This Is Major

A National Book Critics Circle Finalist in Autobiography * Finalist for a Lambda Literary Award * Named one of the most anticipated books of the year by USA Today, Bitch Magazine, Parade, Salon and Ms. Magazine From a fierce and humorous new voice comes a relevant, insightful, and riveting collection of personal essays on the richness and resilience of black girl culture—for readers of Samantha Irby, Roxane Gay, Morgan Jerkins, and Lindy West. Shayla Lawson is major. You don’t know who she is. Yet. But that’s okay. She is on a mission to move black girls like herself from best supporting actress to a starring role in the major narrative. Whether she’s taking on workplace microaggressions or upending racist stereotypes about her home state of Kentucky, she looks for the side of the story that isn’t always told, the places where the voices of black girls haven’t been heard. The essays in This is Major ask questions like: Why are black women invisible to AI? What is “black girl magic”? Or: Am I one viral tweet away from becoming Twitter famous? And: How much magic does it take to land a Tinder date? With a unique mix of personal stories, pop culture observations, and insights into politics and history, Lawson sheds light on these questions, as well as the many ways black women and girls have influenced mainstream culture—from their style, to their language, and even their art—and how “major” they really are. Timely, enlightening, and wickedly sharp, This Is Major places black women at the center—no longer silenced, no longer the minority.

Defining why carbon dioxide is not the major contributor to the earth's greenhouse effect. In spite of the fact computer models used to support emission reductions required of the original Rio Treaty of 1992(1) and the Kyoto Protocol (2) resulted in warming increases that greatly exaggerated actual global warming, alarmists of today still believe the false notion that the carbon dioxide contribution to global warming is about 80% of all greenhouse gases considered. Using Departmrnt of Energy (DOE) (3a), Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC) (3b), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) (4), and European research data, it is provable that such a statement is false. It will be shown the contribution of carbon dioxide is 72.369% only under studies where water vapor (H2O) content is equal to zero. When studies are carried out with water vapor considered an air pollutant with its correct percentage content of the atmospheric gases set to 95.000%(5a) (5b), the actual carbon dioxide (CO2) importance is reduced to a relatively small 3.618%. Another significant finding of greenhouse gas relative importance in studies without and with water vapor included in the studies shows the total man-made greenhouse effect is reduced from 5.53% to 0.28% when studies without water vapor and with water vapor are conducted. In either case, man-made greenhouse effect is relatively small and does not justify the carbon tax being proposed by global warming alarmists.

THE WORLD IS HIJACKED, AND MANY IN THE BODY OF CHRIST ARE HIJACKED! We are in a very real war, a war between Jesus Christ and the anti-Christ, a war between the flesh and the Spirit. Look at this supernatural war: People have been scarred by Satan, serial deception, and the surgeons of sin. People are mingled in lifestyles of pantheism, paganism, an exploding satanism, black cat-smooching, crystal-rubbing, and chicken bone-massaging witchcraft, transgenderism, serial fornication, homosexuality, and public schools teach the gender-confusion curriculum. People are involved in corruption in the government that defies description, state-supported and recreational murder (abortion), back-handed and pistol-whipped addictions, and perpetual, pathological hatred and racism. Law, philosophy, poetry, positive thinking, and psychology cannot change you! Shelley, Keats, Bryon, and Shakespeare cannot change you! You cannot legislate morality, immorality, and virtue. Law will not stop murder, adultery, stealing, rape, child sex trafficking, and government corruption (the least government is the best government), but Christ can do that! Jesus is the answer! The only solution is a blood transfusion from the veins of the Lamb of God. This book retards the deliverance ministry, which is the “sneeze,” “cough,” and “vomit” movement. People are conjuring up, coughing up, and vomiting up Charismatic spirits and looking like utter fools, satanically manifesting like godless pagans, sacrificing themselves to totem poles, a vomiting and manifesting machine—the Manifesting Ministry Movement. The Hijacked Mind retards the hyper-grace movement. If you teach a grace that forgives sin but does not produce repentance, you are preaching from satanic literature. Grace, without repentance, is paganism. The love of God without the wrath of God is Satan’s theology. Love without law produces a secular humanist, and law without love produces a Pharisee. The Hijacked Mind retards atheism. Atheists are mastered by primates, and neo-pagans and environmentalists are anointed by birds, bugs, and bureaucrats. The Hijacked Mind shares the truth of Christ and the absolute existence of Christ. This book shares the biblical truths about heaven and hell, and if you do not believe in heaven or hell, that is because you worship your own back-porch philosophy and think your intellect supersedes the knowledge of God and the truth—this is ignorance on a rampage.

One of Oprah Daily's 20 Favorite Books of 2021 • Selected as one of Pitchfork's Best Music Books of the Year “One of the best books of its kind in decades.” —The Wall Street Journal An epic achievement and a huge delight, the entire history of popular music over the past fifty years refracted through the big genres that have defined and dominated it: rock, R&B, country, punk, hip-hop, dance music, and pop Kelefa Sanneh, one of the essential voices of our time on music and culture, has made a deep study of how popular music unites and divides us, charting the way genres become communities. In Major Labels, Sanneh distills a career’s worth of knowledge about music and musicians into a brilliant and omnivorous reckoning with popular music—as an art form (actually, a bunch of art forms), as a cultural and economic force, and as a tool that we use to build our identities. He explains the history of slow jams, the genius of Shania Twain, and why rappers are always getting in trouble. Sanneh shows how these genres have been defined by the tension between mainstream and outsider, between authenticity and phoniness, between good and bad, right and wrong. Throughout, race is a powerful touchstone: just as there have always been Black audiences and white audiences, with more or less overlap depending on the moment, there has been Black music and white music, constantly mixing and separating. Sanneh debunks cherished myths, reappraises beloved heroes, and upends familiar ideas of musical greatness, arguing that sometimes, the best popular music isn’t transcendent. Songs express our grudges as well as our hopes, and they are motivated by greed as well as idealism; music is a powerful tool for human connection, but also for human antagonism. This is a book about the music everyone loves, the music everyone hates, and the decades-long argument over which is which. The opposite of a modest proposal, Major Labels pays in full.

Discusses ways of using minor scales in playing and improvising jazz.