Eric Brende conceives a real-life experiment: to see if, in fact, all our cell phones, wide-screen TVs, and SUVs have made life easier and better -- or whether life would be preferable without them. He narrows down to a single question: What is the least we need to achieve the most? The Brendes ditched their car, electric stove, refrigerator, running water, and everything else motorized or "hooked to the grid" and began an eighteen-month trial run...

Photographs and text explore such inventions as the wheel, gears, levers, clocks, telephones, and rocket engines.

"From the New York Times-bestselling author of Where Good Ideas Come From and Everything Bad Is Good for You, a new look at the power and legacy of great ideas. In this illustrated volume, Steven Johnson explores the history of innovation over centuries, tracing facets of modern life (refrigeration, clocks, and eyeglass lenses, to name a few) from their creation by hobbyists, amateurs, and entrepreneurs to their unintended historical consequences....

"The Circle is the exhilarating new novel from Dave Eggers, best-selling author of A Hologram for the King, a finalist for the National Book Award. When Mae Holland is hired to work for the Circle, the world's most powerful internet company, she feels she's been given the opportunity of a lifetime. The Circle, run out of a sprawling California campus, links users' personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing with their universal operating...

"The Candy House opens with the staggeringly brilliant Bix Bouton, whose company, Mandala, is so successful that he is 'one of those tech demi-gods with whom we're all on a first name basis.' Bix is 40, with four kids, restless, desperate for a new idea, when he stumbles into a conversation group, mostly Columbia professors, one of whom is experimenting with downloading or 'externalizing' memory. It's 2010. Within a decade, Bix's new technology, 'Own...

Multimedia introduction to machines such as the lawn sprinkler, pneumatic drill, electric guitar, and smoke detector. Provides illustrations of the inner workings of machines, explanations of scientific principles, history of featured inventions, and biographies of inventors. Features animations and audio.

A brief history of how coding got started and thoughts on how it might be used in future applications.

A provocative look at the new, digital landscape of childhood and how to navigate it. In The New Childhood, Jordan Shapiro provides a hopeful counterpoint to the fearful hand-wringing that has come to define our narrative around children and technology. Drawing on groundbreaking research in economics, psychology, philosophy, and education, The New Childhood shows how technology is guiding humanity toward a bright future in which our children will...

This book offers a novel approach to food writing, presenting a history of eating habits and mores through the lens of the technologies we use to prepare, serve, and consume food. It tells the history of food through its tools across different eras and continents to present a fully rounded account of humans' evolving relationship to kitchen technology. From the birth of the fork in Italy as it discovered pasta, to culture wars over spoons in Restoration...

"Education has come a long way thanks to technology, from learning in a classroom at a set schedule to learning virtually anywhere at anytime. In Education in the Disruptors in Tech series, readers will discover how technology has and continues to disrupt how, where, and when students learn. Series includes a table of contents, tech-forward sidebars, a timeline, glossary, index, and author biography"--