Lying In The Middle

The local and regional shows staged throughout America use musical theater’s inherent power of deception to cultivate worldviews opposed to mainstream ideas. Jake Johnson reveals how musical theater between the coasts inhabits the middle spaces between professional and amateur, urban and rural, fact and fiction, fantasy and reality, and truth and falsehood. The homegrown musical provides a space to engage belief and religion—imagining a better world while creating opportunities to expand what is possible in the current one. Whether it is the Oklahoma Senior Follies or a Mormon splinter group’s production of The Sound of Music, such productions give people a chance to jolt themselves out of today’s post-truth malaise and move toward a world more in line with their desires for justice, reconciliation, and community. Vibrant and strikingly original, Lying in the Middle discovers some of the most potent musical theater taking place in the hoping, beating hearts of Americans.

The international bestselling YA thriller by acclaimed author, Karen M. McManus - NOW A MAJOR NETFLIX SERIES. Book One of the Bayview Trilogy. Five students walk into detention. Only four come out alive. Yale hopeful Bronwyn has never publicly broken a rule. Sports star Cooper only knows what he's doing in the baseball diamond. Bad boy Nate is one misstep away from a life of crime. Prom queen Addy is holding together the cracks in her perfect life. And outsider Simon, creator of the notorious gossip app at Bayview High, won't ever talk about any of them again. He dies 24 hours before he could post their deepest secrets online. Investigators conclude it's no accident. All of them are suspects. Everyone has secrets, right? What really matters is how far you'll go to protect them. 'Tightly plotted and brilliantly written, with sharp, believable characters, this whodunit is utterly irresistible' - HEAT 'Twisty plotting, breakneck pacing and intriguing characterisation add up to an exciting single-sitting thrillerish treat' -THE GUARDIAN 'A fantastic murder mystery, packed with cryptic clues and countless plot twists. I could not put this book down' - THE SUN 'Pretty Little Liars meets The Breakfast Club' - ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

Draws on the thought of Thomas Aquinas to provide an innovative approach to the ethics of lying and truthfulness.

This vibrant book examines individual and societal factors contributing to the rise of lying, cheating, bullying, and narcissism, with emphasis on the influence of Trumpism and the valuing of “getting things done” over the importance of self-discipline and issues of morality. George Bear explores individual and environmental factors that influence the development of self-discipline. He examines reasons for the growing prevalence of lying, cheating, bullying, and narcissism and their underlying factors, and the role of parenting and peer relationships in their development. The volume highlights the critical roles that moral reasoning, moral emotions, and mechanisms of moral disengagement play in dishonest and harmful behavior. Lying, Cheating, Bullying, and Narcissism is for students and scholars of child development, parenting, psychopathology, and criminology; professionals in psychology, mental health, and education; as well as others interested in the prevalence and roots of lying, cheating, bullying, and narcissism in America.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! In I’m Telling the Truth, but I’m Lying Bassey Ikpi explores her life—as a Nigerian-American immigrant, a black woman, a slam poet, a mother, a daughter, an artist—through the lens of her mental health and diagnosis of bipolar II and anxiety. Her remarkable memoir in essays implodes our preconceptions of the mind and normalcy as Bassey bares her own truths and lies for us all to behold with radical honesty and brutal intimacy. A The Root Favorite Books of the Year • A Good Housekeeping Best 60 Books of the Year • A YNaija 10 Notable Books of the Year • A GOOP 10 New Favorite Books • A Cup of Jo 5 Big Books of Fall • A Bitch Magazine Most Anticipated Books of 2019 • A Bustle 21 New Memoirs That Will Inspire, Motivate, and Captivate You • A Publishers Weekly Spring Preview Selection • An Electric Lit 48 Books by Women and Nonbinary Authors of Color to Read in 2019 • A Bookish Best Nonfiction of Summer Selection "We will not think or talk about mental health or normalcy the same after reading this momentous art object moonlighting as a colossal collection of essays.” —Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy From her early childhood in Nigeria through her adolescence in Oklahoma, Bassey Ikpi lived with a tumult of emotions, cycling between extreme euphoria and deep depression—sometimes within the course of a single day. By the time she was in her early twenties, Bassey was a spoken word artist and traveling with HBO's Def Poetry Jam, channeling her life into art. But beneath the façade of the confident performer, Bassey's mental health was in a precipitous decline, culminating in a breakdown that resulted in hospitalization and a diagnosis of Bipolar II. In I'm Telling the Truth, But I'm Lying, Bassey Ikpi breaks open our understanding of mental health by giving us intimate access to her own. Exploring shame, confusion, medication, and family in the process, Bassey looks at how mental health impacts every aspect of our lives—how we appear to others, and more importantly to ourselves—and challenges our preconception about what it means to be "normal." Viscerally raw and honest, the result is an exploration of the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of who we are—and the ways, as honest as we try to be, each of these stories can also be a lie.

This anthology provides a set of distinctive selections that explore both Western and Eastern views of lying and truthfulness, including selections from Augustine, Grotius, Aristotle, the Mahābhārata, Confucius, Kant, Plato, Sunzi, Han Feizi, Aquinas, the Lotus Sutra, Hobbes, Hume, Locke, Bacon, Nietzsche, and more. Hackett Readings in Philosophy is a versatile series of compact anthologies, each devoted to a topic of traditional interest in philosophy or political theory. Selections are chosen for their accessibility, significance, and ability to stimulate thought and discussion.

In this forthright and fascinating study, Dr Stephen J. Costello, philosopher and logotherapist, takes us on a profound journey into the intricate and intriguing nature of the dynami of lying. Drawing on philosophy, logical puzzles and Lacanian psychoanalysis, Costello investigates the types of lies we tell, the lies that include a good deal of truth, how and why children lie, the lies lovers tell, self-deception and much more. In the final section of the book Costello focuses in particular on how men and women lie in different ways. Men, he argues, lie in the guise of truth while women tell the truth in the guise of a lie. Men tend to be more direct while women are more deceptive. Men lie to create a better image of themselves, women lie to make others feel more comfortable. Provocative, while also frequently amusing, The Truth about Lying is a pithy primer on the act and art of lying. “This is an absolutely fascinating book . . . a quite extraordinary range of information . . . I can only encourage everyone to read it and thoroughly enjoy it as I did.” - Ivor Browne, from the Foreword

From lying to friends to lies in politics, a wide-ranging examination of the forms and ethics of falsehood. From popular philosopher Lars Svendsen, this book is a comprehensive investigation of lying in everyday life. What exactly is a lie, Svendsen asks, and how does lying differ from related phenomena, such as “bullshit” or being truthful? Svendsen also investigates the ethics of lying—why is lying almost always morally wrong, and why is lying to one’s friends especially bad? The book concludes by looking at lying in politics, from Plato’s theory of the “noble lie” to the Big Lie of Donald Trump. As phrases like “fake news” and “alternative facts” permeate our feeds, Svendsen’s conclusion is perhaps a surprising one: that, even though we all occasionally lie, we are for the most part trustworthy. Trusting others makes one vulnerable, and we will all be duped from time to time. But all things considered, Svendsen contends, truthfulness and vulnerability are preferable to living in a constant state of distrust.