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They know everything about you: how data-collecting corporations and snooping government agencies are destroying democracy

Scheer, Robert
They Know Everything About You is a groundbreaking exposé of how government agencies and tech corporations monitor virtually every aspect of our lives, and a fierce defense of privacy and democracy. The revelation that the government has access to a vast trove of personal online data demonstrates that we already live in a surveillance society. But the erosion of privacy rights extends far beyond big government. Intelligence agencies such as the NSA and CIA are using Silicon Valley corporate partners as their data spies. Seemingly progressive tech companies are joining forces with snooping government agencies to create a brave new world of wired tyranny. Life in the digital age poses an unprecedented challenge to our constitutional liberties, which guarantee a wall of privacy between the individual and the government. The basic assumption of democracy requires the ability of the individual to experiment with ideas and associations within a protected zone, as secured by the Constitution. The unobserved moment embodies the most basic of human rights, yet it is being squandered in the name of national security and consumer convenience. Robert Scheer argues that the information revolution, while a source of public enlightenment, contains the seeds of freedom’s destruction in the form of a surveillance state that exceeds the wildest dream of the most ingenious dictator. The technology of surveillance, unless vigorously resisted, represents an existential threat to the liberation of the human spirit.
Nation Books 2015-02-24 256 pages

Beyond the Beyond

Robert Silverberg
PASSENGERS In this Nebula Award winning short story, unseen visitors can come without warning and inhabit our minds for days at a time. Taking over our bodies, controlling our will for their own selfish, immoral joyrides. Society makes adaptations in its mores and taboos. Since people being ridden have no volition in their actions, they are best ignored. And any action—crime, murder, or rape committed while one in ridden is best forgotten and ignored if at all possible. Becoming conscious after such an psychic invasion is disorienting. For one man who has flashes of memory of his time being “ridden” by a passenger, memories of an uncontrolled sexual encounter impels him to break society’s taboo of forgetting this chance encounter. And he becomes, perversely, compelled to seek her out. “Passengers” is not the only highly-acclaimed masterpiece included within. The other four stories were nominated for multiple major SF awards—and highlight the author’s mastery of the language and his capacity to engage the reader fully in worlds of his own making. Included in this collection are such classic tales as “The Macauley Circuit”, “A Thief in Ni-Moya”, and “Lion Time in Timbuctoo”.
Wonder Audiobooks 2012-11-07 228 pages

Majipoor Chronicles Majipoor Chronicles

Robert Silverberg
The national bestselling saga of Robert Silverberg's stunning imagination continues in the first new hardcover Majipoor novel in nearly a decade. As a prequel to Silverberg's earlier Majipoor novels . Sorcerers of Majipoor provides a deep, dark vision for the background of the conflict inLord Valentine's Castle and Valentine Pontifex. Treachery and wizardry run rampant under the reign of the mighty Pontifex, as both the rightful and the unworthy heirs to the throne anxiously await his demise. Korsibar, son of the current Coronal, plots with his twin sister and ambitious companions to seize the power of the Coronal when his father ascends to the throne of the Pontifex. But the burdens of the crown and scepter exact more of a price than Korsibar is prepared to pay. His rival fights to take his appointed place as keeper of his beloved Majipoor...and to resbackse order to the utter chaos that has befallen their world. "Silverberg has created a big planet, chock-a-block with life and potential sbacksies." -- The Washing Post
HarperCollins 1996-06-12 400 pages

Chinatown, the Last Detail, Shampoo: Screenplays

Towne, Robert
"Chinatown," generally regarded as the Great American Screenplay, follows a seedy private investigator, Jake Gittes, as he becomes involved in a case far more complicated than he ever imagined. Instead of adultery and divorce, he uncovers a conspiracy reaching to the economic foundations of Los Angeles. Set in the 1930s, the film was directed by Roman Polanski and stars Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, and John Huston.
Atlantic Monthly Pr

Patterns

Rod Serling
REQUIRED READING for any aspiring or established television screenwriter -Rod Serling was the television industry's original show runner. His screenplay, "Patterns," aired on January 12, 1955, launched his career. Within hours, Jack Gould of the New York Times wrote, "Nothing in months has excited the television industry as much as the Kraft Television Theatre's production of Patterns, an original play by Rod Serling. The enthusiasm is justified. In writing, acting and direction, Patterns will stand as one of the high points in the TV medium's evolution." An overnight success, Serling immediately found himself in the company of the Golden Age of Television's elite writers including Paddy Chayefsky, Reginald Rose, and Gore Vidal; and the recipient of his first of six Emmy awards. Serling would later write a semi-autobiographical screenplay, "The Velvet Alley," describing such a meteoric rise to fame and success."Patterns," the book, was Serling's first foray into the world of publishing. What is invaluable is not merely the actual screenplays, but Serling's comments on each and his twenty five plus page dissertation on writing for television during its' Golden Age. What is different about this new edition is Mark Dawidziak's insightful forward explaining the relevance of "Patterns" to Serling's prolific body of work. Given Serling's dissertation and Dawidziak's analysis, it is worth repeating that this is, without question, REQUIRED READING for anyone involved in the creation of intelligent television.
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform 2015-02-18 288 pages

