First published in 1971 and written in the midst of radical political developments whose direction Alinsky was one of the first to question, this volume exhibits his style at its best. Like Thomas Paine before him, Alinsky was able to combine, both in his person and his writing, the intensity of political engagement with an absolute insistence on rational political discourse and adherence to the American democratic tradition.
A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice
Our title suggests an Artificial Intelligence approach to the use of computers in the fine arts. We consider computers to have capabilities beyond the utilitarian ones of aiding in art making. Rather, we will investigate the possibility of computers seeing, even understanding, significant form in art. This understanding cannot rise autonomously, but must be the product of careful tutelage by artists, critics, and historians. A powerful tutorial mechanism to use for computers to learn about art is the picture grammar, which allows large classes of compositional structures to be described to a computer by the scholar who has a deep understanding of the art works. In this paper, we illustrate how a machine can be taught the compositional structure of the paintings of the contemporary artist Richard Diebenkorn. With such grammatical instruction, the computer can analyze existing paintings, generate new ones of the same style, and provide a beginning to a computational theory of style.
The proliferation of smart devices, digital media, and network technologies has led to everyday people experiencing everyday things increasingly on and through the screen. In fact, much of the world has become so saturated by digital mediations that many individuals have adopted digitally inflected sensibilities. This gestures not simply toward posthumanism, but more fundamentally toward an altogether post-digital condition-one in which the boundaries between the "real" and the "digital" have become blurred and technology has fundamentally reconfigured how we make sense of the world. Post-Digital Rhetoric and the New Aesthetic takes stock of these reconfigurations and their implications for rhetorical studies by taking up the New Aesthetic-a movement introduced by artist/digital futurist James Bridle that was meant to capture something of a digital way of seeing by identifying aesthetic values that could not exist without computational and digital technologies. Bringing together work in rhetoric, art, and digital media studies, Hodgson treats the New Aesthetic as a rhetorical ecology rather than simply an aesthetic movement, allowing him to provide operative guides for the knowing, doing, and making of rhetoric in a post-digital culture.
ABOUT THE EINSTEIN FACTOR
“The Einstein Factor liberates mental abilities you didn’t know you had. I tried the techniques in the book and they paid off instantly. It’s almost scary.” —Duncan Maxwell Anderson, senior editor, Success.
New research suggests that the superior achievements of famous thinkers may have been more the result of mental conditioning than genetic superiority. Now you can learn to condition your mind in the same way and improve your performance in virtually all aspects of mental ability, including memory, quickness, IQ, and learning capacity.
Intelligence pioneer Dr. Win Wenger has identified the tools you need to reach greater levels of sharpness, insight, and overall intelligence. Using Wenger’s Image Streaming technique, you learn to bypass inhibitions and access the hypernormal capabilities hidden in your own subconscious. Discover how you can:
• Improve your memory
• Read faster and learn more quickly
• Solve problems like a genius
• Score higher on tests
• Build self-esteem
• Induce a state of total creative absorption
• Access powerful subconscious insights through visualization
• Increase your intelligence
The Einstein Factor is your key to living an extraordinarily effective and creative life!
Professionals today, whether scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, or managers, need to maximize their effectiveness. Real world problems are complex and must be tackled with adequate conceptual tools. Hard work and motivation are not enough. Professionals need to think strategically in order to choose the right problem to solve, to solve it in a cost-effective way, to use resources efficiently, and to be innovative and productive. Written in a concise, accessible style, Thinking Strategically goes beyond brainstorming motivational books to provide the power tools needed to dissect problems and to find innovative solutions. These tools are based on an understanding of the power of bottlenecks, paradox, scale and perspective constraints, and feedback as leverage points for getting a grip on the problem. The result is a practical book for managers and other professionals about the strategic use of effort that can lead to astonishing levels of productivity.
Otto Rank, an Austrian psychoanalyst and one of Sigmund Freud's early colleagues, had a unique perspective on the artist's role in society and their psychological makeup. In his works, especially in "Art and Artist" (1932), Rank explores the psychological processes involved in creativity and the artist's struggle with artistic expression.
Rank proposed that there are three types of people concerning their approach to life and creativity:
The Average Person: This type conforms to societal norms and expectations, often suppressing their personal creative impulses to maintain social harmony and personal security.
The Neurotic: According to Rank, neurotics are individuals who feel the impulse to create or express themselves but are overwhelmed by the anxiety it causes. They may retreat from their creative impulses due to the fear of the unknown and the potential disruption to their sense of self and their societal roles.
The Artist: The third type, the artist, manages to harness their creative impulses in a way that both expresses their personal vision and communicates universally relatable truths to others. Unlike the neurotic, the artist confronts and integrates their anxieties into their work, using creativity as a form of therapy and self-realization. Artists are able to live with the tension between their individual needs and the demands of society, transforming personal conflicts into expressive and often socially accepted artistic creations.
