How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy


Stephen Richard Witt - 2015
    It’s about the greatest pirate in history, the most powerful executive in the music business, a revolutionary invention and an illegal website four times the size of the iTunes Music Store. Journalist Stephen Witt traces the secret history of digital music piracy, from the German audio engineers who invented the mp3, to a North Carolina compact-disc manufacturing plant where factory worker Dell Glover leaked nearly two thousand albums over the course of a decade, to the high-rises of midtown Manhattan where music executive Doug Morris cornered the global market on rap, and, finally, into the darkest recesses of the Internet.Through these interwoven narratives, Witt has written a thrilling book that depicts the moment in history when ordinary life became forever entwined with the world online — when, suddenly, all the music ever recorded was available for free. In the page-turning tradition of writers like Michael Lewis and Lawrence Wright, Witt’s deeply-reported first book introduces the unforgettable characters—inventors, executives, factory workers, and smugglers—who revolutionized an entire artform, and reveals for the first time the secret underworld of media pirates that transformed our digital lives.An irresistible never-before-told story of greed, cunning, genius, and deceit, How Music Got Free isn’t just a story of the music industry—it’s a must-read history of the Internet itself.

Are Women Human? Astute and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society


Dorothy L. Sayers - 1970
    The role of both men and women, in her view, was to find the work for which they were suited and to do it. While Sayers did not devote a great deal of time to talking or writing about feminism, she did explicitly address the issue of women's role in society in the two penetrating essays collected here. Though she wrote several decades ago, she still offers in her piquant style a sensible and conciliatory approach to ongoing gender issues.

Why We Can't Sleep: Women's New Midlife Crisis


Ada Calhoun - 2020
    She was married with children and a good career. So why did she feel miserable? And why did it seem that other Generation X women were miserable, too?Calhoun decided to find some answers. She looked into housing costs, HR trends, credit card debt averages, and divorce data. At every turn, she saw a pattern: sandwiched between the Boomers and the Millennials, Gen X women were facing new problems as they entered middle age, problems that were being largely overlooked.Speaking with women across America about their experiences as the generation raised to “have it all,” Calhoun found that most were exhausted, terrified about money, under-employed, and overwhelmed. Instead of being heard, they were told instead to lean in, take “me-time,” or make a chore chart to get their lives and homes in order.In Why We Can’t Sleep, Calhoun opens up the cultural and political contexts of Gen X’s predicament and offers solutions for how to pull oneself out of the abyss—and keep the next generation of women from falling in. The result is reassuring, empowering, and essential reading for all middle-aged women, and anyone who hopes to understand them.

The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century


Amia Srinivasan - 2021
    Yet consent is a blunt tool. To grasp sex in all its complexity—its deep ambivalences, its relationship to gender, class, race and power—we need to move beyond yes and no, wanted and unwanted.We do not know the future of sex—but perhaps we could imagine it. Amia Srinivasan’s stunning debut helps us do just that. She traces the meaning of sex in our world, animated by the hope of a different world. She reaches back into an older feminist tradition that was unafraid to think of sex as a political phenomenon. She discusses a range of fraught relationships—between discrimination and preference, pornography and freedom, rape and racial injustice, punishment and accountability, students and teachers, pleasure and power, capitalism and liberation.The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century is a provocation and a promise, transforming many of our most urgent political debates and asking what it might mean to be free.

The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After


Elizabeth Kantor - 2012
    But we don’t have to, argues Elizabeth Kantor. Jane Austen can show us how to find the love we really want.In The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After, Kantor reveals how the examples of Jane Austen heroines such as Elizabeth Bennett, Elinor Dashwood, and Anne Elliot can help us navigate the modern-day minefields of dating, love, relationships, and sex. By following in their footsteps—and steering clear of the sad endings suffered by characters such as Maria Bertram and Charlotte Lucas—modern women can discover the path to lifelong love and true happiness.Charged with honesty and humor, Kantor's book includes testimonies from modern women, pop culture parallels, the author's personal experiences and, of course, a thorough examination of Austen's beloved novels.Featuring characters and situations from all of Jane Austen’s books (including unfinished novels, and stories not published in her lifetime), The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After tackles the dating and relationship dilemmas that we face today, and equips modern women to approach our love lives with fresh insights distilled from the novels:Don’t be a tragic heroinePursue Elizabeth Bennet’s “rational happiness” —learn what it is, and how you can find itDon’t let cynicism steal your happy endingWhy it’s a mistake to look for your “soul mate”Jane Austen’s skeleton keys to a man’s potentialHow you should deal with men who are “afraid of commitment” (from Jane Austen’s eight case studies)Learn how to arrange your own marriage—by falling in love the Jane Austen way

