The New York Times bestseller Hit Refresh is about individual change, about the transformation happening inside of Microsoft and the technology that will soon impact all of our lives—the arrival of the most exciting and disruptive wave of technology humankind has experienced: artificial intelligence, mixed reality, and quantum computing. It’s about how people, organizations, and societies c…
In August 1969, a group of local Japanese martial arts masters in New York invited Ronald Duncan, a burgeoning Black1 American practitioner of the Japanese martial art of ninjutsu, commonly translated as the “art of stealth,” to exhibit his techniques as part of the second International Convention of Martial Arts hosted by Black Belt mag…
Critical theory emerged in the 1920s from the work of the Frankfurt School, the circle of German-Jewish academics who sought to diagnose—and, if at all possible, cure—the ills of society, particularly fascism and capitalism. In this book, Stephen Eric Bronner provides sketches of leading representatives of the critical tradition (such as George Lukács and Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno and Wa…
Life on earth will come to an end. It's just a matter of when. In this Very Short Introduction, Bill McGuire explores the many potential catastrophes facing our planet and our species in the future, and looks at both the probability of these events happening and our chances of survival. From the likely consequences of global warming to the inevitable destruction of the earth in the far futur…
Organizing this book into chapters that read like magazine profiles makes it more digestible for readers and allows them to read the chapters in whichever order they prefer. Goldberg’s book was structured that way, as was series editor Martin Williams’s similarly readable Jazz Masters of New Orleans (1967). More challenging was deciding which artists to include. I made a…
In the United States, many political leaders throughout history have come from powerful families. For Barack Obama, this is far from the truth. His upbringing was in humble circumstances, and, while he doesn’t fit any typical political mold, he is already considered by many to be one of the most dynamic figures in U.S. politics. His oratory skills, direct style, and ability to communicate are…
The academic landscape is broad and fickle; academic fields, disciplines, and teach-ing perspectives always shift and change. In these academic places, identities, and communities overlap and work together. This book holds space for identities that are often undervoiced in academia. The perspectives of the contributors serve as models for how artists work within communit…
In his 1980 book Language: The Loaded Weapon, Dwight Bolinger decries the number of ‘shamans,’ as he calls them, who comment without authority (and usually without recourse to evidence) on the use of language. The problem, he says, is that ‘they are almost the only people who make the news when language begins to cause trouble, and someone must answer the …