Archives de catégorie : Nonfiction

OUR BIGGEST FIGHT de Frank H. McCourt

The internet as we know it is broken. Here’s how we can seize back control of our lives from the corporate algorithms and create a better internet—before it’s too late.

OUR BIGGEST FIGHT
Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity, and Dignity in the Digital Age
by Frank H. McCourt, Jr. with Michael Casey
Crown Hardcover, March 2024

It was once a utopian dream. But today’s internet, despite its conveniences and connectivity, is the primary cause of a pervasive unease that has taken hold in the U.S. and other democratic societies. It’s why youth suicide rates are rising, why politics has become toxic, and why our most important institutions are faltering.

Information is the lifeblood of any society, and our current system for distributing it is corrupted at its heart. Everything comes down to our ability to communicate openly and trustfully with each other. But, thanks to the dominant digital platforms and the ways they distort human behavior, we have lost that ability—while, at the same time, we’ve been robbed of the data that is rightfully ours.

The roots of this crisis, argue Frank McCourt and Michael Casey, lie in the prevailing order of the internet. In plain but forceful language, the authors—a civic entrepreneur and an acclaimed journalist—show how a centralized system controlled by a small group of for-profit entities has set this catastrophe in motion and eroded our personhood.

And then they describe a groundbreaking solution to reclaim it: rather than superficial, patchwork regulations, we must reimagine the very architecture of the internet. The resulting “third-generation internet” would replace the status quo with a new model marked by digital property rights, autonomy, and ownership.

Inspired by historical calls to action like Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, OUR BIGGEST FIGHT argues that we must act now to embed the core values of a free, democratic society in the internet of tomorrow. Do it right and we will finally unlock its immense potential.

Frank H. McCourt, Jr. is the executive chairman and former CEO of McCourt Global, as well as the founder and executive chairman of Project Liberty, a visionary effort to transform the internet through a new, equitable technology infrastructure and rebuild social media in a way that enables users to own and control their personal data.

Michael J. Casey is chief content officer at CoinDesk, a podcaster and the chairman of the Consensus conference. He has worked as a journalist on five continents, including 18 years with Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal. Casey’s previous books include The Age of Cryptocurrency, The Social Organism, and The Truth Machine.

OUTOFSHAPEWORTHLESSLOSER de Gracie Gold

In this explosive tell-all memoir, Gracie Gold, Olympic medalist, offers an unprecedented look inside the pressure-packed world of figure skating and reveals her battle to survive mental illness, eating disorders, and crippling perfectionism.

OUTOFSHAPEWORTHLESSLOSER
A Memoir of Figure Skating, F*cking Up, and Figuring It Out
by Gracie Gold
Crown, February 2024

When Gracie Gold stepped onto center stage (or ice, rather) as America’s sweetheart at the 2014 Sochi Olympics, she instantly became the face of America’s most beloved winter sport. Beautiful, blonde, Midwestern, and media-trained, she was suddenly being written up everywhere from The New Yorker to Teen Vogue to People and baking cookies with Taylor Swift.

But little did the public know what Gracie was facing when the cameras were off. In 2017, she entered treatment for what was publicly announced as eating disorder and anxiety treatment, but what was, in reality, suicidal ideation. While Gracie’s public star was rising, her private life was falling apart: Cracks within her family were widening, her bulimia was getting worse, and she became a survivor of sexual assault. The pressure of training for years with demanding coaches and growing up in a household that accepted nothing less than gold had finally taken its toll. As Gracie entered treatment, she was asked to cite only her eating disorder and anxiety in the announcement: suicidal ideation wasn’t “palatable.”

In OUTOFSHAPEWORTHLESSLOSER, Gracie shares the less “palatable” parts of her life, revealing exclusive, and harrowing, details about her struggles: the battles with her family, her coaches, the powers-that-be at her federation, and the voice in her head that she calls « outofshapeworthlessloser. » Gracie’s memoir is not only a forceful reckoning from a world-class athlete, but also an intimate account of surviving as a young woman in a society that rewards appearances more than anything and demands perfection at all costs.

Gracie Gold is a two-time U.S. figure-skating champion and an Olympic bronze medalist. Gold is the first and only American woman to win an NHK Trophy title and holds the record for the highest short-program score ever recorded by an American woman. Her writing has been published in The Cut. She lives in Wilmington, Delaware, and trains in suburban Philadelphia.

UNPROCESS YOUR LIFE de Rob Hobson

The first cookbook to tackle ultra-processed foods (UPFs), teaching you the skills and recipes you need to understand and approach food in a fresh, accessible way so you can live an unprocessed life.

UNPROCESS YOUR LIFE
Break Free from Ultra-Processed Foods for Good
by Rob Hobson
Thorsons, January 2024
(via Dorie Simmonds Agency)

Research shows that 1 in 7 of us across the globe is addicted to ultra-processed foods (UPFs), with 1 in 8 children also addicted to UPFs. Often labelled as ‘healthy’, UPFs are everywhere we look – in our shopping baskets, our children’s lunch boxes and our kitchen cupboards. Yet research has shown these foods are synonymous with ill-health and a litany of chronic conditions, such as type 2 diabetes, cancer and cardiovascular disease.

Breaking free from the hold of these cheap, convenient UPFs is one of the best things we can do for our health, but it can feel impossible to know where to begin.

In UNPROCESS YOUR LIFE, expert nutritionist Rob Hobson sets out practical steps and delicious recipes to make your diet fresher and healthier, yet still bursting with flavour.