Cycles of time: an extraordinary new view of the universe

Penrose, Roger
"A groundbreaking book providing a new take on three of cosmology's most profound questions: What, if anything, came before the Big Bang? What is the source of order in our universe? What is the universe's ultimate future? Current understanding of our universe dictates that all matter will eventually thin out to zero density, with huge black holes finally evaporating away into massless energy. Roger Penrose--one of the most innovative mathematicians of our time--turns around this predominant picture of the universe's "heat death," arguing how the expected ultimate fate of our accelerating, expanding universe can actually be reinterpreted as the "Big Bang" of a new one. Along the way to this remarkable cosmological picture, Penrose sheds new light on basic principles that underlie the behavior of our universe, describing various standard and nonstandard cosmological models, the fundamental role of the cosmic microwave background, and the key status of black holes. Intellectually thrilling and accessible, Cycles of Time is another essential guide to the universe from one of our preeminent thinkers"--Provided by publisher.
Alfred A. Knopf 2011 288 pages

Children of a vanished world

Vishniac, Roman
Between 1935 and 1938 the celebrated photographer Roman Vishniac explored the cities and villages of Eastern Europe, capturing life in the Jewish shtetlekh of Poland, Romania, Russia, and Hungary, communities that even then seemed threatened--not by destruction and extermination, which no one foresaw, but by change. Using a hidden camera and under difficult circumstances, Vishniac was able to take over sixteen thousand photographs; most were left with his father in a village in France for the duration of the war. With the publication of Children of a Vanished World , seventy of those photographs are available, thirty-six for the first time. The book is devoted to a subject Vishniac especially loved, and one whose mystery and spontaneity he captured with particular poignancy: children. Selected and edited by the photographer's daughter, Mara Vishniac Kohn, and translator and coeditor Miriam Hartman Flacks, these images show children playing, children studying, children in the midst of a world that was about to disappear. They capture the daily life of their subjects, at once ordinary and extraordinary. The photographs are accompanied by a selection of nursery rhymes, songs, poems, and chants for children's games in both Yiddish and English translation. Thanks to Vishniac's visual artistry and the editors' choice of traditional Yiddish verses, a part of this wonderful culture can be preserved for future generations. Earlier books of Roman Vishniac's photographs include To Give Them Light: The Legacy of Roman Vishniac (1995), A Vanished World (1983), and Polish Jews (1947). A major exhibition titled "Children of a Vanished World: Photographs byRoman Vishniac" is scheduled at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. The show will open to the public on March 7 and run through June 4, 2000.
University of California Press 1999 141 pages

Language City The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York

Ross Perlin
From the co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, a captivating portrait of contemporary New York City through six speakers of little-known and overlooked languages, diving into the incredible history of the most linguistically diverse place ever to have existed on the planet Half of all 7,000-plus human languages may disappear over the next century and--because many have never been recorded--when they're gone, it will be forever. Ross Perlin, a linguist and co-director of the Manhattan-based non-profit Endangered Language Alliance, is racing against time to map little-known languages across the most linguistically diverse city in history: contemporary New York. In Language City , Perlin recounts the unique history of immigration that shaped the city, and follows six remarkable yet ordinary speakers of endangered languages deep into their communities to learn how they are maintaining and reviving their languages against overwhelming odds. Perlin also dives deep into their languages, taking us on a fascinating tour of unusual grammars, rare sounds, and powerful cultural histories from all around the world. Seke is spoken by 700 people from five ancestral villages in Nepal, a hundred of whom have lived in a single Brooklyn apartment building. N'ko is a radical new West African writing system now going global in Harlem and the Bronx. After centuries of colonization and displacement, Lenape, the city's original Indigenous language and the source of the name Manhattan ("the place where we get bows"), has just one fluent native speaker, bolstered by a small band of revivalists. Also profiled in the book are speakers of the Indigenous Mexican language Nahuatl, the Central Asian minority language Wakhi, and the former lingua franca of the Lower East Side, Yiddish. A century after the anti-immigration Johnson-Reed Act closed America's doors for decades and on the 400th anniversary of New York's colonial founding, Perlin raises the alarm about growing political threats and the onslaught of "killer languages" like English and Spanish. Both remarkable social history and testament to the importance of linguistic diversity, Language City is a joyful and illuminating exploration of a city and the world that made it.
Grove/Atlantic, Incorporated 2025-02-11 432 pages