Life for early humans wasn't easy. They may have been able to walk on two feet and create tools 4 million years ago, but they couldn't remember or communicate. Fortunately, people got smarter, and things got better. They remembered on-the-spot solutions and shared the valuable information of their experiences. Clubs became swords, caves became huts, and fires became ovens. Collectively these new tools became technology. As the 21st century unfolds,...

"Jeremy Jordan and Alexandra Chen hope to make a quiet home together but struggle to find a space safe from their personal secrets. For Jeremy, this means leaving behind his former life as an intelligence operative during The Troubles in Northern Ireland, while for Alexandra, a vocation in image control for whole countries cannot prepare her for the challenge of guarding a beloved brother's confidences or learning more of his mysterious history. In...

Beginning in Los Angeles International Airport, where town life--shops, services, sociability--is available without a town, Pico Iyer takes us on a tour of the transnational village our world has become. From Hong Kong, where people actually live in self-contained hotels, to Atlanta's Olympic Village, which seems to inadvertently commemorate a sort of corporate universalism, to Japan, where in the midst of alien surfaces his apartment building is...

Tells the story of the construction of the Flatiron Building in New York City within the context of the times in which it was built in the early twentieth century.

This book predicts the decline of today's professions and describes the people and systems that will replace them. In an Internet society, according to Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind, we will neither need nor want doctors, teachers, accountants, architects, the clergy, consultants, lawyers, and many others, to work as they did in the 20th century. The Future of the Professions explains how 'increasingly capable systems' - from telepresence to...

"In 1994, Sven Birkerts published The Gutenberg elegies, his celebrated rallying cry to resist the oncoming digital advances, especially those that might affect the way we read literature and experience art. Over the next two decades of rampant change, Birkerts has reluctantly allowed a degree of everyday digital technology into his life... In Changing the subject, he examines the changes that he has observed in himself and others -- the distraction...

"Early on July 16, 1945, Joshua Wheeler's great grandfather awoke to a flash, and then a long rumble: the world's first atomic blast filled the horizon north of his ranch in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Out on the range, the cattle had been bleached white by the fallout. Acid West, Wheeler's stunning debut collection of essays, is full of these mutated cows: vestiges of the Old West that have been transformed, suddenly and irrevocably, by innovation. Traversing...

"Social media status determines real world status in this near-future YA coming of age story. Averee is a typical high schooler living in the near future where social media status has real world consequences. The app, Ranked, determines everyone's status, not just online, but in real life; who you can hang out with, what places you have access to, what schools you can get into, and what jobs you can get. And Pretty Kitty, the virtual pop star, is...

Join best-selling author Steven Johnson to hear extraordinary stories behind remarkable ideas that made modern life possible, the unsung heroes who brought them about, and the unexpected and bizarre consequences each of these innovations triggered.