'From Trump's backward-looking promise to "make America great again" to the hipster's fondness for a pre-industrial age of craft, nostalgia saturates our world. Gandini's book is a remarkable and insightful guide to this phenomenon, laying out the deep roots of its origins and setting out the contours of its limits.' Nick Srnicek, co-author of Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work We live an age of nostalgia, incarnated by populist fantasies of “taking back control” and making nations “great again". In the long aftermath of the 2007-08 economic crisis, nostalgia has been established as the cultural zeitgeist of Western society. Populist fantasies of nostalgia represent a cry for help against the demise of the societal model of the postwar era, based on stable employment and mass consumption. The promise of an impossible return to the 'good life' of the 20th century, Gandini contends, particularly appeals to the older generations, who are incapable of making sense of the evolution of Western societies after decades of globalization and neoliberal policies. The younger generations, in the meantime, are instead trying to build a new 'good life' based on another form of return, this time to old practices of craft production and consumption.

Computational molecular and materials modeling has emerged to deliver solid technological impacts in the chemical, pharmaceutical, and materials industries. It is not the all-predictive science fiction that discouraged early adopters in the 1980s. Rather, it is proving a valuable aid to designing and developing new products and processes. People create, not computers, and these tools give them qualitative relations and quantitative properties that they need to make creative decisions. With detailed analysis and examples from around the world, Applying Molecular and Materials Modeling describes the science, applications, and infrastructures that have proven successful. Computational quantum chemistry, molecular simulations, informatics, desktop graphics, and high-performance computing all play important roles. At the same time, the best technology requires the right practitioners, the right organizational structures, and - most of all - a clearly understood blend of imagination and realism that propels technological advances. This book is itself a powerful tool to help scientists, engineers, and managers understand and take advantage of these advances.