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"From the Northern Rockies to the Southwest desert, Betsy Gaines Quammen explores how myths shape our identities, heighten polarizations, and fracture our shared understanding of the world around us. As she investigates the origins and effects of myths of the American West, Gaines Quammen travels through small towns and big cities, engaging people and building relationship at every stop. Misperceptions about land, politics, liberty, and self-determination...

"Female characters throughout history have been burdened by the moral trap that is likeability. Any woman who dares to reveal her messy side has been treated as a cautionary tale. And yet today, unlikeable female characters are everywhere in film, TV, andwider pop culture. For the first time ever, they are being accepted by audiences and even showered with industry awards. We are finally accepting that women are-gasp-fully fledged human beings. How...

"'There Is Life on the Planet Mars' (New York Times, December 9, 1906). This New York Times headline was no joke. In the early 1900s, many Americans actually believed we had discovered intelligent life on Mars, as best-selling science writer David Baron chronicles in The Martians, his truly bizarre tale of a nation swept up in Mars mania. At the center of Baron's historical drama is Percival Lowell, the Boston Brahmin and Harvard scion, who observed...

Coinciding with the twentieth anniversary of the iconic television series, Sex and the city and us tells the story of how a columnist, two gay men -- Darren Star and fellow executive producer Michael Patrick King -- and a writers' room full of women used their own poignant, hilarious, and humiliating stories to launch a cultural phenomenon. Featuring interviews with the cast and writers, including star Sarah Jessica Parker, Sex and the city and us...

"The cowboy apocalypse is a pervasive story replayed in books, film, television, videogames, and live-action-role-playing which blends the mythology of the American Western with doomsday prophecies in which the good guy with the gun is the messiah and God has nothing to do with the apocalypse"-- Provided by publisher.

Explains how the influences of dreamers, zealots, hucksters, and superstitious groups shaped America's tendency toward a rich fantasy life, citing the roles of individuals from P.T. Barnum to Donald Trump in perpetuating conspiracy theories, self-delusion, and magical thinking.

"In nine lively essays, critc Aisha Harris invites us into the wonderful, maddening process of making sense of the pop culture we consume. Aisha Harris has made a name for herself as someone you can turn to for a razor-sharp take on whatever show or movie everyone is talking about. Now, she turns her talents inward, mining the benchmarks of her nineties childhood and beyond to analyze the tropes that are shaping all of us, and our ability to shape...

Veteran trivia master J. Stephen Lang poses over 3,000 questions regarding the United States, including such topics as music, entertainment, politics, states, and religion.

"In Bite by Bite, poet and essayist Aimee Nezhukumatathil explores the way food and drink evoke our associations and remembrances--a subtext or layering, a flavor tinged with joy, shame, exuberance, grief, desire, or nostalgia. Nezhukumatathil restores our astonishment and wonder about food through her encounters with a range of foods and food traditions. From shave ice to lumpia, mangoes to pecans, rambutan to vanilla, she investigates how food marks...

An optimistic and nuanced portrait of a generation that has much to teach us about how to live and collaborate in our digital world.