Penn Jillette

Arming Americans to defend the truth from today's war on facts “In what could be the timeliest book of the year, Rauch aims to arm his readers to engage with reason in an age of illiberalism.” —Newsweek A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Disinformation. Trolling. Conspiracies. Social media pile-ons. Campus intolerance. On the surface, these recent additions to our daily vocabulary appear to have little in common. But together, they are driving an epistemic crisis: a multi-front challenge to America's ability to distinguish fact from fiction and elevate truth above falsehood. In 2016 Russian trolls and bots nearly drowned the truth in a flood of fake news and conspiracy theories, and Donald Trump and his troll armies continued to do the same. Social media companies struggled to keep up with a flood of falsehoods, and too often didn't even seem to try. Experts and some public officials began wondering if society was losing its grip on truth itself. Meanwhile, another new phenomenon appeared: “cancel culture.” At the push of a button, those armed with a cellphone could gang up by the thousands on anyone who ran afoul of their sanctimony. In this pathbreaking book, Jonathan Rauch reaches back to the parallel eighteenth-century developments of liberal democracy and science to explain what he calls the “Constitution of Knowledge”—our social system for turning disagreement into truth. By explicating the Constitution of Knowledge and probing the war on reality, Rauch arms defenders of truth with a clearer understanding of what they must protect, why they must do—and how they can do it. His book is a sweeping and readable description of how every American can help defend objective truth and free inquiry from threats as far away as Russia and as close as the cellphone.

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Poetry. Taking as his subject a series of historically significant inventions--from ancient mythologies to modern scientific wonders--Anthony Etherin explores the structure of language, combining various forms of verse with the most severe literary restrictions. Many of Anthony's poems experiment with palindromes and anagrams: Palindromic sonnets; triolets and sonnets composed of anagrammed lines; and, at the extremes of combinatorial constraint, palindromic poems that are perfect anagrams of each other. This book also introduces Anthony's "aelindromes"--an anagram-palindrome hybrid, in which letters are parsed and reordered according to premeditated numerical sequences. Complemented throughout with experiments in visual poetry, STRAY ARTS (AND OTHER INVENTIONS) presents a complex poetic formalism of previously untested intricacy. "I've seen people able to do perfect bottom deals at casino poker tables for 100 thousand dollar stakes, under heat. I've seen people able to do bottom deals at illegal mob games where everyone was carrying. This poetry is only a bit safer but way, way harder. And impresses me more. I love it."--Penn Jillette "Anthony Etherin renders all my own virtuoso ventures obsolete. I truly covet this book."--Christian Bök "Anthony Etherin is a hard taskmaster with language, making it jump through hoops, run long distances backwards, and then turn in on itself, in a strenuous series of contortions that leave it gleaming with word-sweat--but all this exercise is more than worth it, because the poems Anthony produces are dictionaries of possibilities, maps of linguistic futures that are well worth exploring if you want to find joy and delight and jaw-dropping skill."--Ian McMillan

"Magicians work hard, just like dancers and singers. They don't become great just by snapping their fingers!" (Ages 3-8) When a magician amazes Mila at her birthday party, she wants to become a magician just like her! The magician makes it look so easy, but magic tricks are trickier than Mila thought! Just when Mila's dream feels like it might disappear, she discovers the magic secret in an unexpected place ... and person. Hocus Pocus Practice Focus is an inspiring, rhyming read-aloud that reveals a magician's greatest secret -- real magic happens when you prepare, practice, and persist! "A book that every child interested in magic should have and every girl interested in magic needs." -DAVID COPPERFIELD