Politics Entertainment

The protagonist of Just Do It is Phil Knight, a reclusive billionaire who started a two-man operation importing Japanese running shoes and built it into a $4 billion company. Irreverent, unpredictable, and leery of the sports establishment, Knight created the most muscular jock culture in business, a place where employees routinely took two hours at lunch to work out and then strategized late into the night in their holy war against competitors Reebok and Adidas.

Is the top still spinning? Was it all a dream? In the world of Christopher Nolan's four-time Academy Award-winning movie, people can share one another's dreams and alter their beliefs and thoughts. Inception is a metaphysical heist film that raises more questions than it answers: Can we know what is real? Can you be held morally responsible for what you do in dreams? What is the nature of dreams, and what do they tell us about the boundaries of "self" and "other"?

The American guy is not to be confused with a husband, father, hunk, or intellectual, says guy expert Dave Barry. Published just in time (the American guy faces extinction due to feminism, the men's movement, and stricter sanitation laws), this guide gives women helpful advice for understanding Him (or It) and offers men useful tips on remembering the names of their children and other dilemmas of life.

Who volunteers? Why? What are you willing to do? This title presents the hilarious, heartwarming adventures of a volunteering cynic. Do the feel-good rewards commensurate with the time and effort involved? When Seb Hunter accidentally picks up the phone to a charity Fundraiser one day, he faces a moment of reckoning. It isn't so much that he lacks a social conscience; but he can no longer assuage it by buying the odd copy of the Big Issue and eating Fairtrade chocolate.

Here is the epic human drama behind the making of the five movies nominated for Best Picture in 1967 - Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, The Graduate, In the Heat of the Night, Doctor Dolittle, and Bonnie and Clyde - and through them, the larger story of the cultural revolution that transformed Hollywood and America forever.

Today both reality and entertainment crowd our fields of vision with brutal imagery. The pervasiveness of images of torture, horror, and war has all but demolished the 20th-century hope that such imagery might shock us into a less alienated state, or aid in the creation of a just social order. What to do now? When to look, when to turn away? Genre-busting author Maggie Nelson brilliantly navigates this contemporary predicament, with an eye to the question of whether or not focusing on representations of cruelty makes us cruel.

From Mae West and Lenny Bruce to Richard Pryor and Howard Stern to Kathy Griffith and Kevin Hart, comedians have long been under fire for using provocative, often taboo subjects to challenge mores and get a laugh. But in the age of social media, comedians are at greater risk of being silenced, enduring shaming, threats, and damaged careers because of angry, censorious electronic mobs.

The Queen of Urban Airwaves and VH1 host, Wendy Williams, dishes up juicy revelations and insider stories without batting a false eyelash.

Theophrastus' Characters is a joyous festival of fault-finding: a collection of thirty closely observed personality portraits, defining the full spectrum of human flaws, failings, and follies. With piquant details of speech and behavior taken straight off the streets of ancient Athens, Theophrastus gives us sketches of the mean, vile, and annoying that are comically distorted yet vividly real. Enlivened by Pamela Mensch's fresh translation, Theophrastus' Characters transports us to a world populated by figures of flesh and blood, not bronze and marble.

Seth Grahame-Smith delivers the definitive, essential guide to making it through a horror movie in one piece. As hilarious as it is useful (if you’re trapped in a scary flick, that is), How to Survive a Horror Movie covers all the bases. Trapped in a haunted house? Check. Stalked by an evil doll? Check. Wandering aimlessly through the remains of the old world as a plague of zombies sweeps over the planet? Check.

Can't Slow Down is the definitive portrait of the exploding world of mid-80s pop and the time it defined, from Cold War anxiety to the home-computer revolution. The story of that thrilling, turbulent time, an era when Top 40 radio was both the leading edge of popular culture and a moral battleground, has never been told with the full detail it deserves - until now.

Featuring an enlightening introduction by the book's translator, Michael T. H. Sadler, providing generational and cultural context for Kandinsky and his work, Concerning the Spiritual in Art gives testimony to the mind and creative expression of Kandinsky and other artists of his generation. This seminal and thought-provoking book exploring the heart of the artistic endeavor belongs in the library of every serious artist and student of modern art.

Hit the lights and jump in the fire, you're about to enter the School of Rock! Today's lecture will be a crash course in brain surgery. This hard and fast lesson is taught by instructors who graduated from the old school - they actually paid $5.98 for The $5.98 EP. But back before these philosophy professors cut their hair, they were lieutenants in the Metal Militia.

For 15 years and 35 seasons, the Bachelor franchise has been a mainstay in American TV viewers' lives. Since it premiered in 2002, the show's popularity and relevance has only grown - more than eight million viewers tuned in to see the conclusion of the most recent season of The Bachelor. The iconic reality television show's reach and influence into the cultural zeitgeist is undeniable. Bachelor Nation is the first behind-the-scenes, unauthorized look into the reality television phenomenon.

An original journalist for The Source, Dan Charnas built a celebrated career in the rap industry. In The Big Payback, he chronicles the rise of the hip-hop culture and shows how it became so powerful in a matter of decades. Charnas also profiles many of the movers and shakers in this burgeoning cultural movement, offering unprecedented access to an industry that continues to shake the globe.

We live in an age of the mobile image. This recent kinetic revolution of the image has enormous consequences not only for the way we think about contemporary art and aesthetics but also for art history as well. Responding to this historical moment, Theory of the Image offers a fresh new theory and history of art from the perspective of this epoch-defining mobility. The image has been understood in many ways, but it is rarely understood to be fundamentally in motion.

Following her retirement from Princeton University, celebrated historian Dr. Nell Irvin Painter surprised everyone in her life by returning to school - in her 60s - to earn a BFA and MFA in painting. In Old in Art School, she travels from her beloved Newark to the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design; finds meaning in the artists she loves, even as she comes to understand how they may be undervalued; and struggles with the unstable balance between the pursuit of art and the inevitable, sometimes painful, demands of a life fully lived.

Most of us know Harold Ramis as the filmmaker and actor who brought warmth and humor to the big screen in classics like Caddyshack, Ghostbusters, National Lampoon's Vacation, Groundhog Day, and National Lampoon's Animal House. To Violet Ramis, he was best known as an amazing father, confidant, and friend. In Ghostbuster's Daughter, Violet reflects on the life and legacy of her father, providing listeners with an extraordinarily candid and insightful look into the man who helped shape modern American comedy.

From its first publication in 1992, Men, Women, and Chain Saws has offered a groundbreaking perspective on the creativity and influence of horror cinema since the mid-1970s. Investigating the popularity of the low-budget tradition, Carol Clover looks in particular at slasher, occult, and rape-revenge films. Although such movies have been traditionally understood as offering only sadistic pleasures to their mostly male audiences, Clover demonstrates that they align spectators not with the male tormentor, but with the females tormented.

Many bemoan the decay of culture. But we all have a responsibility to care for culture, to nurture it in ways that help people thrive. In Culture Care artist Makoto Fujimura issues a call to cultural stewardship, in which we become generative and feed our culture's soul with beauty, creativity, and generosity. We serve others as cultural custodians of the future. This is a book for artists, but artists come in many forms.