Sarah Jeong, a journalist trained as a lawyer at Harvard Law School, discusses the problem of “online harassment,” with various accounts of harassment that have made their way into mainstream media, as well as lesser-known ones. The Internet of Garbage considers why and how to recalibrate this ongoing project of garbage-removal from content platforms and social media networks. It’s not as simple as policing offensive material and hitting the delete button online: Jeong tackles precarious issues like free speech, behavior vs. content, doxing and SPAM.
She writes, “Content platforms and social media networks do not have the power to restrain stalkers, end intimate partner violence, eliminate child abuse, or stop street harassment. But they can cultivate better interactions and better discourse, through thoughtful architecture, active moderation and community management.”
So how do we filter content from garbage? Read on.
Remember the first time you saw Michael Jackson dance with zombies in “Thriller”? Diamond Dave karate kick with Van Halen in “Jump”? Tawny Kitaen turning cartwheels on a Jaguar to Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again”? The Beastie Boys spray beer in “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party)”? Axl Rose step off the bus in “Welcome to the Jungle”?
Remember When All You Wanted Was Your MTV?
It was a pretty radical idea-a channel for teenagers, showing nothing but music videos. It was such a radical idea that almost no one thought it would actually succeed, much less become a force in the worlds of music, television, film, fashion, sports, and even politics. But it did work. MTV became more than anyone had ever imagined.
I Want My MTV tells the story of the first decade of MTV, the golden era when MTV’s programming was all videos, all the time, and kids watched religiously to see their favorite bands, learn about new music, and have something to talk about at parties. From its start in 1981 with a small cache of videos by mostly unknown British new wave acts to the launch of the reality-television craze with The Real World in 1992, MTV grew into a tastemaker, a career maker, and a mammoth business.
Featuring interviews with nearly four hundred artists, directors, VJs, and television and music executives, I Want My MTV is a testament to the channel that changed popular culture forever.
The Rock says. . . “Know your damn role–and shut your mouth!” But that simple catch-phrase, embraced by the millions ñand the millions–of The Rock’s fans, can’t begin to capture the spirit and larger-than-life personality of the most electrifying man in sports-entertainment.”
In this action-packed, revealing and outrageously funny memoir, World Wrestling Federation Superstar The Rock recounts his life in and out of the ring with unapologetic honesty and inimitable style. From his boyhood days traveling around the world with his father (professional wrestler Rocky Johnson) to his years as a football player at the University of Miami to his meteoric rise through the ranks of the Federation, The Rock Says… chronicles in vivid detail the life story of one of sports-entertainment’s most innovative and best-loved personalities.
The Rock will take fans on a guided tour of big-time professional wrestling, a highly competitive business in which a handful of gifted and lucky performers dominate, and all others dream of a moment in the spotlight. He provides a breathtaking, minute-by-minute account of Wrestle Mania, the Super Bowl of pro wrestling, including an intimate backstage look at rehearsals with his opponent, Stone Cold Steve Austin. And he discusses in heartfelt detail the loss of his friend and co-worker, Owen Hart.
Filled with genuinely touching stories of love and strife, hilarious anecdotes, inside accounts of an industry whose machinations have long been shrouded in secrecy and dozens of previously unpublished photographs from The Rock’s personal collection, The Rock Says… is–as The Rock himself might put it–“the coolest thing since the other side of the pillow if you smell what The Rock is cookin’.”
In his own words, Bret Hart’s honest, perceptive, startling account of his life in and out of the pro wrestling ring.
The sixth-born son of the pro wrestling dynasty founded by Stu Hart and his elegant wife, Helen, Bret Hart is a Canadian icon. As a teenager, he could have been an amateur wrestling Olympic contender, but instead he turned to the family business, climbing into the ring for his dad’s western circuit, Stampede Wrestling. From his early twenties until he retired at 43, Hart kept an audio diary, recording stories of the wrestling life, the relentless travel, the practical jokes, the sex and drugs, and the real rivalries (as opposed to the staged ones). The result is an intimate, no-holds-barred account that will keep readers, not just wrestling fans, riveted.
Hart achieved superstardom in pink tights, and won multiple wrestling belts in multiple territories, for both the WWF (now the WWE) and WCW. But he also paid the price in betrayals (most famously by Vince McMahon, a man he had served loyally); in tragic deaths, including the loss of his brother Owen, who died when a stunt went terribly wrong; and in his own massive stroke, most likely resulting from a concussion he received in the ring, and from which, with the spirit of a true champion, he has battled back.
