"In the second volume of the Southern Reach Trilogy, questions are answered, stakes are raised, and mysteries are deepened. In Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer introduced Area X--a remote and lush terrain mysteriously sequestered from civilization. This was the first volume of a projected trilogy; well in advance of publication, translation rights had already sold around the world and a major movie deal had been struck. Just months later, Authority,...

"Ted Scheinman spent his childhood eating Yorkshire pudding, singing in an Anglican choir, and watching Laurence Olivier as Mr. Darcy. As the son of a devoted Jane Austen scholar, this seemed normal. Despite his attempts to leave his mother's world behind, he found himself in grad school organizing the first ever University of North Carolina Jane Austen Summer Camp, a weekend-long event that falls somewhere between an academic conference and superfan...

A timely and uncanny portrait of a world in the wake of fake news, diminished privacy, and a total shutdown of the Internet. BEFORE: In Bristol's center lies the Croft, a digital no-man's-land cut off from the surveillance, Big Data dependence, and corporate-sponsored, globally hegemonic aspirations that have overrun the rest of the world. Ten years in, its become a center of creative counterculture. But it is fraying at the edges, radicalizing from...

"Poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert's The Unreality of Memory consists of a series of lyrical and deeply researched meditations on what our culture of catastrophe has done to public discourse and our own inner lives. In these tender and prophetic essays, she focuses in on our daily preoccupation and favorite pastime"--

Michelle Orange uses the lens of pop culture to decode the defining characteristics of our media-drenched times In This Is Running for Your Life, Michelle Orange takes us from Beirut to Hawaii to her grandmother's retirement home in Canada in her quest to understand how people behave in a world increasingly mediated-for better and for worse-by images and interactivity. Orange's essays range from the critical to the journalistic to the deeply personal;...

"An examination of online advertising, and how its imminent collapse could crash the internet"--

"From FSGO x Logic: a Stanford professor's spirited dismantling of Silicon Valley's intellectual origins"-- Adrian Daub's What Tech Calls Thinking is a lively dismantling of the ideas that form the intellectual bedrock of Silicon Valley. Equally important to Silicon Valley's world-altering innovation are the language and ideas it uses to explain and justify itself. And often, those fancy new ideas are simply old motifs playing dress-up in a hoodie....