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How a web-scale network of autonomous micromanagers can challenge the AI revolution and combat the high cost of quantitative business optimization.The artificial intelligence (AI) revolution is leaving behind small businesses and organizations that cannot afford in-house teams of data scientists. In Microprediction, Peter Cotton examines the repeated quantitative tasks that drive business optimization from the perspectives of economics, statistics, decision making under uncertainty, and privacy concerns. He asks what things currently described as AI are not “microprediction,” whether microprediction is an individual or collective activity, and how we can produce and distribute high-quality microprediction at low cost. The world is missing a public utility, he concludes, while companies are missing an important strategic approach that would enable them to benefit―and also give back. In an engaging, colloquial style, Cotton argues that market-inspired “superminds” are likely to be very e

Coding for a purpose: helping young people combine journalism, data, design, and code to make media that makes a difference.Educators are urged to teach “code for all”―to make a specialized field accessible for students usually excluded from it. In Code for What? Clifford Lee and Elisabeth Soep instead ask the question, “code for what?” What if coding were a justice-driven medium for storytelling rather than a narrow technical skill? What if “democratizing” computer science went beyond the usual one-off workshop and empowered youth to create digital products for social impact? Lee and Soep answer these questions with stories of a diverse group of young people in Oakland, California, who combine journalism, data, design, and code to create media that make a difference. These teenage and young adult producers created interactive projects that explored gendered and racialized dress code policies in schools; designed tools for LBGTQ+ youth experiencing discrimination; investigated facial r

An exploration of social media–imposed pressure on new mothers: How the supposed safe havens of online mommy groups have become rife with aggression and groupthink.Many mothers today turn to social media for parenting advice, joining online mothers’ groups on Facebook and elsewhere. But the communities they find in these supposed safe havens can be rife with aggression, peer pressure, and groupthink―insisting that only certain practices are “best,” “healthiest,” “safest” (and mandatory). In this book, Jessica Clements and Kari Nixon debunk the myth of “optimal motherhood”―the idea that there is only one right answer to parenting dilemmas, and that optimal mothers must pursue perfection. In fact, Clements and Nixon write, parenting choices are not binaries, and the scientific findings touted by mommy groups are neither clear cut nor prescriptive. Clements and Nixon trace contemporary ideas of optimal motherhood to the nineteenth-century “Cult of True Womanhood,” which viewed women in te

How to co-create―and why: the emergence of media co-creation as a concept and as a practice grounded in equity and justice.Co-creation is everywhere: It’s how the internet was built; it generated massive prehistoric rock carvings; it powered the development of vaccines for COVID-19 in record time. Co-creation offers alternatives to the idea of the solitary author privileged by top-down media. But co-creation is easy to miss, as individuals often take credit for―and profit from―collective forms of authorship, erasing whole cultures and narratives as they do so. Collective Wisdom offers the first guide to co-creation as a concept and as a practice, tracing co-creation in a media-making that ranges from collaborative journalism to human–AI partnerships. Why co-create―and why now? The many coauthors, drawing on a remarkable array of professional and personal experience, focus on the radical, sustained practices of co-creating media within communities and with social movements. They explore

An argument that the development of scientific practice and growth of scientific knowledge are governed by Darwin’s evolutionary model of descent with modification.Although scientific investigation is influenced by our cognitive and moral failings as well as all the factors impinging on human life, the historical development of scientific knowledge has trended toward an increasingly accurate picture of an increasing number of phenomena. Taking a fresh look at Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in How Knowledge Grows Chris Haufe uses evolutionary theory to explain both why scientific practice develops the way it does and how scientific knowledge expands. This evolutionary model, claims Haufe, helps to explain what is epistemically special about scientific knowledge: its tendency to grow in both depth and breadth. Kuhn showed how intellectual communities achieve consensus in part by discriminating against ideas that differ from their own and isolating thems

An essential exploration of video game aesthetic that decenters the human player and challenges what it means to play.Do we play video games or do video games play us? Is nonhuman play a mere paradox or the future of gaming? And what do video games have to do with quantum theory? In Playing at a Distance, Sonia Fizek engages with these and many more daunting questions, forging new ways to think and talk about games and play that decenter the human player and explore a variety of play formats and practices that require surprisingly little human action. Idling in clicker games, wandering in walking simulators, automating gameplay with bots, or simply watching games rather than playing them―Fizek shows how these seemingly marginal cases are central to understanding how we play in the digital age. Introducing the concept of distance, Fizek reorients our view of computer-mediated play. To “play at a distance,” she says, is to delegate the immediate action to the machine and to become partic

