When her father, who had been ravaged by Alzheimer's for ten years, dies, Kay and her husband, Cyril, determined to one day die with dignity, take control of their final years by making a pact to exit the world together at the age of eighty. Over ten years, Kay Wilkinson watched as Alzheimer's steadily eroded her father into a paranoid lunatic. Both medical professionals, Kay and her husband Cyril have seen too many elderly patients in similar states...

"Rock breaks scissors is based on a simple principle: people are unable to act randomly. Instead they display unconscious patterns that the savvy person can outguess. The principle applies to friends playing rock, paper, scissors for a bar tab as well as to the crowds that create markets for homes and stocks. With a gift for distilling psychology and behavioral economics into accessible advice, Poundstone proves that outguessing is easy, fun, and...

"From the best-selling author of Traffic, a brilliant and entertaining exploration of our personal tastes--why we like the things we like, and what it says about us,"--NoveList. From the tangled underpinnings of our food taste to the complex dynamics of our playlists, our preferences and opinions are constantly being shaped by countless forces. In the digital age, a nonstop procession of "thumbs up" and "likes" is helping dictate our choices. Vanderbilt...

In a culture of restlessness and indecision, which causes tension in people's lives, a civic advocate, using examples from history, personal stories, and applied psychology, shows how purposeful commitment can be a powerful force.