Point Less

"An exploration of moving away from traditional letter or number grades as an assessment and as a result producing more thoughtful students whose learning is more authentic"--

To the delight of his thriving fan base, YouTuber Alfie Deyes extends all the fun of the PointlessBlog to his first interactive activity book! Fully illustrated and packed with a host of games, activities, and pranks, the book will encourage you to connect the dots and bake a cake in a mug; people watch and turn a page with your ear; draw a finger selfie; and play the ultimate basketball challenge. The book is a “thank you” to old followers and a “welcome” to new ones in a delightfully wacky activity book format. It also includes an exclusive Pointless Book app that chronicles Alfie completing the same challenges and includes never-before-seen content!

Learn how to get your listener’s attention, keep her interest, and make your point—all in thirty seconds! Milo Frank, America’s foremost business communications consultant, shows you how to focus your objectives, utilize the “hook” technique, use the secrets of TV and advertising writers, tell terrific anecdotes that make your point, shine in meetings and question-and-answer sessions, and more! These proven techniques give you the edge that successful people share—the art of communicating quickly, precisely, and powerfully!

To the delight of his thriving fan base, YouTuber Alfie Deyes extends all the fun of the Pointless Blog to his third interactive activity book! Featuring never-before-seen content, fan contributions, the exclusive Pointless Book app, and more, Pointless Book #3 is the most engaging book in the series. For the first time in the Pointless series, fans were given an opportunity to directly contribute to the process by designing pages, writing pages, and helping to select the cover. Pointless Book #3 is fully illustrated and packed with a host of games, activities, and pranks. All the great content is accompanied by the Pointless Book app that chronicles Alfie completing the same challenges and includes never-before-seen content. You don’t miss this exciting and unique addition to the Pointless Book series!

"David Orr is no starry-eyed cheerleader for contemporary poetry; Orr’s a critic, and a good one. . . . Beautiful & Pointless is a clear-eyed, opinionated, and idiosyncratic guide to a vibrant but endangered art form, essential reading for anyone who loves poetry, and also for those of us who mostly just admire it from afar." —Tom Perrotta Award-winning New York Times Book Review poetry columnist David Orr delivers an engaging, amusing, and stimulating tour through the world of poetry. With echoes of Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer, Orr’s Beautiful & Pointless offers a smart and funny approach to appreciating an art form that many find difficult to embrace.

The World’s Most Pointless Animals is a witty, quirky, colorfully-illustrated book featuring fascinating facts about some very silly animals…who we find are perhaps not so pointless after all. From familiar animals like giraffes (who don’t have any vocal cords) through to those that surely should not even exist, such as the pink fairy armadillo (absurdly huge front claws, super tough protective shell in baby pink, particularly susceptible to stress), our planet is full of some pretty weird and wonderful animals. For example: Koalas spend up to 18 hours a day asleep! Pandas are born bright pink, deaf, and blind. Dumbo octopuses flap their big fin-like ears to move around. A Narwhal’s tusk grows through its upper lip—ouch! With hilarious text throughout and bright, contemporary illustrations, this guide to absurdly awesome animals contains funny labelled diagrams and some excellent made-up Latin names (n.b. the jellyfish’s scientific name is not actually wibblious wobblious ouchii). Carrying an important message of celebrating diversity and differences, The World’s Most Pointless Animals inspires a drive to conserve our amazing planet and the creatures we’re lucky enough to share it with. Quirky Creatures is a series dedicated to seeking out the weird and wonderful denizens of the natural world and explaining why they are so strange, from the ridiculous to the truly terrifying. Also available in this series is The World's Most Ridiculous Animals and The World's Most Atrocious Animals.

The world is full of pointless things. From rail replacement bus services to chip forks. From war to windchimes. From people who put cushions on beds to people who read the bit they write about the book on amazon. Look around you right now. Just about the only thing that isn't pointless is you. You look amazing. Join Alexander Armstrong and Richard Osman, the hosts of BBC1 quiz show Pointless as they take you on a journey through The 100 Most Pointless Things in the World. Filled with play-along quiz questions and unlikely facts, their hilarious collection of musings on some of the most pointless things found in everyday modern life is the perfect blend of the obscure, the fascinating and the downright silly.

Wasting time in pointless meetings....It's the bane of work life-and the one thing that never seems to change. But meetings can be highly effective, says Martin Murphy, who has helped a "Who's Who" of corporate clients transform timesapping meetings into "breakthrough sessions" that are truly productive. His strategy is not simply to speed them up or make them more palatable with flashier facilitation. Rather, the key is to upend the entire concept of meetings. That means throwing out traditional protocols and using one of four new collaboration models to get more done, faster than ever before. These sessions address: Issues management: identify, rank, and resolve issues-promoting critical concerns to Action Plan status * Problem solving: thirty-minute sessions for solving complex problems * Innovation: discover the billion-dollar idea that lurks in every organization * Strategic planning: stripped-down protocols for the kind of ongoing, realtime planning required in today's fast-paced economy In an era when innovation and speed-to-market rule, No More Pointless Meetings leverages the creativity and knowledge of an organization's people-a potent resource that conventional meetings ignore.

This philosophical inquiry into the problem of human suffering is “insightful, informative and deeply humane . . . a genuine pleasure to read” (Times Higher Education). Suffering is an inescapable part of the human condition—which leads to a question that has proved just as inescapable throughout the centuries: Why? In Seven Ways of Looking at Pointless Suffering, Scott Samuelson tackles this fundamental question. To do so, he travels through the history of philosophy and religion, while attending closely to the world we live in. Samuelson draws insight from sources that range from Confucius to Bugs Bunny, and from his time teaching philosophy to prisoners to Hannah Arendt’s attempts to come to terms with the Holocaust. Samuelson guides us through various attempts to explain why we suffer, explores the many ways we try to minimize or eliminate suffering, and examines people’s approaches to living with pointless suffering. Ultimately, Samuelson shows, to be fully human means to acknowledge a mysterious paradox: we must simultaneously accept suffering and oppose it. And understanding that is itself a step towards acceptance.

From bestselling writer David Graeber—“a master of opening up thought and stimulating debate” (Slate)—a powerful argument against the rise of meaningless, unfulfilling jobs…and their consequences. Does your job make a meaningful contribution to the world? In the spring of 2013, David Graeber asked this question in a playful, provocative essay titled “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.” It went viral. After one million online views in seventeen different languages, people all over the world are still debating the answer. There are hordes of people—HR consultants, communication coordinators, telemarketing researchers, corporate lawyers—whose jobs are useless, and, tragically, they know it. These people are caught in bullshit jobs. Graeber explores one of society’s most vexing and deeply felt concerns, indicting among other villains a particular strain of finance capitalism that betrays ideals shared by thinkers ranging from Keynes to Lincoln. “Clever and charismatic” (The New Yorker), Bullshit Jobs gives individuals, corporations, and societies permission to undergo a shift in values, placing creative and caring work at the center of our culture. This book is for everyone who wants to turn their vocation back into an avocation and “a thought-provoking examination of our working lives” (Financial Times).