An affecting collection of contemporary Chinese photography responding to the monumental encroachment of urban development across the country This timely book documents the phenomenon of rapid and transformative urbanization in China through the work of thirty-one of the country’s most talented art photographers. Capturing both the remnants of widespread demolition and constant, massive new development, these insiders have captured the new Chinese reality—an “era without memories”—brought on by the expansive urban transformation. In four thematic chapters, An Era Without Memories offers a varied and thought-provoking kaleidoscope of imagery depicting every aspect of urban living, from juxtapositions of old and new to still-life pockets of roadside greenery to digital renderings of closely packed high-rises. These include Miao Xiaochun’s photograph of a vast glass building rising ominously from behind a traditional neighborhood; Wang Jinsong’s collages of the Chinese character used to mark condemned buildings; Zhang Peili’s shots of pastiche Western architecture; Xu Zhengqin’s billboards showing dream residential and commercial developments; and Wang Chuan’s poetic images of abandoned, half-finished, modern buildings. Complete with an introduction by Stephan Feuchtwang, an expert on China and Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics, and a personal afterword by author Jiang Jiehong, this remarkable book offers a moving portrait of the dramatically changing Chinese landscape.

Our memory gives the human species a unique evolutionary advantage. Our stories, ideas, and innovations--in a word, our "culture"--can be recorded and passed on to future generations. Our enduring culture and restless curiosity have enabled us to invent powerful information technologies that give us invaluable perspective on our past and define our future. Today, we stand at the very edge of a vast, uncharted digital landscape, where our collective memory is stored in ephemeral bits and bytes and lives in air-conditioned server rooms. What sources will historians turn to in 100, let alone 1,000 years to understand our own time if all of our memory lives in digital codes that may no longer be decipherable? In When We Are No More Abby Smith Rumsey explores human memory from pre-history to the present to shed light on the grand challenge facing our world--the abundance of information and scarcity of human attention. Tracing the story from cuneiform tablets and papyrus scrolls, to movable type, books, and the birth of the Library of Congress, Rumsey weaves a compelling narrative that explores how humans have dealt with the problem of too much information throughout our history, and indeed how we might begin solve the same problem for our digital future. Serving as a call to consciousness, When We Are No More explains why data storage is not memory; why forgetting is the first step towards remembering; and above all, why memory is about the future, not the past. "If we're thinking 1,000 years, 3,000 years ahead in the future, we have to ask ourselves, how do we preserve all the bits that we need in order to correctly interpret the digital objects we create? We are nonchalantly throwing all of our data into what could become an information black hole without realizing it." --Vint Cerf, Chief Evangelist at Google, at a press conference in February, 2015.

