Differences are the spice of life! But cultural differences can also be the source of embarrassing gaffes and miscommunication for business and social travelers alike. No one wants to make a cross-cultural blunder– especially one that could have consequences for crucial partnerships or even your entire organization. But when you seek to understand the origins of these cultural distinctions and develop strategies to cope with them, you'll find that you can navigate any culture– whether virtually or in person– with ease.

The Chan Si Gong, which consists of 18 silk reeling exercises, is an important training method for developing body awareness and coordination. It is a link between building internal energy and expressing explosive force. It gradually enables you to build up power through coordination, linking all the body’s joints like a string of pearls. It teaches you the Tai Chi principle of moving the body as one unit. A good practitioner’s Tai Chi form will give the impression of moving like water – a domino wave like effect. This is due to the spiralling energy being expressed through each and every joint.

Great Britain in the 1970s appeared to be in terminal decline—ungovernable, an economic train wreck, and rapidly headed for global irrelevance. Three decades later, it is the richest and most influential country in Europe, and Margaret Thatcher is the reason. The preternaturally determined Thatcher rose from nothing, seized control of Britain’s Conservative party, and took a sledgehammer to the nation’s postwar socialist consensus. She proved that socialism could be reversed, inspiring a global free-market revolution.

In this exquisitely written new book by the author of A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit explores the ways we make our lives out of stories, and how we are connected by empathy, by narrative, by imagination. In the course of unpacking some of her own stories—of her mother and her decline from memory loss, of a trip to Iceland, of an illness—Solnit revisits fairytales and entertains other stories: about arctic explorers, Che Guevara among the leper colonies, and Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein, about warmth and coldness, pain and kindness, decay and transformation, making art and making self.

This is a digest and re-editing of three episodes of the TV series Northwest Passage, released by M-G-M as a feature in 1960, primarily for markets in which the TV series was unavailable. The bookending episodes are directed by George Waggner. The middle episode, originally titled "The Break-Out," was directed by the great Jacques Tourneur. It stars Keith Larsen and Buddy Ebsen.

Physicist Dave Goldberg speeds across space, time and everything in between showing that our elegant universe—from the Higgs boson to antimatter to the most massive group of galaxies—is shaped by hidden symmetries that have driven all our recent discoveries about the universe and all the ones to come. Why is the sky dark at night? If there is anti-matter, can there be anti-people? Why are past, present, and future our only options? Saluting the brilliant but unsung female mathematician Emmy Noether as well as other giants of physics, Goldberg answers these questions and more, exuberantly demonstrating that symmetry is the big idea—and the key to what lies ahead.