• The Language Game

  'Marvellously clear... playfully persuasive' Richard Dawkins 'Full of Fascinating details. A delight to read.' Tim Harford 'Highly original and convincing ... a delight to read!' - Daniel Everett ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- What is language? Why do we have it? Why does that matter? Language is perhaps humanity's most astonishing accomplishment and one that remains poorly understood. Upending centuries of scholarship (including, most recently, Chomsky and Pinker) The Language Game shows how people learn to talk not by acquiring fixed meanings and rules, but by picking up, reusing, and recombining countless linguistic fragments in novel ways. Drawing on entertaining and persuasive examples from across the world the book explains: · How our short-lived memory copes with the on-rushing deluge of sound that is everyday speech. · Why it is that language is such a challenge for language scientists but learnt effortlessly by toddlers. · Why the languages of the world are so spectacularly varied---and why no two people speak quite the same language. · Why humans have language, but chimps don't. · How language gave us a big brain and changed the course of evolution. · How language doesn't limit, but does shape, how we think. ·And ultimately, why all we know about language should give us hope. Christiansen and Chater's The Language Game draws on a fascinating range of examples to show the way language works, has shaped our evolution and is critical to our future.

  • Shop: buecher
  • Price: 22.99 EUR excl. shipping
• 

  A Slap in the Face: Why Insults Hurt - And Why They Shouldn't , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 353min

  Insults are part of the fabric of daily life. But why do we insult each other? Why do insults cause us such pain? Can we do anything to prevent or lessen this pain? Most importantly, how can we overcome our inclination to insult others?In A Slap in the Face, William Irvine undertakes a wide-ranging investigation of insults, their history, the role they play in social relationships, and the science behind them. He examines not just memorable zingers, such as Elizabeth Bowen's description of Aldous Huxley as "The stupid person's idea of a clever person", but subtle insults as well, such as when someone insults us by reporting the insulting things others have said about us: "I never read bad reviews about myself," wrote entertainer Oscar Levant, "because my best friends invariably tell me about them." Irvine also considers the role insults play in our society: They can be used to cement relations, as when a woman playfully teases her husband, or to enforce a social hierarchy, as when a boss publicly berates an employee.He goes on to investigate the many ways society has tried to deal with insults - by adopting codes of politeness, for example, and outlawing hate speech - but concludes that the best way to deal with insults is to immunize ourselves against them: We need to transform ourselves in the manner recommended by Stoic philosophers. We should, more precisely, become insult pacifists, trying hard not to insult others and laughing off their attempts to insult us.A rousing follow-up to A Guide to the Good Life, A Slap in the Face will interest anyone who's ever delivered an insult or felt the sting of one-in other words, everyone. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Johnny Heller. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/tant/012061/bk_tant_012061_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

  • Shop: Audible
  • Price: 9.95 EUR excl. shipping
• 

  M-Joy Practically Speaking: Matrix Energetics and Living Your Infinite Potential , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 426min

  A Practical Manual for Extraordinary Living Take a brilliant journey into the nature of change and reality to discover the power you have within you to transform. Join inspiring transformational leader Melissa Joy for a playful exploration into universal consciousness and infinite potential, available to everyone within the field of the heart. With beautiful and clear articulation, combined with a humorous weave of science, spirit, and practical play, Melissa Joy reveals how universal consciousness and infinite potential are organized and influence experiences. By practicing heart-centered awareness and freedom of choice, through the power of grace, anyone can navigate practically through life's situations and challenges to experience more flow, joy, and personal fulfillment. The field of the heart is a portal to personal power, individual change, and global transformation, and it will lead you to a new reality based in unity, love, and limitless potential. The field of the heart is the physics of miracles. The field of the heart is the physics of love. This journey into heart-centered awareness is complemented by the knowledge and wisdom Melissa Joy has acquired through teaching Matrix Energetics transformational seminars to thousands of students around the world. Discover how to consistently drop into the heart, let go, notice what you notice, and notice what is different. In this intriguing book, M-Joy shares what she has learned, including specific and effective strategies for change, as you discover how to playfully transform yourself and everything around you. Join M-Joy as she guides you to discover your truth as a limitless being, which is found within the heart, noticed as joy, and available for you to experience in every moment of every day. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Melissa Joy Jonsson. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/acx0/029783/bk_acx0_029783_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

  • Shop: Audible
  • Price: 9.95 EUR excl. shipping
• 

  A Study in Honor: A Novel , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 671min

