Archives par étiquette : Levine Greenberg Rostan

HOW TO STOP TRYING de Kate Williams

A smart and humorous look at the self-help industry and the pervasive impact of social media in our modern world.

HOW TO STOP TRYING:
Rejecting Empowerment Culture, Ignoring Bad Advice, and (Finally) Giving Yourself a Break
by Kate Williams
Harper Wave, Summer 2024
(via Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary)

You can think of this as straddling the line between Jenny Odell’s sparkling How To Do Nothing and Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck if it had been written by a woman who considers Mean Girls a canonical film. Delivered with the whip smart humor and grace of someone who has made a career writing about everything from Wu-Tang Clan to colonics and odor-resistant underwear, HOW TO STOP TRYING has short chapters like Death Is The Ultimate Life Hack that helps you jump into perspective shifts and You Don’t Have to Be Who You Think You Are that teaches you to start living beyond the nouns in your social media bio and think of how you want to be instead of what you want to be.
Kate Williams has spent her career crafting narratives for women—as a ghostwriter for celebrity books, a magazine journalist, and an editorial director at companies like Urban Outfitters and Calvin Klein—but she has come to the conclusion that these narratives of never giving up, pushing through, soldiering on are causing a lot of harm. As a lifelong consumer and maker of media, Kate is keenly aware of exactly how these campaigns are working to sell you stuff, make you feel bad about yourself (so they can sell you stuff) and keep you from enjoying the actual life you’ve already built.
When Kate gave up trying to have a second child after several miscarriages, the most common response she got was: “Don’t give up. Keep trying. It’ll be worth it in the end.” She understood that this response was usually coming from a well-meaning place, but she bristled as her aha moment arrived—at what point do we have to quit, move on make peace, stop trying? And why is everyone else so invested in me not giving up? She did something revolutionary and just…stopped. As she began to turn her attention to what was already in her life instead of what wasn’t she began to see a bigger life theory come into focus. Not just about trying for a baby but trying (so hard) at all the things all the time.
There is no shortage of self-improvement books (Kate has ghostwritten many of these!) but there is a gap in books that really focus on bringing awareness to assumed cultural norms that are damaging so many of us. In the post-pandemic world, the conversation about stepping back is prevalent but what it misses is that stepping back is not just another pit stop before gearing back up to breakneck speed (in the way self-care has become) but instead it’s a whole new road of a gentler way to move forward.

Kate Williams is the author of the YA series The Babysitters Coven and the novel Never Coming Home (Delacorte Press). Her nonfiction has appeared in Cosmopolitan, NYLON, Elle, Women’s Health, Shape, Time Out New York, Monster Children, Russh, Oyster, The Fader, NME, H&M, Popular, Style.com and more. As a ghostwriter, she has written New York Times bestsellers, celebrity tell-alls, memoirs, how-tos, and beauty bibles.

SINKHOLE, AND OTHER INEXPLICABLE VOIDS de Leyna Krow

A darkly fabulist story collection about women’s choices, complicity, and power and the lack thereof (with screen rights to the title story « Sinkhole » sold to Jordan Peele and Universal).

SINKHOLE, AND OTHER INEXPLICABLE VOIDS
by Leyna Krow
Viking, Summer 2024
(via Levine Greenberg Rostan)

Credit: Young Kwak photo

From a genie, a devil, time travelers, a thief in peril, an oversized baby, an exploding woman, a woman with an impossible sinkhole in her yard, a woman who gives birth to a wild child, and more, this collection explores women in power – or in a deficit of power — to confront questions of complicity and intent, hysteria, paranoia, and what makes us whole in a world with relative values. With unsettling insight and echoes of Carmen Maria Machado, Kelly Link and Laura van den Berg, SINKHOLE, AND OTHER INEXPLICABLE VOIDS traces peripheral, upside down spaces in which sometimes there is a choice to be made, rules to be broken, risks to be tried, even crimes to be had, for the sake of a woman’s unconditional freedom.

Leyna Krow’s first collection I’M FINE, BUT YOU APPEAR TO BE SINKING (Featherproof Books, 2017) was a finalist for The Believer Book Award. Krow lives in Spokane, Washington with her husband and two children. She is at work on her second novel

MISBELIEF de Dan Ariely

The renowned social scientist, professor, and bestselling author of Predictably Irrational delivers his most urgent and compelling book—an eye-opening exploration of the human side of the misinformation crisis—examining what drives otherwise rational people to adopt deeply irrational beliefs.

