Introduction to JavaScript Object Notation

Forget everything you've read about the age of dumbed-down, instant-gratification culture. In this provocative, intelligent, and convincing endorsement of today's mass entertainment, national bestselling author Steven Johnson argues that the pop culture we soak in every day-from The Lord of the Rings to Grand Theft Auto to The Simpsons-has been growing more and more sophisticated and, far from rotting our brains, is actually posing new cognitive challenges that are making our minds measurably sharper. You will never regard the glow of the video game or television screen the same way again.

如果這樣，會怎樣？》正宗續集，再度來解答那些令人匪夷所思的傻問題、笨問題、天馬行空的爛問題，只要用邏輯推理、數學推算、一點點物理、化學、生物或天文知識，它們就變成讓人大腦開竅的好問題啦！The #1 New York Times bestselling author of What If? and How To provides his best answers yet to the weirdest questions you never thought to ask The millions of people around the world who read and loved What If? still have questions, and those questions are getting stranger. Thank goodness xkcd creator Randall Munroe is here to help. Planning to ride a fire pole from the moon back to Earth? The hardest part is sticking the landing. Hoping to cool the atmosphere by opening everyone's freezer door at the same time? Maybe it's time for a brief introduction to thermodynamics. Want to know what would happen if you rode a helicopter blade, built a billion-story building, made a lava lamp out of lava, or jumped on a geyser as it erupted? Okay, if you insist. Before you go on a cosmic road trip, feed the residents of New York City to a T. rex, or fill every church with bananas, be sure to consult this

A preventative medicine physician and staff writer for The Atlanticexplains thesurprising and unintended effects of our hygiene practicesin this informative andentertaining introduction to the new science of skin microbes and probiotics.Keeping skin healthy is a booming industry, and yet it seems like almost no one agrees on what actually works.Confusing messages from health authoritiesand ineffectivetreatments haveleft many people desperate for reliable solutions. An enormous alternative industry is filling the void, selling products that are often of questionable safety and totally unknown effectiveness.InClean, doctor and journalist James Hamblin explores how we got here, examining the science and culture of how we care for our skin today. He talks to dermatologists, microbiologists, allergists, immunologists, aestheticians, bar-soap enthusiasts, venture capitalists, Amish people, theologians, and straight-up scam artists, trying to figure out what it really means to be clean.He eve

From the Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author of How to Be an Artist: a deliciously readable survey of the art world in turbulent timesJerry Saltz is one of our most-watched writers about art and artists, and a passionate champion of the importance of art in our shared cultural life. Since the 1990s he has been an indispensable cultural voice: witty and provocative, he has attracted contemporary readers to fine art as few critics have. An early champion of forgotten and overlooked women artists, he has also celebrated the pioneering work of African American, LGBTQ+, and other long-marginalized creators. Sotheby's Institute of Art has called him, simply, “ The art critic.” Now, in Art Is Life, Jerry Saltz draws on two decades of work to offer a real-time survey of contemporary art as a barometer of our times. Chronicling a period punctuated by dramatic turning points―from the cultural reset of 9/11 to the rolling social crises of today―Saltz traces how visionary artists have bo

A delightful intellectual feast from the bestselling author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics and The Order of TimeOne of the world’s most prominent physicists and a fearless free spirit, Carlo Rovelli is also a masterful storyteller. His bestselling books have introduced millions of readers to the wonders of modern physics and his singular perspective on the cosmos. This new collection of essays reveals a curious intellect always on the move. Rovelli invites us on an accessible and enlightening voyage through science, literature, philosophy and politics.Written with his usual clarity and wit, this journey ranges widely across time and space: from Newton’s alchemy to Einstein’s mistakes, from Nabokov’s epidopterology to Dante’s cosmology, from mind-altering psychedelic substances to the meaning of atheism, from the future of physics to the power of uncertainty. Charming, pithy and elegant, this book is the perfect gateway to the universe of one of the most influential minds of our age.

The story of the urgent fight to save the coral reefs, and why it matters to us all Coral reefs are a microcosm of our planet: extraordinarily diverse, deeply interconnected, and full of wonders. When they're thriving, these fairy gardens hidden beneath the ocean's surface burst with color and life. They sustain entire ecosystems and protect vulnerable coasts. Corals themselves are evolutionary marvels that build elaborate limestone formations from their collective skeletons, broker symbiotic relationships with algae, and manufacture their own fluorescent sunblock. But corals across the planet are in the middle of an unprecedented die-off, beset by warming oceans, pollution, human damage, and a devastating pandemic. Juli Berwald fell in love with coral reefs as a marine biology student, entranced by their beauty and complexity. Alarmed by their peril, she traveled the world to discover how to prevent their loss. She met scientists and activists operating in emergency mode, doing everyt

The surprising and important story of how humans gained what amounts to an extra life, from the bestselling author of How We Got to Now and Where Good Ideas Come From As a species we have doubled our

Our bones have many stories to tell, if you know how to listen.Bone is a marvel, an adaptable and resilient building material developed over 500 million years of evolutionary history. It gives our bodies their shapes and the ability to move. It grows and changes with us, an undeniable document of who we are and how we lived. Arguably, no other part of the human anatomy has such rich scientific and cultural significance, both brimming with life and a potent symbol of death. Brian Switek is a charming and enthusiastic osteological raconteur. In this natural and cultural history of bone, he explains where our skeletons came from, what they do inside us, and what others can learn about us when these wondrous assemblies of mineral and protein are all we've left behind. Bone is as embedded in our culture as it is in our bodies. Our species has made instruments and jewelry from bone, treated the dead like collectors' items, put our faith in skull bumps as guides to human behavior, and arrange