  A selection in Parade’s roundup of “25 Hottest Books of Summer 2018” A Paste Magazine’s Most Anticipated 25 books of 2018 pick A Medium’s Books pick for We Can’t Wait to Read in 2018 list Set in a near future Washington, D.C., a clever, incisive, and fresh feminist twist on a classic literary icon - Sherlock Holmes - in which Dr. Janet Watson and covert agent Sara Holmes will use espionage, advanced technology, and the power of deduction to unmask a murderer targeting Civil War veterans. Dr. Janet Watson knows firsthand the horrifying cost of a divided nation. While treating broken soldiers on the battlefields of the New Civil War, a sniper’s bullet shattered her arm and ended her career. Honorably discharged and struggling with the semi-functional mechanical arm that replaced the limb she lost, she returns to the nation’s capital, a bleak, edgy city in the throes of a fraught presidential election. Homeless and jobless, Watson is uncertain of the future when she meets another black and queer woman, Sara Holmes, a mysterious yet playfully challenging covert agent who offers the doctor a place to stay. Watson’s readjustment to civilian life is complicated by the infuriating antics of her strange new roommate. But the tensions between them dissolve when Watson discovers that soldiers from the New Civil War have begun dying one by one - and that the deaths may be the tip of something far more dangerous, involving the pharmaceutical industry and even the looming election. Joining forces, Watson and Holmes embark on a thrilling investigation to solve the mystery - and secure justice for these fallen soldiers. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Lisa Renee Pitts. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/harp/007639/bk_harp_007639_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

  • Shop: Audible
  • Price: 9.95 EUR excl. shipping
• 

  Best Intentions , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 571min

  It starts with some innocent family fun. Writer Stephen Barrow's divorced wife, involved in a second marriage, has given Barrow custody of their six-year-old daughter, Penny. Father and daughter share a relationship that is tender, poignant, and funny. Their home life in a small upstate New York town is a happy and entirely wholesome one. One evening Penny, in her bath, playfully straightens her shampoo-stiffened hair into the horn of a "unicord," and her father takes her picture. When she "moons" him and says, "Take this one!" he clicks the shutter, although the roll of film was finished. Or so the mechanically challenged Barrow believed. The next day, the local pharmacy clerk using the photo machine is shocked by the snapshot, decides Stephen is a child pornographer, and calls the police, who arrest him. That is only the first step in Stephen Barrow's descent into hell. A small-town police chief, a vengeful ex-wife, a fledgling psychologist, a district attorney facing re-election - all of these and more push Barrow deeper and deeper into the depths, until everything he has is taken from him, his freedom, his belongings, and most particularly his beloved daughter. Best Intentions is a horror story. Not a horror story of monsters from the deep or roving homicidal psychopaths, but something much worse, something that batters at the listeners' defenses. As anyone familiar with Klempner's previous books will know, he is a writer with the talent to bring his story home to his listeners. As Best Intentions (based on an actual case) unfolds, its threat becomes more and more real. This could happen to anyone. It could happen to you. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Jeff Cummings. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/brll/009012/bk_brll_009012_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

  • Shop: Audible
  • Price: 9.95 EUR excl. shipping
• 

  Prospero, Ariel, Reith and Gill: A BBC Radio 4 Dramatisation, Hörbuch, Digital, 43min

  Here is Gary Brown's BBC Radio 4 full-cast comedy dramatisation about artist Eric Gill's clash with the BBC over his famous sculpture of Prospero and Ariel. It stars Anton Lesser as Eric Gill and Tim McInnerny as Sir John Reith, the first Director General of the Corporation, and was originally broadcast in the Afternoon Play slot on Wednesday 9 June 2010. Inspired by real events, the play charts a clash between the BBC's governors and the artist over the propriety of the sculpture's appearance. Gill became quite a celebrity as he carved the statue in situ on scaffolding in front of Broadcasting House. In his trademark smock and beret, he drew the attention of the tabloid papers and became known as the ‘Married Monk’. The play imagines conversations between Sir John and the artist as he passes him on his way into Broadcasting House each morning. Framed with a period newsreel-style commentary, the comedy playfully deals with the perennial tension between the Establishment and the Artist. The strange and mysterious Gill contrasts with the authoritarian but often troubled figure of Reith, but in the end the sculpture focuses their thoughts about the role of Art in the life of mankind. While this is a comedy, the play touches a little on the well-documented darker side of both men's nature, and offers an insight into one of the more celebrated events of early BBC history. The cast is completed by Jon Glover as the Newsreel Reporter, David Seddon as Charlie, Stephen Darcy as Father Sean, Tina Gray as Lady Snowden, and Alison Pettitt as the Nanny. Written by Gary Brown and directed by Peter Leslie Wild. Language: English. Narrator: Jon Glover, David Seddon, Stephen Darcy, Tina Gray, Alison Pettitt. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/bbcw/004185/bk_bbcw_004185_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.

