Sex Robots and Vegan Meat: Adventures at the Frontier of Birth, Food, Sex and Death


Jenny Kleeman - 2020
    But what truly motivates them? What kind of person devotes their life to building a death machine? What kind of customer is desperate to buy an artificially intelligent sex doll – and why? Who is campaigning against these advances, and how are they trying to stop them? And what about the many unintended consequences such inventions will inevitably unleash?Sex Robots & Vegan Meat is not science fiction. It’s not about what might happen one day – it’s about what is happening right now, and who is making it happen. In the end, it asks a simple question: are we about to change what it means to be human . . . for ever?

On Virtue Ethics


Rosalind Hursthouse - 1999
    Rosalind Hursthouse, who has made notable contributions to this development, here presents a full exposition and defense of her neo-Aristotelian version of virtue ethics. She shows howvirtue ethics can provide guidance for action, illuminate moral dilemmas, and bring out the moral significance of the emotions.

Dr. Z: The Lost Memoirs of an Irreverent Football Writer


Paul Zimmerman - 2017
    Z came to expect a certain alchemical, trademark blend: words which were caustic and wry, at times self-deprecating or even puzzling, but always devilishly smart with arresting honesty. A complex package, that's the Doctor.  The one-time sparring partner of Ernest Hemingway, Paul Zimmerman is one of the modern era's groundbreaking football minds, a man who methodically charted every play while generating copious notes, a human precursor to the data analytics websites of today. In 2008, Zimmerman had nearly completed work on his personal memoirs when a series of strokes left him largely unable to speak, read, or write. Compiled and edited by longtime SI colleague Peter King, these are the stories he still wants to see told.  Dr. Z’s memoir is a rich package of personalities, stories never shared about such characters as Vince Lombardi, Walter Payton, Lawrence Taylor, and Johnny Unitas. Even Joe Namath, with whom Zimmerman had a legendary and well-documented 23-year feud, saw fit to eventually unburden himself to the remarkable scribe.  Also included are Zimmerman's encounters with luminaries and larger-than-life figures outside of sports, notably Donald Trump, Rupert Murdoch, and Hunter S. Thompson. But not to be missed are Zimmerman's quieter observations on his own life and writing, witticisms and anecdotes which sway between the poignant and hilarious. No matter the topic, Dr. Z: the Lost Memoirs of an Irreverent Football Writer proves essential, compelling reading for sports fans old and new.

Words and Music: A History of Pop in the Shape of a City


Paul Morley - 2003
    A succession of celebrities, geniuses and other protagonists led by Madonna, Kraftwerk, Brian Eno, Erik Satie, John Cage and Wittgenstein appear to give their points of view. Detours and sights along the way include Missy Elliot, Jarvis Cocker, Eminem, Human League, Radiohead, Lou Reed, Now! That's What I Call Music, Ornette Coleman and the ghost of Elvis Presley.

Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!


Douglas Coupland - 2010
    A fellow Canadian, a master of creative sociology, a writer who supplied a defining term, Coupland is the ideal chronicler of the uncanny prophet whose vision of the global village—now known as the Internet—has come to pass in the 21st century.

Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording


David Grubbs - 2014
    He repeatedly spoke of the ways in which recorded music was antithetical to his work. In Records Ruin the Landscape, David Grubbs argues that, following Cage, new genres in experimental and avant-garde music in the 1960s were particularly ill suited to be represented in the form of a recording. These activities include indeterminate music, long-duration minimalism, text scores, happenings, live electronic music, free jazz, and free improvisation. How could these proudly evanescent performance practices have been adequately represented on an LP?In their day, few of these works circulated in recorded form. By contrast, contemporary listeners can encounter this music not only through a flood of LP and CD releases of archival recordings but also in even greater volume through Internet file sharing and online resources. Present-day listeners are coming to know that era's experimental music through the recorded artifacts of composers and musicians who largely disavowed recordings. In Records Ruin the Landscape, Grubbs surveys a musical landscape marked by altered listening practices.

The Devil's Guide to Hollywood: The Screenwriter as God!


Joe Eszterhas - 2006
    "foot soldiers" would hunt him down. He's antagonized almost everyone at the top in Tinseltown. And now, Joe Eszterhas tells everything he knows -- in brief, quotable bursts -- about the business, the history of Hollywood, and how to write screenplays that make millions. Idiosyncratic, gruff and as shaggy as Eszterhas himself, The Devil's Guide to Hollywood makes a character/leitmotif of Eszterhas' fellow Hungarian Zsa Zsa Gabor ("Money is like a sixth sense that makes it possible for you to fully enjoy the other five."), and makes the case that Marilyn Monroe was the sharpest tack in Hollywood ("Hollywood is a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul. I know, because I turned down the first offer often enough and held out for the fifty cents."). Refreshing, dirty, tough, there's no book like it.