Rank's theory highlights the artist as someone who not only produces art to satisfy personal needs but also transforms personal suffering into something that has universal appeal. This transformation is a key aspect of what Rank saw as the therapeutic value of art, both for the artist and for those who engage with the artist's work.
Understanding Rank's view helps to appreciate how he saw the artist as a pivotal figure in bridging inner psychological realities with external social expressions, contributing deeply to the cultural and emotional life of their communities.
Rank’s development of will psychology led him to a philosophy of the psychological, outlined in Truth and Reality. Here he explores the psychological determinants of the relationship of inner world to outer reality.
Anticipating one of the central findings of post-Freudian psychiatry, he argues that “truth” is irrelevant to the work of therapy. He contrasts the negative externalization of will, which leads to denial and guilt, with the creative power of will, tracing this conflict in both the individual and the history of human society.
You might have trouble imagining life without your social media accounts, but virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier insists that we’re better off without them. In Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, Lanier, who participates in no social media, offers powerful and personal reasons for all of us to leave these dangerous online platforms.
In User Friendly, Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant reveal the untold story of a paradigm that quietly rules our modern lives: the assumption that machines should anticipate what we need. Spanning over a century of sweeping changes, from women’s rights to the Great Depression to World War II to the rise of the digital era, this book unpacks the ways in which the world has been—and continues to be—remade according to the principles of the once-obscure discipline of user-experience design.
In this essential text, Kuang and Fabricant map the hidden rules of the designed world and shed light on how those rules have caused our world to change—an underappreciated but essential history that’s pieced together for the first time. Combining the expertise and insight of a leading journalist and a pioneering designer, User Friendly provides a definitive, thoughtful, and practical perspective on a topic that has rapidly gone from arcane to urgent to inescapable. In User Friendly, Kuang and Fabricant tell the whole story for the first time—and you’ll never interact with technology the same way again.
List of books that cover major ideas in tech.
“Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real.”
Elon Musk recommends reading @waitbutwhy by Tim Urban.
Advanced Methods to Learn, Remember, and Master New Skills and Information
The revised and updated translation of sacred gnostic texts
Zero To One by Peter Thiel
High Output Management by Grove
The Lean Startup Ries
Behave by Sapolsky
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Kanneman
The Network State by Srinivasan
Read Write Own by Dixon
The Courage to Be Disliked by Kishimi and Koga
The Hard Thing About Hard Thigng by Horowitz
poor Charlie Almanac by Munger
Rational Optimist by Ridley
Job Stacking by Haltza
Extreme Ownership by Willink and Babin
Becoming STeve Jobs by Schlender and Tetzeli
All out War by Shipman
When the Wolves Bite by Wapner
the World that Wasn't by Steil
Paper Belt on Fire by Gibson
Private Truths, Public Lies by Kuran
Blitzed by Ohler
Rise of the Machines by Rid
Snow Crash by Stephenson
The Weirdest People in the World by Henrich
Patter Breakers by Maples and Ziebelman
I'll make a more thorough attempt to identify the visible books, moving roughly from top to bottom and left to right:
In the leftmost stack:
Several dark-colored books but titles are too blurry to read reliably
Middle-left stack:
"How to Read a Book"
"Shoe Dog" by Phil Knight
"Autobiography" (appears to be by Yogi)
"Sapiens" by Yuval Noah Harari
"The Stranger" (appears to be by Albert Camus)
Some blurry titles in between
Middle-right stack:
"The Upanishads"
"Never Split the Difference"
"Escape from Freedom" by Erich Fromm
"Finite and Infinite Games"
"Raising Lions"
"Inner Engineering"
"Levels"
"Life After Life"
Rightmost stack:
Several red-spined books including what appears to be titles by Christopher McDougall
"Games People Play"
"Utopia"
There are many other books visible but their titles are either too blurry or partially obscured to read with confidence. The stacks appear to be a mix of philosophy, psychology, business, and self-development books.
I also notice what appears to be titles by authors like Seth Godin and Elizabeth Gilbert in the collection, though I can't make out the specific book titles clearly.
Ryan Holiday asked ppl on X... "What's your favorite book to re-read?"
social proof to me that there's something in these books that are either perpetual or discoverable on subsequent reads.
Attention all psychonauts, trip sitters, shamans, taitas, mamas, facilitators, guardians, seekers, and journeyers!
My psychedelic book is taking shape! The title is changing to HAVE A NICE TRIP! with the subtitle "A No BS Guide to Getting the Most Out of Plant Medicine"
I want to talk to people! I've had plenty of my own experiences and now I've been to retreats and such. However, there are many approaches and I've already talked to a lot of people (more than a dozen interviews already!)
So, if you're interested in contributing, please HMU in the comments and we can exchange some DMs and maybe hop on a call.