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Ilove the Internet, and if you picked up this book, you probably do, too. The Internet is dynamic, chaotic, exciting, interesting, and useful, all at the same time. The Web is pretty fun from a user’s point of view, but that’s only part of the story. Perhaps the best part of the Internet is how participatory it is. You can build...

Since the introduction of personal computers, software has emerged as a driving force in the global economy and a major industry in its own right. During this time, the U.S. government has reversed its prior policy against software patents and is now issuing thousands of such patents each year, provoking heated controversy among programmers,...

Ever since the former rich girl-turned-Cleveland cemetery tour guide banged her head on a headstone, she sees dead people. Worse still, she hears them—and they won't shut up! Now it's Didi Bowman, a poodle-skirted relic from the Great Beyond, who's bending Pepper's ear, complaining that her famous author sister,...

In the award-winning AMC television series Mad Men, set in the early 1960s, a mysterious and massive machine shows up one day in the offices of the advertising agency Stirling Cooper. The machine is a Xerox photocopier, and the workplace is about to change forever. Previously, document duplication was done with a mimeograph, a hand-cranked...

In Henry Fielding’s great novel Tom Jones, the young hero and his friend Partridge go to see a production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet—a play that had been around for less than 50 years at that point. Partridge, always opinionated and usually wrong, is not impressed by the actor playing Hamlet: “Why, I could act as well as...

In June 1994 the United States went to the brink of war with North Korea. With economic sanctions impending, President Bill Clinton approved the dispatch of substantial reinforcements to Korea, and plans were prepared for attacking the North's nuclear weapons complex. The turning point came in an extraordinary private diplomatic...

As a child, when my family traveled outside Alaska for vacations, I often met other children who asked, “Wow, you live in Alaska? What’s it like?” I never did well with that question. To me, the place I was visiting was far simpler and easier to describe than the one I was from. The Lower 48 seemed a fairly homogeneous land...

What would you expect to find if you traveled back in time to the Garden of Eden? Adam and Eve? The tree of knowledge? A wicked serpent? How about some giant fucking flying sharks! That's right, I said sharks. Biblical sharks. Sharks that are bigger than city buses....

With the same sharp eye, quick with, and narrative drive that marked his bestsellers The Game, The Dirt, and How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, Neil Strauss takes us on a white-knuckled journey through America's heart of darkness as he scrambles to escape the system. It's one man's story of a dangerous...