A riveting inside look at an elite unit within the Pentagon—the Defense Innovation Unit, also known as Unit X—whose mission is to bring Silicon Valley’s cutting-edge technology to America’s military: from the two men who launched the unit.A vast and largely unseen transformation of how war is fought as profound as the invention of gunpowder or advent of the nuclear age is occurring. Flying cars that can land like helicopters, artificial intelligence-powered drones that can fly into buildings and map their interiors, microsatellites that can see through clouds and monitor rogue missile sites—all these and more are becoming part of America’s DIU-fast-tracked arsenal. Until recently, the Pentagon was known for its uncomfortable relationship with Silicon Valley and for slow-moving processes that acted as a brake on innovation. Unit X was specifically designed as a bridge to Valley technologists that would accelerate bringing state of the art software and hardware to the battle space. Given authority to cut through red tape and function almost as a venture capital firm, Shah, Kirchhoff, and others in the Unit who came after were tasked particularly with meeting immediate military needs with technology from Valley startups rather than from so-called “primes”—behemoth companies like Lockheed, Raytheon, and Boeing. Taking us inside AI labs, drone workshops, and battle command centers—and, also, overseas to Ukraine’s frontlines—Shah and Kirchhoff paint a fascinating picture of what it takes to stay dominant in a fast-changing and often precarious geopolitical landscape. In an era when America’s chief rival, China, has ordered that all commercial firms within its borders make their research and technology available for military exploitation, strengthening the relationship between Washington and Silicon Valley was always advisable. Today, it is an urgent necessity.
"A gung-ho travel guide to Heaven, Hell, and beyond. . . . Jennings approaches his subject with a wry, ready-to-be-delighted open-mindedness.” —New Yorker From the New York Times bestselling author and legendary Jeopardy! champion and host Ken Jennings comes a hilarious travel guide to the afterlife, exploring to-die-for destinations from literature, mythology, pop culture, and more.
Hugely popular former White House Press Secretary and high-profile host of her own MSNBC shows Jen Psaki shares the surprising lessons she's learned on her path to success, entertaining readers with her trademark wit and intelligence and empowering them to become stronger communicators.
"In 2019, Maggie visits a remote island in Scotland's Outer Hebrides to prove that a man was murdered there twenty-five years before. Maggie's motives are as dark as they are surprising. But she isn't prepared for the dangerous secrets and lies that are hiding at the heart of Kilmeray's isolated community. Or within herself. Robert Reid moved his family to Kilmeray in the early 1990s, driven both by hope and a terrible secret that he kept hidden for more than fifteen years. But the violent storms are returning to the islands, and what awaits him in Kilmeray can't be escaped a second time. Because some secrets should stay buried, and some mysteries are better left alone. Especially when the truth can cost you everything you thought you knew. Including your life."--
Now available in an accessible, new translation, "The Emperor's Handbook" is an important piece of ancient literature that remains more relevant than ever today.
"The world has fallen. Without warning, a mysterious and omnipotent force has claimed the planet for their own. There are no negotiations, no demands, no reasons given for their actions. All they have is a message: humanity has thirty days to reach the one place on Earth where they will be allowed to exist...Antarctica. Cold People follows the perilous journeys of a handful of those who endure the frantic exodus to the most extreme environment on the planet. But their goal is not merely to survive the present. Because as they cling to life on the ice, the remnants of their past swept away, they must also confront the urgent challenge: can they change and evolve rapidly enough to ensure humanity's future? Can they build a new society in the sub-zero cold? Original and imaginative, as profoundly intimate as it is grand in scope, Cold People is a masterful and unforgettable epic"--
"It begins in an unnamed city nicknamed "the Fairest", it is distinguished by many things from the river fair to the mountains that split the municipality in half; its theaters and many museums; the Morgue Ship; and, like all cities, but maybe especially so, by its essential unmappability. Dora, a former domestic servant at the university has a secret desire--to find where her brother went after he died, believing that the answer lies within The Museum of Psykical Research, where he worked when Dora was a child. With the city amidst a revolutionary upheaval, where citizens like Robert Barnes, her lover and a student radical, are now in positions of authority, Dora contrives to gain the curatorship of the half-forgotten museum only to find it all but burnt to the ground, with the neighboring museums oddly untouched. Robert offers her one of these, The National Museum of the Worker. However, neither this museum, nor the street it is hidden away on, nor Dora herself, are what they at first appear to be. Set against the backdrop of a nation on the verge of collapse, Dora's search for the truth behind the mystery she's long concealed will unravel a monstrous conspiracy and bring her to the edge of worlds."--