The life of Nobel-winning biologist Salvador Luria, whose passion for science was equaled by his commitment to political engagement in Cold War America.Blacklisted from federal funding review panels but awarded a Nobel Prize for his research on bacteriophage, biologist Salvador Luria (1912–1991) was as much an activist as a scientist. In this first full-length biography of Luria, Rena Selya draws on extensive archival research; interviews with Luria’s family, colleagues, and students; and FBI documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act to create a compelling portrait of a man committed to both science and society.In addition to his work with viruses and bacteria in the 1940s, Luria broke new ground in molecular biology and cancer research from the 1950s to the 1980s and was a leader in calling for scientists to accept an educational and advisory responsibility to the public. In return, he believed, the public should rely on science to strengthen social and political insti

How politicians’ digital strategies appeal to the same fantasies of digital connection, access, and participation peddled by Silicon Valley.Smartphones and other digital devices seem to give us a direct line to politicians. But is interacting with presidential tweets really a manifestation of digital democracy? In Selfie Democracy, Elizabeth Losh examines the unintended consequences of politicians’ digital strategies, from the Obama campaign’s pioneering construction of an online community to Trump’s Twitter dominance. She finds that politicians who use digital media appeal to the same fantasies of digital connection, access, and participation peddled by Silicon Valley. Meanwhile, smartphones and social media don’t enable participatory democracy so much as they incentivize citizens to perform attention-getting acts of political expression. Losh explores presidential rhetoric casting digital media as tools of democracy, describes the conflation of gender and technology that contributed

How the discovery of a harmless leak of radiation sparked a media firestorm, political grandstanding, and fearmongering that closed a vital scientific facility.In 1997, scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory found a small leak of radioactive water near their research reactor. Brookhaven was―and is―a world-class, Nobel Prize–winning lab, and its reactor was the cornerstone of US materials science and one of the world’s finest research facilities. The leak, harmless to health, came from a storage pool rather than the reactor. But its discovery triggered a media and political firestorm that resulted in the reactor’s shutdown, and even attempts to close the entire laboratory. A quarter century later, the episode reveals the dynamics of today’s controversies in which fears and the dismissal of science disrupt serious discussion and research of vital issues such as vaccines, climate change, and toxic chemicals. This story has all the elements of a thriller, with vivid characters and dr

The life and work of Freeman Dyson―renowned scientist, visionary, and iconoclast―and his particular way of thinking about deep questions.Freeman Dyson (1923–2020)―renowned scientist, visionary, and iconoclast―helped invent modern physics. Not bound by disciplinary divisions, he went on to explore foundational topics in mathematics, astrophysics, and the origin of life. General readers were introduced to Dyson’s roving mind and heterodox approach in his 1979 book Disturbing the Universe, a poignant autobiographical reflection on life and science. “Well, Doc, You’re In” (the title quotes Richard Feynman’s remark to Dyson at a physics conference) offers a fresh examination of Dyson’s life and work, exploring his particular way of thinking about deep questions that range from the nature of matter to the ultimate fate of the universe. The chapters―written by leading scientists, historians, and science journalists, including some of Dyson’s colleagues―trace Dyson’s formative years, his buddi

How meaning works―from monkey calls to human language, from spoken language to sign language, from gestures to music―and how meaning is connected to truth.We communicate through language, connecting what we mean to the words we say. But humans convey meaning in other ways as well, with facial expressions, hand gestures, and other methods. Animals, too, can get their meanings across without words. In What It All Means, linguist Philippe Schlenker explains how meaning works, from monkey calls to human language, from spoken language to sign language, from gestures to music. He shows that these extraordinarily diverse types of meaning can be studied and compared within a unified approach―one in which the notion of truth plays a central role. “It’s just semantics” is often said dismissively. But Schlenker shows that semantics―the study of meaning―is an unsung success of modern linguistics, a way to investigate some of the deepest questions about human nature using tools from the empirical a