Helping to navigate the modern food landscape, Rob explains how to identify UPFs, providing handy tips on choosing foods to suit your lifestyle. The recipes have been structured to satisfy all those moments when we are most vulnerable to ultraprocessed foods, such as dinnertime with the kids, quick meals and packed lunches.

Sharing effortless wholefood swaps and tasty recipes that will create speedy meals, freezer favourites, sauces and snacks, UNPROCESS YOUR LIFE presents a simple, satisfying and achievable way to embrace food without the nasties.

Rob Hobson is an award-winning registered nutritionist with over 17 years of experience in the industry and a trusted, go-to voice in the media. He has written hundreds of articles for publications, including the Daily Mail, Women’s Health, Style Magazine, and Hello! magazine.

Rob appears regularly on the radio and has been featured on TV shows, including Channel 4’s Food Unwrapped. Alongside this, he consults for major international brands and has coauthored the best-selling Detox Kitchen Bible and The Art of Sleeping.

THE GRIEF CURE de Cody Delistraty

In this lyrical and moving story of the world of Prolonged Grief, journalist Cody Delistraty reflects on his experience with loss and explores what modern science, history, and literature reveal about the nature of our relationship to grief and our changing attitudes toward its cure.

THE GRIEF CURE
by Cody Delistraty
HarperCollins, June 2024
(via Frances Goldin Literary Agency)

When Cody Delistraty lost his mother to cancer in his early 20s, he found himself unsure how to move forward. Planning for her recovery, he and his family had a purpose. But after she was gone, there seemed to exist only the empty advice on grief: move through the five stages, achieve closure, get back to work, go back to normal. So begins a journey into the new frontiers of grief, where Delistraty seeks out the researchers, technologists, therapists, marketers, and communities around the world looking to cure the pain of loss in novel ways. From the neuroscience of memory deletion to book prescriptions, laughter therapy, psilocybin, and Breakup Bootcamp, what ultimately emerges is not so much a cure as a fresh understanding of what living with grief truly means.

As Delistraty followed the blueprint of his own ad hoc treatment plan, the question of whether the most painful kind of grief can and should be cured had also been taken up by the American Psychiatry Association, as they recently gave extended, intense, disruptive grief an official name: Prolonged Grief Disorder. Stamping this kind of grief with a diagnosis has opened innovative avenues of treatment and an important conversation about a debilitating form of grief, but it also raises the question of whether grief, no matter how severe, is best treated medically at all?

Rigorously researched and beautifully written, The Grief Cure is a moving and eye-opening chronicle of a new diagnosis and a wide-ranging cultural history of grief of all sorts as a human rite. Braiding deep, emotional resonance with sharp research and historical insight, Delistraty places his own experience in dialogue with great writers and thinkers throughout history who have puzzled over this eternal question: how might we best face loss?

Cody Delistraty is the culture editor at The Wall Street Journal Magazine. He has written essays and criticism for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic and, while living in Paris for several years, he was the European arts columnist for The Paris Review. He has degrees in politics from New York University and history from the University of Oxford, where he graduated with a double distinction (first class). He and his work have been featured on WNYC, France 5 and Arté; British Vogue named him a best young writer of the year; and he has given corporate talks about tragedy, art, and creativity to companies like PwC.

FRIGHTEN THE HORSES d’Oliver Radclyffe

For fans of Jennifer Finney Boylan’s She’s Not There and Thomas Page McBee, FRIGHTEN THE HORSES is a textured and sharply written queer memoir about coming of age in the fourth decade of one’s life and embracing one’s truest self in a world that wants to fit everyone in neat boxes.

FRIGHTEN THE HORSES
by Oliver Radclyffe
Roxane Gay Books/Grove Atlantic, September 2024

From the outside, Oliver Radclyffe spent four decades living an immensely privileged, beautifully composed life. As the daughter of two well-to-do British parents and the wife of a handsome, successful man from an equally privileged family, Oliver played the parts expected of him. He checked off every box—marriage, children (four), a white-picket fence surrounding a stately home in Connecticut, and a golden retriever named Biscuit.

But beneath the shiny veneer, Oliver was desperately trying to stay afloat as he struggled to maintain a façade of normalcy—his hair was falling out in large clumps, he couldn’t eat, and his mood swings often brought him to tears. And then, on an otherwise unremarkable afternoon in September, Oliver Radclyffe woke up and realized the life of a trapped housewife was not one he was ever meant to live. In fact, Oliver had spent his entire life denying the deepest, truest parts of himself. In the wake of this realization, he began the challenging, messy journey toward self-acceptance and living a truer life, knowing he risked the life he’d built to do so.

The journey is fraught, as Oliver navigated leaving a marriage and reintroducing himself to his children. And despite the challenges he faced, Oliver realizes there was no way for him to go back to the beautiful lie of his previous life. Not if he wanted to survive. FRIGHTEN THE HORSES is a trans man’s coming of age story, about a housewife who comes out as lesbian and tentatively, at first, steps into the world of queerness. With growing courage and the support of his newfound community, Oliver is finally able to face the question of his gender identity and become the man he is supposed to be. The story of a flawed, fascinating, gorgeously queer man, FRIGHTEN THE HORSES introduces Oliver Radclyffe as a witty, arresting, unforgettable voice.

Oliver Radclyffe is part of the new wave of transgender writers unafraid to address the complex nuances of transition, examining the places where gender identity, sexual orientation, feminist allegiance, social class, and family history overlap. His work has appeared in The New York Times and Electric Literature, and he has a book of essays due for publication in October 2023 with Unbound Edition Press. He currently lives on the Connecticut coast, where he is raising his four children.