"For readers of Inside of a Dog and The Soul of an Octopus, a fascinating, charming, and revelatory look at the science behind why animals play that shows how life-at its most fundamental level-is playful. In Kingdom of Play, critically acclaimed science writer David Toomey takes us on a fast-paced and entertaining tour of playful animals and the scientists who study them. From octopuses on Australia's Great Barrier Reef to meerkats in the Kalahari Desert to brown bears on Alaska's Aleutian Islands, we follow adventurous researchers as they design and conduct experiments seeking answers to new, intriguing questions: When did play first appear in animals? How does play develop the brain, and how did it evolve? Are the songs and aerial acrobatics of birds the beginning of avian culture? Is fairness in dog play the foundation of canine ethics? And does play direct and possibly accelerate evolution? Monkeys belly-flop, dolphins tail-walk, elephants mud-slide, crows dive-bomb, and octopuses bounce balls. These activities are various, but all are play, and as Toomey explains, animal play can be seen as a distinct behavior-one that is ongoing and open-ended, purposeless and provisional-rather like natural selection. Through a close examination of both natural selection and play, Toomey argues that life itself is fundamentally playful. A globe-spanning journey and a scientific detective story filled with lively animal anecdotes, Kingdom of Play is an illuminating-and yes, playful-look at a little-known aspect of the animal kingdom"--
A riveting dual biography of the McLaughlins—identical twin sisters who became groundbreaking photographers in New York during the glamorous magazine golden age of the 1930s and 40s—for fans of Ninth Street Women and The Barbizon. The McLaughlin twins were trailblazing female photographers, celebrated in their time as stars in their respective fields, but have largely been forgotten since. Here, in Double Click, author Carol Kino provides us with a fascinating window into the golden era of magazine photography and the first young women’s publications, bringing these two brilliant women and their remarkable accomplishments to vivid life. Frances was the only female photographer on staff in Condé Nast's photo studio, hired just after Irving Penn, and became known for streetwise, cinema verité-style work, which appeared in the pages of Glamour and Vogue. Her sister Kathryn’s surrealistic portraits filled the era’s new "career girl" magazines, including Charm and Mademoiselle. Both twins married Harper’s Bazaar photographers and socialized with a glittering crowd that included the supermodel Lisa Fonssagrives and the photographer Richard Avedon. Kino uses their careers to illuminate the lives of young women during this time, an early twentieth-century moment marked by proto-feminist thinking, excitement about photography’s burgeoning creative potential, and the ferment of wartime New York. Toward the end of the 1940s, and moving into the early 1950s, conventionality took over, women were pushed back into the home, and the window of opportunity began to close. Kino renders this fleeting moment of possibility in gleaming multi-color, so that the reader cherishes its abundance, mourns its passing, and gains new appreciation for the talent that was fostered at its peak. Pulling back the curtain on an electric, creative time in New York’s history, and rich with original research, Double Click is cultural reportage and biography at its finest.
"Camp counselor Cory Ansel, eighteen and aimless, afraid to face her high-strung single mother in New York, is no longer sure where home is when the father of one of her campers offers an alternative. The CEO of a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company, Rolo Picazo is middle-aged, divorced, magnetic. He is also intoxicated by Cory. When Rolo proffers a childcare job (and an NDA), Cory quiets an internal warning and allows herself to be ferried to his private island. Plied with luxury and opiates manufactured by his company, she continues to tell herself she's in charge. Her mother Emer senses otherwise. With her daughter seemingly vanished, Emer crosses land and sea to heed a cry for help she alone is convinced she hears"--
Former PepsiCo COO Grace Puma and former Nike President of Consumer Direct Christiana Smith Shi offer a groundbreaking, empowering guide for women that shows how to prioritize a career path, build professional value, and enjoy a full life both in and out of the workplace.