An expert offers a guide to where we should use artificial intelligence―and where we should not.Before we know it, artificial intelligence (AI) will work its way into every corner of our lives, making decisions about, with, and for us. Is this a good thing? There’s a tendency to think that machines can be more “objective” than humans―can make better decisions about job applicants, for example, or risk assessments. In Awkward Intelligence, AI expert Katharina Zweig offers readers the inside story, explaining how many levers computer and data scientists must pull for AI’s supposedly objective decision making. She presents the good and the bad: AI is good at processing vast quantities of data that humans cannot―but it’s bad at making judgments about people. AI is accurate at sifting through billions of websites to offer up the best results for our search queries and it has beaten reigning champions in games of chess and Go. But, drawing on her own research, Zweig shows how inac

An approachable introduction to elementary sheaf theory and its applications beyond pure math.Sheaves are mathematical constructions concerned with passages from local properties to global ones. They have played a fundamental role in the development of many areas of modern mathematics, yet the broad conceptual power of sheaf theory and its wide applicability to areas beyond pure math have only recently begun to be appreciated. Taking an applied category theory perspective, Sheaf Theory through Examples provides an approachable introduction to elementary sheaf theory and examines applications including n-colorings of graphs, satellite data, chess problems, Bayesian networks, self-similar groups, musical performance, complexes, and much more. With an emphasis on developing the theory via a wealth of well-motivated and vividly illustrated examples, Sheaf Theory through Examples supplements the formal development of concepts with philosophical reflections on topology, category theory, and

The first collection of Leibniz’s key writings on the binary system, newly translated, with many previously unpublished in any language.The polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) is known for his independent invention of the calculus in 1675. Another major―although less studied―mathematical contribution by Leibniz is his invention of binary arithmetic, the representational basis for today’s digital computing. This book offers the first collection of Leibniz’s most important writings on the binary system, all newly translated by the authors with many previously unpublished in any language. Taken together, these thirty-two texts tell the story of binary as Leibniz conceived it, from his first youthful writings on the subject to the mature development and publication of the binary system. As befits a scholarly edition, Strickland and Lewis have not only returned to Leibniz’s original manuscripts in preparing their translations, but also provided full critical apparatus. In additio

Technology companies claim to connect people through touchscreens, but by conflating physical contact with emotional sentiments, they displace the constructed aspects of devices and women and other oppressed individuals’ critiques of how such technologies function.Technology companies and device designers correlate touchscreens and online sites with physical contact and emotional sentiments, promising unmediated experiences in which the screen falls away in favor of visceral materiality and connections. While touchscreens are key elements of most people’s everyday lives, critical frameworks for understanding the embodied experiences of using them are wanting. In Touch Screen Theory, Michele White focuses on the relation between physically touching and emotionally feeling to recenter the bodies and identities that are empowered, produced, and displaced by these digital technologies and settings. Drawing on detailed cases and humanities methods, White shows how and why gender, race, and

The story of the British amusement arcade from the 1800s to the present.Amusement arcades are an important part of British culture, yet discussions of them tend to be based on American models. Alan Meades, who spent his childhood happily playing in British seaside arcades, presents the history of the arcade from its origins in traveling fairs of the 1800s to the present. Drawing on firsthand accounts of industry members and archival sources, including rare photographs and trade publications, he tells the story of the first arcades, the people who made the machines, the rise of video games, and the legislative and economic challenges spurred by public fears of moral decline. Arcade Britannia highlights the differences between British and North American arcades, especially in terms of the complex relationship between gambling and amusements. He also underlines Britain’s role in introducing coin-operated technologies into Europe, as well as the industry’s close links to America and, espec

Discover the hidden electrical world inside your nervous system using DIY, hands-on experiments, for all ages. No MD or PhD required!The workings of the brain are mysterious: What are neural signals? What do they mean? How do our senses really sense? How does our brain control our movements? What happens when we meditate? Techniques to record signals from living brains were once thought to be the realm of advanced university labs . . . but not anymore! This book allows anyone to participate in the discovery of neuroscience through hands-on experiments that record the hidden electrical world beneath our skin and skulls. In How Your Brain Works, neuroscientists Greg Gage and Tim Marzullo offer a practical guide―accessible and useful to readers from middle schoolers to college undergraduates to curious adults―for learning about the brain through hands-on experiments. Armed with some DIY electrodes, readers will get to see what brain activity really looks like through simple neuroscience e

