A heartbreaking and empowering debut memoir about a mother’s all-consuming love, a son’s perilous quest to discover the world beyond the front door and the unregulated homeschool system that impacts millions like him Stefan Merrill Block was nine when his mother pulled him from school, certain that his teachers were “stifling his creativity.” With no background in education and no formal training, she began to instruct Stefan in the family’s living room. Beyond his formal lessons in math, however, Stefan was largely left to his own devices and his mother’s erratic whims. She forced him to bleach his hair and to crawl like a baby in a strange and regressive attempt to recapture his early years. Long before homeschooling would become a massive nationwide movement, at a time when it had just become legal in his home state of Texas, Stefan vanished into that unseen space and into his mother’s increasingly eccentric theories and projects. But when, after five years away from the outside world, Stefan reentered the public school system in Plano as a freshman, he was in for a jarring awakening. At once a novelistic portrait of mother and son, and an illuminating window into an overlooked corner of the American education system, Homeschooled is a moving, funny and ultimately inspiring story of a son’s battle for a life of his own choosing, and the wages of a mother’s all-consuming love.

From California Governor Gavin Newsom comes an intimate and poignant account of identity, belonging, and the defining moments that inspired a life in politics “Go slow,” his political elders advised him. But young Gavin Newsom didn’t know such a speed. A month into his first term as mayor of San Francisco, he turned city hall into an altar of gay marriage, an act of defiance that catapulted him onto the national stage, irking not only some of his hometown political mentors but elected officials across the country.   The California Dream has always run in Newsom’s blood. It lured his father’s family from County Cork, Ireland, six generations ago. His great-great-grandfather, a cop, walked a beat in San Francisco; his grandfather, nicknamed the Boss, built neighborhoods that looked out to the Pacific. His father, William, became an appellate court judge and a consigliere to his best friend, Gordon Getty.   Newsom was five when his parents divorced, and as he came of age, he struggled to make fit the starkly different worlds of his mother and father. His mother, Tessa, worked three jobs to pay the bills, while his father, ensconced in San Francisco society, had become a distant figure. His struggle with dyslexia made childhood harder, a dissonance that made him pedal even faster on his paper route.   In Young Man in a Hurry, Newsom traces his rise as a successful businessman and the happenstance that led him to politics. As the governor of California, he confronts the challenges of balancing his family life as he guides California through plague, flood, wildfire, and the rise of autocratic figures in American politics, and examines the many forces that shaped the lives of his parents and grandparents. Filled with intimate family history and written with candor and remarkable personal insight, here is a deeply resilient American story.

Award-winning journalist David Ewing Duncan considers 24 visions of possible human-robot futures--Incredible scenarios from Teddy Bots to Warrior Bots, and Politician Bots to Sex Bots--Grounded in real technologies and possibilities and inspired by our imagination. What robot and AI systems are being built and imagined right now? What do they say about us, their creators? Will they usher in a fantastic new future, or destroy us? What do some of our greatest thinkers, from physicist Brian Greene and futurist Kevin Kelly to inventor Dean Kamen, geneticist George Church, and filmmaker Tiffany Shlain, anticipate about our human-robot future? For even as robots and A.I. intrigue us and make us anxious about the future, our fascination with robots has always been about more than the potential of the technology-it's also about what robots tell us about being human. Prelude: When the robots arrived -- Teddy bear bot -- The %$@! robot that swiped my job -- Sex (intimacy) bot -- Facebook bot -- Doc bot -- Hello, robot driver -- Warrior bot -- Beer bot -- It's not about the robots bot -- Politician bot -- Wearable bot -- Amazon bot -- Journalism bot -- Mars (Daemon) bot -- Risk-free bot -- Brain optimization bot -- Thriller bot -- Coffee delivery bot -- Memory bot -- Matrix bot -- Homo digitalis/homo syntheticis -- Tourist (evolution) bot -- God bot -- Immortal me bot -- Epilogue: After the robots arrived

