When you were a kid, the first day of Spring-like weather probably meant it was time to dust off your bike and take a spin around the neighborhood.  But we’ve come a long way from those carefree days.  As cycling becomes more popular, especially in big cities, it brings with it some unexpected downsides, many of which Grant Petersen takes on in Just Ride, his book about opting out of racer culture and into enjoying your bike the way you did as a kid.  Petersen is the founder and owner of Rivendell Bicycle Works, and a well-known figure in the bike world.  His argument?  “A lot of the advice you’ve been getting ever since you became a bike rider is flat-out wrong and is actually bad for your health.”  Just Ride is against all of the following: helmets, carbohydrates, biking as a way to lose weight, and wearing silly riding outfits. Well, he’s not exactly against those things, but Petersen has some unconventional opinions about them.  If you’ve ever ridden in the bicycle lane, rode in a charity race, or watched the Tour de France (or, as Petersen calls it, the BORAF, for Big Old Race Around France), you’ll want to read what he has to say.  The book comes out in May, and until then, the Atlantic has an excerpt to tide you over.

It’s 3/14, so you nerds know what that means: It’s Pi Day*! We here at Workman love anything that brings out our geekiest sides, so we’re celebrating this most mathematical of days with the release of The Book of Perfectly Perilous Math by Sean Connolly. If you want to make middle school math fun–really, it’s possible!–you need this book.

Let’s say a vampire has moved onto your block, and every month he feeds on two people in your town, turning them into vampires. One month later, he and the new vampires are all capable of turning two more people into vampires—a pattern that continues until some brave individual intervenes. Approximately how many months will it take for your 500,000-person town to become populated entirely by blood-sucking fiends if they’re not stopped?

Did we just ask a word problem about a vampire invasion? Yeah, we did! If you want more life-or-death scenarios, this book has got ‘em, including questions about killer tornadoes, deadly spiders, lethal lasers, and out-of-control asteroids.

Now, if you’ll excuse us, it’s time to solve circumference problems while eating varieties of pie. A perfect Pi Day? We think so.

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*3.14 are the first three digits of pi, of course!

Photo by Librado Romero/The New York Times

If you’ve ridden a New York City subway lately, maybe you’ve noticed an elongated illustration depicting a wide array of commuters. The print is by Sophie Blackall, our very own author of Missed Connections, and it’s part of the MTA’s Arts for Transit initiative. This weekend, according to news reports, one subway rider admired the illustration so much that he tried to steal it, with a screwdriver! He was quickly nabbed by a plainclothes police officer who happened to be standing nearby. Ms. Blackall was flattered by the attempted heist, but other fans should note that there are more lawful ways to obtain her work: the print itself is available at the Transit Museum’s store, and Missed Connections, a collection of illustrated love stories, can be found at bookstores everywhere.

Though it was much beloved around Workman’s editorial department, until recently To Marry an English Lord, originally published in 1989, was out of print, and, we feared, forgotten. Then, like like the appearance of a long-lost cousin or a wealthy American heiress on a soap opera to save the day, fate intervened. On January 19th of this year, the New York Times ran an article celebrating Edith Wharton’s 150th birthday as well as the cultural moment that, thanks in part to Downton Abbey, women like Wharton–late 19th century and early 20th century heiresses–seem to be enjoying. And right there in the article’s second paragraph was To Marry an English Lord, by Gail MacColl and Carol McD. Wallace, cited as one of Julian Fellowes’s inspirations for creating Downton Abbey.

Workman jumped at the chance to re-release the book, and now it’s available once more, with a redesigned cover and the same juicy stories of real American heiresses taking on the British peerage: women just like Lady Grantham, who left the nouveau riche-distaining Gilded Age United States for the greener pastures of England, and brought her fortune, which saved the estate of Downton Abbey, with her. The difference between an earl and a “mere sir,” a thorough explanation of entails, the roots of Anglomania–it’s all there, and more, in To Marry an English Lord, a sure-fire method of keeping yourself occupied until the third season of Downton Abbey airs next year. Find the book here, or check out an excerpt of the book here.

In honor of the 2012 South by Southwest festival, which starts today, we’re celebrating with a visit to the Austin, Texas studio of Austin Kleon,  frequent SXSW panelist and attendee, and author of  the new book Steal Like an Artist. Here, we ask him a few questions, speed round style.

Recent book you loved/learned from: 

Jonathan Lethem’s The Ecstasy of Influence. The original piece that book is centered around had a huge influence on Steal Like An Artist, but the book is even richer.

Favorite bookstore:

It’s hard to pick just one! BookPeople and Domy Books are two amazing stores in Austin, Texas.

Hidden talent:

If it’s hidden, it’s hidden for a reason. (Wink.)

Bookmark or dog-ear?:

Dog-eared. And underlined. And scribbled in the margins… 

Book you are most ashamed never to have read:

I have a book out on creativity and I’ve never read Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit or Julia Cameron’s The Artist Way. (Whoops!)

Most frequent form of writerly procrastination:

Twitter!