How epidemic photography during a global pandemic of bubonic plague contributed to the development of modern epidemiology and our concept of the “pandemic.”In Visual Plague, Christos Lynteris examines the emergence of epidemic photography during the third plague pandemic (1894–1959), a global pandemic of bubonic plague that led to over twelve million deaths. Unlike medical photography, epidemic photography was not exclusively, or even primarily, concerned with exposing the patient’s body or medical examinations and operations. Instead, it played a key role in reconceptualizing infectious diseases by visualizing the “pandemic” as a new concept and structure of experience―one that frames and responds to the smallest local outbreak of an infectious disease as an event of global importance and consequence. As the third plague pandemic struck more and more countries, the international circulation of plague photographs in the press generated an unprecedented spectacle of imminent global thre

How ecological design emerged in Scandinavia during the 1960s and 1970s, building on both Scandinavia’s design culture and its environmental movement.Scandinavia is famous for its design culture, and for its pioneering efforts toward a sustainable future. In Ecological by Design, Kjetil Fallan shows how these two forces came together in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Scandinavian designers began to question the endless cycle in which designed objects are produced, consumed, discarded, and replaced in quick succession. The emergence of ecological design in Scandinavia at the height of the popular environmental movement, Fallan suggests, illuminates a little-known reciprocity between environmentalism and design: not only did design play a role in the rise of modern environmentalism, but ecological thinking influenced the transformation in design culture in Scandinavia and beyond that began as the modernist faith in progress and prosperity waned. Fallan describes the efforts of Scan

More than sixty speculative art and design projects explore how art, food, and creative thinking can prepare us for future catastrophes.In the Age of the Anthropocene―a era characterized by human-caused climate disaster―catastrophes and dystopias loom. The Anthropocene Cookbook takes our planetary state of emergency as an opportunity to seize the moment to imagine constructive change and new ideas. How can we survive in an age of constant environmental crises? How can we thrive? The Anthropocene Cookbook answers these questions by presenting a series of investigative art and design projects that explore how art, food, and creative thinking can prepare us for future catastrophes. This cookbook of ideas rethinks our eating habits and traditions, challenges our food taboos, and proposes new recipes for humanity’s survival. These more than sixty projects propose new ways to think and make food, offering tools for creative action rather than traditional recipes. They imagine modifying the h

Tracks the evolution of the international cellular industry from the late 1970s to the present.The development of the mobile-phone industry into what we know today required remarkable cooperation between companies, governments, and industrial sectors. Companies developing cellular infrastructure, cellular devices, cellular network services, and eventually software and mobile semiconductors had to cooperate, not simply compete, with each other. In this global history of the mobile-phone industry, Daniel D. Garcia-Swartz and Martin Campbell-Kelly examine its development in the United States, Europe, Japan, and several emerging economies, including China and India. They present the evolution of mobile phones from the perspective of vendors of telephone equipment and network operators, users whose lives have been transformed by mobile phones, and governments that have fostered specific mobile-phone standards. Cellular covers the technical aspects of the cellphone, as well as its social and

How people make decisions, size up situations, spot anomalies, and anticipate problems in real-world settings.Gary Klein, author of the bestselling Sources of Power, is the cognitive psychologist who discovered how people actually make decisions, particularly under time pressure and uncertainty. In Snapshots of the Mind, he offers a set of short essays―“snapshots” of different aspects of cognitive functioning in real-world settings that will help us learn to recognize the cognitive processes that underlie and drive performance. In these essays Klein provides practical tools for escaping fixation on initial hunches and learning to detect the ways that people make decisions, size up situations, spot anomalies, and anticipate problems. Snapshots of the Mind grows out of the Naturalistic Decision Making movement, which studies how decision makers handle uncertainty and complexity in high-stakes situations. In the essays, Klein examines how people make tough choices and assessments in the

New edition of a graduate-level textbook on that focuses on online convex optimization, a machine learning framework that views optimization as a process.In many practical applications, the environment is so complex that it is not feasible to lay out a comprehensive theoretical model and use classical algorithmic theory and/or mathematical optimization. Introduction to Online Convex Optimization presents a robust machine learning approach that contains elements of mathematical optimization, game theory, and learning theory: an optimization method that learns from experience as more aspects of the problem are observed. This view of optimization as a process has led to some spectacular successes in modeling and systems that have become part of our daily lives. Based on the “Theoretical Machine Learning” course taught by the author at Princeton University, the second edition of this widely used graduate level text features:Thoroughly updated material throughoutNew chapters on boosting, ad

