I'm Special

I'm Special
Author: Ryan O'Connell
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2015-06-02
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1476700400

NOW a NETFLIX series entitled Special from Executive Producer JIM PARSONS starring RYAN O‘CONNELL as himself. From the beloved blogger turned voice of an online generation, an unforgettable and hilarious memoir-meets-manifesto exploring what it means to be a millennial gay man living with cerebral palsy, which VICE calls “a younger, gay version of Mary Karr's Lit.” People are obsessed with Ryan O’Connell’s blogs. With tens of thousands reading his pieces on Thought Catalog and Vice, watching his videos on YouTube, and hanging on to each and every #dark tweet, Ryan has established himself as a unique young voice who’s not afraid to dole out some real talk. He’s that candid, snarky friend you consult when you fear you’re spending too much time falling down virtual k-holes stalking your ex on Facebook or when you’ve made the all-too-common mistake of befriending a psycho while wasted at last night’s party and need to find a way to get rid of them the next morning. But Ryan didn’t always have the answers to these modern-day dilemmas. Growing up gay and disabled with cerebral palsy, he constantly felt like he was one step behind everybody else. Then the rude curveball known as your twenties happened and things got even more confusing. Ryan spent years as a Millennial cliché: he had dead-end internships; dabbled in unemployment; worked in his pajamas as a blogger; communicated mostly via text; looked for love online; spent hundreds on “necessary” items, like candles, while claiming to have no money; and even descended into aimless pill-popping. But through extensive trial and error, Ryan eventually figured out how to take his life from bleak to chic and began limping towards adulthood. Sharp and entertaining, I’m Special will educate twentysomethings (or other adolescents-at-heart) on what NOT to do if they ever want to become happy fully functioning grown-ups with a 401k and a dog.

The Book of Minds

The Book of Minds
Author: Philip Ball
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 513
Release: 2022-06-28
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0226822044

Popular science writer Philip Ball explores a range of sciences to map our answers to a huge, philosophically rich question: How do we even begin to think about minds that are not human? Sciences from zoology to astrobiology, computer science to neuroscience, are seeking to understand minds in their own distinct disciplinary realms. Taking a uniquely broad view of minds and where to find them—including in plants, aliens, and God—Philip Ball pulls the pieces together to explore what sorts of minds we might expect to find in the universe. In so doing, he offers for the first time a unified way of thinking about what minds are and what they can do, by locating them in what he calls the “space of possible minds.” By identifying and mapping out properties of mind without prioritizing the human, Ball sheds new light on a host of fascinating questions: What moral rights should we afford animals, and can we understand their thoughts? Should we worry that AI is going to take over society? If there are intelligent aliens out there, how could we communicate with them? Should we? Understanding the space of possible minds also reveals ways of making advances in understanding some of the most challenging questions in contemporary science: What is thought? What is consciousness? And what (if anything) is free will? Informed by conversations with leading researchers, Ball’s brilliant survey of current views about the nature and existence of minds is more mind-expanding than we could imagine. In this fascinating panorama of other minds, we come to better know our own.

Moving Ourselves, Moving Others

Moving Ourselves, Moving Others
Author: Ad Foolen
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 502
Release: 2012-04-12
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027274916

The close relationship between motion (bodily movement) and emotion (feelings) is not an etymological coincidence. While moving ourselves, we move others; in observing others move – we are moved ourselves. The fundamentally interpersonal nature of mind and language has recently received due attention, but the key role of (e)motion in this context has remained something of a blind spot. The present book rectifies this gap by gathering contributions from leading philosophers, psychologists and linguists working in the area. Framed by an introducing prologue and a summarizing epilogue (written by Colwyn Trevarthen, who brought the phenomenological notion of intersubjectivity to a wider audience some 30 years ago) the volume elaborates a dynamical, active view of emotion, along with an affect-laden view of motion – and explores their significance for consciousness, intersubjectivity, and language. As such, it contributes to the emerging interdisciplinary field of mind science, transcending hitherto dominant computationalist and cognitivist approaches. Now Open Access as part of the Knowledge Unlatched 2017 Backlist Collection.

How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America

How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America
Author: Kiese Laymon
Publisher: Scribner
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2020-11-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1982170824

A New York Times Notable Book A revised collection with thirteen essays, including six new to this edition and seven from the original edition, by the “star in the American literary firmament, with a voice that is courageous, honest, loving, and singularly beautiful” (NPR). Brilliant and uncompromising, piercing and funny, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America is essential reading. This new edition of award-winning author Kiese Laymon’s first work of nonfiction looks inward, drawing heavily on the author and his family’s experiences, while simultaneously examining the world—Mississippi, the South, the United States—that has shaped their lives. With subjects that range from an interview with his mother to reflections on Ole Miss football, Outkast, and the labor of Black women, these thirteen insightful essays highlight Laymon’s profound love of language and his artful rendering of experience, trumpeting why he is “simply one of the most talented writers in America” (New York magazine).

