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"As I hunched over this mysterious artifact, picking out seeds and stems while scanning the oversized pages, for the first time, I encountered names like Buckminster Fuller, Gregory Bateson, Stewart Brand, and concepts like systems thinking, nomadics, geodesic domes, and countless domains of DIY. I was completely enthralled. . . . The 'Whole Earth Field Guide,' new from MIT Press, attempts to bring some of the genius that inspired me and so many others in the 60s and 70s to a new generation of Spaceship Earth crew members and to anyone interested in counter-cultural history. . . . Reading the 'Whole Earth Field Guide,' you really get a sense for how these powerful and timely ideas, presented in this unique format, helped shape many aspects of our modern world." —Gareth Branwyn, @boingboing 📷: @tipitinbooks
From the archives, Quine's "Word and Object," "Time Series" by Norbert Wiener, and "Models for the Perception of Speech and Visual Form," which was the inspiration for the cover of our Fall 2017 catalog. #tbt
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Happy #nationalbikemonth 🚲 Image: "The New Woman" by Lyonel Feininger, Berlin 1898; photo H.E.Lessing
In "Living Well Now and in the Future," philosopher Randall Curren and scientist Ellen Metzger lay out the nature and value of sustainability, survey the problems, catalog the obstacles, and identify the kind of efforts needed to overcome them. #Earthday 🌏🌱
"With illustration as his guide, veteran physicist Don S. Lemons surveys the rise of physical science in 'Drawing Physics: 2,600 Years of Discovery From Thales to Higgs.' . . . We meet the usual cast of characters—Galileo, Newton, Einstein—but also many less-heralded supporting players: ancient Eratosthenes, the 11th-century Iraqi sage Alhazen, and Simon Stevin, a 16th-century mathematician from the Low Countries. . . . The book’s drawings, rendered with cheery unpretentiousness by illustrator Jesse Graber, range from notional representations of a falling rock or the disintegration of a neutron to a full-fledged, number-bearing graph depicting the binding energy of atomic nuclei. . . . Although physics complexifies through the 19th and 20th centuries, with Maxwell, Einstein and their fellow brainiacs pushing the limits of comprehension, the book retains its clarity and charm."—@WSJ
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Great pic from @seminarycoopbookstores Bright colors for dark times! #untimelymeditations
"Fantasies of the Library" lets readers experience the library anew. The book imagines, and enacts, the library as both keeper of books and curator of ideas—as a platform of the future. The reader emerges from this book-as-exhibition with the growing conviction that the library is not only a curatorial space but a bibliological imaginary, ripe for the exploration of consequential paginated affairs. Photo credit: @owlcave #nationallibraryweek
Ever since Freud’s "Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious" appeared in 1905, humor both light and dark has frequently surfaced as a subversive, troubling, or liberating element in art. "The Artist’s Joke" from @whitechapelgallery surveys the rich and diverse uses of humor by avant-garde and contemporary artists. It examines what André Breton called the “lightning bolt” of the unsettlingly comic, as seen in the anarchic wordplay of Duchamp, Picasso, the Dadaists, and Surrealists; Pop’s fetish for kitsch and the comic strip; Bruce Nauman’s sinister clowns and twisted puns; Richard Prince’s joke paintings; art ambushed by feminist wit, from the Dadaism of Hannah Höch in the 1920s to the politicized conceptualism of Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger in the 1980s; the serenely uncanny in Mike Kelley’s installations and the risibly grotesque in Paul McCarthy’s; and the strangely comic scenarios of artists as various as Maurizio Cattelan, Andrea Fraser, Raymond Pettibon, and David Shrigley. Photo credit: @ahornbooks #aprilfools
"Al, a Dutch architect and professor of urban design at the University of Pennsylvania, provides a tour of the Las Vegas Strip that is erudite, entertaining, and impossible to conduct in person, given the breakneck pace of demolition, refurbishment, and replacement that has been that city’s only constant. These shifts, Al convincingly argues, aren’t an outlier but rather a physical chronology of the American leisure imagination, from the Wild West to the atomic age to corporate glitz to Disney to the age of “starchitecture.” When cultural trends percolate elsewhere, they are poured into foundations in Vegas. The argument is fascinating both in its larger sweep and in its particulars. Al is a droll observer of culture and design evolution. . . . Al’s Las Vegas is a story of the American national identity, and once you’ve bought in, this compulsive read won’t lose you a dime." —Publishers Weekly (starred review) on "The Strip: Las Vegas and the Architecture of the American Dream" by Stefan Al #lasvegas #architecture
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" 'Communism for Kids,' by Bini Adamczak, is in fact for everyone, an inspired and necessary book especially now, a moment when people feel that we are on the verge of the destruction of the world, and without any new world to hope for, or believe in. Have two hundred years of capitalism brought us freedom? Or just more inequality than has ever been experienced by humans on earth? Global capitalism is not human destiny, it merely is. To think beyond it, with the help of Adamczak’s primer, is to take a first step toward freedom, at least the freedom to imagine other worlds." —Rachel Kushner, author of 'The Flamethrowers'
"Grace Hopper, who became a 'coder' (or programmer) in the 1940s, was one of the great pioneers of the computer age. . . . Beyer’s meticulously researched biography shows how Hopper was one of the first to realise that software was the key to unlocking the power of the computer." —@Guardian on "Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age" by Kurt Beyer #IWD2017 #internationalwomensday
" 'Atari Age' examines the impact early video games had on culture and their effects both positive and negative on society. Michael Newman chronicles a history of early games and how their nature and focus created an acceptance of computer technology by society at large. The tension between the positive and negative aspects of the new medium are well illustrated by showing how arcades evolved from dark unsavory places to clean welcoming places that women might frequent. This is a fascinating and well-researched book that is sure to be important in the history of video games." —Al Alcorn, developer of Pong #atari #tbt
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