How companies can gain strategic advantage by developing blockchain capabilities.Blockchain is far more than cryptocurrency. Regarded for a decade as complex and with limited application, blockchain has now matured to be on the verge of fully realizing its disruptive potential. In Enterprise Strategy for Blockchain, business strategy expert Ravi Sarathy shows how companies can gain competitive advantage by developing and deploying blockchain capabilities. Sarathy explains what makes blockchain unique, including its capacities to eliminate intermediaries, guard against hackers, decentralize, and protect privacy. Presenting examples drawn from such sectors as finance, supply chains, computer services, consumer products, and entertainment, he describes how executives can strategically assess blockchain’s applicability to their business. After outlining blockchain’s technological features―and its technological obstacles―Sarathy describes disruptive technologies already happening in the fin

An idiosyncratic guidebook to architectural (and other) wonders of Italy, accompanied by the author’s own witty illustrations.In Some Reasons for Traveling to Italy, architect Peter Wilson offers a Grand Tour of Grand Tours, providing an idiosyncratic guidebook to architectural (and other) wonders of Italy, illustrated by his own witty watercolors and sketches. Wilson chronicles the reasons that people throughout history have traveled to Italy―ranging from “To Be the Subject of an Equestrian Painting by Uccello in Florence Cathedral” to “To Rebuild Herculaneum in Malibu” (the desire of oil tycoon J. Paul Getty in the 1970s)―while giving readers a deeper understanding of Italy’s architectural habitat and cultural mythology. In Wilson’s narratives and anecdotes, place names function as talismans; the events may not tally with recorded history, or with the exact topographies of actual places. Wilson offers historical reworkings, appropriations, and an architect’s scrutiny of certain Itali

In praise of imperfection: how life on our planet is a catalog of imperfections, errors, alternatives, and anomalies.In the beginning, there was imperfection, which became the source of all things. Anomalies and asymmetries caused planets to take shape from the bubbling void and sent light into darkness. Life on earth is a catalog of accidents, alternatives, and errors that turned out to work quite well. In this book, Telmo Pievani shows that life on our planet has flourished and survived not because of its perfection but despite (and perhaps because of) its imperfection. He begins his story with the disruption-filled birth of the universe and proceeds through the random DNA copying errors that fuel evolution, the transformations of advantages into handicaps by natural selection, the anatomical and functional jumble that is the human brain, and our many bodily mismatches. Along the way, Pievani tells readers about the Irish elk (incidentally, neither Irish nor elk), whose enormous antl

How Richard Riemerschmid’s designs of everyday―but “extraordinary”―objects recalibrate our understanding of modernism.At the beginning of the twentieth century, German artist Richard Riemerschmid (1868–1957) was known as a symbolist painter and, by the advent of World War I, had become an important modern architect. This, however, the first English-language book on Riemerschmid, celebrates his understudied legacy as a designer of everyday objects―furniture, tableware, clothing―that were imbued with an extraordinary sense of vitality and even personality. Freyja Hartzell makes a case for the importance of Riemerschmid's designed objects in the development of modern design―and for the power of everyday things to change the way we live our lives, understand history, and design our future. Hartzell offers for the first time an interpretive history of Riemerschmid's design practice embedded in a fresh examination of modernism told by the objects themselves. Hartzell explores Riemerschmid's

The importance of telling new climate stories―stories that center the persistence of life itself, that embrace comedy and radical hope.“How dare you?” asked teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg at the United Nations in 2019. How dare the world’s leaders fiddle around the edges when the world is on fire? Why is society unable to grasp the enormity of climate change? In Beyond Climate Breakdown, Peter Friederici writes that the answer must come in the form of a story, and that our miscomprehension of the climate crisis comes about because we have been telling the wrong stories. These stories are pervasive; they come from long narrative traditions, sanctioned by capitalism, Hollywood, and social media, and they revolve around a myth: that the nation exists primarily as a setting for a certain kind of economic activity. Stories are how we make sense of the world and our place in it. The story that “the economy” takes priority over everything else may seem foreordained, but, Friederici

An analysis of wandering within different game worlds, viewed through the lenses of work, colonialism, gender, and death.Wandering in games can be a theme, a formal mode, an aesthetic metaphor, or a player action. It can mean walking, escaping, traversing, meandering, or returning. In this book, game studies scholar Melissa Kagen introduces the concept of “wandering games,” exploring the uses of wandering in a variety of game worlds. She shows how the much-derided Walking Simulator―a term that began as an insult, a denigration of games that are less violent, less task-oriented, or less difficult to complete―semi-accidentally tapped into something brilliant: the vast heritage and intellectual history of the concept of walking in fiction, philosophy, pilgrimage, performance, and protest. Kagen examines wandering in a series of games that vary widely in terms of genre, mechanics, themes, player base, studio size, and funding, giving close readings to Return of the Obra Dinn, Eastshade, Ri