Widely considered by his peers as one of the business’s best technicians and workers, Hart describes pro wrestling as part dancing, part acting, and part dangerous physical pursuit. He is proud that in all his years in the ring he never seriously hurt a single wrestler, yet did his utmost to deliver to his fans an experience as credible as it was exciting. He also records the incredible toll the business takes on its workhorses: he estimates that twenty or more of the wrestlers he was regularly matched with have died young, weakened by their own coping mechanisms, namely drugs, alcohol, and steroids. That toll included his own brother-in-law, Davey Boy Smith. No one has ever written about wrestling like Bret Hart. No one has ever lived a life like Bret Hart’s.
From acclaimed tech writer Clive Thompson, a brilliant and immersive anthropological reckoning with the most powerful tribe in the world today, computer programmers – where they come from, how they think, what makes for greatness in their world, and what should give us pause.
You use software nearly every instant you’re awake. And this may sound weirdly obvious, but every single one of those pieces of software was written by a programmer. Programmers are thus among the most quietly influential people on the planet. As we live in a world made of software, they’re the architects. The decisions they make guide our behavior. When they make something newly easy to do, we do a lot more of it. If they make it hard or impossible to do something, we do less of it.
If we want to understand how today’s world works, we ought to understand something about coders. Who exactly are the people that are building today’s world? What makes them tick? What type of personality is drawn to writing software? And perhaps most interestingly — what does it do to them?
One of the first pieces of coding a newbie learns is the program to make the computer say “Hello, world!” Like that piece of code, Clive Thompson’s book is a delightful place to begin to understand this vocation, which is both a profession and a way of life, and which essentially didn’t exist little more than a generation ago, but now is considered just about the only safe bet we can make about what the future holds. Thompson takes us close to some of the great coders of our time, and unpacks the surprising history of the field, beginning with the first great coders, who were women. Ironically, if we’re going to traffic in stereotypes, women are arguably “naturally” better at coding than men, but they were written out of the history, and shoved out of the seats, for reasons that are illuminating. Now programming is indeed, if not a pure brotopia, at least an awfully homogenous community, which attracts people from a very narrow band of backgrounds and personality types. As Thompson learns, the consequences of that are significant – not least being a fetish for disruption at scale that doesn’t leave much time for pondering larger moral issues of collateral damage. At the same time, coding is a marvelous new art form that has improved the world in innumerable ways, and Thompson reckons deeply, as no one before him has, with what great coding in fact looks like, who creates it, and where they come from. To get as close to his subject has he can, he picks up the thread of his own long-abandoned coding practice, and tries his mightiest to up his game, with some surprising results.
More and more, any serious engagement with the world demands an engagement with code and its consequences, and to understand code, we must understand coders. In that regard, Clive Thompson’s Hello, World! is a marvelous and delightful master class.
The story of Chesapeake pirates and patriots begins with a land dispute and ends with the untimely death of an oyster dredger at the hands of the Maryland Oyster Navy. From the golden age of piracy to Confederate privateers and oyster pirates, the maritim.
This is a memoir by Marianne Faithfull, recounting her days in the swinging ’60s. She recalls her love and life with Mick Jagger, how Bob Dylan wooed her, the Rolling Stones courted her and finally, how drugs trapped her into a world where nothing else mattered but the next fix. She also reveals the contradictions of life as a “star”, first as the pop confection she was packaged as, and later as the hard-edged artist who co-authored “Sister Morphine” and shocked the world with “Broken English”.
The wildly popular YouTube personality and author of the New York Times bestseller My Drunk Kitchen is back!
This time, she’s stirring up memories and tales from her past. By combing through the journals that Hannah has kept for much of her life, this collection of narrative essays deliver a fuller picture of her life, her experiences, and the things she’s figured out about family, faith, love, sexuality, self-worth, friendship and fame. Revealing what makes Hannah tick, this sometimes cringe-worthy, poignant collection of stories is sure to deliver plenty of Hannah’s wit and wisdom, and hopefully encourage you to try your hand at practicing reckless optimism.