MISBELIEF:
What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things
by Dan Ariely
HarperCollins, September 2023
(via Levine Greenberg Rostan)

Misinformation affects all of us on a daily basis—from social media to larger political challenges, from casual conversations in supermarkets, to even our closest relationships. While we recognize the dangers that misinformation poses, the problem is complex—far beyond what policing social media alone can achieve—and too often our limited solutions are shaped by partisan politics and individual interpretations of truth.
In MISBELIEF, preeminent social scientist Dan Ariely argues that to understand the irrational appeal of misinformation, we must first understand the behavior of “misbelief”—the psychological and social journey that leads people to mistrust accepted truths, entertain alternative facts, and even embrace full-blown conspiracy theories. Misinformation, it turns out, appeals to something innate in all of us—on the right and the left—and it is only by understanding this psychology that we can blunt its effects. Grounded in years of study as well as Ariely’s own experience as a target of disinformation, MISBELIEF is an eye-opening and comprehensive analysis of the psychological drivers that cause otherwise rational people to adopt deeply irrational beliefs. Utilizing the latest research, Ariely reveals the key elements—emotional, cognitive, personality, and social—that drive people down the funnel of false information and mistrust, showing how under the right circumstances, anyone can become a misbeliever.
Yet Ariely also offers hope. Even as advanced artificial intelligence has become capable of generating convincing fake news stories at an unprecedented scale, he shows that awareness of these forces fueling misbelief make us, as individuals and as a society, more resilient to its allure. Combating misbelief requires a strategy rooted not in conflict, but in empathy. The sooner we recognize that misbelief is above all else a human problem, the sooner we can become the solution ourselves.

Dan Ariely is the James B. Duke Professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University. He is a founding member of the Center for Advanced Hindsight; co-creator of the film documentary (Dis)Honesty: The Truth About Lies; and a three-time New York Times bestselling author. His books include Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, The Honest Truth About Dishonesty, Irrationally Yours, Payoff, Dollars and Sense, and Amazing Decisions. His TED talks have been viewed more than 27 million times. Dan has what appears to be bad luck in terms of the troubles he gets into, but also the good fortune to learn and develop from these challenges.

POWER AND PREDICTION d’Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans & Avi Goldfarb

Disruption resulting from the proliferation of AI is coming. The authors of the bestselling Prediction Machines can help you prepare.

POWER AND PREDICTION:
The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence
by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans & Avi Goldfarb
Harvard Business Review Press, November 2022
(via Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary)

Artificial intelligence (AI) has impacted many industries around the world—banking and finance, pharmaceuticals, automotive, medical technology, manufacturing, and retail. But it has only just begun its odyssey toward cheaper, better, and faster predictions that drive strategic business decisions. When prediction is taken to the max, industries transform, and with such transformation comes disruption.
What is at the root of this? In their bestselling first book, Prediction Machines, eminent economists Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb explained the simple yet game-changing economics of AI. Now, in POWER AND PREDICTION , they go deeper, examining the most basic unit of analysis: the decision. The authors explain that the two key decision-making ingredients are prediction and judgment, and we perform both together in our minds, often without realizing it. The rise of AI is shifting prediction from humans to machines, relieving people from this cognitive load while increasing the speed and accuracy of decisions.
This sets the stage for a flourishing of new decisions and has profound implications for system-level innovation. Redesigning systems of interdependent decisions takes time—many industries are in the quiet before the storm—but when these new systems emerge, they can be disruptive on a global scale. Decision-making confers power. In industry, power confers profits; in society, power confers control. This process will have winners and losers, and the authors show how businesses can leverage opportunities, as well as protect their positions.
Filled with illuminating insights, rich examples, and practical advice, POWER AND PREDICTION is the must-read guide for any business leader or policymaker on how to make the coming AI disruptions work for you rather than against you.

Ajay Agrawal is Professor of Strategic Management and the Geoffrey Taber Chair in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. He is founder of the Creative Destruction Lab and the Metaverse Mind Lab and cofounder of NEXT Canada and Sanctuary.
Joshua Gans is the Jeffrey S. Skoll Chair of Technical Innovation and Entrepreneurship and Professor of Strategic Management at Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. He is Chief Economist of the Creative Destruction Lab, department editor (Strategy) at Management Science, and cofounder and managing director of Core Economic Research.
Avi Goldfarb is the Rotman Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Healthcare and Professor of Marketing at Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. He is also Chief Data Scientist at the Creative Destruction Lab, a fellow at Behavioral Economics in Action at Rotman, and a faculty affiliate at the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

KILLING ME de Michelle Gagnon

Utterly original and wildly entertaining, with a protagonist whose life is a total mess, KILLING ME is the laugh-out-loud funny thriller that we never knew we needed.

KILLING ME
by Michelle Gagnon
Putnam, May 2023
(via Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary)

She escaped a serial killer. Then things got weird. Amber Jamison cannot believe she’s about to become the latest victim of a serial killer—she’s savvy and street smart, so when she gets pushed into, of all things, a white windowless van, she’s more angry than afraid. Things get even weirder when she’s miraculously saved by a mysterious woman…who promptly disappears. Who was she? And why is she hunting serial killers?
You’d think escaping one psychopath would be enough, but Amber’s problems are just beginning. Her close call has law enforcement circling a past she’s tried to outrun. So she flees across the country, ending up at a seedy motel in Las Vegas with a noir-obsessed manager and a sex worker as her unlikely companions…and danger right behind. She’s landed in the crosshairs of the world’s most prolific killer, caught up in a deadly game that’s been going on for years. To survive, she’s forced to dust off her old playbook and partner with someone she can’t trust. The odds are against her, but sometimes you just have to roll the dice.

Michelle Gagnon writes thrillers for teens and adults. A former modern dancer, dog walker, bartender, freelance journalist, personal trainer, and model, she’s currently pursuing a master’s degree in clinical psychology. She lives in Los Angeles with her family and way too many dogs.