The power of images to represent the unseeable: stunning visualizations of science, from the microscopic to the incredibly vast.We live among patterns of delicate beauty and exquisite chaos that our eyes can’t detect; we are surrounded by invisible particles and shifting fields of matter that permeate all of space. Our very cells are intricate molecular machines, and the story of our origins stretches back through an unimaginable amount of time. How can we see the richness of what lies beyond our sensory perception? Scientists have developed visualization tools that can make the invisible visible. This bountifully illustrated book demonstrates the power of images to represent the unseeable, offering stunning visualizations of science that range from the microscopic to the incredibly vast. With more than 200 color images and an engaging text by leading science writer Jack Challoner, How Scientists Visualize Things explains and illustrates the techniques by which scientists create visual

How colleges and universities can live up to their ideals of diversity, and why inclusivity and excellence go hand in hand.Most colleges and universities embrace the ideals of diversity and inclusion, but many fall short, especially in the hiring, retention, and advancement of faculty who would more fully represent our diverse world―in particular women and people of color. In this book, Abigail Stewart and Virginia Valian argue that diversity and excellence go hand in hand and provide guidance for achieving both. Stewart and Valian, themselves senior academics, support their argument with comprehensive data from a range of disciplines. They show why merit is often overlooked; they offer statistics and examples of individual experiences of exclusion, such as being left out of crucial meetings; and they outline institutional practices that keep exclusion invisible, including reliance on proxies for excellence, such as prestige, that disadvantage outstanding candidates who are not members

Drawing as a tool of thought: an investigation of drawing, cognition, and creativity that integrates text and hand-drawn images.Drawing is a way of constructing ideas and observations as much as it is a means of expressing them. When we are not ready or able to put our thoughts into words, we can sometimes put them down in arrangements of lines and marks. Artists, designers, architects, and others draw to generate, explore, and test perceptions and mental models. In Drawing Thought, artist-educator Andrea Kantrowitz invites readers to use drawing to extend and reflect on their own thought processes. She interweaves illuminating hand-drawn images with text, integrating recent findings in cognitive psychology and neuroscience with accounts of her own artistic and teaching practices. The practice of drawing seems to be found across almost all known human cultures, with its past stretching back into the caves of prehistory. It takes advantage of the ways in which human cognition is embodie

How the way we perceive our bodies plays a critical role in the way we perceive ourselves: stories of phantom limbs, rubber hands, anorexia, and other phenomena.The body is central to our sense of identity. It can be a canvas for self-expression, decorated with clothing, jewelry, cosmetics, tattoos, and piercings. But the body is more than that. Bodily awareness, says scientist-writer Moheb Costandi, is key to self-consciousness. In Body Am I, Costandi examines how the brain perceives the body, how that perception translates into our conscious experience of the body, and how that experience contributes to our sense of self. Along the way, he explores what can happen when the mechanisms of bodily awareness are disturbed, leading to such phenomena as phantom limbs, alien hands, and amputee fetishes. Costandi explains that the brain generates maps and models of the body that guide how we perceive and use it, and that these maps and models are repeatedly modified and reconstructed. Drawing

The exhaustion, disappointment, and listlessness experienced under digital capitalism, explored through works by contemporary artists, writers, and performers.Sometimes, interacting with digital platforms, we want to be passive―in those moments of dissociation when we scroll mindlessly rather than connecting with anyone, for example, or when our only response is a shrugging “lol.” Despite encouragement by these platforms to “be yourself,” we want to be anyone but ourselves. Tung-Hui Hu calls this state of exhaustion, disappointment, and listlessness digital lethargy. This condition permeates our lives under digital capitalism, whether we are “users,” who are what they click, or racialized workers in Asia and the Global South. Far from being a state of apathy, however, lethargy may hold the potential for social change. Hu explores digital lethargy through a series of works by contemporary artists, writers, and performers. These dispatches from the bleeding edge of digital culture includ