One day, lonely cubicle dweller and otherwise bored New York City transplant Hannah Hart decided to make a fake cooking show for a friend back home in California. She opened her laptop, pulled out some bread and cheese, and then, as one does, started drinking. The video was called “Butter Yo Sh*t” and online sensation My Drunk Kitchen was born.
My Drunk Kitchen (the book!) includes recipes, stories, color photographs, and tips and tricks to inspire your own adventures in tipsy cooking. Hannah offers cocktail recommendations, culinary advice (like, remember to turn off the oven when you go to bed), and shares never-before-seen recipes such as:
The Hartwich (Knowledge is ingenuity! Learn from the past!) Can Bake (Inventing things is hard! You don’t have to start from scratch!) Latke Shotkes (Plan ahead to avoid a night of dread!) Tiny Sandwiches (Size doesn’t matter! Aim to satisfy.) Saltine Nachos (It’s not about resources! It’s about being resourceful.)
In the end, My Drunk Kitchen may not be your go-to guide for your next dinner party . . . but it will make you laugh and drink . . . I mean think . . . about life.
The moment you check your phone in the morning you are giving away data. Before you’ve even switched off your alarm, a whole host of organisations have been alerted to when you woke up, where you slept, and with whom. As you check the weather, scroll through your ‘suggested friends’ on Facebook, you continually compromise your privacy.
Without your permission, or even your awareness, tech companies are harvesting your information, your location, your likes, your habits, and sharing it amongst themselves. They’re not just selling your data. They’re selling the power to influence you. Even when you’ve explicitly asked them not to. And it’s not just you. It’s all your contacts too.
Digital technology is stealing our personal data and with it our power to make free choices. To reclaim that power and democracy, we must protect our privacy.
What can we do? So much is at stake. Our phones, our TVs, even our washing machines are spies in our own homes. We need new regulation. We need to pressure policy-makers for red lines on the data economy. And we need to stop sharing and to adopt privacy-friendly alternatives to Google, WhatsApp and other online platforms.
Short, terrifying, practical: Privacy is Power highlights the implications of our laid-back attitudes to data, and sets out how we can reclaim control.
One part memoir, one part political platform, the bass player of Nirvana–the most heralded and influential rock band of the past 20 years–tells the story of his own musical and political coming-of-age. From his relationship to Kurt Cobain to his evolution as a political activist, Novoselic’s passion, intelligence and integrity come shining through in this moving and inspirational book.
Though Krist Novoselic will undoubtedly be forever best known as a member of Nirvana, his accomplishments go far beyond that remarkable achievement. Nirvana was a band with a conscience, and as a major label act they regularly played benefits–the first Rock For Choice show, a major concert in support of gay rights, and a legendary gig that raised money for the Balkan Women’s Aid Fund.
In 1995, Novoselic founded JAMPAC (Joint Artists and Music Promotions Political Action Committee), a proactive organization that advocated on behalf of Washington state’s music community. Novoselic’s work with JAMPAC helped Seattle club owners find ways to host all-ages shows and was instrumental in helping to overturn the infamous Teen Dance Ordinance. And sometimes making music and making a statement go hand in hand, as when Novoselic, Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil and drummer Gina Mainwal backed Jello Biafra as the “No W.T.O. Combo” at a show performed during the World Trade Organization conference held in Seattle in 1999.
There have been other musical endeavors since Nirvana, as well as new causes (Novoselic is a strong -supporter of electoral reform, an issue he writes about extensively on his website. The one constant is Novoselic’s desire to continue making progressive contributions to the community–and to keep on making good music.
Goodbye, Guns N’ Roses transports the reader into a mind-altering trip through the colors, scandals, nihilism, and mythology that make Guns N’ Roses so much more than another “hair metal” band. A valentine and a breakup letter to one of rock’s most controversial bands. Goodbye, Guns N’ Roses is a genre-rattling attempt to explain the appeal of America’s most divisive rock band. While it includes uncharted history and the self-lacerating connoisseurship of a Guns N’ Roses fetishist, it is not a recycled chronicle — this book is a deconstruction of myth, one that blends high and low art sketches to examine how Guns N’ Roses impacted popular culture. Unlike those who have penned other treatments of what might be considered a clich d subject, Art Tavana is not writing as a GNR patriot or former employee. His book aims to provide an untethered exploration that machetes through the jungle of propaganda camouflaging GNR’s explosive appeal. After circling the band’s three-decade plundering of American culture, Goodbye, Guns N’ Roses uncovers a postmodern portrait that persuades its viewer to think differently about their symbolic importance. This is not a rock bio but a biography of taste that treats a former “hair metal” band like a decomposing masterpiece. This is the first Guns N’ Roses book written for everyone; from the Sunset Strip to a hyper-digital generation’s connection to “Woke Axl,” it is a pop investigation that dodges no bullets.
