History & Culture

Elon Musk is both an illuminating and authorized look at the extraordinary life of one of Silicon Valley's most exciting, unpredictable, and ambitious entrepreneurs....

Two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize David McCullough tells the dramatic story behind the story about the courageous brothers who taught the world how to fly....

From the leading theorist of the Metaverse comes the definitive account of the next internet: what the Metaverse is, what it will take to build it, and what it means for all of us....

A galvanizing critique of the forces vying for our attention - and our personal information - that redefines what we think of as productivity, reconnects us with the environment, and reveals all that we've been too distracted to see about ourselves and our world....

In Survival of the Richest, Rushkoff traces the origins of The Mindset in science and technology through its current expression in missions to Mars, island bunkers, AI futurism, and the metaverse....

Minimalism is the art of knowing how much is just enough. Digital minimalism applies this idea to our personal technology. It's the key to living a focused life in a noisy world. Author Cal Newport introduces a philosophy for technology use that has already improved countless lives....

The first full account of the Slenderman stabbing, a true-crime narrative of mental illness, the American judicial system, the trials of adolescence, and the power of the internet....

The authors of the best-selling Bold and The Rise of Superman explore altered states of consciousness and how they can ignite passion, fuel creativity, and accelerate problem solving....

How will artificial intelligence affect crime, war, justice, jobs, society, and our very sense of being human? The rise of AI has the potential to transform our future more than any other technology....

Today's "machine-learning" systems, trained by data, are so effective that we've invited them to see and hear for us - and to make decisions on our behalf. But alarm bells are ringing. Systems cull résumés until, years later, we discover that they have inherent gender biases.

Following his blockbuster biography of Steve Jobs, The Innovators is Walter Isaacson’s revealing story of the people who created the computer and the Internet....

Thunderstruck tells the stories of two men: Hawley Crippen, a very unlikely murderer, and Guglielmo Marconi, the obsessive creator of a seemingly supernatural means of communication....

For over three decades, Ray Kurzweil has been one of the most respected and provocative advocates of the role of technology in our future. In his classic The Age of Spiritual Machines, he argued that computers would soon rival the full range of human intelligence at its best....

In this explosive yet practical book, Kevin Mitnick illustrates what is happening without your knowledge - and he teaches you "the art of invisibility"....

The phenomenal true story of the Black female mathematicians at NASA whose calculations helped fuel some of America's greatest achievements in space....

The grid is an accident of history and of culture, in no way intrinsic to how we produce, deliver and consume electrical power. Yet this is the system the United States ended up with....

Lulu Chen tells the story of how Tencent is changing the world, a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at one of the worlds biggest tech companies....

A gripping story of human transformation played out against a backdrop of technological upheaval, The Shallows will forever alter the way we think about media and our minds....

A leading artificial intelligence researcher lays out a new approach to AI that will enable us to coexist successfully with increasingly intelligent machines....

An exciting scientific adventure from the days of wooden ships and iron men, Longitude is full of heroism and chicanery, brilliance and the absurd....

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is neither a hand-wringing narrative of danger and decline nor a digital fairy tale. It offers a reasoned and evocative examination of the contests over the next chapter of capitalism that will decide the meaning of information civilization....

Based on hundreds of interviews with current and former Uber employees, along with previously unpublished documents, Super Pumped is a pause-resisting story of ambition and deception, obscene wealth, and bad behavior....

Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google are the four most influential companies on the planet. Just about everyone thinks they know how they got there. They're wrong....

People are now exposed to more information than ever before, provided both by technology and by increasing access to every level of education....

Gene Kranz was present at the creation of America's manned space program and was a key player in it for three decades....

Technology has always been a key driving force in the development of civilization. From transitioning to agricultural societies to the development of steam and electrical power, humans have long relied on the advancement of technology to improve their environment. This book, Startups and Tech Revolution, is the first step toward understanding this new world. This book is meant to help those outside the startup world get a basic understanding of the tech revolution underway by providing a simple yet comprehensive overview of how the system works.

Look around. Clearly, we humans are radically different from the other creatures on this planet. But why? Where are the Bronze Age beavers? The Iron Age iguanas? Byron Reese argues that we owe our special status to our ability to imagine the future and recall the past, escaping the perpetual present that all other living creatures are trapped in. Envisioning human history as the development of a societal superorganism he names Agora, Reese shows us how this escape enabled us to share knowledge on an unprecedented scale, and predict—and eventually master—the future.

Bloomberg tech journalist Mark Bergen delivers the definitive account on YouTube, detailing how it started, how it works and ultimately how it drives Google's success. It can be seen as the story of a technical marvel that has upended traditional media and created stars out of everyday people, or the story of the rise of a ruthless advertising conglomerate with little regard for its impact on the world beyond the bottom line—but in reality, it's the story of both.