Favorite childhood book:

Ernie’s Big Mess. (A Sesame Street Start-to-Read Book)

Alternate ambition:

Beach bum.

Your perfect meal:

My mom’s fried chicken, mashed potatoes with gravy, a slice of cherry pie, and a glass of milk.

Big dream:

To be unemployed and independently wealthy.

Super power of choice:

Flying. I’d be having some Grimaldi’s pizza for dinner. (Like my dachshund, I’m food motivated.)

In Steal, you recommend reaching out to creative heroes who inspire you by writing blog posts, dedicating your work to them, and writing fan letters. What was the last fan letter you wrote?

The last fan letter I wrote was Steal! It’s a public fan letter to all the artists who’ve taught me so much.

What Workman book would you like to receive as compensation for your participation?

I Will Teach You To Be Rich

If you’re in Austin, Texas come by the Austin Convention Center this Saturday from 12:30 – 1:30 to hear Austin Kleon and filmmaker Kirby Ferguson discuss creativity in the digital age, followed by a book signing.

Beans: They’re magical! Not only are they delicious, but they have many health-giving properties, and their numerous varieties can be put to a seemingly infinite number of uses.

Crescent Dragonwagon is the author of numerous highly successful cookbooks, including Passionate Vegetarian. Her latest, Bean by Bean: A Cookbook, celebrates all things leguminous, and is chock-full of scrumptious recipes and fascinating facts. Below, 10 interesting things you probably didn’t know about beans!

1. Beans are the only cultivated plants that actually enrich, rather than deplete, the soil during the growing process. How is this possible? Legumes have nodules on their roots that add nitrogen to the soil instead of using it up.
2. Cooked beans can be frozen for up to six months. Thaw them overnight in the fridge before reheating.
3. Bean carbohydrates have been proven to drastically improve the stability of blood sugar levels in diabetics. Many adult-onset diabetics have been able to greatly reduce or eliminate their dependence on insulin through diets containing substantial amounts of beans.
4. In ancient Rome, so esteemed were legumes that the four leading families took their names from them: Lentullus (lentil), Piso (pea), Cicero (chickpea), and Fabius (fava).
5. India, Canada, Turkey, Australia, Nepal, the United States, Bangladesh, and China are the world’s top lentil producers.
6. Beans, their kin, and the products made from them—such as tofu and tempeh—are the most concentrated source of plant-based protein in the world. Between 6 and 11 percent of a cooked bean’s weight is protein.
7. Some ancient cults who believed in reincarnation, most notably the monastic followers of Pythagoras, thought human souls traveled through the stems of bean plants to Hades, where they were then transmogrified for their next lives; it was therefore a sin to eat beans or even walk among bean plants.
8. The mischief-maker behind the bean’s reputation as a musical fruit is a group of complex sugars called oligosaccharides. Oligosaccharides cannot be broken down by our digestive enzymes; instead, our intestinal bacteria ferment them during digestion, causing most of the gas attributable to beans. Luckily, it’s possible to mitigate the gas-making effects of beans through controlling factors such as cooking method and duration, complementary ingredients, and the variety of bean used. (The least “flatulating” legumes are said to be lentils, split peas, adzuki beans, mung beans, and black-eyed peas.)
9. A 1907 resolution introduced by Minnesota Senator Knute Nelson states that while the Senate is in session, bean soup must be served daily, regardless of the weather.
10. In terms of sheer numbers and staggering diversity, no part of the world comes close to matching the abundance and variety of beans available in America: kidney and black beans, navy and cranberry, lima, white runner, scarlet runner, brown tepary and white tepary, calico, eye-of-the-goat, nightfall, fresh green beans, and more!

Crescent Dragonwagon is a writer and food enthusiast who lives on a farm in Vermont. You can follow her on Twitter @CDragonwagon. Bean by Bean is available for purchase online and in a bookstore near you.

The dreaded March SAT test date is upon us this Saturday.  Whiz kid Alan Hatfield, who scored a perfect 2400 on the test and went on to guest edit the 2011-2012 edition of Up Your Score (that’s him in red on the cover), joins us with some tips in this guest post:

It’s the week before the SAT. You’ve spent weeks, if not months, poring through reams of vocabulary flashcards and meticulously reviewing your subsection scores on practice test after practice test. By now, you should have a good idea of which sections you’ve made the most progress in and which sections are your strong suit. So how do you make the most of the final sprint?  Over the course of the next few days, take some time each night to go through practice questions from your two weaker subsections. If you have or can find some practice tests, go through individual sections each night, focusing on simulating a testing atmosphere. This means you should be giving yourself just as much time as on the real test, just to make sure that you’re ready for the rigors of fast test taking. Focus on being comfortable while working in a rushed manner, since your most valuable weapon on test day will be a clear and focused mind along with confidence in your answers.

Once you hit Thursday night, spend a couple hours going through practice questions from all three sections. You don’t have to time yourself: Just focus on developing your unique pace, answering questions only as fast as you can confidently and completely. By this point, you will be able to predict the various kinds of questions you’ll encounter, so practicing with individual questions as opposed to sections will be your best option.