A dual-edition full-color book for the millions of fans who have taken The Lord of the Rings to heart through the celebrated film trilogy. Many of the images included in this volume, depicting pivotal scenes and characters, were previously embargoed and have never appeared in book form. The work of Alan Lee and John Howe — the two artists most closely associated with Tolkien’s world — is featured, along with that of many other talented artists and designers. The artists’ own descriptions of the design process used in creating the look of the films both enlighten and enliven this essential book.
In his new book, economist Dean Baker debunks the myth that conservatives favor the market over government intervention. In fact, conservatives rely on a range of “nanny state” policies that ensure the rich get richer while leaving most Americans worse off. It’s time for the rules to change. Sound economic policy should harness the market in ways that produce desirable social outcomes – decent wages, good jobs and affordable health care. Dean Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
You don’t need to be a genius, you just need to be yourself. That’s the message from Austin Kleon, a young writer and artist who knows that creativity is everywhere, creativity is for everyone. A manifesto for the digital age, Steal Like an Artist is a guide whose positive message, graphic look and illustrations, exercises, and examples will put readers directly in touch with their artistic side.
Lawrence Lessig’s “Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace” v1 quickly began to define a certain vocabulary for thinking about the regulation of cyberspace. More than any other social space, cyberspace would be controlled or not depending upon the architecture, or “code,” of that space. And that meant regulators, and those seeking to protect cyberspace from at least some forms of regulation, needed to focus not just upon the work of legislators, but also the work of technologists. Code version 2.0 updates the original work. It is not, as Lessig writes in the preface, a “new work.” The aim of the update was to recast the argument in the current context, and to clarify the argument where necessary. While Lessig himself has strong views about preserving important liberties that cyberspace originally protected, this book does not push any particular set of values. Unlike Lessig’s other books, The Future of Ideas, and Free Culture, this book has no particular political agenda. Instead, the objective of Code is to introduce and defend a particular way of understanding regulation, and to describe the trend that we should expect regulation in cyberspace to take. Code v2 is published under the terms of the CC Attribution-ShareAlike license. Money raised from the sale of this book supports the development of free software and documentation.
Who are computer hackers? What is free software? And what does the emergence of a community dedicated to the production of free and open source software–and to hacking as a technical, aesthetic, and moral project–reveal about the values of contemporary liberalism? Exploring the rise and political significance of the free and open source software (F/OSS) movement in the United States and Europe, Coding Freedom details the ethics behind hackers’ devotion to F/OSS, the social codes that guide its production, and the political struggles through which hackers question the scope and direction of copyright and patent law. In telling the story of the F/OSS movement, the book unfolds a broader narrative involving computing, the politics of access, and intellectual property.
E. Gabriella Coleman tracks the ways in which hackers collaborate and examines passionate manifestos, hacker humor, free software project governance, and festive hacker conferences. Looking at the ways that hackers sustain their productive freedom, Coleman shows that these activists, driven by a commitment to their work, reformulate key ideals including free speech, transparency, and meritocracy, and refuse restrictive intellectual protections. Coleman demonstrates how hacking, so often marginalized or misunderstood, sheds light on the continuing relevance of liberalism in online collaboration.
The Georgian “Profanisaurus”.
From the 1790s to the 1820s, numerous editions of the Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue were published. Looking at the slang and vernacular language of the time, this dictionary pre-dated Roger Mellie’s best-selling Profanisaurus by a good 200 years. Reprinted here, it covers the rude, the crude and the downright vulgar.
Learn how the Georgians and early Victorians would insult each other and find out how some of today’s words and derivations have come about. But most of all, just dip in and see how our ancestors considered and talked about such subjects as sex and the workings of the human body.