A groundbreaking investigation into a string of unsolved murders at America’s largest military base, and what the crimes reveal about drug-trafficking and impunity among elite special operations soldiers Two dead bodies were discovered in a forested area of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in 2020. One, William “Billy” Lavigne, was a member of Delta Force, the most secretive “black ops” unit in the military. A long-serving veteran of America’s classified assassination program, Lavigne had done more than a dozen deployments, was addicted to crack cocaine, dealt drugs on base, and had committed a series of violent crimes before he was mysteriously killed. The other, Timothy Dumas, was a supply officer attached to the Special Forces who used his proximity to clandestine missions to steal guns and traffic drugs into the United States from abroad, and had written a blackmail letter threatening to expose criminality in the special operations task force in Afghanistan. As soon as Seth Harp, an Iraq war veteran and investigative reporter, begins looking into the double murder, he learns that there have been many more unexplained deaths at Fort Bragg recently, all with some apparent connection to drug-trafficking, as well as dozens of fatal overdoses. Drawing on trial transcripts, police records, and hundreds of interviews, Harp tells a scathing story of narco-trafficking in the Special Forces, drug conspiracies abetted by corrupt police, blatant military cover-ups, American complicity in the Afghan heroin trade, and the pernicious consequences of continuous war.

David Hume is one of the most provocative philosophers to have written in English. His Dialogues ask if a belief in God can be inferred from what is known of the universe, or whether such a belief is even consistent with such knowledge. The Natural History of Religion investigates the origins of belief, and follows its development from polytheism to dogmatic monotheism. Together, these works constitute the most formidable attack upon religious belief ever mounted by a philosopher. This new edition includes Section XI of The Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and a letter by Hume in which he discusses Dialogues .

Too many popular histories seek to establish heroes, pioneers and martyrs but as Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller argue, the past is filled with queer people whose sexualities and dastardly deeds have been overlooked. We all remember Oscar Wilde, but who speaks for Bosie? What about those ‘bad gays’ whose unexemplary lives reveals more than we might expect? Part revisionist history, part historical biography and based on the hugely popular podcast series, Bad Gays subverts the notion of gay icons and queer heroes and asks what we can learn about LGBTQ history, sexuality and identity through its villains and baddies. From the Emperor Hadrian to notorious gangster Ronnie Kray, the authors excavate the buried history of queer lives. This includes fascist thugs, famous artists, austere puritans and debauched bon viveurs, imperialists, G-men and architects. Together these amazing life stories expand and challenge the mainstream assumptions of sexual identity. They show that homosexuality itself was an idea that emerged in the nineteenth century and that its interpretation has been central to major historical moments of conflict from the ruptures of Weimar Republic to red-baiting in Cold War America. Amusing, disturbing and fascinating, Bad Gays puts centre stage the queer villains and evil twinks in history.

Panama, 1989. The once warm relationship between United States and Gen. Manuel Noriega has eroded dangerously. Newly elected President George Bush has declared the strongman a drug trafficker and a rigger of elections. Intimidation on the streets is a daily reality for U.S. personnel and their families. The nation is a powder keg. Naval Investigative Service (NIS) Special Agent Rick Yell has worked the job in Panama since 1986, and lives there with his wife Annya and infant child. Like most NIS agents, he’s a civilian with no military rank with a specialty in working criminal cases. The dynamic changes suddenly when Yell inadvertently develops an intelligence source with unparalleled access to the Noriega regime. Now the agent is thrust into a world of spy-versus-spy, of secret meetings and hidden documents. Yell’s source – known as “The Old Man” – warns when Cuban military personnel arrive and identifies anti-American officers within the Panamanian Defense Forces, provides information about an imprisoned CIA asset and helps track Noriega’s movements, agitating for the dictator’s kidnapping. The reports created by Yell and his NIS colleagues shape the decisions made in Washington D.C., CIA headquarters in Langley and the innermost sanctums of Pentagon. The powder keg is lit on December 16, 1989, when a young U.S. Marine is gunned down at a checkpoint in Panama City. Yell and his cadre of trusted agents deploy immediately to investigate the killing, and what they determine will decide the fate of two nations. When President Bush hears the details they uncover, he orders an invasion that puts Yell’s family, informants and fellow agents directly in harm’s way. Using a blend of research and interviews with the NIS agents who were directly involved, Ghosts of Panama reveals the untold, clandestine story of counterintelligence professionals placed in a pressure cooker assignment of historic proportions.