Confessions Of a Crabgrass Cowboy is a tale about coming of age in a fresh and eccentric environment called suburbia. As a personal memoir, the book details the vicissitudes of replacing playground bullies with "Playboy Playmates," while simultaneously preparing daily for the Armageddon we were promised was right around the corner. Confessions Of a Crabgrass Cowboy also chronicles the cultural quirks of the era itself-Dick and Jane, CONELRAD, Charles Atlas, Tupperware(R), X-Ray spectacles, coon skin caps, and anatomically correct dolls are but a handful-that we now so closely and warmly associate with this distinctive period in American history. Were Dick and Jane the only children in American without a surname? Did Battle Creek, Michigan really exist? Were the prodigious privates of John Dillinger really placed briefly on display at the world-renowned Smithsonian Institute? Were the lyrics of the Kingsmen's 1963 one-hit-wonder "Louie Louie" as obscenity-laced as many believed? What hapless sitcom blew the lid off the unspoken toilet taboo by exposing millions of viewers to the interior of an American bathroom for the first time? So saddle up for a leisurely ride back in time and discover what all the fuss was really about.

Out of Control chronicles the dawn of a new era in which the machines and systems that drive our economy are so complex and autonomous as to be indistinguishable from living things.

Cuisine and Culture presents a multicultural and multiethnic approach that draws connections between major historical events and how and why these events affected and defined the culinary traditions of different societies. Witty and engaging, Civitello shows how history has shaped our diet--and how food has affected history. Prehistoric societies are explored all the way to present day issues such as genetically modified foods and the rise of celebrity chefs. Civitello's humorous tone and deep knowledge are the perfect antidote to the usual scholarly and academic treatment of this universally important subject.

Features the book, "The Hacker Crackdown," by Bruce Sterling. Includes a preface to the electronic release of the book and the chronology of the hacker crackdown. Notes that the book has chapters on crashing the computer system, the digital underground, law and order, and the civil libertarians.

The violence wrought by climate change, toxic drift, deforestation, oil spills, and the environmental aftermath of war takes place gradually and often invisibly. Using the innovative concept of "slow violence" to describe these threats, Rob Nixon focuses on the inattention we have paid to the attritional lethality of many environmental crises, in contrast with the sensational, spectacle-driven messaging that impels public activism today. Slow violence, because it is so readily ignored by a hard-charging capitalism, exacerbates the vulnerability of ecosystems and of people who are poor, disempowered, and often involuntarily displaced, while fueling social conflicts that arise from desperation as life-sustaining conditions erode. In a book of extraordinary scope, Nixon examines a cluster of writer-activists affiliated with the environmentalism of the poor in the global South. By approaching environmental justice literature from this transnational perspective, he exposes the limitations of the national and local frames that dominate environmental writing. And by skillfully illuminating the strategies these writer-activists deploy to give dramatic visibility to environmental emergencies, Nixon invites his readers to engage with some of the most pressing challenges of our time.

This book uses mathematical models of language to explain why there are certain gaps in language: things that we might expect to be able to say but can't. For instance, why can we say I ran for five minutes but not *I ran all the way to the store for five minutes? Why is five pounds of books acceptable, but *five pounds of book not acceptable? What prevents us from saying *sixty degrees of water to express the temperature of the water in a swimming pool when sixty inches of water can express its depth? And why can we not say *all the ants in my kitchen are numerous? The constraints on these constructions involve concepts that are generally studied separately: aspect, plural and mass reference, measurement, and distributivity. In this book, Lucas Champollion provides a unified perspective on these domains, connects them formally within the framework of algebraic semantics and mereology, and uses this connection to transfer insights across unrelated bodies of literature and formulate a single constraint that explains each of the judgments above.