In a series of conversational observations and meditations on the writing process, The Art of Slow Writing examines the benefits of writing slowly. DeSalvo advises her readers to explore their creative process on deeper levels by getting to know themselves and their stories more fully over a longer period of time. She writes in the same supportive manner that encourages her students, using the slow writing process to help them explore the complexities of craft. The Art of Slow Writing is the antidote to self-help books that preach the idea of fast-writing, finishing a novel a year, and quick revisions. DeSalvo makes a case that more mature writing often develops over a longer period of time and offers tips and techniques to train the creative process in this new experience.
DeSalvo describes the work habits of successful writers (among them, Nobel Prize laureates) so that readers can use the information provided to develop their identity as writers and transform their writing lives. It includes anecdotes from classic American and international writers such as John Steinbeck, Henry Miller, Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence as well as contemporary authors such as Michael Chabon, Junot Diaz, Jeffrey Eugenides, Ian McEwan, and Salman Rushdie. DeSalvo skillfully and gently guides writers to not only start their work, but immerse themselves fully in the process and create texts they will treasure.
What makes a page-turner? What mysterious literary essence holds a reader so hard they feel they must keep reading? And then tell friends, “I couldn’t put it down!”
And what do literary agents and publishers really look for in a manuscript?
Internationally-acclaimed author and story coach Barbara Kyle reveals the answers in Page-Turner with insights into:
– the essentials of story structure
– how to create a “storyline”
– the power of “deep character”
– the art of crafting dialogue
– mastering point of view
– maximizing settings
– plus practical advice on how to query agents and get published
… and more
Page-Turner shows how to create the kind of novel that brings offers from publishers and praise from readers.
For emerging writers who want to break in, and published authors who want to produce a breakout book, Page-Turner is an indispensable guide.
The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called “surveillance capitalism,” and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior.
In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth.
Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new “behavioral futures markets,” where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new “means of behavioral modification.”
The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a “Big Other” operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff’s comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled “hive” of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit–at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future.
With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future–if we let it.
In Furiously Happy, a humor memoir tinged with just enough tragedy and pathos to make it worthwhile, Jenny Lawson examines her own experience with severe depression and a host of other conditions, and explains how it has led her to live life to the fullest:
“I’ve often thought that people with severe depression have developed such a well for experiencing extreme emotion that they might be able to experience extreme joy in a way that ‘normal people’ also might never understand. And that’s what Furiously Happy is all about.”
Jenny’s readings are standing room only, with fans lining up to have Jenny sign their bottles of Xanax or Prozac as often as they are to have her sign their books. Furiously Happy appeals to Jenny’s core fan base but also transcends it. There are so many people out there struggling with depression and mental illness, either themselves or someone in their family—and in Furiously Happy they will find a member of their tribe offering up an uplifting message (via a taxidermied roadkill raccoon). Let’s Pretend This Never Happened ostensibly was about embracing your own weirdness, but deep down it was about family. Furiously Happy is about depression and mental illness, but deep down it’s about joy—and who doesn’t want a bit more of that?
Cayce Pollard is an expensive, spookily intuitive market-research consultant. In London on a job, she is offered a secret assignment: to investigate some intriguing snippets of video that have been appearing on the Internet. An entire subculture of people is obsessed with these bits of footage, and anybody who can create that kind of brand loyalty would be a gold mine for Cayce’s client. But when her borrowed apartment is burgled and her computer hacked, she realizes there’s more to this project than she had expected.
Still, Cayce is her father’s daughter, and the danger makes her stubborn. Win Pollard, ex-security expert, probably ex-CIA, took a taxi in the direction of the World Trade Center on September 11 one year ago, and is presumed dead. Win taught Cayce a bit about the way agents work. She is still numb at his loss, and, as much for him as for any other reason, she refuses to give up this newly weird job, which will take her to Tokyo and on to Russia. With help and betrayal from equally unlikely quarters, Cayce will follow the trail of the mysterious film to its source, and in the process will learn something about her father’s life and death.
In the first book of this brilliant series, Stephen King introduces readers to one of his most enigmatic heroes, Roland of Gilead, The Last Gunslinger. He is a haunting figure, a loner on a spellbinding journey into good and evil. In his desolate world, which frighteningly mirrors our own, Roland pursues The Man in Black, encounters an alluring woman named Alice, and begins a friendship with the Kid from Earth called Jake. Both grippingly realistic and eerily dreamlike, The Gunslinger leaves readers eagerly awaiting the next chapter.