Who We're Reading When We're Reading Murakami


David Karashima - 2020
    Today his books are in fifty languages and have won prizes and sold millions of copies globally. How did a loner destined for a niche domestic audience become one of the most famous writers alive? This book tells one key part of the story. Its cast includes an expat trained in art history who never intended to become a translator; a Chinese-American ex-academic who never planned to work as an editor; and other publishing professionals in New York, London, and Tokyo who together introduced an understated, pop-inflected, unexpected Japanese voice to the wider literary world.David Karashima synthesizes research, correspondence, and interviews with dozens of individuals—including Murakami himself—to examine how countless behind-the-scenes choices over the course of many years worked to build an internationally celebrated author's persona and oeuvre. He looks beyond the "Murakami Industry" toward larger questions: How active a role should translators and editors play in framing their writers' texts? What does it mean to translate and edit "for a market"? How does Japanese culture get packaged and exported for the West?

Please God Let it Be Herpes: A Heartfelt Quest For Love and Companionship


Carlos Kotkin - 2012
    His trouble with females usually begins upon opening his mouth.Here, Carlos shares his ups and mostly downs of bachelorhood, including romantic conquests with a slew of childhood crushes, insane yogis, a Playboy vixen, a STD host, the flaky, the deaf, and the just plain dumb. His unique mating style is not to be duplicated, but it will definitely make readers laugh-and want to get tested ASAP.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF HOWARD HUGHES: Confessions of an Unhappy Billionaire


Clifford Irving - 1982
    This is a hypnotizing narrative, a brilliant study of money's power to corrupt absolutely. It's a crime not to publish it." -- Robert Kirsch, Los Angeles Times Immense wealth. Corrupt political power. Scientific genius. Sexual kinkiness. Howard Hughes, the legendary Texas billionaire, exemplified all these qualities. Oil tycoon, record-breaking aviator, Oscar-winning moviemaker, and the shy lover of dozens of Hollywood movie stars, he bought the favors of U.S. presidents and even tried to buy Las Vegas. In his twilight years he became a recluse, hiding in shadowed hotel suites. Many believed that he had died and his business associates had stolen his billions. Enter author and adventurer Clifford Irving. "Howard Hughes is alive and he's alive, and wants me to help him write the story of his life. He's going to tell a more shocking story than anyone could have foreseen." The book was called "a stunning hoax," but many believe that Richard Nixon's fear of the truths in the manuscript caused him to order the burglary of Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate. For what he had done, Clifford Irving was sentenced to 2 ½ years in federal prison. Except for a small private 1998 edition, this is the Hughes Autobiography's first publication in the United States. "Until now, the most famous unpublished book of the 20th century." -- International Herald Tribune.

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft


Stephen King - 2000
    Part memoir, part master class by one of the bestselling authors of all time, this superb volume is a revealing and practical view of the writer's craft, comprising the basic tools of the trade every writer must have. King's advice is grounded in his vivid memories from childhood through his emergence as a writer, from his struggling early career to his widely reported near-fatal accident in 1999 -- and how the inextricable link between writing and living spurred his recovery. Brilliantly structured, friendly and inspiring, On Writing will empower and entertain everyone who reads it -- fans, writers, and anyone who loves a great story well told.(back cover)

How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry


Edward Hirsch - 1999
    Turn on a single lamp and read it while you're alone in an otherwise dark room or while someone sleeps next to you. Say it over to yourself in a place where silence reigns and the din of culture-the constant buzzing noise that surrounds you-has momentarily stopped. This poem has come from a great distance to find you." So begins this astonishing book by one of our leading poets and critics. In an unprecedented exploration of the genre, Hirsch writes about what poetry is, why it matters, and how we can open up our imaginations so that its message-which is of vital importance in day-to-day life-can reach us and make a difference. For Hirsch, poetry is not just a part of life, it is life, and expresses like no other art our most sublime emotions. In a marvelous reading of world poetry, including verse by such poets as Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Pablo Neruda, William Wordsworth, Sylvia Plath, Charles Baudelaire, and many more, Hirsch discovers the meaning of their words and ideas and brings their sublime message home into our hearts. A masterful work by a master poet, this brilliant summation of poetry and human nature will speak to all readers who long to place poetry in their lives but don't know how to read it.

