Every kindergarten soccer player gets a trophy. Many high schools name dozens of seniors as valedictorians—of the same class. Cars sport bumper stickers that read "USA—Number 1." Prizes proliferate in every corner of American society, and excellence is trumpeted with ratings that range from "Academy Award winner!" to "Best Neighborhood Pizza!" In Everyone’s a Winner, Joel Best— acclaimed author of Damned Lies and Statistics and many other books—shines a bright light on the increasing abundance of status in our society and considers what it all means. With humor and insight, Best argues that status affluence fosters social worlds and, in the process, helps give meaning to life in a large society.

Looks at the increasing abundance of status in our society and considers its effects, including the tendency to split into ever more specific groups to enhance status.

Social Mobility for the 21st Century addresses experiences of social mobility, and the detailed processes through which entrenched, intergenerationally transmitted privilege is reproduced. Contributions include (but are not limited to) family relationships, students’ encounters with higher education, narratives of work careers, and ‘mobility identities’. The book intends to challenge both the framework of the more traditional approach, and the politicisation of mobility which casts ‘mobility’ as a possession, a commodity or a character trait, and threatens to castigate the ‘non-mobile’ as carrying a personal responsibility for their situation. This book presents critical analyses of routes into social mobility, the experience of social mobility, and the political and social implications of social mobility’s ‘panacea’ status. Drawing on the work of established scholars and more recent entrants, the chapters offer a fresh look at social mobility, opening up the topic to a wider readership among the profession and beyond, and stimulating further debate. This book will appeal to higher level students and scholars of sociology alike, as well as having a broad cross-disciplinary appeal.

A guide to all-new, non-competitive sports and games which don't need special equipment and which anyone can play. Includes such games as New Frisbee, Infinity, Volleyball, Hunker Hauser, and information on fitness and yoga.

In this Updated, New Edition, you'll learn how to play every hand from every position with every type of flop. Learn the 14 categories of starting hands, the 10 most common hold'em tells, how to evaluate a game for profit, the value of deception, the art of bluffing, 8 secrets to winning, starting hand categories, position, and more! Includes detailed analysis of the top 40 hands and the most complete chapter on hold'em odds in print. Over 400,000 copies sold! 224 pages

Amber Sparks holds her crown in the canon of the weird with this fantastical collection of “eye-popping range” (John Domini, Washington Post). Boldly blending fables and myths with apocalyptic technologies, Amber Sparks has built a cultlike following with And I Do Not Forgive You. Fueled by feminism in all its colors, her surreal worlds—like Kelly Link’s and Karen Russell’s—are all-too-real. In “Mildly Happy, With Moments of Joy,” a friend is ghosted by a text message; in “Everyone’s a Winner at Meadow Park,” a teen coming-of-age in a trailer park befriends an actual ghost. Rife with “sharp wit, and an abiding tenderness” (Ilana Masad, NPR), these stories shine an interrogating light on the adage that “history likes to lie about women,” as the subjects of “You Won’t Believe What Really Happened to the Sabine Women” will attest. Written in prose that both shimmers and stings, the result is “nothing short of a raging success, a volume that points to a potentially incandescent literary future” (Kurt Baumeister, The Brooklyn Rail).