Are you a thrill-seeker or a chill-seeker? A clinical psychologist lifts the lid on what makes adrenaline junkies tick.

The ethnically and geographically heterogeneous countries that comprise Latin America have each produced music in unique styles and genres - but how and why have these disparate musical streams come to fall under the single category of "Latin American music"? Reconstructing how this category came to be, author Pablo Palomino tells the dynamic history of the modernization of musical practices in Latin America. He focuses on the intellectual, commercial, musicological, and diplomatic actors that spurred these changes in the region between the 1920s and the 1960s, offering a transnational story based on primary sources from countries in and outside of Latin America. The Invention of Latin American Music portrays music as the field where, for the first time, the cultural idea of Latin America disseminated through and beyond the region, connecting the culture and music of the region to the wider, global culture, promoting the now-established notion of Latin America as a single musical market. Palomino explores multiple interconnected narratives throughout, pairing popular and specialist traveling musicians, commercial investments and repertoires, unionization and musicology, and music pedagogy and Pan American diplomacy. Uncovering remarkable transnational networks far from a Western cultural center, The Invention of Latin American Music firmly asserts that the democratic legitimacy and massive reach of Latin American identity and modernization explain the spread and success of Latin American music.

From award-winning higher education journalist and New York Times bestselling author Jeffrey Selingo comes a revealing look from inside the admissions office—one that identifies surprising strategies that will aid in the college search. Getting into a top-ranked college has never seemed more impossible, with acceptance rates at some elite universities dipping into the single digits. In Who Gets In and Why, journalist and higher education expert Jeffrey Selingo dispels entrenched notions of how to compete and win at the admissions game, and reveals that teenagers and parents have much to gain by broadening their notion of what qualifies as a “good college.” Hint: it’s not all about the sticker on the car window. Selingo, who was embedded in three different admissions offices—a selective private university, a leading liberal arts college, and a flagship public campus—closely observed gatekeepers as they made their often agonizing and sometimes life-changing decisions. He also followed select students and their parents, and he traveled around the country meeting with high school counselors, marketers, behind-the-scenes consultants, and college rankers. While many have long believed that admissions is merit-based, rewarding the best students, Who Gets In and Why presents a more complicated truth, showing that “who gets in” is frequently more about the college’s agenda than the applicant. In a world where thousands of equally qualified students vie for a fixed number of spots at elite institutions, admissions officers often make split-second decisions based on a variety of factors—like diversity, money, and, ultimately, whether a student will enroll if accepted. One of the most insightful books ever about “getting in” and what higher education has become, Who Gets In and Why not only provides an unusually intimate look at how admissions decisions get made, but guides prospective students on how to honestly assess their strengths and match with the schools that will best serve their interests.

The notion that the stateliest of oaks germinates from an altogether miniscule acorn has special meaning for the community of Oxford, Georgia, whether used literally to describe the "Prince of the Forest" or metaphorically depict large and long serving families or the birth of a great university. Emory College was rooted in the soils of Oxford for 80 years, growing in fits and starts until 1919, when, with relative suddenness, it was transplanted to Atlanta. In the wake of that move, the community shrank from a Methodist stronghold to an institutional afterthought. Yet, both the community and the campus endured and thrived again, as both old and new families put down fresh roots and engendered a deep sense of place, fellowship, service, and celebration.

Universities are more than engines propelling us into a bold new future. They are also living history. A college campus serves as a repository for the memories of countless students, staff, and faculty who have passed through its halls. The history of a university resides not just in its archives but also in the place itself—the walkways and bridges, the libraries and classrooms, the gardens and creeks winding their way across campus. To think of Emory as place, as Hauk invites you to do, is not only to consider its geography and its architecture (the lay of the land and the built-up spaces its people inhabit) but also to imagine how the external, constructed world can cultivate an internal world of wonder and purpose and responsibility—in short, how a landscape creates meaning. Emory as Place offers physical, though mute, evidence of how landscape and population have shaped each other over decades of debate about architecture, curriculum, and resources. More than that, the physical development of the place mirrors the university’s awareness of itself as an arena of tension between the past and the future—even between the past and the present, between what the university has been and what it now purports or intends to be, through its spaces. Most of all, thinking of Emory as place suggests a way to get at the core meaning of an institution as large, diverse, complex, and tentacled as a modern research university.

There is one sound that will always be loudest in sports. It isn’t the squeak of sneakers or the crunch of helmets; it isn’t the grunts or even the stadium music. It’s the deafening roar of sports fans. For those few among us on the outside, sports fandom—with its war paint and pennants, its pricey cable TV packages and esoteric stats reeled off like code—looks highly irrational, entertainment gone overboard. But as Erin C. Tarver demonstrates in this book, sports fandom has become extraordinarily important to our psyche, a matter of the very essence of who we are. Why in the world, Tarver asks, would anyone care about how well a total stranger can throw a ball, or hit one with a bat, or toss one through a hoop? Because such activities and the massive public events that surround them form some of the most meaningful ritual identity practices we have today. They are a primary way we—as individuals and a collective—decide both who we are who we are not. And as such, they are also one of the key ways that various social structures—such as race and gender hierarchies—are sustained, lending a dark side to the joys of being a sports fan. Drawing on everything from philosophy to sociology to sports history, she offers a profound exploration of the significance of sports in contemporary life, showing us just how high the stakes of the game are.