The Killing Handbook


Emma Kennedy - 2012
    There's no need to panic. This is your chance to get inside the world of Sarah Lund: from the characters, the plot holes, and the politics to the language and dating the Danish way. So if you've ever wondered who cut the CCTV wire outside Lund's apartment in season one, why Morten went so far to protect Troels, where you can start your walking tour of Copenhagen from woods to warehouses and the County Hall, or even how you can knit your own Lund jumper—this is the book for you. Written by a true superfan, this is a hilarious guide to everything you're going to need to pretend you are Danish, bone up on everything suspicious, and transform yourself into Sarah Lund herself.

Inconsequential Dilemmas


Knock Knock - 2013
    Use this book’s handy flowcharts to make your next irrelevant choice with pseudoscientific confidence! Make the right dumb decision the first time—every time Perfect book gift for anyone who faces meaningless judgment calls Paperback; 7 x 7 inches, 96 pages; 2013 PubWest Book Design Award winner for cover design

A History of Reading


Alberto Manguel - 1996
    Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader. Noted essayist Alberto Manguel moves from this essential moment to explore the 6000-year-old conversation between words and that magician without whom the book would be a lifeless object: the reader. Manguel lingers over reading as seduction, as rebellion, as obsession, and goes on to trace the never-before-told story of the reader's progress from clay tablet to scroll, codex to CD-ROM.

Code: Version 2.0


Lawrence Lessig - 1999
    Harvard Professor Lawrence Lessig warns that, if we're not careful we'll wake up one day to discover that the character of cyberspace has changed from under us. Cyberspace will no longer be a world of relative freedom; instead it will be a world of perfect control where our identities, actions, and desires are monitored, tracked, and analyzed for the latest market research report. Commercial forces will dictate the change, and architecture—the very structure of cyberspace itself—will dictate the form our interactions can and cannot take. Code And Other Laws of Cyberspace is an exciting examination of how the core values of cyberspace as we know it—intellectual property, free speech, and privacy-—are being threatened and what we can do to protect them. Lessig shows how code—the architecture and law of cyberspace—can make a domain, site, or network free or restrictive; how technological architectures influence people's behavior and the values they adopt; and how changes in code can have damaging consequences for individual freedoms. Code is not just for lawyers and policymakers; it is a must-read for everyone concerned with survival of democratic values in the Information Age.

The Good, the Bad & the Difference: How to Tell the Right from Wrong in Everyday Situations


Randy Cohen - 2002
    Cohen's wisdom and witticisms have now been collected in The Good, the Bad & the Difference, a collection of his columns as wise and funny as a combination of "Dear Abby," Plato, and Mel Brooks. The columns are supplemented with second thoughts on (and sometimes complete reversals of) his original replies, follow-up notes on how his advice affected the actions of various letter writers, reactions from readers both pro and con, and observations from such "guest ethicists" as David Eggers and the author's mom. Each chapter also features an "Ethics Pop Quiz," and readers will be invited to post their answers on the book's Web site. The best of them will appear in a future paperback edition of the book.The Good, the Bad & the Difference is divided into seven sections: -Civic Life (what we do in public)-Family Life (what we do at home)-Social Life (what we do in other people's homes)-Commercial Life (what we do in situations where money is a factor)-Medical Life (the rights and obligations of patients and caregivers)-Work Life (ethics for the professional sphere)-School Life (moral questions from and about kids)Each section provides a window into how we live today, shedding light on the ways in which a more ethical approach to the decisions we make, and to our daily behavior, can make a big difference in how we feel about ourselves tomorrow.