Machine History

In his insightful and provocative work, Lennox explores the biblical text in light of the rapidly exploding world of technology, especially Artificial Intelligence (AI), and warns modern believers of the implications of Jesus’ final earthly message to his followers, as well as a potential link to the end times leader that the Gospel writer John refers to as the Antichrist.

Winner of the FT and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award Named a Best Book of 2025 by The Economist “Framed as a biography of Jensen Huang, the only CEO Nvidia has ever had, the book is also something more interesting and revealing: a window onto the intellectual, cultural, and economic...

This is the complete history of the synthesizer—from electromagnetic experiments in the 1870s to the software and hardware you use today. You'll discover how these instruments evolved from room-sized laboratory equipment to portable analog classics to digital dominance to the software revolution to the analog revival happening right now. Every major instrument, every breakthrough, every paradigm shift that shaped how electronic music gets made. You'll understand why the Minimoog became legendary, how the Prophet-5 changed everything with patch memory, why the DX7 killed analog synthesis ...

When the Marines decided to buy a helicopter-airplane hybrid "tiltrotor" called the V-22 Osprey, they saw it as their dream machine. The tiltrotor was the aviation equivalent of finding the Northwest Passage: an aircraft able to take off, land, and hover with the agility of a helicopter yet fly as fast and as far as an airplane. Many predicted it would reshape civilian aviation. The Marines saw it as key to their very survival. Opponents called it one of the worst boondoggles in Pentagon history.

As lives offline and online merge, it's easy to forget how we got here. Rise of the Machines reclaims the story of cybernetics, a control theory of man and machine. Thomas Rid delivers a portrait of our technology-enraptured era. Springing from mathematician Norbert Wiener amid the devastation of World War II, the cybernetic vision underpinned a host of myths about the future of machines. This vision radically transformed the postwar world, ushering in sweeping cultural change.

When the crash of the U.S. stock market became public knowledge in the fall of 2008, it was already old news. The real crash had taken place silently over the previous year, in obscure financial markets where the SEC doesn’t bother to look: the bond and real estate derivative markets where geeks invent impenetrable securities to profit from the misery of lower- and middle-class Americans who can’t pay their debts. The smart people who understood what was actually happening were paralyzed by hope and fear; in any case, they weren’t talking.

In this lively and entertaining work, Witold Rybczynski-hailed as "one of the best writers on design working today" by Publishers Weekly-tells the story of the most distinctive cars in history and the artists, engineers, dreamers, and gearheads who created them.

The remarkable true story of a lone genius whose quest to unlock the science behind the perfect swing changed golf forever. In 1939, Homer Kelley played golf for the first time and scored 116. Frustrated, he did not play again for six months; when he did he carded a 77. Determined to understand why he was able to shave nearly 40 strokes off his score, Kelley spent three decades of trial and error to unlock the answer and to recapture that one wonderful day when golf was easy and enjoyable.

A collection of writing by Simon Reynolds, centered on music that seemed, in its moment, to prefigure the Future Simon Reynolds's first book in eight years is a celebration of music that feels like a taste of tomorrow. Sounds that prefigure pop music's future—the vanguard genres and heroic...

Tracy Kidder's "riveting" (Washington Post) story of one company's efforts to bring a new microcomputer to market won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and has become essential reading for understanding the history of the American tech industry. Computers have changed since...

Longlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year The "rich and gripping" true story of the first time machines came for human jobs—and how the Luddite uprising explains the power, threat, and toll of big tech and AI today (Naomi Klein) The most urgent story in modern tech begins...

Robots may one day rule the world, but what is a robot-ruled Earth like? Many think the first truly smart robots will be brain emulations, or ems. Scan a human brain, then run a model with the same connections on a fast computer, and you have a robot brain, but recognizably human. Train an em to do some job and copy it a million times; an army of workers is at your disposal. When they can be made cheaply, within perhaps a century, ems will displace humans in most jobs.

What truly built human civilization? It wasn't the plow, the steam engine, or silicon chips—it was our awareness of death. From the fossilized grief of prehistoric creatures to the cold processors of quantum servers, The Death Complex takes readers on a sweeping, 20-chapter journey through history, anthropology, evolutionary biology, and future technology. Mehmet Çalışkan traces humanity’s greatest dilemma: How the terrifying confrontation with biological mortality birthed our gods, built the pyramids of Egypt and the stone pillars of Göbekli Tepe, forged ancient mythologies, ...

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES AND USA TODAY BESTSELLER A vital exploration as we head into the 2026 midterm elections of how right-wing extremism, media manipulation, and ideological echo chambers have eroded critical thinking and deepened political divisions—and how we can fight back to save our...

The Doomsday Machine is Ellsberg's hair-raising insider's account of the most dangerous arms buildup in the history of civilization, whose legacy - and renewal under the Obama administration - threatens the very survival of humanity. It is scarcely possible to estimate the true dangers of our present nuclear policies without penetrating the secret realities of the nuclear strategy of the late Eisenhower and early Kennedy years, when Ellsberg had high-level access to them.

“A fast-burning fuse of a book, every page bursting with revelatory detail.”—ERIK LARSON A sweeping account of the anarchists who terrorized the streets of New York and the detective duo who transformed policing to meet the threat—a tale of fanaticism, forensic science, and dynamite from...

Read by George Newbern "George Newbern provides a convincing, conversational narration of this audiobook about robot intelligence. There's a lot to digest. Much of it deals with speculation as to who will be right: those who believe in AI (artificial intelligence machines that may eventually...

For decades, history has considered Tammany Hall, New York's famous political machine, shorthand for the worst of urban politics: graft, crime, and patronage personified by notoriously corrupt characters. Infamous crooks like William "Boss" Tweed dominate traditional histories of Tammany, distorting our understanding of a critical chapter of American political history. In Machine Made, historian and New York City journalist Terry Golway convincingly dismantles these stereotypes.

Did the ancient Greeks and Romans have conspiracy theories? Did they come close to an industrial revolution? Did they drink beer? In a series of fast-paced essays, Insane Emperors, Sunken Cities, and Earthquake Machines answers 40 questions that ancient historian Garrett Ryan has been asked in the classroom and through his popular YouTube channel ToldinStone. As in Dr. Ryan's previous book—Naked Statues, Fat Gladiators, and War Elephants—the emphasis is on the fascinating details of daily life in the classical world.

The extraordinary true story of Lockheed Martin’s “Skunk Works”—the radical innovation hub that designed the greatest airplanes of the twentieth century—and the visionary who made it all possible "A kerosene-soaked masterclass in what extreme innovation looks, feels, and even smells...