No matter your goals, Atomic Habits offers a proven framework for improving—every day. James Clear, one of the world's leading experts on habit formation, reveals practical strategies that will teach you exactly how to form good habits, break bad ones, and master the tiny behaviors that lead to remarkable results. If you're having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn't you. The problem is your system. Bad habits repeat themselves again and again not because you don't want to change, but because you have the wrong system for change. You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. Here, you'll get a proven system that can take you to new heights. Clear is known for his ability to distill complex topics into simple behaviors that can be easily applied to daily life and work. Here, he draws on the most proven ideas from biology, psychology, and neuroscience to create an easy-to-understand guide for making good habits inevitable and bad habits impossible. Along the way, readers will be inspired and entertained with true stories from Olympic gold medalists, award-winning artists, business leaders, life-saving physicians, and star comedians who have used the science of small habits to master their craft and vault to the top of their field. Learn how to: - Make time for new habits (even when life gets crazy); - Overcome a lack of motivation and willpower; - Design your environment to make success easier; - Get back on track when you fall off course; ...and much more. Atomic Habits will reshape the way you think about progress and success, and give you the tools and strategies you need to transform your habits--whether you are a team looking to win a championship, an organization hoping to redefine an industry, or simply an individual who wishes to quit smoking, lose weight, reduce stress, or achieve any other goal.

Written after two years of artistic silence, during which the world came to a halt due to the COVID pandemic and Minneapolis became the epicenter of protest following the murder of George Floyd, Bluff is Danez Smith’s powerful reckoning with their role and responsibility as a poet and with their hometown of the Twin Cities. This is a book of awakening out of violence, guilt, shame, and critical pessimism to wonder and imagine how we can strive toward new existence in a world that seems to be dissolving into desolate futures. Smith brings a startling urgency to these poems, their questions demanding a new language, a deep self-scrutiny, and virtuosic textual shapes. A series of “ars poetica” gives way to “anti poetica” and “ars america” to implicate poetry’s collusions with unchecked capitalism. A photographic collage accrues across a sequence to make clear the consequences of American acceptance of mass shootings. A brilliant long poem―part map, part annotation, part visual argument―offers the history of Saint Paul’s vibrant Rondo neighborhood before and after the city decided to run an interstate directly through it. Bluff is a kind of manifesto about artistic resilience, even when time and will can seem fleeting, when the places we most love―those given and made―are burning. In this soaring collection, Smith turns to honesty, hope, rage, and imagination to envision futures that seem possible.

No matter your goals, Atomic Habits offers a proven framework for improving—every day. James Clear, one of the world's leading experts on habit formation, reveals practical strategies that will teach you exactly how to form good habits, break bad ones, and master the tiny behaviors that lead to remarkable results. If you're having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn't you. The problem is your system. Bad habits repeat themselves again and again not because you don't want to change, but because you have the wrong system for change. You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. Here, you'll get a proven system that can take you to new heights. Clear is known for his ability to distill complex topics into simple behaviors that can be easily applied to daily life and work. Here, he draws on the most proven ideas from biology, psychology, and neuroscience to create an easy-to-understand guide for making good habits inevitable and bad habits impossible. Along the way, readers will be inspired and entertained with true stories from Olympic gold medalists, award-winning artists, business leaders, life-saving physicians, and star comedians who have used the science of small habits to master their craft and vault to the top of their field. Learn how to: - Make time for new habits (even when life gets crazy); - Overcome a lack of motivation and willpower; - Design your environment to make success easier; - Get back on track when you fall off course; ...and much more. Atomic Habits will reshape the way you think about progress and success, and give you the tools and strategies you need to transform your habits--whether you are a team looking to win a championship, an organization hoping to redefine an industry, or simply an individual who wishes to quit smoking, lose weight, reduce stress, or achieve any other goal.

