Social Games

In the wartime fall of 1943, at the little-known North Carolina College for Negroes, Coach John McLendon was on the verge of changing the game forever. Within six months his Eagles would become the highest-scoring college basketball team in America, a fast-breaking, hard-pressing juggernaut that would shatter its opponents by as many as 60 points per game. The last student of James Naismith, basketball's inventor, McLendon had opened the door to its future.

Although its participants are still in grade school, Pop Warner football is serious business in Miami, where local teams routinely advance to the national championships. Games draw thousands of fans; recruiters vie for nascent talent; drug dealers and rap stars bankroll teams; and the stakes are so high that games sometimes end in gunshots. In America's poorest neighborhood, troubled parents dream of NFL stardom for children who long only for a week in Disney World at the Pop Warner Super Bowl.

Pete Axthelm follows the 1969 - 70 season of the New York Knicks and provides a parallel focus on basketball as it was then played in the black neighborhoods of New York City. Throughout, he writes clearly, intelligently, and passionately about the game, bringing alive the players’ efforts, accomplishments, and failures.

Twelve-year-old Ben is a shy, quiet kid. His life isn’t perfect, but he feels at home in his New York City apartment. Then his dad takes a job in London, and everything changes. His parents separate, and Ben’s mom moves them back to her hometown of Austin, Texas. Ben’s simple life is suddenly complicated. He misses his apartment, his best friend, Jake, and his dad.

An examination of the terrifying ideas of the Dark State’s internationalist-elite oligarchs and the disquieting technological trends that, combined, threaten the fabric of our reality and the very future of mankind.

Everyone is vulnerable to these secret mind control techniques...Learn how to protect yourself now! Mind control techniques are everywhere. It doesn’t matter how smart or how naturally skeptical you are - you’re still prone to dark psychology tricks because they play upon fundamental human feelings. Your only weapon against psychological manipulators - no matter if salespeople, politicians, or toxic people in your social circle - is knowledge. Once you’re able to see through their tricks, they lose their power.

America's long-standing principles and traditional values are under attack by leftist ideologues who reject them outright and are working hard to replace them. We are fast becoming a nation of socialists, secular humanists, atheists, agnostics, and anarchists who want to tear down every virtue enshrined by our Founding Fathers.

What does it take to get everything you want in life? It's not how much money you have but how you go about asking for what you want. If you can understand how people think, you can persuade them to do what you want. Dark psychology taps into how the brain works, how we form the habits we do, and exactly what it takes to influence people. Learn the strategies that have the hardest critics saying yes.

The hardening of racial lines during the first half of the 20th century eliminated almost all African Americans from white organized sports, forcing black athletes to form their own teams, organizations, and events. This separate sporting culture, explored in the 12 essays included here, comprised much more than athletic competition; these “separate games” provided examples of black enterprise and black self-help and showed the importance of agency and the quest for racial uplift in a country fraught with racialist thinking and discrimination.

Warum gibt es heute mehr Sklaven als zu Zeiten der alten Römer? Warum gehen Unternehmen unter? Warum lässt sich Demokratie nie auf andere Länder übertragen? Die Antwort ist immer die selbe: Kein "Skin in the Game". Zu viele der Menschen, die auf der Welt Macht und Einfluss haben, müssen nicht wirklich den Kopf hinhalten. Man riskiert etwas und zahlt einen Preis dafür. Handwerker und selbstständige Unternehmer - sie alle haben etwas zu verlieren. Berufspolitiker, Angestellte und Journalisten meistens nicht.

In Great Games, Local Rules, Alexander Cooley, one of America's most respected international relations scholars, explores the dynamics of the new competition for control of the region since 9/11. All three great powers have crafted strategies to increase their power in the area, which includes Afghanistan and the former Soviet republics of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan. Each nation is pursuing important goals: basing rights for the US, access to natural resources for the Chinese, and increased political influence for the Russians.

Listeners will cheer on Pippa Park in this wonderful middle school book about friendships, bullying, crushes, and family. In this relatable story, Pippa reinvents herself and discovers who she really is on and off the basketball court.

The first in a fast-paced, funny series featuring The Stig: Top Gear's legendary racing driver. Sam Wheeler may be the new boy in Bunsfold, but he's got a feeling that all is not well either in the town or at Bunsfold High - and he's not just talking about the maths teacher with the unfortunate flatulence. A local boy, Buster Mustang, has recently gone missing, and no one seems to care - they're all too busy playing the highly addictive video game Xenon or getting the town ready for its very first TT race.

Oral historian and documentary researcher David Wolinsky invites listeners to sit in on a series of urgent, intimate conversations between some of the most distinguished voices across entertainment and media as they reflect on the longstanding impact of Gamergate. What went wrong, and what can we learn from Gamergate to help us build a more equitable online world?

India's relations with the People's Republic of China have captured the popular imagination ever since the 1950s but have rarely merited a detailed understanding of the issues. Individual episodes tend to arouse lively debate, which often dissipates without a deeper exploration of the factors that shaped the outcomes.

This audiobook is the window into the underground world of cheating at the highest levels, which set off a frenzy of activity and hand-wringing in the offices of Major League Baseball and Congress. Through the authors' pursuit of sources and documents, they were able to open for public view a world in which elite athletes trade money and risk their health for the edge that will allow them to run faster, hit harder, and compete longer, and then cash in on the fame and wealth.

A wall in the distant north cuts the world in two. Ruthless sea borne warriors raid the coasts from their war galleys, yearning to regain lost glories. A young nobleman and his kin are slaughtered under a banner of truce within a mighty castle. A warrior king becomes a legend when he smites his foe with one swing of his axe during a nation-forging battle. Yet this isn’t Westeros–it’s Scotland.

Bill Littlefield (NPR's Only a Game) presents the second installment in the Library of America series devoted to classic American sportswriters, a definitive collector's edition of the pathbreaking writer who invented the long-form sports story.

Olivia Peters is over the moon when her literary idol, the celebrated novelist and much-adored local priest Mark D. Brendan, offers to become her personal writing mentor. But when Father Mark’s enthusiasm for Olivia’s prose develops into something more, Olivia’s emotions quickly shift from wonder to confusion to despair. Exactly what game is Father Mark playing, and how on earth can she get out of it?

Ever since George Washington used them to help topple the British, spies and their networks have helped and hurt America at key moments in history. In this fascinating collection, Paul B. Janeczko probes such stories as that of Elizabeth Van Lew, an aristocrat whose hatred of slavery drove her to be one of the most successful spies in the Civil War; the "Choctaw code talkers," Native Americans who were instrumental in sending secret messages during World War I; and more.