Are You Entertained

The advent of the internet and the availability of social media and digital downloads have expanded the creation, distribution, and consumption of Black cultural production as never before. At the same time, a new generation of Black public intellectuals who speak to the relationship between race, politics, and popular culture has come into national prominence. The contributors to Are You Entertained? address these trends to consider what culture and blackness mean in the twenty-first century's digital consumer economy. In this collection of essays, interviews, visual art, and an artist statement the contributors examine a range of topics and issues, from music, white consumerism, cartoons, and the rise of Black Twitter to the NBA's dress code, dance, and Moonlight. Analyzing the myriad ways in which people perform, avow, politicize, own, and love blackness, this volume charts the shifting debates in Black popular culture scholarship over the past quarter century while offering new avenues for future scholarship. Contributors. Takiyah Nur Amin, Patricia Hill Collins, Kelly Jo Fulkerson-Dikuua, Simone C. Drake, Dwan K. Henderson, Imani Kai Johnson, Ralina L. Joseph, David J. Leonard, Emily J. Lordi, Nina Angela Mercer, Mark Anthony Neal, H. Ike Okafor-Newsum, Kinohi Nishikawa, Eric Darnell Pritchard, Richard Schur, Tracy Sharpley-Whiting, Vincent Stephens, Lisa B. Thompson, Sheneese Thompson

The advent of the internet and the availability of social media and digital downloads have expanded the creation, distribution, and consumption of Black cultural production as never before. At the same time, a new generation of Black public intellectuals who speak to the relationship between race, politics, and popular culture has come into national prominence. The contributors to Are You Entertained? address these trends to consider what culture and blackness mean in the twenty-first century's digital consumer economy. In this collection of essays, interviews, visual art, and an artist statement the contributors examine a range of topics and issues, from music, white consumerism, cartoons, and the rise of Black Twitter to the NBA's dress code, dance, and Moonlight. Analyzing the myriad ways in which people perform, avow, politicize, own, and love blackness, this volume charts the shifting debates in Black popular culture scholarship over the past quarter century while offering new avenues for future scholarship. Contributors. Takiyah Nur Amin, Patricia Hill Collins, Kelly Jo Fulkerson-Dikuua, Simone C. Drake, Dwan K. Henderson, Imani Kai Johnson, Ralina L. Joseph, David J. Leonard, Emily J. Lordi, Nina Angela Mercer, Mark Anthony Neal, H. Ike Okafor-Newsum, Kinohi Nishikawa, Eric Darnell Pritchard, Richard Schur, Tracy Sharpley-Whiting, Vincent Stephens, Lisa B. Thompson, Sheneese Thompson

Impossible Goals, Inevitable Successes Why are you struggling to grow your business when everyone else seems to be crushing their goals? If you needed to triple revenue within the next three years, would you know exactly how to do it? Doubling the size of your business, tripling it, even growing ten times larger isn’t about magic. It’s not about privileges, luck, or working harder. There’s a template that the world’s fastest growing companies follow to achieve and sustain much, much faster growth. From Impossible to Inevitable details the hypergrowth playbook of companies like the record-breaking Zenefits (which skyrocketed from $1 million to $100 million in two years), Salesforce.com (the fastest growing multibillion dollar software company), and EchoSign—aka Adobe Document Services—(which catapulted from $0 to $144 million in seven years). Whether you have a $1 billion or a $100,000 business, you can use the same insights as these notable companies to learn what it really takes to break your own revenue records. For instance, one of the authors shows how he grew his income from $67,000 to $720,000 in four years while maintaining a 20-30 hour work week and welcoming a new child—nine times. This book shows you how to surpass plateaus and get off of the up-and-down revenue rollercoaster by answering three questions about growing revenue to tens times its size: Why aren’t you growing faster? What does it take to get to hypergrowth? How do you sustain growth? This powerful, effective book provides a template for you to kick off your biggest growth spurt yet. This template includes The 7 Ingredients Of Hypergrowth: You’re not ready to grow until you Nail a Niche. Overnight success is a fairy tale. You’re not going to be magically discovered. You need sustainable systems that Create Predictable Pipeline. Growth exposes your weaknesses and it will cause more problems than it solves—until you Make Sales Scalable. It’s hard to build a big business out of small deals. Figure out how to Double Your Dealsize. It’ll take years longer than you want, but don’t quit too soon. Make sure you can Do the Time. Your people are renting, not owning their jobs. Develop a culture of initiative, not adequacy by Embracing Employee Ownership. Employees, you are too accepting of “reality” and too eager to quit. You can Define Your Destiny to make a difference, for yourself and your company, no matter what you do or where you work. The authors take each ingredient and break it down into specific steps to guide you through implementation. From Impossible to Inevitable helps you take impossible goals and turn them into inevitable successes for your business and team. You will achieve success even bigger than you can imagine from where you’re sitting today.

She’s overworked. He’s out of this world. In a galaxy brimming with deadly threats, can they claim a happily ever after? Eliza Anderson refuses to be dragged down. Forced to grow up fast and take care of her sister, she tirelessly juggles work and senior year schoolwork just to make ends meet. And not even the mysterious, cute new boy can distract her from the fear she’s falling victim to the same troubling visions and sickness that claimed her mom. Jack Cartwright keeps his pain buried deep. Though slow to trust after being raised by his brutal human mother, the half-alien is quick to follow strange orders to keep some random Earth girl alive. But defending his feisty charge from a formidable enemy gets complicated when sparks start to fly… Shocked when she sees a terrifying man freeze time to rob a bank, Eliza questions her own identity when her protector reveals he’s part-extraterrestrial. And as the elusive criminal searches for a powerful artifact, Jack can’t afford to give in to his red-hot chemistry with the beautiful teen. As truth emerges from the shadows, can their hearts survive a cunning foe’s attack? Contact is the inter-stellar first book in the Encounter YA science fiction romance series. If you like sassy pairings, electrifying twists, and underground conspiracies, then you’ll love Joanna Homer’s adventures of the third kind. Buy Contact to wish upon the stars today!

Once a cowboy, always a hero . . . A taut Texas thriller from an author who writes “pulse-pounding” romantic suspense (New York Times–bestselling author Tess Gerritsen). Recovering from a kidnapping ordeal at the Double K ranch, Rachel Maxwell reexamines her life. Is she still the brilliant defense attorney she was before the attack? Will she be able to handle a career-making criminal case while still struggling with panic attacks? Before she can decide, an obsessed killer targets her, drawing cowboy Luke Dawkins to her rescue. He, too, is trying to escape his troubled past as he returns to his family’s Texas ranch after multiple tours of duty in the Middle East. Protecting Rachel gives him new purpose—but while their attraction sizzles, the danger grows. . . . Praise for the Joanna Wayne “Wayne creates intricate relationships and compellingly plotted suspense.” —Romantic Times