A house in Bangkok is the confluence of lives shaped by upheaval, memory, and the lure of home. A missionary doctor pines for his native New England even as he succumbs to the vibrant chaos of ninetee

"Wonderful... Physicans would do well to learn this most important lesson about caring for patients." —The New York Times Book Review Over the years that Victoria Sweet has been a phy

Get ready to make history. . . better.What would you do if a time machine hurled you thousands of years into the past . . . and then broke? How would you survive? Could you improve on humanity's origi

A groundbreaking book about making once-in-a-lifetime decisions, from the bestselling author of How We Got to Now and Where Good Ideas Come FromPlenty of books offer useful advice on how to get better

Daniel H. Pink, the #1 bestselling author of Drive and To Sell Is Human, unlocks the scientific secrets to good timing to help you flourish at work, at school, and at home.Everyone knows that timing i

"What Ferrante did for female friends—exploring the tumult and complexity their relationships could hold—Spiegelman sets out to do for mothers and daughters. She’s essentially written My Brilliant Mom

The thrilling account of how a band of Malian librarians and archivists risked their lives to save priceless ancient manuscripts from destruction in al Qaeda–occupied Timbuktu, interwoven with the his

A dazzlingly accomplished debut collection explores the ties that bind mothers and daughters and men and women to one another and to the places they call home. Lesley Arimah emigrated from Nigeria to

A memoir of mothers and daughters—and mothers as daughters—traced through four generations, from Paris to New York and back again. Well past the age when most children stop believing in magic, N

Most of us want to succeed. And most of us want to do the right thing. But we often forget that the way to succeed is by doing the right thing, as Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe remind us in Pract

Silas Deane, a Connecticut merchant and member of the Continental Congress, went to France to persuade the king to support the colonists in their struggle with Britain. Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaum

From the acclaimed New Yorker writer, a thought-provoking, innovative, and challenging new approach to protecting our environment. Most Americans think of cities as ecological nightmares-wastelands

Dinaw Mengestu's first novel. The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, earned the young writer comparisons to Bellow, Fitzgerald, and Naipaul, and garnered ecstatic critical praise and awards around t

From Augustine's Confessions to Augusten Burroughs's Running with Scissors, from Julius Caesar to Ulysses S. Grant, from Mark Twain to David Sedaris, the art of memoir has had a fascinating life, and

Millions of readers have embraced Suze Orman's New York Times bestselling The Road to Wealth since it was originally published in 2001. But the world has changed vastly since then, and it's more impo

Soon to be a major motion picture The moving, personal story of Charles Darwin and his revolutionary views on nature, evolution, and the human condition. As Darwin's theories continue to shape much

A challenging, controversial, and highly readable look at our lives, our world, and our future. In this remarkable challenge to conventional thinking about the environment, David Owen argues that the

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, thirty years have been added to the normal human life expectancy. In September Songs, the follow-up to her bestselling Intimate Partners, Maggie Scarf in

Jonathan Marcus, a young American lawyer and a former doctoral student in classics, has become a sought-after commodity among less-scrupulous antiquities dealers. But when he is summoned to Rome to e

Drawing from his own experience and the lives of some of the worldA's great writers and poets, David Whyte brings compelling insights to our three most important commitmentsA- to another, to our work

A gritty and ferocious debut novel written by an LAPD officer who continues to patrol the streets he writes about, L.A. Rex is the story of Ben Halloran, a seemingly fresh-faced rookie assigned to L.

The epic conclusion to the bestselling Tales of the Otori-"one of the most thrilling new series of our time."* The Harsh Cry of the Heron is the rich and stirring finale to a series whose imaginativ

These eight short stories and novella travel from Panama's dusty city streets to its humid beaches to create an affecting portrait of a country in transition. They illustrate family bonds and generat

Generation Debt offers a truly gripping account of how young Americans are being ground down by low wages, high taxes, huge student loans, sky-high housing prices, not to mention the impending retire

An art critic journeys to a remote island off Brittany to sit for a portrait painted by an old friend, a gifted but tormented artist living in self-imposed exile. The painter recalls their years of fr

Attempting to deconstruct America's joyless obsession with sobriety, The Modern Drunkard offers today's befuddled drinkers a comprehensive and instructive manual on how to drink-and how to do it well

Lawyers. Accountants. Radiologists. Software engineers. That's what our parents encouraged us to become when we grew up. But Mom and Dad were wrong. The future belongs to a very different kind of pers

The empowering new 3-step guide to combining work and life strategically, creatively, and successfully. The message is simple: Work doesn't have to be all or nothing. There are countless combination

Whether one is a college junior facing the LSATs, a senior sitting with disappointing test scores, or someone who has always dreamed of a career in the law, there is too much at stake not to ask the

After seven years of tests and more tests, treatments and more treatments, Elizabeth Swire-Falker understands what it means to struggle with infertility. In this frank, reassuring, and thoroughly res

In this comprehensive, practical approach to combating and preventing cancer, readers can assess their risks through a screening questionnaire, learn to change their internal environment to thwart ca

"All I have to say about these songs is that I love them, and want to sing along to them, and force other people to listen to them, and get cross when these other people don't like them as much as I