Science Identity

Martha S. Jones grew up feeling her Black identity was obvious to all who saw her. But weeks into college, a Black Studies classmate challenged Jones’s right to speak. Suspicious of the color of her skin and the texture of her hair, he confronted her with a question that inspired a lifetime of introspection: “Who do you think you are?” Now a prizewinning scholar of Black history, Jones delves into her family’s past for answers. In every generation since her great-great-great-grandmother survived enslavement to raise a free family, color determined her ancestors’ lives.

Marvin the Magnificent, formerly employed by King Parking as his Black (mediocre) Magician, messed up royally when his potion meant to turn Tundra from beast to beauty cast her into a near fatal sleep. After he was banished, the only employment he could get as an unlicensed magician was mixing drinks at the Black Cauldron, a tavern in the Magic Kingdom. After a bit of effort, Marvin announced to his girlfriend he’d come up with something he called Identity Theft. He took on the appearance of the king, and started walking around helping himself to everything…including the queen.

Finding Normal explores how people are using the internet to find community, forge connections, and create identity in ways that challenge a variety of sexual norms. Based on a highly candid interview series conducted for New York magazine's human science column - "What It's Like" - each story in Finding Normal intimately immerses the listener in the world of a person who is grappling with a unique set of circumstances relating to sexuality.

Iris Prince is starting over. After years of drifting apart, she and her husband are going through a surprisingly drama-free divorce. She’s moved to a new house in a new neighborhood, and has plans for gardening, coffee clubs, and spending more time with her nine-year-old daughter Melanie. It feels like her life is finally exactly what she wants it to be. Then, one beautiful morning, she looks outside her kitchen window—and sees that a wall has appeared in her front yard overnight. Where did it come from? What does it mean? And why does it seem to keep growing?

The slippery online ecosystem is the perfect breeding ground for identities: true, false, and in between. The Internet shorthand IRL - "in real life" - now seems naïve. We no longer question the reality of online experiences but the reality of selfhood in the digital age. In The Secret Life, the essayist and novelist Andrew O'Hagan issues three bulletins from the porous border between cyberspace and IRL.

Identical twins Isabella and Hà were born in Vietnam and raised on opposite sides of the world, each knowing little about the other’s existence, until they were reunited as teenagers, against all odds. Award-winning journalist Erika Hayasaki spent years and hundreds of hours interviewing each of the birth and adoptive family members and tells the girls’ incredible story from their perspectives, challenging conceptions about adoption and what it means to give a child a good life.

While people used to conceal the fact that they were gay or lesbian to protect themselves from stigma and discrimination, it is now commonplace for people to "come out" and encourage others to do so as well. Come Out, Come Out, Whoever You Are systematically examines how coming out has moved beyond gay and lesbian rights groups and how different groups wrestle with the politics of coming out in their efforts to resist stigma and enact social change. It shows how different experiences and disparate risks of disclosure shape these groups' collective strategies.

Our society is undergoing an evolution, and we should take this as a call to action to ensure that all people, regardless of gender identity, sexual orientation, ability, age, ethnicity, race, religion, or social class, are treated as humans worthy of respect.

A move at age ten from a Detroit suburb to Chattanooga in 1984 thrusts Anjali Enjeti into what feels like a new world replete with Confederate flags, Bible verses, and whiteness. It is here that she learns how to get her bearings as a mixed-race brown girl in the Deep South and begins to understand how identity can inspire, inform, and shape a commitment to activism. Her own evolution is a bumpy one, and along the way Enjeti, racially targeted as a child, must wrestle with her own complicity in white supremacy and bigotry as an adult.

Chased by the Memory is a story about the ongoing search for family and love, and the inner arguments about the human desire to connect to something, even to the land. It is an investigation of the ethical and physical lessons that a person can learn by paying attention to his or her childhood. The book is an attempt to rekindle the spark of being mindful of place as we struggle to find and build our identity.

Original and expansive, Asian American Histories of the United States is a nearly 200-year history of Asian migration, labor, and community formation in the US. Reckoning with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the surge in anti-Asian hate and violence, award-winning historian Catherine Ceniza Choy presents an urgent social history of the fastest growing group of Americans. The book features the lived experiences and diverse voices of immigrants, refugees, US-born Asian Americans, multiracial Americans, and workers from industries spanning agriculture to healthcare.

As we approach 2050, it is projected that human consciousness will encounter a superior intelligence for the very first time: artificial machine intelligence. It is important for us to understand the evolutionary impact of this event, but also that we are being altered from the inside out for the singularity to arise.

In Real Americans, Jared A. Goldstein boldly challenges the conventional wisdom that a shared devotion to the Constitution is the essence of what it means to be American.

A boy is plunged into a quest within a mysterious world. When he uncovers a dark conspiracy, he realizes he must find his true identity to find his way home...

In Privilege Lost, Jessi Streib traces the lives of over 100 youth born into the upper-middle-class. Following them for over 10 years as they transition from teens to young adults, Streib examines who falls from the upper-middle-class, how, and why don't they see it coming. In doing so, she reveals the patterned ways that individuals' resources and identities push them onto mobility paths - and the complicated choices youth make between staying true to themselves and staying in their class position.

At the age of 27, Sarah Valentine discovered that she was not, in fact, the White girl she had always believed herself to be. She learned the truth of her paternity: that her father was a Black man. And she learned the truth about her own identity: mixed race. And so Sarah began the difficult and absorbing journey of changing her identity from White to Black. In this memoir, Sarah details the story of the discovery of her identity, how she overcame depression to come to terms with this identity, and, perhaps most importantly, asks: why?

Rebuilding a life while still missing an identity isn't easy, but that's what Adara's determined to do. It's why she's been ignoring the overtures from an elegant vampire and the stalking by an overprotective werewolf. However, when a mysterious presence begins to haunt her memories - and dreams - wakening a primal terror, she has no choice but to ask for help. The problem is, unraveling her secret past seems to be triggering demon attacks. Someone doesn't want her finding answers.

Twelve-year-old Korean American adoptee Emma Davidson has a problem. Two problems. Okay, three: 1. She has a crush on her best friend, Avangeline, that she hasn’t been able to share. 2. Avangeline now has to move out of their town because her parents are getting a divorce. 3. Oh, and Emma is a secret witch who can’t really control her powers. It’s a complicated summer between sixth and seventh grade. Emma’s parents made her promise that she’d keep her powers a secret and never, ever use them. But if Avangeline’s parents fell back in love, it would fix everything.

Muchas personas no llegan a vivir su sexualidad en congruencia con su identidad por haber sufrido traumas sexuales, traumas de relación y traumas de amor. Confunden su identidad con la identificación con otros, en muchos casos con el autor de su trauma. Su sexualidad está marcada por esa identificación. En esta obra el autor, al cual avala una experiencia de veinticinco años como terapeuta, expone que hay muchos más traumas sexuales de los que creemos, puesto que muchas veces los abusos sexuales tienen lugar en el propio seno de la familia.

Modern life calls for modern relationship advice. Sex from Scratch is a love and dating guidebook that gleans real-life knowledge from smart people in a variety of nontraditional relationships. Instead of telling people how to snag a man, seduce a woman, or find "true love", the book sums up what dozens of diverse folks have learned the hard way over time. Sarah Mirk offers tips and stories from the steadfastly single to people making open relationships work, from people who've decided they're never going to have kids to parents.