Also published in French as Visages de la Silicon Valley.

A former Senior Partner and Global Managing Director at the legendary design firm IDEO shows how to design conversations and meetings that are creative and impactful. Conversations are one of the most fundamental means of communicating we have as humans. At their best, conversations are unconstrained, authentic and open—two or more people sharing thoughts and ideas in a way that bridges our individual experiences, achieves a common goal. At their worst, they foster misunderstanding, frustration and obscure our real intentions. How often do you walk away from a conversation feeling really heard? That it moved the people in it forward in some important way? You’re not alone. In his practice as a designer, Fred Dust began to approach conversations differently. After years of trying to broker communication between colleagues and clients, he came to believe there had to a way to design the art of conversation itself with intention and purpose, but still artful and playful. Making Conversation codifies what he learned and outlines the seven elements essential to successful exchanges: Commitment, Creative Listening, Clarity, Context, Constraints, Change, and Create. Taken together, these seven elements form a set of resources anyone can use to be more deliberate and purposeful in making conversations work.

An adventure-packed biography of a dynamic entrepreneur, whose exciting career sees him scoring win after win against dangers, setbacks and adversities. Fred sets off on the adventure of a lifetime, surviving a near hurricane in the Navy and seeing parts of the world he could only dream of, growing up in a small Irish town during World War II. Through his life, Fred faces new and exciting challenges: a career in Shell Petroleum leads to his building a highly successful tomato farm and building a privately-commissioned oil refinery, where his plant in Northern Ireland is targeted by bomb plots and death threats. Undeterred by bombs, six-month bank strikes, competitor espionage, and even being held on suspicion of IRA activity, he moves on to launch Atlas Oil International, still trading after forty years. Fred's rollercoaster career changes see him shifting to semi-state Venture Capital Analyst as MD of the Irish Health Services Development Corporation, a stint in the Saudi desert, and a confrontation with the Saudi military commander. When his fortune is severely trimmed in the Lloyd's debacle and the Stock Market crash, he recovers with aplomb, launching Greenman Group and repeating his entrepreneurial success in London and Europe. Still smiling, Fred takes on his biggest challenge yet at 87: writing his larger-than-life story in Adventures of a Serial Entrepreneur: Achievements over Adversity.

In the early 1960s, computers haunted the American popular imagination. Bleak tools of the cold war, they embodied the rigid organization and mechanical conformity that made the military-industrial complex possible. But by the 1990s—and the dawn of the Internet—computers started to represent a very different kind of world: a collaborative and digital utopia modeled on the communal ideals of the hippies who so vehemently rebelled against the cold war establishment in the first place. From Counterculture to Cyberculture is the first book to explore this extraordinary and ironic transformation. Fred Turner here traces the previously untold story of a highly influential group of San Francisco Bay–area entrepreneurs: Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth network. Between 1968 and 1998, via such familiar venues as the National Book Award–winning Whole Earth Catalog, the computer conferencing system known as WELL, and, ultimately, the launch of the wildly successful Wired magazine, Brand and his colleagues brokered a long-running collaboration between San Francisco flower power and the emerging technological hub of Silicon Valley. Thanks to their vision, counterculturalists and technologists alike joined together to reimagine computers as tools for personal liberation, the building of virtual and decidedly alternative communities, and the exploration of bold new social frontiers. Shedding new light on how our networked culture came to be, this fascinating book reminds us that the distance between the Grateful Dead and Google, between Ken Kesey and the computer itself, is not as great as we might think.

New York Times–Bestselling Author: “Brings Dave Barry-style humor to an illuminating book on what is wrong with American democracy—and how to put it right.” —The Washington Post The democracy you live in today is different—completely different—from the democracy you were born into. You probably don't realize just how radically your republic has been altered during your lifetime. Yet more than any policy issue, political trend, or even Donald Trump himself, our redesigned system of government is responsible for the peril America faces today. What explains the gap between what We, the People want and what our elected leaders do? How can we fix our politics before it's too late? And how can we truly understand the state of our democracy without wanting to crawl under a rock? That’s what former Obama speechwriter David Litt set out to answer. Poking into forgotten corners of history, translating political science into plain English, and traveling the country to meet experts and activists, Litt explains how the world’s greatest experiment in democracy went awry. (He also tries to crash a party at Mitch McConnell’s former frat house. It goes poorly.) The result is something you might not have thought possible: an unexpectedly funny page-turner about the political process. You’ll meet the Supreme Court justice charged with murder, learn how James Madison’s college roommate broke the Senate, encounter a citrus thief who embodies what’s wrong with our elections, and join Belle the bill as she tries to become a law (a quest far more harrowing than the one in Schoolhouse Rock!). Yet despite his clear-eyed assessment of the dangers we face, Litt remains audaciously optimistic. He offers a to-do list of bold yet achievable changes—a blueprint for restoring the balance of power in America. “In the book’s strongest contribution, Litt shows how radically our democracy has been altered in recent decades . . . [making] the case that nearly all of these negative trends are occurring by design.” —The Washington Post “Wry, quickly readable, yet informed.” —The Atlantic “Equal parts how-to, historical, and hilarious.” —Keegan-Michael Key