On Friday night, take a half hour to go through a few individual questions from your weakest section, but make sure you don’t take a full practice test. You’ll want to save your energy for Saturday morning, so eat a full, healthy dinner and after your short review session, blast your theme song to get yourself psyched. By the time you wake up on Saturday morning, you’ll feel comfortable and confident. The rest will be history.

For a more comprehensive study plan, check out Up Your Score!  Good luck to everyone taking the test Saturday–may you hit the triple-800 jackpot.

I wish we’d had Katie Workman’s The Mom 100 Cookbook when I was growing up.

When I was a kid, there was very little I wouldn’t eat. Broccoli? Bring it on. Oysters? Okay! Something foreign and unidentifiable? Sure, I’ll try anything once. I didn’t often complain about what was put on my plate—and that’s why I’m my parents’ favorite.

My sister, on the other hand—aaargh. Every night was a battle of the wills as my mom plied my sister to eat and the girl just flat-out refused. If it were up to her, Meredith would’ve eaten fish sticks and mac and cheese for every meal of her childhood. And sure, I guess there’s something sort of appealing about that (no…no, there’s not), but it’s just not a viable option—not in terms of health (hello, vegetables?!) and not in terms of practicality, either. Because what mom has the time and the energy to whip up a healthy, tasty meal for not only herself (and potentially a spouse), but also a handful of kids all clamoring for different variations on the same old bland kids’ dinners? No mom, that’s who!

Enter Katie Workman, chef extraordinaire and savior to moms everywhere. With The Mom 100 Cookbook, Katie has assembled a hundred recipes that are guaranteed to please everyone in your family, from the budding gourmands to the pickiest of picky eaters. Every recipe is healthy and delicious, and the excellent “Fork in the Road” feature highlights ways in which moms can cater to kids of all levels of food-adventurousness.

Katie recently spoke with a few local moms about their most common cooking predicaments. How many of these have you experienced? (I’ll admit it: Even I don’t love fish.)

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h57gr04xTkQ&feature=youtu.be[/youtube]

The Mom 100 Cookbook comes out on April 3 of this year. You can preorder copies now.

Goodbye February, hello March.  “In like a lion, out like a lamb” is the proverb we associate with this month’s weather, and it got us thinking: lions, lambs, the harsh and the soft meeting in the middle when we never thought they would (think Beauty and the Beast)–sounds like an unlikely friendship.  While we hope you’re familiar with the runaway bestseller Unlikely Friendships by now, you may not have known that the book has been adapted for younger readers.  In each book in the Unlikely Friendships for Kids series, kids can read five stories of improbable, heartwarming friendship between species.  The books come “out like a lamb” in April, and are great for animal lovers age 7 and up.

With some editorializing, here’s a summary of Arielle Eckstut and David Henry Sterry’s excellent advice for writers putting together nonfiction book proposals. There’s guidance regarding fiction proposals in the book as well, but nonfiction proposals are definitely the more mysterious of the two. So here goes:

1. Mind your format. Nonfiction book proposals follow a pretty standardized form—you’ll need a table of contents, an overview, a bio, an audience section, a look at the competition, a sample chapter, and more. Check out their book, The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published, or the free chapter, below, for details.
2. Mind your voice. The sample chapter isn’t the only piece of the proposal that should speak to your writing chops. Even the nuts-and-bolts sections should sparkle.
3. Create a cohesive pitch. It’s not enough that all the pieces of your proposal be equally well-written. They should also be equally relevant to the task at hand—that of selling your book. In other words, your bio is not just your bio. It’s an answer to the question, “Why should this guy write this book?”
4. Identify your audience. It may seem obvious to you that there’s a huge untapped audience yearning for information on extreme fly-fishing, but your potential publishers might be generalists who need you to spell out the opportunity. Numbers and data are key here.
5. Show that you know your stuff. Use your proposal as a showcase for your depth of knowledge in the area you’re writing about.
6. Show that you’re not afraid of hard work. (Arielle and David don’t say this outright, but I know they agree.) A well-researched, carefully structured, and well-written proposal doesn’t just make a better case for your idea than a hot mess—it also shows publishers that they can expect to sign on with a hard-working author. These days, that’s more important than ever.
7. Leave ‘em wanting more. As Arielle and David put it, “The less information you can give and still make an airtight case, the better. Why? Because publishers live off HOPE. Hope that your book will be reviewed in top-tier newspapers and magazines. Hope that your book will speak to Terry Gross and, for that matter, that she’ll speak to it. Hope that it will quicken the pulses of buyers at bookstores. Hope that it will spread on the World Wide Web like a virus. Hope that it will beat the odds and become a big fat juicy bestseller […]. 95% of the time, publishers are more likely to shell out good money if they read a dazzling sample chapter or two to get the voice and point of view. More than that is rarely necessary. Indeed, doing too much writing can both harm your chances (if it strays from the agent’s or publisher’s idea of what the book should be) and waste your time (because the publisher or agent who takes on your project may want you to change large parts of it).” (Note: There are several exceptions to this rule, the most notable of which is memoirs.)