The Wheel of Time is now an original series on Prime Video, starring Rosamund Pike as Moiraine! With Robert Jordan’s untimely passing in 2007, Brandon Sanderson, the New York Times bestselling author of the Mistborn novels and the Stormlight Archive, was chosen by Jordan’s editor—his wife, Harriet McDougal—to complete the final volume in The Wheel of Time®, later expanded to three books. In A Memory of Light, the fourteenth and concluding novel in Jordan’s #1 New York Times bestselling epic fantasy series, the armies of Light gather to fight in Tarmon Gai’don, the Last Battle, to save the Westland nations from the shadow forces of the Dark One. Rand al’Thor, the Dragon Reborn, is ready to fulfill his destiny. To defeat the enemy that threatens them all, he must convince his reluctant allies that his plan—as foolhardy and dangerous as it appears—is their only chance to stop the Dark One’s ascension and secure a lasting peace. But if Rand’s course of action fails, the world will be engulfed in shadow. Across the land, Mat, Perrin, and Egwene engage in battle with Shadowspawn, Trollocs, Darkfriends, and other creatures of the Blight. Sacrifices are made, lives are lost, but victory is unassured. For when Rand confronts the Dark One in Shayol Ghul, he is bombarded with conflicting visions of the future that reveal there is more at stake for humanity than winning the war. Since its debut in 1990, The Wheel of Time® by Robert Jordan has captivated millions of readers around the globe with its scope, originality, and compelling characters. The last six books in series were all instant #1 New York Times bestsellers, and The Eye of the World was named one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read. The Wheel of Time® New Spring: The Novel #1 The Eye of the World #2 The Great Hunt #3 The Dragon Reborn #4 The Shadow Rising #5 The Fires of Heaven #6 Lord of Chaos #7 A Crown of Swords #8 The Path of Daggers #9 Winter's Heart #10 Crossroads of Twilight #11 Knife of Dreams By Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson #12 The Gathering Storm #13 Towers of Midnight #14 A Memory of Light By Robert Jordan and Teresa Patterson The World of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time By Robert Jordan, Harriet McDougal, Alan Romanczuk, and Maria Simons The Wheel of Time Companion By Robert Jordan and Amy Romanczuk Patterns of the Wheel: Coloring Art Based on Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Rediscovered by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, this unique account of life before, during, and after the Civil War was written by the wife of Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan, who played a central role in some of the most significant civil rights decisions of his era. “Remarkable . . . a chronicle of the times, as seen by a brave woman of the era.”—Ruth Bader Ginsburg, from the foreword When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg began researching the history of the women associated with the Supreme Court, the Library of Congress sent her Malvina Harlan’s unpublished manuscript. Recalling Abigail Adams’s order to “remember the ladies,” Justice Ginsburg guided its long journey from forgotten document to published book. Malvina Shanklin Harlan witnessed—and gently influenced—national history from the perspective of a political leader’s wife. Her husband, Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan (1833–1911), wrote the lone dissenting opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson, the infamous case that endorsed separate but equal segregation. And for fifty-seven years he was married to a woman who was busy making a mental record of their eventful lives. After Justice Harlan’s death in 1911, Malvina wrote Some Memories of a Long Life, 1854–1911, as a testament to her husband’s accomplishments and to her own. The memoir begins with Malvina, the daughter of passionate abolitionists, becoming the teenage bride of John Marshall Harlan, whose family owned more than a dozen slaves. Malvina depicts her life in antebellum Kentucky, and her courageous defense of the Harlan homestead during the Civil War. She writes of her husband’s ascent in legal circles and his eventual appointment to the Supreme Court in 1877, where he was the author of opinions that continued to influence American race relations deep into the twentieth century. Yet Some Memories is more than a wife’s account of a famous and powerful man. It chronicles the remarkable evolution of a young woman from Indiana who became a keen observer of both her family’s life and that of her nation.

A deeply informed, yet playful and ironic look at how the internet has changed human experience, memory, and our sense of self, and that belongs on the shelf with the best writings of Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard. “One day, as I was daydreaming on the boulevard Beaumarchais, I had the idea—it came and went in a flash, almost in spite of myself—of Googling to find out what I’d been up to and where I’d been two evenings before, at five o’clock, since I couldn’t remember on my own.” So begins Maël Renouard’s Fragments of an Infinite Memory, a provocative and elegant inquiry into life in a wireless world. Renouard is old enough to remember life before the internet but young enough to have fully accommodated his life to the internet and the gadgets that support it. Here this young philosopher, novelist, and translator tries out a series of conjectures on how human experience, especially the sense of self, is being changed by our continual engagement with a memory that is impersonal and effectively boundless. Renouard has written a book that is rigorously impressionistic, deeply informed historically and culturally, but is also playful, ironic, personal, and formally adventurous, a book that withstands comparison to the best of Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard.

Written in Soviet Moscow in the 1920s—but considered too subversive even to show to a publisher—the seven tales included here attest to Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s boundless imagination, black humor, and breathtaking irony: a man loses his way in the vast black waste of his own small room; the Eiffel Tower runs amok; a kind soul dreams of selling “everything you need for suicide”; an absentminded passenger boards the wrong train, winding up in a place where night is day, nightmares are the reality, and the backs of all facts have been broken; a man out looking for work comes across a line for logic but doesn’t join it as there’s no guarantee the logic will last; a sociable corpse misses his own funeral; an inventor gets a glimpse of the far-from-radiant communist future.

Explores the universal myth of Paradise across cultures, uncovering its personal message and social consequences. Companion video.