  • Shop: Audible
  • Price: 9.95 EUR excl. shipping
• 

  Spotify Teardown

  An innovative investigation of the inner workings of Spotify that traces the transformation of audio files into streamed experience.Spotify provides a streaming service that has been welcomed as disrupting the world of music. Yet such disruption always comes at a price. Spotify Teardown contests the tired claim that digital culture thrives on disruption. Borrowing the notion of teardown from reverse-engineering processes, in this book a team of five researchers have playfully disassembled Spotify's product and the way it is commonly understood.Spotify has been hailed as the solution to illicit downloading, but it began as a partly illicit enterprise that grew out of the Swedish file-sharing community. Spotify was originally praised as an innovative digital platform but increasingly resembles a media company in need of regulation, raising questions about the ways in which such cultural content as songs, books, and films are now typically made available online.Spotify Teardown combines interviews, participant observations, and other analyses of Spotify's front end with experimental, covert investigations of its back end. The authors engaged in a series of interventions, which include establishing a record label for research purposes, intercepting network traffic with packet sniffers, and web-scraping corporate materials. The authors' innovative digital methods earned them a stern letter from Spotify accusing them of violating its terms of use; the company later threatened their research funding. Thus, the book itself became an intervention into the ethics and legal frameworks of corporate behavior.

  • Shop: buecher
  • Price: 13.99 EUR excl. shipping
• 

  Spotify Teardown (eBook, ePUB)

  An innovative investigation of the inner workings of Spotify that traces the transformation of audio files into streamed experience.Spotify provides a streaming service that has been welcomed as disrupting the world of music. Yet such disruption always comes at a price. Spotify Teardown contests the tired claim that digital culture thrives on disruption. Borrowing the notion of "teardown” from reverse-engineering processes, in this book a team of five researchers have playfully disassembled Spotify's product and the way it is commonly understood.Spotify has been hailed as the solution to illicit downloading, but it began as a partly illicit enterprise that grew out of the Swedish file-sharing community. Spotify was originally praised as an innovative digital platform but increasingly resembles a media company in need of regulation, raising questions about the ways in which such cultural content as songs, books, and films are now typically made available online.Spotify Teardown combines interviews, participant observations, and other analyses of Spotify's "front end” with experimental, covert investigations of its "back end.” The authors engaged in a series of interventions, which include establishing a record label for research purposes, intercepting network traffic with packet sniffers, and web-scraping corporate materials. The authors' innovative digital methods earned them a stern letter from Spotify accusing them of violating its terms of use; the company later threatened their research funding. Thus, the book itself became an intervention into the ethics and legal frameworks of corporate behavior.

  • Shop: buecher
  • Price: 11.95 EUR excl. shipping
• 

  Antoni in the Kitchen

  Queer Eye sensation and passionate cook Antoni Porowski is taking the world by storm. With a disarmingly fresh approach to food, Antoni inspires both newbies and knowledgeable cooks to get back into the kitchen. Antoni's gorgeous debut cookbook brings together his trademark inclusive and accessible attitude to food with one hundred of his all-time favourite recipes. With chapters including Weeknight Healthyish Meals, Apps and Snacks and Bakes, the book celebrates Antoni's love for fresh, casual and healthy cooking and the occasional indulgent feast. Antoni gets dinner on the table fast with Chicken Milanese with Baby Tomato Salad, makes visual stunners such as Roasted Carrots with Carrot-Top Pesto, playfully reboots Hi-Lo Poutine from his French-Canadian heritage and dazzles with Salty Lemon Squares for dessert. Stories behind every recipe give readers a peek inside Antoni's kitchen and life. With delicious recipes, beautiful photos and simple cooking techniques, Antoni in the Kitchen celebrates fast feel-good food, the therapeutic nature of cooking and the joy of sharing food with friends and loved ones. Reality TV with heart, Netflix smash hit Queer Eye burst onto our screens in 2018. A team of style experts known as the 'Fab Five' forge relationships with men and women who often have different beliefs from them, leading to moments of social commentary interspersed with style advice. On release, the show had a 100% rating on review website Rotten Tomatoes. In 2018, the show won three Emmy Awards and was nominated for four People's Choice Awards.

  • Shop: buecher
  • Price: 17.99 EUR excl. shipping
• 

  The Underachiever's Manifesto (eBook, ePUB)

  The Underachiever's Manifesto is the playfully persuasive pocket guide to living life to the least and loving it. This isn't your average handbook-this is a funny self-help book for our ongoing modern age of overachievement. The book makes the case for just the right amount of effort-a lot less than we've been led to believe-and reveals how mediocrity is the key to happiness at work, in relationships, dieting, exercise, investment, and more. • Contains easy-to-follow advice with gentle humor and genuine wisdom • Addresses issues such as social media stress, FOMO, and the life-draining tragedy of tidying up • Author Ray Bennett is a medical specialist in Seattle and a recovering overachiever This welcome new edition-revised just enough but not going overboard-brings its needed-now-more-than-ever perspective to our new era of fitness tracking, app overload, and tidying up. Turn it down a notch. Don't you feel better already? • Humorous but actually helpful-a rarity for self-help books • Perfect for overachievers, underachievers, anyone looking for a funny, friendly way to take things down a notch • Great for those who loved The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life by Mark Manson, Unfu*k Yourself: Get Out of Your Head and into Your Life by Gary John Bishop, and How to Be an Imperfectionist: The New Way to Self-Acceptance, Fearless Living, and Freedom from Perfectionism by Stephen Guise

  • Shop: buecher
  • Price: 4.99 EUR excl. shipping

---

---