Yates is a Futurist. Which is to say he makes a very good living flying around the world dispensing premonitory wisdom, aka prepackaged bull, to world governments, corporations, and global leadership conferences. He is an optimist by trade and a cynic by choice. He's the kind of man who can give a lecture on successive days to a leading pesticide manufacturer and the Organic Farmers of America, and receive standing ovations at both. But just as the...

Look at all those footprints on Everest! The moon has them, too. Been there, done that. But only this Esquire editor and NPR contributor has read the Encyclopedia Britannica from A to Z. In this amusing chronicle, he discusses the feat of reading all 32 volumes (33,000 pages) and the quirky ways it changed his life.

Young "Little Britches" life is radically changed when his ailing father dies. Then his mother reveals a terrible secret and the family is forced to flee their Colorado ranch to an uncertain future. Fortified with the Yankee ingenuity his father taught him, at age eleven Ralph takes on his new role an Man of the Family. His mother deplores her inability to give her children everything materially, and instead gives them much to build their lives and...

Presents an analysis of mysticism, heresy, and the witch craze in Europe between 1000 and 1700.

In between scouring estate sales for her new interior design business, Cottages by the Sea, Meg visits the swanky East Hampton home of her old college roommate, Jillian Spenser. But instead of seeing how the other half lives-she learns how the other half dies. Jillians mother, known as the Queen Mother of the Hamptons, has been murdered. Someone has staged a coup.