Christina Pugh's fifth book of poems explores the technologies both ancient and new that inhabit our contemporary cultural moment. Mapping an uncanny journey through the clusters of media we encounter daily but seldom stop to contemplate, Pugh's focused descriptions, contrasting linguistic textures, and acute poetic music become multifarious sources of beauty, disruption, humor, and hurt. Here, Netflix and YouTube share space with eighteenth-century paintings, Italian graffiti, ballet, Kurt Cobain's recordings, and even a collection of rocks. Whether technology is a vessel for joy or grief in these poems, it is always an expression of our continuing desire to invent and to mediate. At once personal archive and cultural barometer, Stardust Media traces the moving constellations of life in the distant twenty-first century, "a kaleidoscope / . . . half-filled with sky-blue glass-cut blossoming, / then labored to crystallize."

In this tender-hearted debut, set against the tumultuous backdrop of life in 1973, when homosexuality is still considered a mental illness, two boys defy all the odds and fall in love. The year is 1973. The Watergate hearings are in full swing. The Vietnam War is still raging. And homosexuality is still officially considered a mental illness. In the midst of these trying times is sixteen-year-old Jonathan Collins, a bullied, anxious, asthmatic kid, who aside from an alcoholic father and his sympathetic neighbor and friend Starla, is completely alone. To cope, Jonathan escapes to the safe haven of his imagination, where his hero David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust and dead relatives, including his mother, guide him through the rough terrain of his life. In his alternate reality, Jonathan can be anything: a superhero, an astronaut, Ziggy Stardust, himself, or completely "normal" and not a boy who likes other boys. When he completes his treatments, he will be normal--at least he hopes. But before that can happen, Web stumbles into his life. Web is everything Jonathan wishes he could be: fearless, fearsome and, most importantly, not ashamed of being gay. Jonathan doesn't want to like brooding Web, who has secrets all his own. Jonathan wants nothing more than to be "fixed" once and for all. But he's drawn to Web anyway. Web is the first person in the real world to see Jonathan completely and think he's perfect. Web is a kind of escape Jonathan has never known. For the first time in his life, he may finally feel free enough to love and accept himself as he is. A poignant coming-of-age tale, Ziggy, Stardust and Me heralds the arrival of a stunning and important new voice in YA.

In Search of Stardust is the first comprehensive popular science book about micrometeorites. It's illustrated with 1,500 previously unpublished images from high-resolution color microscopes and scanning electron microscopes.

Hollywood is placeless, timeless, and iconic, a key fabricator and forger of American cultural myths and stories. How, then, will the history of Hollywood be written?

For more than 20 years, Network World has been the premier provider of information, intelligence and insight for network and IT executives responsible for the digital nervous systems of large organizations. Readers are responsible for designing, implementing and managing the voice, data and video systems their companies use to support everything from business critical applications to employee collaboration and electronic commerce.

On the Trail of Stardust puts the heavens in your hands—in the form of cosmic dust, or micrometeorites. With this handy guide from the author of the international bestseller In Search of Stardust, Jon Larsen, you will learn how to find micrometeorites in your own neighborhood! Stardust—also known as micrometeorites—is the oldest matter anywhere. Nothing has traveled farther to reach Earth. For a century, scientists have searched everywhere for stardust, but only found it in remote areas like Antarctica and, more recently, outer space. Author and citizen scientist extraordinaire Jon Larsen was the first to find them in populated areas. With this book, you too can discover stardust as near as your own rooftop! Following his successful debut, In Search of Stardust, Larsen turns his attention from explaining the formation and various kinds of stardust to revealing his methods and techniques for finding micrometeorites in a compact, durable guide. Larsen covers everything from the origins and formation of micrometeorites to assembling the simple array of gear needed to get out there and find stardust in your own neighborhood, rooftop, or rain gutters. Larsen explains the best places to look and offers step-by-step photo sequences of the techniques he has developed to assemble his collection of 1,500-plus verified micrometeorites (and counting). And you don’t need a multi-million-dollar scanning electron microscope to document your collection; Jon shows how to assemble a serviceable photo setup from easily accessible equipment. The book is capped off with a field guide of sorts that offers a taxonomy of the various types of micrometeorites, along with sample images, as well as the kinds of man-made and terrestrial spherules that stardust hunters are likely to encounter and how to identify them as imposters. Once thought to exist only at the bottoms of oceans and atop polar ice, it turns out that stardust is everywhere…and On the Trail of Stardust is your indispensable tool to finding it for yourself.

A Hugo Award-winning author and music journalist explores the weird and wild story of when rock ’n’ roll met the sci-fi world of the 1970s As the 1960s drew to a close, and mankind trained its telescopes on other worlds, old conventions gave way to a new kind of hedonistic freedom that celebrated sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. Derided as nerdy or dismissed as fluff, science fiction rarely gets credit for its catalyzing effect on this revolution. In Strange Stars, Jason Heller recasts sci-fi and pop music as parallel cultural forces that depended on one another to expand the horizons of books, music, and out-of-this-world imagery. In doing so, he presents a whole generation of revered musicians as the sci-fi-obsessed conjurers they really were: from Sun Ra lecturing on the black man in the cosmos, to Pink Floyd jamming live over the broadcast of the Apollo 11 moon landing; from a wave of Star Wars disco chart toppers and synthesiser-wielding post-punks, to Jimi Hendrix distilling the “purplish haze” he discovered in a pulp novel into psychedelic song. Of course, the whole scene was led by David Bowie, who hid in the balcony of a movie theater to watch 2001: A Space Odyssey, and came out a changed man… If today’s culture of Comic Con fanatics, superhero blockbusters, and classic sci-fi reboots has us thinking that the nerds have won at last, Strange Stars brings to life an era of unparalleled and unearthly creativity—in magazines, novels, films, records, and concerts—to point out that the nerds have been winning all along.