A leading Japanese journalist gives an analysis and descriptive account of Tokyo's current youth culture and modern Japanese society. He examines why 40 million young people between the ages of 15 and 30 are breaking away from traditional society to seek quick money and new ways of life - technology, drugs, free sex, punk rock. Many school drop-outs join the tribes of lawless bikers hoping to be accepted into the immensely wealthy underworld gangs of the Yazuka. is broad - from drug dealers, office girls and hostesses, to students at Tokyo's most prestigious university.

"Pronged ants, horned humans, a landscape carved on a fruit pit--some of the displays in David Wilson's Museum of Jurassic Technology are hoaxes. But which ones? As he guides readers through an intellectual hall of mirrors, Lawrence Weschler revisits the 16th-century "wonder cabinets" that were the first museums and compels readers to examine the imaginative origins of both art and science"

In this thoroughly researched, scrupulously annotated and shockingly provocative book you’ll learn: how and why Cannabis prohibition began and what that has meant to America ; all the uses of hemp as medicine, food, fuel, fiber, paper, and as a plastic replacement ; the straight dope on marijuana smoke and its effect on the human body ; who profits from the prohibition and criminalization of Cannabis ; what you can do to speed up legalization and profit from the coming changes.

A revised edition of this celebrated cultural history features a new afterword and three new chapters focusing on the global K-pop phenomenon BTS, as well as the Academy Award–winning film Parasite and the hit Netflix series Squid Game. In this fresh, funny, and insightful cultural history, Euny Hong recounts how South Korea vaulted itself into the twenty-first century, becoming a global leader in business, technology, education, and pop culture. Along the way we meet teachers, cultural critics, Michelin-starred chefs, pop music superstars, and government ministers in charge of creating boy bands with highly synchronized dance moves. The strict rigors of the Korean education system now lead to a society that works and plays hard—with a Ministry of Culture that churns out movies, television dramas, pop bands, and video games exported throughout the world. The Birth of Korean Cool reveals how a really uncool country became cool, and how a nation that once banned miniskirts, long hair on men, and rock and roll could come to be known for its pop music and the smartphone in everyone’s pocket. This revised edition features a new afterword and three new chapters focusing on the global K-pop phenomenon BTS, as well as the Academy Award-winning film Parasite and the hit Netflix series Squid Game.

A revealing, forward-looking examination of the outsize influence Google has had on the changing media landscape, telling the story of how it formed and crashed into traditional media businesses--from newspapers to books, to television, to movies, to telephones, to advertising, to Microsoft.

The popular authority on movies, television, and video now tunes in to the Golden Age of Radio. This fascinating and long-overdue celebration of the way things were includes... -- Behind the scenes stories about Orson Welles, Lucille Ball, Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Kirk Douglas, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, and many, many others -- The history of radio soap operas, westerns, variety shows, comedies, and thrillers -- Hundreds of revealing personal interviews with radio legends -- More than 125 rare photographs and illustrations

"A fresh, funny, up-close look at how South Korea remade itself as the world's pop culture powerhouse of the twenty-first century. By now, everyone in the world knows the song "Gangnam Style" and Psy, an instantly recognizable star. But the song's international popularity is no passing fad. "Gangnam Style" is only one tool in South Korea's extraordinarily elaborate and effective strategy to become a major world superpower by first becoming the world's number one pop culture exporter. As a child, Euny Hong moved from America to the Gangnam neighborhood in Seoul. She was a witness to the most accelerated part of South Korea's economic development, during which it leapfrogged from third-world military dictatorship to first-world liberal democracy on the cutting edge of global technology. The Birth of Korean Cool recounts how South Korea vaulted itself into the twenty-first century, becoming a global leader in business, technology, education, and pop culture.Featuring lively, in-depth reporting and numerous interviews with Koreans working in all areas of government and society, Euny Hong reveals how a really uncool country became cool, and how a nation that once banned miniskirts, long hair on men, and rock 'n' roll could come to mass produce boy bands, soap operas, and the world's most popular smartphone"--

From one of our foremost cultural critics comes a provocative collection of essays on politics and popular culture in Mexico and the Hispanic community in the United States. Ilan Stavans examines the delightful if torturous relationship between a Europeanized elite and the hybrid masses in a continent he sees as imprisoned in the labyrinth of identity. In "Santa Selena," for example, Stavans explores the beatification of the martyred Tejana singer in the context of American pop iconography. Similarly, Stavans's portraits of Jose Guadalupe Posada, Tina Modotti, Frida Kahlo, Sandra Cisneros, Cantinflas, and Carlos Fuentes are less about these luminaries than about what people have turned them into. His search is not for the idol but for the idolater, and for ways in which technology and the media refurbish reality. This theme is nowhere more tangible than in the essay on Subcomandante Marcos as a postmodern incarnation of Che Guevara and Abimael Guzman, a mythical guerrillero whose best weapons were not the bayonet and hand grenade but the fax machine and e-mail.

Richard Brauer (1901-1977) was one of the leading algebraists of this century. Although he contributed to a number of mathematical fields, Brauer devoted the major share of his efforts to the study of finite groups, a subject of considerable abstract interest and one that underlies many of the more recent advances in combinatorics and finite geometries.