"A bracing, rollicking read about the spark that ignites when people start asking meaningful questions." —O MagazineChristopher Phillips is a man on a mission: to revive the love of questions that Socrates inspired long ago in ancient Athens. "Like a Johnny Appleseed with a master's degree, Phillips has gallivanted back and forth across America, to cafés and coffee shops, senior centers, assisted-living complexes, prisons, libraries, day-care centers, elem...

"A provocative extension of Jefferson’s original plan." —Kirkus ReviewsThomas Jefferson believed that every generation of Americans should rewrite our Constitution from scratch—to mirror the progress of the human mind and, most of all, to maintain the revolutionary spirit. He would be dismayed that it’s considered untouchable these days. Taking up Jefferson’s cause, Christopher Phillips leads a motley group of Americans across the fruited plain in an offbe...

Christopher Phillips is a man on a mission: to revive the love of questions that Socrates inspired long ago in ancient Athens. “Like a Johnny Appleseed with a master’s degree, Phillips has gallivanted back and forth across America, to cafés and coffee shops, senior centers, assisted-living complexes, prisons, libraries, day care centers, elementary and high schools, and churches, forming lasting communities of inquiry”—Utne Reader. Phillips not only presents the fundamentals of ph...

Weaving together philosophy, social science and neuroscience research, personal anecdotes and dialogues, A Child at Heart takes a radically different approach to the traditional boundaries between childhood and adulthood to reveal how rather than lapse into adulthood, we can achieve what the Greeks of old call arete-all-around excellence-when we look to children and youth as a lodestar for our development.Childhood is our primary launching pad, a time of life when...

How people around the world grapple with the great questions posed by Socrates.What is virtue? What is moderation? What is justice? What is courage? What is good? What is piety? Socrates thought that understanding the perspectives of others on these six great questions would help him become a more excellent human being. Following in Socrates's footsteps, Christopher Phillips—"Johnny Appleseed with a master's degree" (Utne Reader)—investigates these same qu...

An era of sweeping cultural change in America, the postwar years saw the rise of beatniks and hippies, the birth of feminism, and the release of the first video game. It was also the era of new math. Introduced to US schools in the late 1950s and 1960s, the new math was a curricular answer to Cold War fears of American intellectual inadequacy. In the age of Sputnik and increasingly sophisticated technological systems and machines, math class came to be viewed as a crucial component of the ...

The essential guide to geopolitics in the modern Middle EastThe Middle East is in crisis. The shocking events of the war in Gaza have rocked the entire region. More than a decade ago, the Arab Spring had raised hopes of a new beginning but instead ushered in a series of civil wars, coups, and even harsher autocracies. Tensions were exacerbated by the meddling of outsiders, as regional and global powers sought to further their interests. The United States, for so lo...

Weaving together philosophy, social science and neuroscience research, personal anecdotes and dialogues, The Philosophy of Childing takes a radically different approach to the traditional boundaries between childhood and adulthood to reveal how rather than lapse into adulthood, we can achieve what the Greeks arete-all-around excellence-when we look to children and youth as a lodestar for our development.Childhood is our primary launching pad, a time of life when ...

Most Americans imagine the Civil War in terms of clear and defined boundaries of freedom and slavery: a straightforward division between the slave states of Kentucky and Missouri and the free states of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Kansas. However, residents of these western border states, Abraham Lincoln's home region, had far more ambiguous identities-and contested political loyalties-than we commonly assume. In The Rivers Ran Backward, Christopher Phillips sheds light on the flu...

How people around the world grapple with the great questions posed by Socrates.What is virtue? What is moderation? What is justice? What is courage? What is good? What is piety? Socrates thought that understanding the perspectives of others on these six great questions would help him become a more excellent human being. Following in Socrates's footsteps, Christopher Phillips—"Johnny Appleseed with a master's degree" (Utne Reader)—investigates these same qu...

The United States of America is not the most populated nation and doesn’t own the most land, but its influence is felt throughout the world. To My Brave Countrymen outlines the foundational American political tenets to highlight America’s uniqueness in governance. The author celebrates our freedoms, such as the freedom of the press, the right to peaceably assemble, and protection against illegal searches and seizures. He also highlights the Constitution’s many provisions that protect us ag...

Wildly fantastic superhero stories by a cross section of today's cutting-edge urban fantasy and crime writers.Expanding on the concept behind Byron Preiss's Weird Heroes from the 1970s, George R. R. Martin's Wild Card series, and Michael Chabon's McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, The Darker Mask is a collection of original prose stories recalling the derring-do of the beings we call Superheroes and the worlds they f...