Strange Bedfellows

"Joyful and funny . . . Park uses science, compassion, humor, diverse stories and examples of her own shame-free living to take the stigma out of these infections." —The New York Times With curiosity and wit, Strange Bedfellows rips back the bedsheets to expose what really happens when STDs enter the sack. Sexually transmitted diseases have been hidden players in our lives for the whole of human history, with roles in everything from World War II to the growth of the Internet to The Bachelor. But despite their prominence, STDs have been shrouded in mystery and taboo for centuries, which begs the question: why do we know so little about them? Enter Ina Park, MD, who has been pushing boundaries to empower and inform others about sexual health for decades. With Strange Bedfellows, she ventures far beyond the bedroom to examine the hidden role and influence of these widely misunderstood infections and share their untold stories. Covering everything from AIDS to Zika, Park explores STDs on the cellular, individual, and population-level. She blends science and storytelling with historical tales, real life sexual escapades, and interviews with leading scientists—weaving in a healthy dose of hilarity along the way. The truth is, most of us are sexually active, yet we’re often unaware of the universe of microscopic bedfellows inside our pants. Park aims to change this by bringing knowledge to the masses in an accessible, no-nonsense, humorous way—helping readers understand the broad impact STDs have on our lives, while at the same time erasing the unfair stigmas attached to them. A departure from the cone of awkward silence and shame that so often surrounds sexual health, Strange Bedfellows is the straight-shooting book about the consequences of sex that all curious readers have been looking for.

Strange Bedfellows recounts the unlikely ways in which the efforts of feminists and divorced men's activists dovetailed with the activity of lawmakers, judges, welfare activists, immigrant spouses, the LGBTQ community, the Reagan coalition, and other Americans, to redefine family and marriage without relying on traditional gender norms.

A significant number of Americans get some of their "news" about politics and national affairs from comedy shows. Is "infotainment" a debasement, or a replacement, for traditional news outlets?

"What do Arnold Schwarzenegger and Barack Obama have in common? When it comes to helping students become savvy about genre, rhetoric, and language: everything. In Strange Bedfellows Carol Rawlings Miller pairs short pieces by famous writers and speakers for side-by-side discussion and frames these pairs in lessons that help students meet a variety of curricular goals." "From the Bard to Barack. From the Maginot Line to the World Trade Center. With Strange Bedfellows it's never been easier to find high-quality instruction that engages students with top-notch, real-world texts." --Book Jacket.

An obsessive and revealing self-portrait of a remarkable woman humiliated by the circumstances of her birth and by her physical appearance, La Bâtarde relates Violette Leduc’s long search for her own identity through a series of agonizing and passionate love affairs with both men and women. When first published, La Bâtarde earned Violette Leduc comparisons to Jean Genet for the frank depiction of her sexual escapades and immoral behavior. A confession that contains portraits of several famous French authors, this book is more than just a scintillating memoir—like that of Henry Miller, Leduc’s brilliant writing style and attention to language transform this autobiography into a work of art.

Art, like politics, makes for strange bedfellows indeed, and the development of an avant-garde in the U.S. depended as much on socializing as on aesthetics. This lively social history recounts the adventures and amours of America's first practitioners of the modern arts. Diagrams of the convoluted relationships, a chronology, a cast of characters, and much more shed additional light on an immensely appealing period. 220 illustrations, 20 in color.

Looking at how journalism has changed over time, this book explores how the long-standing and untrustworthy conventions developed. It examines why reliable standards of objectivity and accuracy are critical not just to a free press but to the democratic society it informs and serves. It offers an account of how journalism and truth work.

If politics makes for strange bedfellows, perhaps no bedfellows are stranger than Grant Lambert and Austin Peebles. Austin Peebles is a professional politician with a problem: a prominent rightwing blogger has come into possession of a compromising cell phone photo of the congressional candidate...an image that could derail his campaign. Enter Grant Lambert—a professional criminal who lives so far below society's radar he's never even registered to vote—and his partner in life and crime, Chase LaMarca. If Grant and Chase can make the picture disappear, they'll make a cool $50,000. It sounds like easy money to the cash-strapped criminals, but then more pictures turn up, the double- and triple-crosses begin, and Grant, Chase, and their gang of gay and lesbian confederates find themselves immersed in the brutal sport of politics, as the stakes grow larger and the bedfellows get stranger and stranger...