TV’s most successful comedy producer Chuck Lorre delivers a hilarious collection of vanity cards in print for the first time. Since 1997, fans of some of the most popular sitcoms ever broadcast — The Big Bang Theory, Two and a Half Men, Mike & Molly and Dharma & Greg — have been granted a fleeting glimpse each week into the unfettered and uncompromising mind of the incredibly prolific creative force behind those series, Chuck Lorre. That's because Lorre devotes exactly one second of airtime per show to expressing his deepest thoughts at the end of the credits on his now-infamous vanity cards, which for many years could only be enjoyed by freeze-framing on a VCR and squinting to read the tiny, wobbling words. Now, for the first time ever, hundreds of Lorre's witty and insightful musings have been gathered together in a limited-edition, slipcase book from Chuck Lorre himself that reveals a hilarious, thought-provoking and scandalous body of work unlike any other creative endeavor. Veering from philosophical treatises to personal revelations to the occasional furious diatribe, Lorre never shies away from controversy — even in the face of network censorship, as has often happened. But never fear: Every word on the original vanity cards included in this curated selection is here — even the censored texts that never made it to air. Enhanced with sly, ingenious illustrations and designs that capture the off-kilter essence of Lorre's bite-sized dispatches, What Doesn't Kill Us Makes Us Bitter will change the way you think about life, the universe and TV — or at least it'll save your eyesight.

More than 40 years before Gary Taubes published The Case Against Sugar, John Yudkin published his now-classic exposé on the dangers of sugar—reissued here with a new introduction by Robert H. Lustig, the bestselling author of Fat Chance. Scientist John Yudkin was the first to sound the alarm about the excess of sugar in the diet of modern Americans. His classic exposé, Pure, White, and Deadly, clearly and engagingly describes how sugar is damaging our bodies, why we eat so much of it, and what we can do to stop. He explores the ins and out of sugar, from the different types—is brown sugar really better than white?—to how it is hidden inside our everyday foods, and how it is harming our health. In 1972, Yudkin was mostly ignored by the health industry and media, but the events of the last forty years have proven him spectacularly right. Yudkin’s insights are even more important and relevant now, with today’s record levels of obesity, than when they were first published. Brought up-to-date by childhood obesity expert Dr. Robert H. Lustig, this emphatic treatise on the hidden dangers of sugar is essential reading for anyone concerned about their health, the health of their children, and the wellbeing of modern society.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • “A tour de force . . . a comprehensive and suitably furious guide to the political landscape of American healthcare . . . persuasive, shocking.”—The New York Times America’s Bitter Pill is Steven Brill’s acclaimed book on how the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, was written, how it is being implemented, and, most important, how it is changing—and failing to change—the rampant abuses in the healthcare industry. It’s a fly-on-the-wall account of the titanic fight to pass a 961-page law aimed at fixing America’s largest, most dysfunctional industry. It’s a penetrating chronicle of how the profiteering that Brill first identified in his trailblazing Time magazine cover story continues, despite Obamacare. And it is the first complete, inside account of how President Obama persevered to push through the law, but then failed to deal with the staff incompetence and turf wars that crippled its implementation. But by chance America’s Bitter Pill ends up being much more—because as Brill was completing this book, he had to undergo urgent open-heart surgery. Thus, this also becomes the story of how one patient who thinks he knows everything about healthcare “policy” rethinks it from a hospital gurney—and combines that insight with his brilliant reporting. The result: a surprising new vision of how we can fix American healthcare so that it stops draining the bank accounts of our families and our businesses, and the federal treasury. Praise for America’s Bitter Pill “An energetic, picaresque, narrative explanation of much of what has happened in the last seven years of health policy . . . [Brill] has pulled off something extraordinary.”—The New York Times Book Review “A thunderous indictment of what Brill refers to as the ‘toxicity of our profiteer-dominated healthcare system.’ ”—Los Angeles Times “A sweeping and spirited new book [that] chronicles the surprisingly juicy tale of reform.”—The Daily Beast “One of the most important books of our time.”—Walter Isaacson “Superb . . . Brill has achieved the seemingly impossible—written an exciting book about the American health system.”—The New York Review of Books

New York Times Bestseller Robert Lustig’s 90-minute YouTube video “Sugar: The Bitter Truth”, has been viewed more than three million times. Now, in this much anticipated book, he documents the science and the politics that has led to the pandemic of chronic disease over the last 30 years. In the late 1970s when the government mandated we get the fat out of our food, the food industry responded by pouring more sugar in. The result has been a perfect storm, disastrously altering our biochemistry and driving our eating habits out of our control. To help us lose weight and recover our health, Lustig presents personal strategies to readjust the key hormones that regulate hunger, reward, and stress; and societal strategies to improve the health of the next generation. Compelling, controversial, and completely based in science, Fat Chance debunks the widely held notion to prove “a calorie is NOT a calorie”, and takes that science to its logical conclusion to improve health worldwide.

A nameless man with nothing left to lose travels across America in a violent downward spiral in a novel that “coils and tightens like a spring” (Brian Evenson, author of Last Days). Alone except for his beloved bulldog, a former crime writer who’s failed at his career, his marriage, and his own simple hopes makes his way across America, contemplating his own bitter past along the way. Heading home to his distant brother, he witnesses tragedies and crimes—things bad enough to bring out the killer in him. Slowly but surely, he finds himself transforming into the kind of man he used to only write about. Full of realism and grit, Every Shallow Cut burrows deep into the darkness of America to give voice to the fears most of us never speak aloud: the terror of loss, the overwhelming dread of failure, the desperate push towards crime, the horror of missed-out, mediocre dreams. And the all-too-average explosive rage.

Historian Nora Titone takes a fresh look at the strange and startling history of the Booth brothers, answering the question of why one became the nineteenth-century’s brightest, most beloved star, and the other became the most notorious assassin in American history. The scene of John Wilkes Booth shooting Abraham Lincoln in Ford’s Theatre is among the most vivid and indelible images in American history. The literal story of what happened on April 14, 1865, is familiar: Lincoln was killed by John Wilkes Booth, a lunatic enraged by the Union victory and the prospect of black citizenship. Yet who Booth really was—besides a killer—is less well known. The magnitude of his crime has obscured for generations a startling personal story that was integral to his motivation. My Thoughts Be Bloody, a sweeping family saga, revives an extraordinary figure whose name has been missing, until now, from the story of President Lincoln’s death. Edwin Booth, John Wilkes’s older brother by four years, was in his day the biggest star of the American stage. Without an account of Edwin Booth, author Nora Titone argues, the real story of Lincoln’s assassin has never been told. Using an array of private letters, diaries, and reminiscences of the Booth family, Titone has uncovered a hidden history that reveals the reasons why John Wilkes Booth became this country’s most notorious assassin. The details of the conspiracy to kill Lincoln have been well documented elsewhere. My Thoughts Be Bloody tells a new story, one that explains for the first time why Lincoln’s assassin decided to conspire against the president in the first place, and sets that decision in the context of a bitterly divided family—and nation. By the end of this riveting journey, readers will see Abraham Lincoln’s death less as the result of the war between the North and South and more as the climax of a dark struggle between two brothers who never wore the uniform of soldiers, except on stage.