The culture of computer and network- mediated communication is growing both in size and sophistication. Cyberspace is the new frontier where new worlds, meanings and values are developed. CyberSociety focuses on the construction, maintenance and mediation of community in electronic networks and computer-mediated communication. Leading scholars representing the range of disciplines involved in the study of cyberculture lay out the definitions, boundaries and approaches to the field, as they focus on the social relations that computer-mediated communication engenders.

ALL FIVE NOVELS OF THE AFK SERIES: AFK. Definitely Thursday, Second Life(R) detective, reflects on cases and confessions, on love, on anger and on understanding the virtual world as perhaps the greatest liberator there has ever been. AFK, AGAIN. Step Stransky is dead. All that Thursday has to do is live with the fact of being his killer. AFK, INDEFINITELY. Step Stransky is dead. And everyone knows now it was murder. And everyone knows now it was Thursday who murdered him. Can she stay ahead of the law long enough to complete one last mission in the metaverse? AFK, INPURSUIT OF AVENGEMENT. The virtual world is changing. And Definitely Thursday is struggling to keep up. Once she tracked down metaverse cheats; now her job is to find criminals who would use the virtual world to con, rape and murder. AFK, AWAITING. Her partner is dead and the killer's coming for her next; meanwhile, her cover is blown and the authorities are once more on her trail. The net is finally starting to close around Thursday.

Virtual worlds have exploded out of online game culture and now capture the attention of millions of ordinary people: husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, workers, retirees. Devoting dozens of hours each week to massively multiplayer virtual reality environments (like World of Warcraft and Second Life), these millions are the start of an exodus into the refuge of fantasy, where they experience life under a new social, political, and economic order built around fun. Given the choice between a fantasy world and the real world, how many of us would choose reality? Exodus to the Virtual World explains the growing migration into virtual reality, and how it will change the way we live--both in fantasy worlds and in the real one.

A heartwarming, “beautifully crafted” picture book that celebrates the work of Mister Rogers and carries on his legacy of kindness (Booklist, starred review). Mister Rogers is one of the most beloved television personalities of our time, but before he was the man who brought us Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, he was just little Freddie Rogers. Though he was often sick and had trouble making friends as a child, his mom and grandfather encouraged him to ask for help and explore the world. With their support, he learned how to better say what he was feeling and see the beauty around him. As he grew up, he realized he could spread the message of compassion, equality, and kindness through television. You Are My Friend is a gentle homage to Fred Rogers and shows how his simple message still resonates with us today: “There’s no person in the world like you and I like you just the way you are.” The book also includes a short biography of Fred Rogers’ life and a bibliography. “A simply written, thoughtful tribute worthy of the incomparable Mister Rogers.” ?Kirkus Reviews This is a work of fiction. This book is an expression of admiration of Fred Rogers, the man and the artist, by the author and illustrator. This book is not associated with or endorsed by The Fred Rogers Company.

This ambitious book presents a comprehensive new 'macro-monetary' interpretation of Marx’s logical method in Capital, based on substantial textual evidence, which emphasises two main points: (1) Marx’s theory is primarily a macroeconomic theory of the total surplus-value produced in the economy as a whole; and (2) Marx’s theory is a monetary theory from beginning to end and the circuit of money capital – M - C - M’ – is the logical framework of Marx’s theory. It follows from this 'macro-monetary' interpretation that, contrary to the prevailing view, there is no 'transformation problem' in Marx’s theory; i.e., Marx did not 'fail to transform the inputs of constant capital and variable capital' in his theory of prices of production in Part 2 of Volume III.