Showing results for "Gift" in History & Culture

A top cybersecurity journalist tells the story behind the virus that sabotaged Iran’s nuclear efforts and shows how its existence has ushered in a new age of warfare—one in which a digital attack can have the same destructive capability as a megaton bomb. “Immensely enjoyable...

One of New York Magazine's best books on Silicon Valley! The true, behind-the-scenes history of the people who built Silicon Valley and shaped Big Tech in America Long before Margaret O'Mara became one of our most consequential historians of the American-led digital revolution, she worked in the...

A New York Times Bestseller From one of our leading technology thinkers and writers, a guide through the twelve technological imperatives that will shape the next thirty years and transform our lives Much of what will happen in the next thirty years is inevitable, driven by technological trends...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER “The conscience of the AI revolution” (Fortune) explains how we’ve arrived at an era of AI harms and oppression, and what we can do to avoid its pitfalls. “AI is not coming, it’s here. If we answer the beautiful call inside these pages, we can decide who we are...

“It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence,” twenty-four-year-old Alan Turing announced in 1936. In Turing’s Cathedral, George Dyson focuses on a small group of men and women, led by John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study...

“With wit and brio, Frank separates current nonsense about aliens from the serious and fascinating search for extraterrestrial life.” —Carlo Rovelli, New York Times bestselling author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics From astrophysicist Adam Frank, a little book on the biggest questions...

The definitive history of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon agency that has quietly shaped war and technology for nearly sixty years. Founded in 1958 in response to the launch of Sputnik, the agency’s original mission was to create “the unimagined weapons of the...

Slate, "25 Best Crime Books, Podcasts, and Documentaries of All Time" Vanity Fair’s “Books We Can't Stop Thinking About” Carnegie Medal Nonfiction Longlist 2023 The Washington Post Best Non-Fiction Books of 2022 Publishers Weekly Best Books 2022 Kirkus Best Non-Fiction Books of 2022 Slate...

From the acclaimed author of Tubes, a lively and surprising tour of the infrastructure behind the weather forecast, the people who built it, and what it reveals about our climate and our planet The weather is the foundation of our daily lives. It’s a staple of small talk, the app on our...

Following the success of The Accidental Billionaires and Moneyball comes Console Wars—a mesmerizing, behind-the-scenes business thriller that chronicles how Sega, a small, scrappy gaming company led by an unlikely visionary and a team of rebels, took on the juggernaut Nintendo and...

At a time when Steve Jobs was only a teenager and Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t even born, a group of visionary engineers and designers—some of them only high school students—in the late 1960s and 1970s created a computer system called PLATO, which was light-years ahead in experimenting with how...

Longlisted for the Porchlight Business Book Award for Current Events & Public Affairs Longlisted for the Non-Obvious Book Award 2025 A Next Big Idea Book Club March 2025 Must-Read An urgent and illuminating perspective that offers a window into how the most pernicious aspects of the venture...

We’re running out of time. Fossil fuels are choking the planet and renewable energy isn’t cutting it. The solution has been hiding in plain sight all along. Nuclear. When most people hear that word, they go to a very bad place: bombs, Chernobyl, hazmat suits, radioactive fallout… the stuff...

A Soul of the New Machine for our time, a gripping account of invention, commerce, and duplicity in the age of technology A worldwide race is on to perfect the next engine of economic growth, the advanced lithium-ion battery. It will power the electric car, relieve global warming, and catapult...

Named a Best Book of 2019 by NPR “How might we mitigate losses caused by shortsightedness? Bina Venkataraman, a former climate adviser to the Obama administration, brings a storyteller’s eye to this question. . . . She is also deeply informed about the relevant science.” —The New York...

Silicon Valley’s leading intellectual and the founder of O’Reilly Media explores the upside and the potential downsides of our future—what he calls the ""next economy."" Tim O’Reilly’s genius is to identify and explain emerging technologies with world shaking potential—the World Wide...

Brought to you by Penguin. The global, open internet is fragmenting. How To Save the Internet outlines the global cooperation needed to reform Big Tech and preserve the internet as we know it. As democracies aim to control Big Tech, Silicon Valley adopts an America-first agenda, and...

A rallying call for extending human rights beyond our physical selves—and why we need to reboot rights in our data-intensive world. Winner of the 2024 Balsillie Prize for Public Policy Shortlisted, 2024 Lionel Gelber Prize Our data-intensive world is here to stay, but does that come at the...

The astonishing story of America’s airwaves, the two friends—one a media mogul, the other a famous inventor—who made them available to us, and the government which figured out how to put a price on air. This is the origin story of the airwaves—the foundational technology of the...

A behind-the-scenes look at how the military uses video game technology to train soldiers, treat veterans, and entice new recruits How does the U.S. military train its soldiers for new forms of armed conflict, all within the constraints of diminished defense budgets? Increasingly, the answer is...