Social Games

Twelve-year-old Ben is a shy, quiet kid. His life isn’t perfect, but he feels at home in his New York City apartment. Then his dad takes a job in London, and everything changes. His parents separate, and Ben’s mom moves them back to her hometown of Austin, Texas. Ben’s simple life is suddenly complicated. He misses his apartment, his best friend, Jake, and his dad.

The fifth book in Sarah Levi's thought-provoking series, "Secrets of Pimpology Applied to the Seduction Game," is titled "Aggressive Pickup Artist Tactics For the City: How to Approach and Meet Women." This episode takes a small detour, focusing on the urban setting as an ideal setting for using aggressive pickup techniques. With an arsenal of daring, assertive dating strategies designed especially for the busy, cutthroat dating scenes of big cities, Levi hopes to equip listeners.

Everyone is vulnerable to these secret mind control techniques...Learn how to protect yourself now! Mind control techniques are everywhere. It doesn’t matter how smart or how naturally skeptical you are - you’re still prone to dark psychology tricks because they play upon fundamental human feelings. Your only weapon against psychological manipulators - no matter if salespeople, politicians, or toxic people in your social circle - is knowledge. Once you’re able to see through their tricks, they lose their power.

America's long-standing principles and traditional values are under attack by leftist ideologues who reject them outright and are working hard to replace them. We are fast becoming a nation of socialists, secular humanists, atheists, agnostics, and anarchists who want to tear down every virtue enshrined by our Founding Fathers.

A wall in the distant north cuts the world in two. Ruthless sea borne warriors raid the coasts from their war galleys, yearning to regain lost glories. A young nobleman and his kin are slaughtered under a banner of truce within a mighty castle. A warrior king becomes a legend when he smites his foe with one swing of his axe during a nation-forging battle. Yet this isn’t Westeros–it’s Scotland.

The hardening of racial lines during the first half of the 20th century eliminated almost all African Americans from white organized sports, forcing black athletes to form their own teams, organizations, and events. This separate sporting culture, explored in the 12 essays included here, comprised much more than athletic competition; these “separate games” provided examples of black enterprise and black self-help and showed the importance of agency and the quest for racial uplift in a country fraught with racialist thinking and discrimination.

In Great Games, Local Rules, Alexander Cooley, one of America's most respected international relations scholars, explores the dynamics of the new competition for control of the region since 9/11. All three great powers have crafted strategies to increase their power in the area, which includes Afghanistan and the former Soviet republics of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan. Each nation is pursuing important goals: basing rights for the US, access to natural resources for the Chinese, and increased political influence for the Russians.

The first in a fast-paced, funny series featuring The Stig: Top Gear's legendary racing driver. Sam Wheeler may be the new boy in Bunsfold, but he's got a feeling that all is not well either in the town or at Bunsfold High - and he's not just talking about the maths teacher with the unfortunate flatulence. A local boy, Buster Mustang, has recently gone missing, and no one seems to care - they're all too busy playing the highly addictive video game Xenon or getting the town ready for its very first TT race.

Den unga Vaiana, dotter till hövdingen av Motunui, har alltid dragits till det stora blå havet och drömmer om att segla iväg och upptäcka världen. När en stor fara dyker upp trotsar Vaiana sin fars regel om att hon aldrig får segla utanför korallrevet som omger Motunui. Hon ger sig ut på en strapatsrik segling över havet för att hitta halvguden Maui och rädda världen!

Oral historian and documentary researcher David Wolinsky invites listeners to sit in on a series of urgent, intimate conversations between some of the most distinguished voices across entertainment and media as they reflect on the longstanding impact of Gamergate. What went wrong, and what can we learn from Gamergate to help us build a more equitable online world?

This audiobook is the window into the underground world of cheating at the highest levels, which set off a frenzy of activity and hand-wringing in the offices of Major League Baseball and Congress. Through the authors' pursuit of sources and documents, they were able to open for public view a world in which elite athletes trade money and risk their health for the edge that will allow them to run faster, hit harder, and compete longer, and then cash in on the fame and wealth.

Bill Littlefield (NPR's Only a Game) presents the second installment in the Library of America series devoted to classic American sportswriters, a definitive collector's edition of the pathbreaking writer who invented the long-form sports story.

Olivia Peters is over the moon when her literary idol, the celebrated novelist and much-adored local priest Mark D. Brendan, offers to become her personal writing mentor. But when Father Mark’s enthusiasm for Olivia’s prose develops into something more, Olivia’s emotions quickly shift from wonder to confusion to despair. Exactly what game is Father Mark playing, and how on earth can she get out of it?

Everyone in Lumush’s Nairobi neighborhood knows to stay away from the house on Desai Street. A family died there, and now the place is haunted by strange noises and ghosts in the night. Lumush and his friends, Dado, Mose, and Odush, who spend their free time hanging out by the wreck of an old Zephyr car near the railway yards, begin sneaking into the old house on Desai Street in search of adventure. They soon realize that it’s not ghosts they have to fear but Mwachuma, the malevolent owner of the town junkyard who has his own reputation for violence.

India's relations with the People's Republic of China have captured the popular imagination ever since the 1950s but have rarely merited a detailed understanding of the issues. Individual episodes tend to arouse lively debate, which often dissipates without a deeper exploration of the factors that shaped the outcomes.

Nearly everyone has played chess at some point in their lives. Its rules and pieces have served as a metaphor for society including military strategy, mathematics, artificial intelligence, literature, and the arts. It has been condemned as the devil’s game by popes, rabbis, and imams, and lauded as a guide to proper living by different popes, rabbis, and imams. In his wide-ranging and ever fascinating examination of chess, David Shenk gleefully unearths the hidden history of a game that seems so simple yet contains infinity.

In the mystical realm of Bríandalör, every day the brave and the bold delve into hidden temples or forgotten dungeons, battling vile monsters and evil wizards to loot their treasure hoards for sweet, sweet magic items. But in their free time, our heroes - Thromdurr the mighty barbarian, Devis the shifty thief, Vela the noble paladin, Sorrowshade the Gloom Elf assassin, and Albiorix the (good!) wizard - need to relax and unwind. That’s why they meet up once a week to play a role-playing game where they assume the characters of average American eighth graders.

Play Money explores a remarkable new phenomenon that's just beginning to enter public consciousness: MMPORGs, or Massively MultiPlayer Online Role-Playing Games, in which hundreds of thousands of players operate fantasy characters in virtual environments the size of continents. With city-sized populations of nearly full-time players, these games generate their own cultures, governments, and social systems and, inevitably, their own economies, which spill over into the real world.

Award-winning comedian and popular-science writer Helen Keen uncovers the astounding science behind the mystical, blood-soaked world of Game of Thrones, answering questions like: Is it possible to crush a person's head with your bare hands? What really happens when royal families interbreed? Does Cersei have borderline personality disorder? What curious medical disorder does Hodor suffer from? And more.

Hannah Montana is used to hard work and tough schedules. But Miley Stewart could use a break. Lucky for her, summer is here, and she and the family are heading east to Nantucket, Massachusetts, for some serious R & R. Even better? Lilly and Oliver will be coming, too, although they are going for more educational purposes - their parents want them to get extra credit by completing a science program set on the high seas. But even with learning on the agenda, the friends are stoked.