How the Pentagon became the world’s largest single greenhouse gas emitter and why it’s not too late to break the link between national security and fossil fuel consumption.The military has for years (unlike many politicians) acknowledged that climate change is real, creating conditions so extreme that some military officials fear future climate wars. At the same time, the U.S. Department of Defense―military forces and DOD agencies―is the largest single energy consumer in the United States and the world’s largest institutional greenhouse gas emitter. In this eye-opening book, Neta Crawford traces the U.S. military’s growing consumption of energy and calls for a reconceptualization of foreign policy and military doctrine. Only such a rethinking, she argues, will break the link between national security and fossil fuels.The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War shows how the U.S. economy and military together have created a deep and long-term cycle of economic growth, fossil fuel use, and dep

An in-depth exploration of the experience of playing board games and how game designers shape that experience.In Unboxed, Gordon Calleja explores the experience of playing board games and how game designers shape that experience. Calleja examines key aspects of board game experience―the nature of play, attention, rules, sociality, imagination, narrative, materiality, and immersion―to offer a theory of board game experience and a model for understanding game involvement that is relevant to the analysis, criticism, and design of board games. Drawing on interviews with thirty-two leading board game designers and critics, Calleja―himself a board game designer―provides the set of conceptual tools that board game design has thus far lacked. After considering different conceptions of play, Calleja discusses the nature and role of attention and goes on to outline the key forms of involvement that make up the board game playing experience. In subsequent chapters, Calleja explores each of these

How the definition, production, and leveraging of information are shaped by caste, class, and gender, and the implications for development.Information, says Janaki Srinivasan, has fundamentally reshaped development discourse and practice. In this study, she examines the history of the idea of “information” and its political implications for poverty alleviation. She presents three cases in India―the circulation of price information in a fish market in Kerala, government information in information kiosks operated by a nonprofit in Puducherry, and a political campaign demanding a right to information in Rajasthan―to explore three uses of information to support goals of social change. Countering claims that information is naturally and universally empowering, Srinivasan shows how the definition, production, and leveraging of information are shaped by caste, class, and gender.Srinivasan draws on archival and ethnographic research to challenge the idea of information as objective and factual

Zigzagging through six locations on the edges of the German-speaking world, exploring them through politics, architecture, literature, film, art, music, food, and history.“Zickzack” is the German word for “zigzag”: hopping around, moving back and forth, never following a straight line, avoiding the monotony of one thing following another. Zickzack is William Firebrace’s zigzagging exploration of six places on the edges of the German-speaking world. Deploying essays, narration, conversations, descriptions, and lists, Firebrace celebrates locations on defined and undefined borders, where cultures, languages, and histories mix. In his nonlinear wandering, he touches on ethnicity, topography, history, film, literature, myth, languages, and gastronomy. These locales are not the famous cities of Berlin, Vienna, and Zurich, but areas that straddle countries, geographies, and influences. Two are within Germany itself, one lies on (and over) the border with Poland, and three were once within th

A journey through the history, cultures, and societies of Marseille.There are many Marseilles, or at least many versions of Marseille: seaside village, haven of gangsters, gateway to the East, city of immigrants and outcasts. It is by turns the dull bourgeois provincial town where nothing ever happens and the mysterious unknowable city of the Mediterranean. In Marseille Mix, William Firebrace explores the many Marseilles, the invented and the actual. Leading readers down narrow streets, through undulating terrain that seems at once, or serially, Italian, Greek, Levantine, and North African, Firebrace traces the history and culture of Marseille through landscapes, buildings, food, films, literature, and criminology. In seven chapters, in writing that is by turns essay, narrative, description, list, recipe, glossary, and conversation, Firebrace investigates the city’s defining mix. He tells stories of famous Marseillais, including Marcel Pagnol and Antonin Artaud, and famous visitors, in

A cultural history of living in the undersea, both fictional and real, from Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo to NASA’s ECC02 project.In Memo for Nemo, William Firebrace investigates human inhabitation of the undersea, both fictional and real. Beginning with Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo―an undersea Renaissance man with a library of 12,000 volumes on his submarine―and proceeding through aquariums, undersea photography, artificial seas on land, nuclear-powered submarines, undersea film epics, giant squid, and NASA satellites, Firebrace examines the undersea as a zone created by exploration and invention. Throughout, the history of undersea life is accompanied by an imagined undersea, envisioned by cultural figures ranging from Verne and Herman Melville to Orson Welles and Jimi Hendrix. Firebrace takes readers though the enormous sequence of rooms (impossible in real life) in Nemo’s submarine, recounts the competition among nineteenth-century cities to build the most spectacular aquatic world, and