Florida's economy thrived, its education system outperformed the nation, and its COVID mortality rate for seniors was lower than that in 38 states. When he enacted policies to keep leftist political concepts like critical race theory and woke gender ideology out of Florida's classrooms, the media demagogued his actions, but parents across Florida rallied to his cause. Dishonest attacks from the media don't deter him. In fact, DeSantis keeps racking up wins for Floridians. A firsthand account from the blue-collar boy who grew up to take on Disney and Dr. Fauci, The Courage to Be Free delivers something no other politician's memoir has before: stories of victory. This book is a winning blueprint for patriots across the country. And it is a rallying cry for every American who wishes to preserve our liberties.

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?

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?

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.

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 second book in the four-part series debates the steps that led to us being so completely different to anything that had ever appeared before. If we really were just another kind of animal off the production line of life, then what were the revolutions that turbo-charged our abilities? How is it possible that we only arrived a fluttering of an eyelash ago compared to evolutionary time, yet we are now so completely dominant over everything else in life? Book Two also sets out to answer the questions around what we did that meant we could alter ourselves in an instant, and so avoid being stuck in an evolutionary niche like every other organism. Why, for example, was it such a huge step forward when we began to run? Why was the taming of fire arguably the most important thing we ever did? How did we manage to create the intelligence and insights that allowed us to make our own life decisions? Why was gossiping so critical? With the same writing approach that typified Book One, in How Did We Get To Be So Different? O'Connor sets out to answer these and other questions by summarising the views of the great biologists, anthropologists, and revolutionary theorists - and then adding some opinions of his own.. Example questions posed (and answered) in Book Two - How Did We Get To Be So Different? If we have a degree of control over our lives, then why were our rulers always so horrible- and why did we put up with them? Why do we copy each other so much, and yet we'd accept that others could be so unbelievably violent? How did fire make us so different? Where did the free will come from that let us override the drives of our animal pasts - something that no other organism had ever managed before in the long history of evolution? How did we develop language? Why was gossip so critical? How did printing and reading completely change our world?