An eminent historian demonstrates how claims about the origins of humanity have been used to justify many of the worst events of the last three hundred years. Books about the origins of humanity dominate bestseller lists, while major newspapers present breathless accounts of new archaeological findings and speculation about what those findings might tell us about ourselves. We are obsessed with prehistory―and, in this respect, our current era is no different from any other in the last three hundred years. In this coruscating history of prehistory, Stefanos Geroulanos moves from Rousseau’s “state of nature” and Romantic notions of virtuous German barbarians to theories about Neanderthals, killer apes, and a matriarchal paradise where women ruled. Yet as he shows, such ideas became, for the most part, the ideological foundations of repressive regimes and globe-spanning empires. Accounts of prehistory tell us more about the moment when they are proposed than about the deep past, Geroulanos argues―and if we hope to start improving our future, we would be better off setting aside the search for how it all started. 101 images

An entertaining deep dive into the world, gameplay, and evolution of the hugely successful Assassin’s Creed video game franchise​A hooded figure stands in a bell tower overlooking medieval Jerusalem, surveying his prey. Parkour-style, he leaps down into the square to kill his target before vanishing into the crowd . . . Released in fall 2007, Assassin’s Creed transformed video gaming. Across more than a dozen franchise entries, players engage with the eternal conflict between the Order of Assassins and the nefarious Templar Order, carrying out missions in a series of painstakingly rendered historical settings, from the Holy Lands during the Third Crusade to Renaissance Italy, the Age of Piracy, the French Revolution, and Victorian London. Everything is Permitted is an analysis of the development, evolution, gameplay, and world-building of this sprawling and distinctive franchise. Cameron Kunzelman examines key themes and concepts that connect the games in the series. Combining close readings of the games themselves with discussion of the broader landscape of video game franchises since its initial release, he uncovers what it means for a game to be part of the Assassin’s Creed franchise. Kunzelman maps the elements that contribute to the immersiveness and continual playability of the games, showing how historically inflected conspiracies and science fictional premises ground the fantastical stories the games tell on a massive scale. Diving into the real-world histories and ideas that the game designers used for inspiration, Kunzelman argues that the virtual conflicts between the franchise’s opposing sides offer intriguing insights into actual reality, from ethical dilemmas to the roles of freedom and fate. He demonstrates how, by incorporating themes of means and ends, control and freedom into its gameplay, the franchise engages with profound questions in a sustained, long-form way that is unique among video games. As the Assassins say, “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.”   Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

Written after two years of artistic silence, during which the world came to a halt due to the COVID pandemic and Minneapolis became the epicenter of protest following the murder of George Floyd, Bluff is Danez Smith’s powerful reckoning with their role and responsibility as a poet and with their hometown of the Twin Cities. This is a book of awakening out of violence, guilt, shame, and critical pessimism to wonder and imagine how we can strive toward new existence in a world that seems to be dissolving into desolate futures. Smith brings a startling urgency to these poems, their questions demanding a new language, a deep self-scrutiny, and virtuosic textual shapes. A series of “ars poetica” gives way to “anti poetica” and “ars america” to implicate poetry’s collusions with unchecked capitalism. A photographic collage accrues across a sequence to make clear the consequences of American acceptance of mass shootings. A brilliant long poem―part map, part annotation, part visual argument―offers the history of Saint Paul’s vibrant Rondo neighborhood before and after the city decided to run an interstate directly through it. Bluff is a kind of manifesto about artistic resilience, even when time and will can seem fleeting, when the places we most love―those given and made―are burning. In this soaring collection, Smith turns to honesty, hope, rage, and imagination to envision futures that seem possible.

From the nationally bestselling author of The Luminous Dead and The Death of Jane Lawrence, a transfixing, intensely atmospheric fever dream of medieval horror. Aymar Castle has been under siege for six months. Food is running low and there has been no sign of rescue. But just as the survivors consider deliberately thinning their number, the castle stores are replenished. The sick are healed. And the divine figures of the Constant Lady and her Saints have arrived, despite the barricaded gates, offering succor in return for adoration. Soon, the entire castle is under the sway of their saviors, partaking in intoxicating feasts of terrible origin. The war hero Ser Voyne gives her allegiance to the Constant Lady. Phosyne, a disorganized, paranoid nun-turned-sorceress, races to unravel the mystery of these new visitors and exonerate her experiments as their source. And in the bowels of the castle, a serving girl, Treila, is torn between her thirst for a secret vengeance against Voyne and the desperate need to escape from the horrors that are unfolding within Aymar’s walls. As the castle descends into bacchanalian madness—forgetting the massed army beyond its walls in favor of hedonistic ecstasy—these three women are the only ones to still see their situation for what it is. But they are not immune from the temptations of the castle’s new masters… or each other; and their shifting alliances and entangled pasts bring violence to the surface. To save the castle, and themselves, will take a reimagining of who they are, and a reorganization of the very world itself.