Firebird: The Spy Thriller of the 1960s


Noel Hynd - 2018
     It is 1968, one of the most tumultuous years of the 20th Century. Frank Cooper, a former star investigative reporter now writes obituaries for a popular New York City tabloid. He hears the confession of a dying man named Leonard Rudawski, a former American diplomat, who bitterly questions the fate of Pavel Lukashenko, a would-be Soviet defector in Paris in 1965. Lukashenko promised to expose the espionage secret of a generation if he could get to the West. But the defector, code named “Firebird,” vanished. Or did he? Cooper teams with Lauren Richie, a young NY/Latina reporter from the same tabloid. They prowl into the dying man’s confession. Soon they are onto the story of their lifetimes, reviving a dangerous once-cold trail of back channel/back alley CIA and KGB intrigue and tradeoffs, all of which factor into the 3-way racially tinged American election of that year: Nixon vs. Humphry vs. the segregationist George Wallace. Murder, espionage, romance, betrayal and conspiracy intertwine. Readers will meet and recognize dozens of memorable “real life” characters: reporters, gangsters, diplomats, call girls, spy masters, politicians and assassins. The story is tough, large, sprawling and historically precise. "Russians sabotage and destabilize the west," says one experienced reporter with KGB knowledge. "It's not just what they do. It's what they do best." The story straddles the decades from World War Two to 2018, even throwing a cynical light on Russian-American relations of today. “Hynd is a solid, dependable writer with enough literary flair to move him up a few notches above the Ludlums and Clancys of the world. —Booklist

Lurking: How a Person Became a User


Joanne McNeil - 2020
    It has created a new, unprecedented cultural space that we are all a part of—even if we don’t participate, that is how we participate—but by which we’re continually surprised, betrayed, enriched, befuddled. We have churned through platforms and technologies and in turn been churned by them. And yet, the internet is us and always has been.In Lurking, Joanne McNeil digs deep and identifies the primary (if sometimes contradictory) concerns of people online: searching, safety, privacy, identity, community, anonymity, and visibility. She charts what it is that brought people online and what keeps us here even as the social equations of digital life—what we’re made to trade, knowingly or otherwise, for the benefits of the internet—have shifted radically beneath us. It is a story we are accustomed to hearing as tales of entrepreneurs and visionaries and dynamic and powerful corporations, but there is a more profound, intimate story that hasn’t yet been told.Long one of the most incisive, ferociously intelligent, and widely respected cultural critics online, McNeil here establishes a singular vision of who we are now, tells the stories of how we became us, and helps us start to figure out what we do now.

The Nation's Favourite


Simon Garfield - 1999
    Matthew Bannister said he was going to reinvent the station, the most popular in Europe. But things didn't go exactly to plan. The station lost millions of listeners. Its most famous DJs left, and their replacements proved to be disasters. Radio 1's commercial rivals regarded the internal turmoil with glee. For a while a saviour arrived, in the shape of Chris Evans. But his behaviour caused further upheavals, and his eventual departure provoked another mass desertion by listeners. What was to be done? In the middle of this crisis, Radio 1 bravely (or foolishly) allowed the writer Simon Garfield to observe its workings from the inside. For a year he was allowed unprecedented access to management meetings and to DJs in their studios, to research briefings and playlist conferences. Everyone interviewed spoke in passionate detail about their struggle to make their station credible and successful once more. The result is a gripping and often hilarious portrait a much loved national institution as it battles back from the brink of calamity.

How to Watch TV News


Neil Postman - 1991
    Postman and Powers warn that anyone who relies exclusively on TV for a knowledge of the world is making a serious mistake and suggest ways to intelligently evaluate TV news shows.

Roger Rogerson


Duncan McNab - 2016
    Both have been found guilty of murder and possession of 2.78 kilograms of methamphetamine, and sentenced to life imprisonment.But this wasn't Rogerson's first trial or conviction. Once one of the most highly decorated police officers in New South Wales, he was dismissed from the police force in 1986, and jailed twice.That was just the tip of the iceberg.This is the eye-opening account of Rogerson's life of crime - policing it and committing it - and reveals the full story of one of the most corrupt and evil men in Australia, and the events that led inexorably to the chilling murder of Jamie Gao in storage unit 803.

Leanings: The Best of Peter Egan from Cycle World


Peter Egan - 2002
    The range of motorcycle riding reports cover runs along the Mississippi River to New Orleans for a tin of chicory coffee or flying to Japan to test-ride new Yamahas. In Leanings, Egan's favorite feature articles and columns have been reprinted for the first time, including his trip cross-country on a British twin with his wife and a journey on the abandoned Route 66, plus many more stories about the open road.

Cruel Britannia


Ian Cobain - 2012
    And yet, the evidence is irrefutable: when it comes to dealing with potential threats to our national security, the gloves always come off. As the enquiries into the on-going abuse of terror suspects uncover an ever more sinister and unpalatable chain of complicity - going right to the top of government - it is time to re-examine the assumption that the British don't 'do' torture. Drawing on previously unseen official documents, and the accounts of witnesses, victims and experts, prize-winning investigative journalist Ian Cobain looks beyond the cover-ups and the attempts to dismiss brutality as the work of a few rogue interrogators, to reveal a secret and shocking record of torture. From WWII to the War on Terror, via Kenya and Northern Ireland, Cruel Britannia shows how the British have repeatedly and systematically resorted to torture, turning a blind eye where necessary, bending the law where they can, and issuing categorical denials all the while. What emerges is a picture of Britain that challenges our complacency on human rights and exposes the lie behind our reputation for fair play.

Aesthetic Unconscious


Jacques Rancière - 2001
    Rather, it is concerned with why this interpretation plays such an important role in demonstrating the contemporary relevance of psychoanalytic concepts.