"Frances Ha meets No One Is Talking About This in a debut that follows two twenty-something siblings-turned-roommates navigating an absurd world about to suffer great change-a Seinfeldian novel of existentialism and sisterhood. It's March of 2019, and twenty-eight-year-old Jules Gold-anxious, artistically frustrated, and internet-obsessed-has been living alone in the apartment she once shared with the man she thought she'd marry when her younger sister Poppy comes to crash. Indefinitely. Poppy is a year out from a suicide attempt only Jules knows about, and as she searches for work and meaning in Brooklyn, Jules spends her days hate-scrolling the feeds of Mormon mommy bloggers and waiting for life to happen. Then the hives that've plagued Poppy since childhood flare up. Jules's uterus turns against her. Poppy brings home a maladjusted rescue dog named Amy Klobuchar. The girls' mother-a newly devout Messianic Jew-starts falling for the same deep-state conspiracy theories as Jules's online mommies. A trip home to Florida ends in disaster. Amy Klobuchar may or may not have rabies. And Jules struggles halfheartedly to scrape her way to the source of her ennui, slowly and cruelly coming to blame Poppy for her own insufficiencies as a friend, a writer, and a sister. As the year shambles on and a new decade looms near, Jules and Poppy-comrades, competitors, permanent fixtures in each other's lives-must ask themselves what they want their futures to look like, and whether they'll spend them together or apart. Deadpan, dark, and brutally funny, Worry is a sharp portrait of two sisters enduring a dread-filled American moment from a nervy new voice in contemporary fiction"--
"When NASA sent astronauts to the moon in the 1960s and 1970s the agency excluded women from the corps, arguing that only military test pilots--a group then made up exclusively of men--had the right stuff. ... Eventually, though, NASA realized its blunder and opened the application process to a wider array of hopefuls, regardless of race or gender. From a candidate pool of 8,000, six elite women were selected in 1978: Sally Ride, Judy Resnik, Anna Fisher, Kathy Sullivan, Shannon Lucid, and Rhea Seddon. In [this book], ... journalist Loren Grush shows these brilliant and courageous women enduring claustrophobic--and sometimes deeply sexist--media attention, undergoing rigorous survival training, and preparing for years to take multi-million-dollar payloads into orbit"--]cProvided by publisher.
Now collected in a giftable boxed set, two companion works by Holocaust survivor and eminent psychologist Edith Eger—her New York Times bestselling memoir The Choice, and her inspirational guide The Gift. “I’ll be forever changed by Edith Eger’s story.” —Oprah WinfreyEdith Eger’s classic nonfiction works, wonderful gifts on their own, are now available in a collectible set. Her profound messages help us analyze our own thoughts and behaviors, move on from past hardships, and find joy in everyday life. Read in tandem, these works will inspire and guide readers toward a richer, more fulfilling life of love, understanding, and forgiveness. In the New York Times bestselling The Choice, Eger tells the story of her training as a ballerina and Olympic gymnast before being sent to Auschwitz at the age of sixteen. After decades struggling with flashbacks and survivor’s guilt, determined to stay silent and hide from the past, she returned to Auschwitz thirty-five years after the war ended, and began at last to truly heal. She finally understood how to forgive the one person she’d been unable to forgive—herself. Edie interweaves her remarkable personal journey with the moving stories of patients she has helped. She explores how we can be imprisoned in our own minds and how to find the key to freedom. The Choice is a life-changing book that has already provided hope and comfort to hundreds of thousands of readers. In The Gift, Eger explains why the most persistent imprisonment she experienced was not in the prison the Nazis put her in, but the one she created for herself—the prison within her own mind. The Gift, a prescriptive complement to The Choice, helps readers see a path forward in their own lives, and explains how to attain the peace Eger eventually found for herself. Accompanied by stories from her own life and the lives of her patients, Eger’s empowering lessons help readers see how their darkest moments can be their greatest teachers. We all face suffering—sadness, loss, despair, fear, anxiety, failure. And we all have a choice: to give in and give up in the face of trauma and hardship, or to live every moment as a gift. The new edition of The Gift includes two new chapters on dealing with the emotional consequences of Covid, and how to bring the joy of food and family into your life. This chapter, jointly written with her daughter, Dr. Marianne Engle, is accompanied by seventeen of their favorite recipes.
"This English-language debut from the award-winning Chinese author contains nine short stories in her trademark with and style based around everyday people facing the challenges of loneliness, emotional and physical displacement and longing."--
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