In the early 1960s, the quiet borough of Queens was rocked by the violent and brutal murders of Barbara Kralik, Annie Mae Johnson, and Kitty Genovese. These murders shocked not only Queens and New York, but the entire nation, especially when newspapers disclosed Kitty's neighbors heard her screams and looked on without calling the police. Two suspects were apprehended and indicted, Winston Moseley for the Genovese murder and Alvin Mitchell for the Kralik murder. Before the trials, Moseley claimed to have committed the Kralik and Johnson murders as well, not taken seriously by the police and DA until Moseley disclosed details only the actual killer could have known. Charles Skoller, the young prosecutor assigned to these trials was now faced with a prosecutor's nightmare. In Twisted Confessions, he details the murders and relives his investigations and trials that followed in the almost impossible task of revealing and convicting the actual killer.

Can crime make our world safer? Crimes are the worst of humanity’s wrongs but, oddly, they sometimes “trigger” improvement in our lives. Crimes That Changed Our World explores some of the most important trigger cases of the past century, revealing much about how change comes to our modern world. The exact nature of the crime-outrage-reform dynamic can take many forms, and Paul and Sarah Robinson explore those differences in the cases they present. Each case is in some ways unique but there are repeating patterns that can offer important insights about what produces change and how in the future we might best manage it. Sometimes reform comes as a society wrestles with a new and intolerable problem. Sometimes it comes because an old problem from which we have long suffered suddenly has an apparent solution provided by technology or some other social or economic advance. Or, sometimes the engine of reform kicks into gear simply because we decide as a society that we are no longer willing to tolerate a long-standing problem and are now willing to do something about it. As the amazing and often touching stories that the Robinsons present make clear, the path of progress is not just a long series of course corrections; sometimes it is a quick turn or an unexpected lurch. In a flash we can suddenly feel different about present circumstances, seeing a need for change and can often, just as suddenly, do something about it. Every trigger crime that appears in Crimes That Changed Our World highlights a societal problem that America has chosen to deal with, each in a unique way. But what these extraordinary, and sometime unexpected, cases have in common is that all of them describe crimes that changed our world.

Newly separated and determined to reclaim her life, middle-aged mom Emme Witt-Eden embarked on a journey to rediscover herself through sex. The outcome is a wildly entertaining and unfiltered narrative of her experience becoming an “f-girl” – well, a middle-aged one. When Witt-Eden ended her decade-long marriage, it left her with a shattered self-esteem and a loss of trust in men. After learning her husband had cheated on her with multiple women, she could have become a bitter, middle-aged woman. Instead, she burst back onto the dating scene with a ravenous desire for sex. At first, astonishingly insecure and utterly ignorant about current dating practices, she soon found herself growing empowered by experiences such as a passionate encounter in a park, steamy sex in a shower, and a rendezvous with a nude photographer. Emboldened with newfound confidence, she began to reap the rewards of meeting men from the convenience of her iPhone. Along the way, she learned many lessons, such as never to leave her vibrator at home and that she could still orgasm even with a man she disliked. However, not yet legally divorced from her husband, she was still emotionally entangled with him. A chance meeting with his former mistress made her realize that what she really wanted was love. Filled with riveting, sensual, and steamy descriptions, Confessions of a Middle-Aged F-Girl is more than an erotic memoir; it is the story of one woman’s emotional rebirth. Erotic in places, tragic in others, and sometimes downright hilarious, this book offers an uncensored look at what it is to date as a middle-aged woman in our modern age. With unabashed honesty, Witt-Eden shows that women really do reach their sexual peak after forty and that it’s never too late to start over.

In "No One Helped" Marcia M. Gallo examines one of America's most infamous true-crime stories: the 1964 rape and murder of Catherine "Kitty" Genovese in a middle-class neighborhood of Queens, New York. Front-page reports in the New York Times incorrectly identified thirty-eight indifferent witnesses to the crime, fueling fears of apathy and urban decay. Genovese's life, including her lesbian relationship, also was obscured in media accounts of the crime. Fifty years later, the story of Kitty Genovese continues to circulate in popular culture. Although it is now widely known that there were far fewer actual witnesses to the crime than was reported in 1964, the moral of the story continues to be urban apathy. "No One Helped" traces the Genovese story's development and resilience while challenging the myth it created."No One Helped" places the conscious creation and promotion of the Genovese story within a changing urban environment. Gallo reviews New York's shifting racial and economic demographics and explores post–World War II examinations of conscience regarding the horrors of Nazism. These were important factors in the uncritical acceptance of the story by most media, political leaders, and the public despite repeated protests from Genovese's Kew Gardens neighbors at their inaccurate portrayal. The crime led to advances in criminal justice and psychology, such as the development of the 911 emergency system and numerous studies of bystander behaviors. Gallo emphasizes that the response to the crime also led to increased community organizing as well as feminist campaigns against sexual violence. Even though the particulars of the sad story of her death were distorted, Kitty Genovese left an enduring legacy of positive changes to the urban environment.

This Handbook provides a comprehensive guide to the latest research on role-playing games (RPGs) across disciplines, cultures, and media in one single, accessible volume. Collaboratively authored by more than 40 key scholars, it traces the history of RPGs, from wargaming precursors to tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons to the rise of live-action role-play and contemporary computer RPG and massively multiplayer online RPG franchises, like Baldur’s Gate, Genshin Impact, and World of Warcraft. Individual chapters survey the perspectives, concepts, and findings on RPGs from key disciplines, like performance studies, sociology, psychology, education, economics, game design, literary studies, and more. Other chapters integrate insights from RPG studies around broadly significant topics, like worldbuilding, immersion, and player-character relations, as well as explore actual play and streaming, diversity, equity, inclusion, jubensha, therapeutic uses of RPGs, and storygames, journaling games, and other forms of text-based RPGs. Each chapter includes definitions of key terms and recommended readings to help students and scholars new to RPG studies find their way into this interdisciplinary field. A comprehensive reference volume ideal for students and scholars of game studies and immersive experiences and those looking to learn more about the ever-growing, interdisciplinary field of RPG studies.

Confess! Confess your love, your hate, your lusteverything. By the time you are on your deathbed and feel the urge to do these things, it will be far too late. The ears of the ones who need to hear the confessions will not be there to hear your heartfelt truth that they deserved to hear so many years ago. Don't wait until the hands of time are wound so tightly that the beauty in your confessions no longer exists. Do it as you feel it. The naked and raw outcome is refreshing and peaceful. Olive May has lived her entire life in lies and deceit, in all ways. Every decision she has made arose not from truth and honesty, but from treachery, masked by thoughts of judgment. She was born the seventh child of a tormented woman, her mother dying within the first year of her birth. Her father did not want her, but eventually she was adopted by her mothers ex-husband and his new wife; joining her mothers six other children created unusual circumstances that laid the groundwork for her later problems. Now she sees the pleasure in truth, and she longs to help others see this light.