So your wife signed up with a network-marketing company, and now you’re tripping over a pile of skepticism, frustration, and a million questions. Oh no. She can’t be serious. These things are scams! Thousands of men across the country are in the same boat. They hear their wives talk about a new “opportunity” and immediately launch into all the reasons why network marketing doesn’t work, how nobody makes real money, and how most people quit the business within a year. Instead of encouraging their wives’ excitement and enthusiasm, many husbands pour a bucket of cold water on their dreams. In She’s Selling What?! Tim Farrant opens up about his wife’s start and epic rise in network marketing and his own journey from shock and skepticism to understanding and support as he set aside his ego and figured out how to support his wife as she built a business that changed their family forever. As you follow along, you will: Discover how to overcome your initial skepticism and take a good, honest look at your wife’s network-marketing business. Identify your family’s big win that will make all her hard work worthwhile. Understand how her compensation plan works, how to maximize it to make the most money possible. See where you fit into her business and how you can make an exponential impact on her success. Find answers to the most common questions husbands have about network marketing. Learn when you should speak up—and when you should shut up. Embrace your role as her number-one fan. Realize that her business can be the best thing that ever happened to your family. We owe it to our wives to set aside our initial skepticism and preconceived notions about network marketing and dig deep into the issue that matters most: how we can become the supportive, encouraging husbands—and teammates—our hard-working wives deserve.

In his exciting new book, based on a decade of ethnographic fieldwork, Maurice Magaña considers how urban and migrant youth in Oaxaca embrace subcultures from hip-hop to punk and adopt creative organizing practices to create meaningful channels of participation in local social and political life. In the process, young people remake urban space and construct new identities in ways that directly challenge elite visions of their city and essentialist notions of what it means to be indigenous in the contemporary era. Cartographies of Youth Resistance is essential reading for students and scholars interested in youth politics and culture in Mexico, social movements, urban studies, and migration.

A landmark insider’s tour of how social media affects our decision-making and shapes our world in ways both useful and dangerous, with critical insights into the social media trends of the 2020 election and beyond “The book might be described as prophetic. . . . At least two of Aral’s three predictions have come to fruition.”—New York NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY WIRED • LONGLISTED FOR THE PORCHLIGHT BUSINESS BOOK AWARD Social media connected the world—and gave rise to fake news and increasing polarization. It is paramount, MIT professor Sinan Aral says, that we recognize the outsize effect social media has on us—on our politics, our economy, and even our personal health—in order to steer today’s social technology toward its great promise while avoiding the ways it can pull us apart. Drawing on decades of his own research and business experience, Aral goes under the hood of the most powerful social networks to tackle the critical question of just how much social media actually shapes our choices, for better or worse. He shows how the tech behind social media offers the same set of behavior influencing levers to everyone who hopes to change the way we think and act—from Russian hackers to brand marketers—which is why its consequences affect everything from elections to business, dating to health. Along the way, he covers a wide array of topics, including how network effects fuel Twitter’s and Facebook’s massive growth, the neuroscience of how social media affects our brains, the real consequences of fake news, the power of social ratings, and the impact of social media on our kids. In mapping out strategies for being more thoughtful consumers of social media, The Hype Machine offers the definitive guide to understanding and harnessing for good the technology that has redefined our world overnight.

Here are complete toasts for the best man -- frequently updated with new speeches. From traditional to unusual to pleasantly quirky, the speeches come with simple tips, explaining structure and tone. This is a short, to-the-point tool designed to unstick the brain and get ideas flowing.

Why do rap MCs present their studio recorded lyrics as “live and direct”? Why do they so insistently define abilities or actions, theirs or someone else’s, against a pre-existing signifier? This book examines the compositional practice of rap lyricists and offers compelling answers to these questions. Through a 40 year-span analysis of the music, it argues that whether through the privileging of chanted call-and-response phrases or through rhetorical strategies meant to assist in getting one’s listening audience open, the focus of the first rap MCs on community building and successful performer-audience cooperation has remained prevalent on rap records with lyrics and production techniques encouraging the listener to become physically and emotionally involved in recorded performances. Relating rap’s rhetorical strategy of posing inferences through intertextuality to early call-and-response routines and crowd-controlling techniques, this study emphasizes how the dynamic and collective elements from the stage performances and battles of the formative years of rap have remained relevant in the creative process behind this music. It contends that the customary use of identifiable references and similes by rap lyricists works as a fluid interchange designed to keep the listener involved in the performance. Like call-and-response in live performances, it involves a dynamic form of communication and places MCs in a position where they activate the shared knowledge of their audience, making sure that they “know what they mean,” thus transforming their mediated lyrics into a collective and engaging performance.

Originally published in hardcover in 2013.