The Second Self

The Second Self
Author: Sherry Turkle
Publisher: Touchstone
Total Pages: 372
Release: 1984
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780671606022

In The Second Self, Sherry Turkle looks at the computer not as a "tool," but as part of our social and psychological lives; she looks beyond how we use computer games and spreadsheets to explore how the computer affects our awareness of ourselves, of one another, and of our relationship with the world. "Technology," she writes, "catalyzes changes not only in what we do but in how we think." First published in 1984, The Second Self is still essential reading as a primer in the psychology of computation. This twentieth anniversary edition allows us to reconsider two decades of computer culture-to (re)experience what was and is most novel in our new media culture and to view our own contemporary relationship with technology with fresh eyes. Turkle frames this classic work with a new introduction, a new epilogue, and extensive notes added to the original text. Turkle talks to children, college students, engineers, AI scientists, hackers, and personal computer owners-people confronting machines that seem to think and at the same time suggest a new way for us to think-about human thought, emotion, memory, and understanding. Her interviews reveal that we experience computers as being on the border between inanimate and animate, as both an extension of the self and part of the external world. Their special place betwixt and between traditional categories is part of what makes them compelling and evocative. In the introduction to this edition, Turkle quotes a PDA user as saying, "When my Palm crashed, it was like a death. I thought I had lost my mind." Why we think of the workings of a machine in psychological terms-how this happens, and what it means for all of us-is the ever more timely subject of The Second Self. Book jacket.

Codependent No More

Codependent No More
Author: Melody Beattie
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 155
Release: 2009-06-10
Genre: Self-Help
ISBN: 1592857922

In a crisis, it's easy to revert to old patterns. Caring for your well-being during the coronavirus pandemic includes maintaining healthy boundaries and saying no to unhealthy relationships. The healing touchstone of millions, this modern classic by one of America's best-loved and most inspirational authors holds the key to understanding codependency and to unlocking its stultifying hold on your life. Is someone else's problem your problem? If, like so many others, you've lost sight of your own life in the drama of tending to someone else's, you may be codependent--and you may find yourself in this book--Codependent No More. The healing touchstone of millions, this modern classic by one of America's best-loved and most inspirational authors holds the key to understanding codependency and to unlocking its stultifying hold on your life. With instructive life stories, personal reflections, exercises, and self-tests, Codependent No More is a simple, straightforward, readable map of the perplexing world of codependency--charting the path to freedom and a lifetime of healing, hope, and happiness. Melody Beattie is the author of Beyond Codependency, The Language of Letting Go, Stop Being Mean to Yourself, The Codependent No More Workbook and Playing It by Heart.

Full Cicada Moon

Full Cicada Moon
Author: Marilyn Hilton
Publisher: Dial Books for Young Readers
Total Pages: 402
Release: 2015
Genre: Astronomy
ISBN: 0525428755

In 1969 twelve-year-old Mimi and her family move to an all-white town in Vermont, where Mimi's mixed-race background and interest in "boyish" topics like astronomy make her feel like an outsider.

Accepting Ourselves & Others

Accepting Ourselves & Others
Author: Sheppard B. Kominars
Publisher: Hazelden Publishing
Total Pages: 396
Release: 1996-10-04
Genre: Self-Help
ISBN: 9781568381206

Accepting Ourselves and Others

Looking at Ourselves and Others

Looking at Ourselves and Others
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 108
Release: 1998
Genre: Cross-cultural studies
ISBN:

"Looking at Ourselves and Others contains lesson plans, activities, and readings that help students understand components of their own culture and leads them to appreciate and understand differences between their culture and that of others."--Home page.

Getting to Know Ourselves and Others Through the ABCs

Getting to Know Ourselves and Others Through the ABCs
Author: Claudia Finkbeiner
Publisher: IAP
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2015-01-01
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1623967708

This book is a valuable resource for teachers and other professionals who are looking for a proven way to increase cultural appreciation and awareness. New applications of the ABCs model of Cultural Understanding and Communication are presented and discussed in this new volume, based on studies done in the United States, and Canada and Europe. In this ground-breaking project, the authors describe how the ABCs model complicated and challenged and changed the cultural perceptions of those who participated in it, even those who were initially highly resistant to such possibilities. At the heart of the project is the exchange of narratives – life stories that give insight into the cultural worlds of selves and others. In addition to the narratives, other instruments including the Transcultural Competence Scale (TCC), provide further evidence of the positive impact of the ABCs on participants' receptivity toward cultural differences. In the TRANSABCs project, researchers from both sides of the Atlantic invited teacher candidates, students who will become workplace and other professionals to write an autobiography (A) of themselves from various cultural perspectives, a biography (B) of an individual who is culturally different from themselves along particular dimensions, and to use these documents to conduct cross-cultural comparisons (C) between themselves and the person they interviewed. Furthermore, candidates developed culturally responsive ideas for the school or the workplace (C). These exchanges and analyses produced epiphanies and insights that translated into specific actions to improve cultural understanding and communication in classrooms and workplaces. Educators and professionals can take from these examples to inspire their own personal journey toward greater cultural understanding and sensitivity.