Be Kind


Book Description

A thoughtful picture book illustrating the power of small acts of kindness, from the award-winning author of Sophie's Squash.




Stuff


Book Description

The New York Times bestseller. “Gripping . . . By turns fascinating and heartbreaking . . . Stuff invites readers to reevaluate their desire for things.”—Boston Globe “Amazing . . . utterly engrossing . . . Read it.”—The Washington Post Book World What possesses someone to save every scrap of paper that’s ever come into his home? What compulsions drive a person to sacrifice her marriage or career for an accumulation of seemingly useless things? Randy Frost and Gail Steketee were the first to study hoarding when they began their work a decade ago. They didn’t expect that they would end up treating hundreds of patients and fielding thousands of calls from the families of hoarders. Their vivid case studies (reminiscent of Oliver Sacks) in Stuff show how you can identify a hoarder—piles on sofas and beds that make the furniture useless, houses that can be navigated only by following small paths called goat trails, vast piles of paper that the hoarders “churn” but never discard, even collections of animals and garbage—and illuminate the pull that possessions exert over all of us. Whether we’re savers, collectors, or compulsive cleaners, very few of us are in fact free of the impulses that drive hoarders to extremes. “Authoritative, haunting, and mysterious. It is also intensely, not to say compulsively readable.”—Tracy Kidder, Pulitzer Prize-winning author “Fascinating . . . a good mix of cultural and psychological theories on hoarding.”—Newsweek “Pioneering researchers offer a superb overview of a complex disorder that interferes with the lives of more than six-million Americans . . . An absorbing, gripping, important report.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)




How to Get People to Do Stuff


Book Description

We all want people to do stuff. Whether you want your customers to buy from you, vendors to give you a good deal, your employees to take more initiative, or your spouse to make dinner—a large amount of everyday is about getting the people around you to do stuff. Instead of using your usual tactics that sometimes work and sometimes don't, what if you could harness the power of psychology and brain science to motivate people to do the stuff you want them to do - even getting people to want to do the stuff you want them to do. In this book you’ll learn the 7 drives that motivate people: The Desire For Mastery, The Need To Belong, The Power of Stories, Carrots and Sticks, Instincts, Habits, and Tricks Of The Mind. For each of the 7 drives behavioral psychologist Dr. Susan Weinschenk describes the research behind each drive, and then offers specific strategies to use. Here’s just a few things you will learn: The more choices people have the more regret they feel about the choice they pick. If you want people to feel less regret then offer them fewer choices. If you are going to use a reward, give the reward continuously at first, and then switch to giving a reward only sometimes. If you want people to act independently, then make a reference to money, BUT if you want people to work with others or help others, then make sure you DON’T refer to money. If you want people to remember something, make sure it is at the beginning or end of your book, presentation, or meeting. Things in the middle are more easily forgotten. If you are using feedback to increase the desire for mastery keep the feedback objective, and don’t include praise.




Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff


Book Description

“An incredibly interesting work.” —Jane Smiley “A straight up masterwork.” —Sarah Silverman “Blisteringly funny.” —Corey Seymour “A transcendent apocalyptic satire.” —Michael Silverblatt “Crackling with life.” —Paul Theroux “Great fun.” —Salman Rushdie “A provocative debut.” —Kirkus Reviews From legendary actor and activist Sean Penn comes a scorching, “charmingly weird” (Booklist, starred review) novel about Bob Honey—a modern American man, entrepreneur, and part-time assassin. Bob Honey has a hard time connecting with other people, especially since his divorce. He’s tired of being marketed to every moment, sick of a world where even an orgasm isn’t real until it is turned into a tweet. A paragon of old-fashioned American entrepreneurship, Bob sells septic tanks to Jehovah’s Witnesses and arranges pyrotechnic displays for foreign dictators. He’s also a contract killer for an off-the-books program run by a branch of United States intelligence that targets the elderly, the infirm, and others who drain society of its resources. When a nosy journalist starts asking questions, Bob can’t decide if it’s a chance to form some sort of new friendship or the beginning of the end for him. With treason on everyone’s lips, terrorism in everyone’s sights, and American political life sinking to ever-lower standards, Bob decides it’s time to make a change—if he doesn’t get killed by his mysterious controllers or exposed in the rapacious media first. A thunderbolt of startling images and painted “with a broadly satirical, Vonnegut-ian brush” (Kirkus Reviews), Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff is one of the year's most controversial and talked about literary works.




Whose Stuff Is This?


