"From the New York Times-bestselling author of Where Good Ideas Come From and Everything Bad Is Good for You, a new look at the power and legacy of great ideas. In this illustrated volume, Steven Johnson explores the history of innovation over centuries, tracing facets of modern life (refrigeration, clocks, and eyeglass lenses, to name a few) from their creation by hobbyists, amateurs, and entrepreneurs to their unintended historical consequences....

"The Candy House opens with the staggeringly brilliant Bix Bouton, whose company, Mandala, is so successful that he is "one of those tech demi-gods with whom we're all on a first name basis." Bix is 40, with four kids, restless, desperate for a new idea, when he stumbles into a conversation group, mostly Columbia professors, one of whom is experimenting with downloading or "externalizing" memory. It's 2010. Within a decade, Bix's new technology, "Own...

"We spend an average of just 47 seconds on any screen before shifting our attention. It takes 25 minutes to bring our attention back to a task after an interruption. And we interrupt ourselves more than we're interrupted by others. In Attention Span, psychologist Gloria Mark reveals these and more surprising results from her decades of research into how technology affects our attention. She shows how much of what we think we know is wrong, including...

"A widower battles his grief, rage, and the mysterious evil inhabiting his home smart speaker, in this mesmerizing horror thriller from newcomer Gus Moreno"--

In Mayda, a post-apocalyptic city off the coast of Portugal, a brilliant young engineer and a mysterious recluse race to build a flying machine, unaware that powerful enemies will kill to possess--or destroy--their new technology.

"System Error" exposes the root of our current predicament: how big tech's relentless focus on optimization is driving a future that reinforces discrimination, erodes privacy, displaces workers, and pollutes the information we get. Armed with an understanding of how technologists think and exercise their power, three Stanford professors share their provocative insights and concrete solutions to help everyone understand what is happening, what is at...

"The global boom in skyscrapers-why it's happening now, how they're made, and what they do to cities and people. We are living in a new urban age and its most tangible expression is the 'supertall': megastructures that are dramatically bigger, higher, and more ambitious than any in history. In Supertall, TED Resident Stefan Al-himself an experienced architect who has worked on some of the largest buildings in the world-reveals the advancements in...

The most urgent story in modern tech begins not in Silicon Valley but two hundred years ago in rural England, when workers known as the Luddites rose up rather than starve at the hands of factory owners who were using automated machines to erase their livelihoods. The Luddites organized guerrilla raids to smash those machines--on punishment of death--and won the support of Lord Byron, enraged the Prince Regent, and inspired the birth of science fiction....

The 21st Century Junior Library Extraordinary Engineering series explains how important feats of engineering are accomplished. Dams examines the engineering concepts that make these critical structures possible.

"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"--