Summer of Unrest (Slight Return). For a few days at the start of August, England was gripped by the riots that erupted in its city centres. Although there were various motivations behind the trouble and a broad spectrum of ages and backgrounds involved, the front pages were emblazoned with images of hooded youths running amok and stories of the revenge of the feral underclass. In this final part of the Brain Shots: Summer of Unrest series, Nikesh Shukla and Kieran Yates interrogate whether young people are deliberately conforming to a stereotype foisted upon them, and point instead to the creativity and entrepreneurialism that are defining a supposedly 'lost' generation. An antidote to the broadsheet commentariat, this street-level view of the defining moment of the Summer of Unrest finds much to inspire hope and confidence for our future.

Mattie and Brewster are normal, typical 16-year-old twins who live with their normal, boring parents: Martin and Gwen Banks. Normal and boring, that is, until the day their father's best friend shows up at their house - dressed in what appears to be a bathrobe. The next thing Mattie and Brewster know, their parents are frozen like human statues in their living room, the guy in the bathrobe has vanished, and they need to find answers - fast. The twins set off on a quest to discover the truth of their parents' lives. Along the way they find secrets, lies, magic, time travel, strange new friends, stranger new enemies, and a really weird dirigible (which, they're told repeatedly, is not a blimp). It is a twisted and bizarre trail that, they hope, will lead them to the man they blame for their parents' peril: Phillip.

In Kids These Days, early Wall Street occupier Malcolm Harris gets real about why the Millennial generation has been wrongly stereotyped, and dares us to confront and take charge of the consequences now that we are grown up. Millennials have been stereotyped as lazy, entitled, narcissistic, and immature. We've gotten so used to sloppy generational analysis filled with dumb clichés about young people that we've lost sight of what really unites Millennials. Namely: We are the most educated and hardworking generation in American history. We poured historic and insane amounts of time and money into preparing ourselves for the 21st-century labor market. We have been taught to consider working for free (homework, internships) a privilege for our own benefit. We are poorer, more medicated, and more precariously employed than our parents, grandparents, even our great grandparents, with less of a social safety net to boot. Kids These Days is about why. In brilliant, crackling prose, early Wall Street occupier Malcolm Harris gets mercilessly real about our maligned birth cohort. Examining trends like runaway student debt, the rise of the intern, mass incarceration, social media, and more, Harris gives us a portrait of what it means to be young in America today that will wake you up and piss you off. Millennials were the first generation raised explicitly as investments, Harris argues, and in Kids These Days he dares us to confront and take charge of the consequences now that we are grown up.

Making a game can be an intensive process, and if not planned accurately can easily run over budget. The use of procedural generation in game design can help with the intricate and multifarious aspects of game development; thus facilitating cost reduction. This form of development enables games to create their play areas, objects and stories based on a set of rules, rather than relying on the developer to handcraft each element individually. Readers will learn to create randomized maps, weave accidental plotlines, and manage complex systems that are prone to unpredictable behavior. Tanya Short’s and Tarn Adams’ Procedural Generation in Game Design offers a wide collection of chapters from various experts that cover the implementation and enactment of procedural generation in games. Designers from a variety of studios provide concrete examples from their games to illustrate the many facets of this emerging sub-discipline. Key Features: Introduces the differences between static/traditional game design and procedural game design Demonstrates how to solve or avoid common problems with procedural game design in a variety of concrete ways Includes industry leaders’ experiences and lessons from award-winning games World’s finest guide for how to begin thinking about procedural design

From the author of Popular Economics comes a surpringly sunny projection of America's future job market. Forget the doomsday predictions of sour-faced nostalgists who say automization and globalization will take away your dream job. The job market is only going to get better and better, according to economist John Tamny, who argues in The End of Work that the greatest gift of prosperity, beyond freedom from painful want, is the existence of work that is interesting.

Featuring Powder finger, Kylie, The Presets, The Drones, Silver chair, Jet, INXS, Sarah Blasko, Eskimo Joe, The Veronicas, The Living End, Australian Crawl, You Am I, Delta Goodrem and many more, Play listed takes the pulse of Australian rock-n-roll with a series of short, sharp chapters from leading music journalist Craig Mathieson. Smart, opin...

President Bill Clinton gives us his views on the challenges facing the United States today and why government matters—presenting his ideas on restoring economic growth, job creation, financial responsibility, resolving the mortgage crisis, and pursuing a strategy to get us "back in the future business.” He explains how we got into the current economic crisis, and offers specific recommendations on how we can put people back to work, increase bank lending and corporate investment, double our exports, restore our manufacturing base, and create new businesses. He supports President Obama’s emphasis on green technology, saying that changing the way we produce and consume energy is the strategy most likely to spark a fast-growing economy while enhancing our national security. Clinton also stresses that we need a strong private sector and a smart government working together to restore prosperity and progress, demonstrating that whenever we’ve given in to the temptation to blame government for all our problems, we’ve lost our ability to produce sustained economic growth and shared prosperity. Clinton writes, “There is simply no evidence that we can succeed in the twenty-first century with an antigovernment strategy,” based on “a philosophy grounded in ‘you’re on your own’ rather than ‘we’re all in this together.’ ” He believes that conflict between government and the private sector has proved to be good politics but has produced bad policies, giving us a weak economy with not enough jobs, growing income inequality and poverty, and a decline in our competitive position. In the real world, cooperation works much better than conflict, and “Americans need victories in real life.”