Dr Anne-Marie Imafidon, a dynamic advocate for women in STEM, insists that technology is not an unchangeable and unquestionable force. It is not the preserve of the elite. It is in our homes and in our hands. Rather than feeling powerless to make changes to the way tech works and fails, she argues that it's time to get into the room where the decisions are made. Or, better yet, create our own tech rooms.

Will machines someday replace attorneys, physicians, computer programmers, and world leaders? What about composers, painters, and novelists? Will tomorrow’s supercomputers duplicate and exceed humans? Are we just wetware, natural computers doomed to obsolescence by tomorrow’s ultra-powerful artificial intelligence? In Non-Computable You: What You Do That Artificial Intelligence Never Will, Robert J. Marks II answers these and other fascinating questions with his trademark blend of whimsy and expertise. 

In Survival of the Richest, Rushkoff traces the origins of The Mindset in science and technology through its current expression in missions to Mars, island bunkers, AI futurism, and the metaverse. In a dozen urgent, electrifying chapters, he confronts tech utopianism, the datafication of all human interaction, and the exploitation of that data by corporations. Through fascinating characters, Rushkoff explains why those with the most power to change our current trajectory have no interest in doing so.

Across the world, people watch more than a billion hours of video on YouTube every day. Every minute, more than five hundred additional hours of footage are uploaded to the site, a technical feat unmatched in the history of computing. YouTube invented the attention economy we all live in today, forever changing how people are entertained, informed, and paid online. Everyone knows YouTube. And yet virtually no one knows how it works.

Science and technology have always been central to the plots that make up the world of Bond, and in Superspy Science Kathryn Harkup explores the full range of 007’s exploits and the arms, technologies, tactics and downfalls of his various foes. From the practicalities of building a volcano-based lair, to whether being covered in gold paint really will kill you, and—if your plan is to take over the world—whether it is better to use bacteria, bombs, or poison—this audiobook has all the answers and more.

Escape is a fascinating exploration of the rise and demise of the internet. It's a look back on the platforms, the people and the online places. It's an analysis of the lessons being online has taught us, how the internet has changed us—and a celebration of the tools it gives us to feel less alone. The online generation have forever altered the world we live in, but is the internet still a place for the people that shaped it?

Sensationalism about AI has reached new heights, and getting a useful understanding of it has never been more important. AI will extend and accelerate thinking, delivering unprecedented abundance. But it will also require us to navigate a path of challenges ranging from today’s issues of bias, privacy, and explainability, to job displacement through automation, and a future coexistence with superintelligent machines. This book is the roadmap to that path.

The bicycle is a vestige of the Victorian era, seemingly out of pace with our age of smartphones and ridesharing apps and driverless cars. Yet we live on a bicycle planet. Across the world, more people travel by bicycle than by any other form of transportation. Almost anyone can learn to ride a bike—and nearly everyone does. In Two Wheels Good, writer and critic Jody Rosen reshapes our understanding of this ubiquitous machine, an ever-present force in humanity's life and dreamlife, and a flashpoint in culture wars for more for than 200 years.

In 2004, Android was two people who wanted to build camera software, but couldn't get investors interested. Today, Android is a large team at Google, delivering an operating system (including camera software) to over 3 billion devices worldwide. This is the inside story, told by the people who made it happen. Androids: The Team That Built the Android Operating System is a firsthand chronological account of how the startup began, how the team came together, and how they all built an operating system from the kernel level to its applications, and everything in between.  

The term metaverse is suddenly everywhere, from debates over Fortnite to the pages of the New York Times to the speeches of Mark Zuckerberg, who proclaimed in June 2021 that “the overarching goal” of Facebook is to “bring the metaverse to life”. But what, exactly, is the metaverse? As pioneering theorist and venture capitalist Matthew Ball explains, it is the successor to the mobile internet that has defined the last two decades. 

In 2019, a Chinese entity called Tencent overtook Facebook to become the world's fifth-largest company. It was a watershed moment, a wake-up call for those in the West accustomed to regarding the global tech industry through the prism of Silicon Valley: Facebook, Google, Apple and Microsoft. Yet to many of the two billion-plus people who live just across the Pacific Ocean, it came as no surprise at all.

Locked away in refrigerated vaults, sanitized by gas chambers, and secured within bombproof caverns deep under mountains are America's most prized materials: the ever-expanding collection of records that now accompany each of us from birth to death. This data complex backs up and protects our most vital information against decay and destruction, and yet it binds us to corporate and government institutions whose power is also preserved in its bunkers, infrastructures, and sterilized spaces.