Book Description

For those who carry energetic burdens that belong to someone else. With more than 24 proven ways to clear your energy field, this guide employs empowering, proactive techniques to manage your own energy. Including a chapter on the psychology of empathy by Dr. Caron Goode, the author presents her personal story of how she learned to psychically protect herself.




Stuff Matters


Book Description

An eye-opening adventure deep inside the everyday materials that surround us, from concrete and steel to denim and chocolate, packed with surprising stories and fascinating science.




Curtis


Book Description

Kylie Washington’s business is failing, and there isn’t much she can do about it. Short of living in her car and eating scraps for the rest of her life, she has to take the Hunters' offer. She has her father to think of, he made the paper what it was.​ Curtis has loved Kylie his entire life—but she loves Daniel. Stepping back from the beauty has been the hardest thing he’s ever done. But he will help her and her father even if he has to beat her butt to make it happen.​ But someone else wants the Washington building too. There is something inside that he wants badly enough to kill for—even his own father. ​ Vaughan isn’t going to take ‘no’ for an answer, and if Kylie does say it, he had already decided to kill her and take it anyway.​ Kylie and Curtis fight each other at every turn. When one says ‘no,’ the other says ‘yes.’ That is until Vaughan LaMancusa steps into the picture, and they work together to keep their families safe. But will it be enough? Will they live happily ever after?




Space, Time, and Stuff


Book Description

Frank Arntzenius presents a series of radical ideas about the structure of space and time, and establishes a new metaphysical position which holds that the fundamental structure of the physical world is purely geometrical structure. He argues that we should broaden our conceptual horizons and accept that spaces other than spacetime may exist.




Stuff


Book Description

Explore the interiors, collections, and fascinations of the brilliant design duo Carey Maloney and Hermes Mallea of M(Group) in the one-of-a-kind monograph on their work, Stuff: The M(Group) guide to collecting, decorating with, and learning about wonderful and unusual things. A treasure trove of design eclecticism, Stuff brings you inside their world of beautifully orchestrated, transformative, and bold city and country interiors. To enter the world of Stuff is to become versed in subjects that span their diverse and sometimes esoteric interests: from Australian Aboriginal art to Chinese scholar's rocks, ancient Greek marbles to twentieth-century anatomical medical models, Pre-Columbian Aztec pottery to Maoist revolutionary ceramics, each subject is accompanied by anecdotes as insightful and witty as the spaces they love to create. Moving the monograph into the twenty-first century with digital recognition technology that allows readers to delve further into the collecting topics with links to the world's leading museums and art and antiques dealers, Stuff offers an opportunity to learn in-depth about some of the world's greatest areas of collecting, and to find out about new areas of collecting you might not know existed Stuff is elegant, fun, full of fascinating and erudite information, and shows how great collections of wonderful, world-class art are created, displayed, and integrated into day-to-day life - with wit and tongue firmly in cheek. The topics pages of this title have Digimarc watermarks, digital recognition technology, where a free app can scan the topics pages and take readers to links on a wide and quirky range of resources which, for maps, includes links not just to high-end dealers but also to a Web page on map tattoos




The Science of Managing Our Digital Stuff


Book Description

Why we organize our personal digital data the way we do and how design of new PIM systems can help us manage our information more efficiently. Each of us has an ever-growing collection of personal digital data: documents, photographs, PowerPoint presentations, videos, music, emails and texts sent and received. To access any of this, we have to find it. The ease (or difficulty) of finding something depends on how we organize our digital stuff. In this book, personal information management (PIM) experts Ofer Bergman and Steve Whittaker explain why we organize our personal digital data the way we do and how the design of new PIM systems can help us manage our collections more efficiently. Bergman and Whittaker report that many of us use hierarchical folders for our personal digital organizing. Critics of this method point out that information is hidden from sight in folders that are often within other folders so that we have to remember the exact location of information to access it. Because of this, information scientists suggest other methods: search, more flexible than navigating folders; tags, which allow multiple categorizations; and group information management. Yet Bergman and Whittaker have found in their pioneering PIM research that these other methods that work best for public information management don't work as well for personal information management. Bergman and Whittaker describe personal information collection as curation: we preserve and organize this data to ensure our future access to it. Unlike other information management fields, in PIM the same user organizes and retrieves the information. After explaining the cognitive and psychological reasons that so many prefer folders, Bergman and Whittaker propose the user-subjective approach to PIM, which does not replace folder hierarchies but exploits these unique characteristics of PIM.