My Friends Want Me to Pick Sides

In Set Boundaries, Find Peace, therapist Nedra Glover Tawwab details how you can transform your relationships by learning to set healthy boundaries, which are standards for how you’d like to be treated. Tawwab explains where your boundaries come from and offers strategies for identifying and communicating your boundaries in a variety of situations.

In our guide, we’ll first focus on defining what healthy boundaries look like. Then, we’ll offer a step-by-step process you can follow to identify, communicate, and reinforce your boundaries. We’ll focus on a few types of relationships in which many people struggle to set boundaries. Finally, we’ll discuss the ways others may violate your boundaries, offering suggestions for how you can respond when violations occur. We’ll also compare Tawwab’s work to other psychological approaches to relationships, as well as offer more tools you can use to set healthy boundaries.

Do you struggle to make friends? Have you ever wanted to learn how to read people? If so, Jack Schafer and Marvin Karlins’s The Like Switch can help. Schafer spent 22 years as a Special Agent in counter-intelligence, counter-terrorism, and behavioral analysis at the FBI. In The Like Switch, Schafer—with the help of Karlins, a management and organizational behavior expert—applies his experience earning the trust of witnesses, suspects, and spies to the art of making friends and fostering powerful connections.

In this guide, we’ll explore how to use nonverbal signals to identify potential friends and show others that you’re open to friendship. We’ll also outline techniques for attracting new friends and for maintaining strong relationships. Finally, we’ll look at the unique dynamics and challenges of online connections. In our commentary, we’ll discuss the research behind the book’s psychological principles and some alternative points of view on relationship building.

What would happen if you faced your fears and said “yes” to everything outside your comfort zone for a whole year? In Year of Yes, Shonda Rhimes, the celebrated television screenwriter and producer of the hit series “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Scandal,” answers that very question. Rhimes recounts her journey of personal growth and transformation as she embarks on a year-long experiment to say "yes" to everything that scares her. From giving public speeches to prioritizing playtime with her daughters, Rhimes pushes herself out of her comfort zone and learns to embrace new experiences.

In this guide, we’ll explore Rhimes’s journey from a life of merely surviving to full-hearted thriving and outline the meaningful lessons she wishes to pass on to her readers so they, too, can reclaim their lives from fear. Along the way, we’ll compare the author's ideas to those of other similar self-help writers and provide additional context from sociology and psychology experts to help you better understand and apply Rhimes’s insights to your life.

Do you constantly get swept away by your emotions? Would you like to learn how to control your emotional reactions at home or at work? Or maybe you’re uncomfortable with emotions, and don’t understand why you or anyone else feels them? Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman is a comprehensive look at what emotions are and why we have them, how we can get better at managing them, and why the well-being of humanity might depend on us doing so.

If you believe that some people are naturally smarter, that you’re born with inherent aptitudes and weaknesses, and that if you struggle to understand a subject then you’re not cut out for it, then everything you know about learning is wrong. In Limitless Mind, math educator Jo Boaler shows that the brain is capable of learning new skills and incorporating new ideas all throughout our lives, and that struggling to learn and making mistakes are integral parts of cognitive growth.

In this guide, we’ll explore our modern understanding of how the brain develops, the value of attitude over aptitude, and why flexible approaches to learning and teaching are more productive than older, more rigid practices. We’ll also examine what scientists say about brain development, what teachers and psychologists say about modern education, and the role that parents and society play in determining what and how we learn.

A Promised Land is Barack Obama’s memoir of his early political career and the first two years of his presidency. Obama takes us on his journey from relative obscurity as a biracial kid from Hawaii to becoming a transformative figure as the nation’s first African-American president. At every step of his career, Obama was guided by a deep faith in the fundamental unity of Americans; the potential and promise of America; the necessity of compromise and seeking common ground; and above all, the power of the democratic system to heal our divisions and effect real change for ordinary people.

The Biden administration has temporarily suspended approval of natural gas exports to non-free trade agreement countries as part of its ongoing effort to balance energy production with aggressive climate change goals. As Democrats prepare for the 2024 presidential election, they must balance the economic benefits of increasing natural gas exports with fulfilling climate change pledges.

In Blowout, journalist and MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow aims to expose the corruption and exploitation underlying the oil and gas industry. Pointing the finger primarily at Russian politicians like Vladimir Putin and American energy magnates like former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, Maddow contends that over the past 40 years, the industry has wreaked havoc on the environment, developing economies in the third world, and international relations, especially in Eastern Europe. Ultimately, she argues that only full transparency and strict environmental regulation can protect the planet from devastating accidents and corporate greed.

In this guide, we’ll discuss her evidence for how a handful of companies and politicians have exploited oil and gas reserves worldwide, both for profit and to serve dangerous political ends. We’ll also elaborate on how oil and gas have damaged the environment (perhaps permanently), how American energy policy continued to evolve under the Trump and Biden presidencies, and how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 further destabilized the international energy market.