History

When Elon Musk was a kid in South Africa, he was regularly beaten by bullies. One day a group pushed him down some concrete steps and kicked him until his face was a swollen ball of flesh.

From one of tech’s boldest thinkers and his longtime deputy and advisor, a sweeping indictment of Silicon Valley, showing how the West has slid into a culture of complacency, even as we enter a new era of mounting global threats.

John Strausbaugh takes us behind the Iron Curtain in this witty, deeply researched history of the surprisingly ramshackle Soviet space program, and how its success was more spin than science....

Bitcoin was promised to be a liberating technology, a free market alternative to state-controlled money. But that promise was broken after a small group of insiders took over the project and fundamentally changed Bitcoin's design.

The smartphones in our pockets and computers like brains. The vagaries of game theory and evolutionary biology. Nuclear weapons and self-replicating spacecrafts. All bear the fingerprints of one remarkable, yet largely overlooked, man: John von Neumann....

From the New York Times bestselling author of Midnight in Chernobyl comes the definitive, dramatic, minute-by-minute story of the Challenger disaster, based on fascinating in-depth reporting and new archival research—a riveting history that flows like a thriller.

Part memoir, part history, Burn Book is a necessary chronicle of tech’s most powerful players. This is the inside story we’ve all been waiting for about modern Silicon Valley and the biggest boom in wealth creation in the history of the world....

Science writer Adam Becker investigates how Silicon Valley’s heartless, baseless, and foolish obsessions—with escaping death, emergent AI tyrants, and limitless growth—pervert public discourse and distract us from real social problems.

Following his blockbuster biography of Steve Jobs, The Innovators is Walter Isaacson’s revealing story of the people who created the computer and the Internet....

Thunderstruck tells the stories of two men: Hawley Crippen, a very unlikely murderer, and Guglielmo Marconi, the obsessive creator of a seemingly supernatural means of communication....

El esperado nuevo libro de Yuval Noah Harari, uno de los pensadores más innovadores, interesantes y clarividentes de la actualidad, y autor de Sapiens, el fenómeno literario global que ha cautivado a millones de lectores.

The phenomenal true story of the Black female mathematicians at NASA whose calculations helped fuel some of America's greatest achievements in space....

The binge-worthy first Western biography of SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, financial disruptor and personification of the 21st century’s addiction to instant wealth, Gambling Man is an unforgettable character study and alarming true story of twenty-first-century commerce.

The Soul of a New Machine is an essential chapter in the history of the machine that revolutionized the world in the 20th century....

An entertaining account of the philosophy and technology of hacking—and why we all need to understand it....

The virus now known as Stuxnet was unlike any other piece of malware built before: Rather than simply hijacking targeted computers or stealing information from them, it proved that a piece of code could escape the digital realm and wreak actual, physical destruction....

Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), credited as the inspiration for radio, robots, and even radar, has been called the patron saint of modern electricity....

A sweeping history of data and its technical, political, and ethical impact on our world....

The best-selling author traces the development of technology from the Industrial Age to the Digital Age to explore the single component crucial to advancement - precision - in a superb history....

Throughout history, technological change — whether it takes the form of agricultural improvements in the Middle Ages, the Industrial Revolution, or today’s artificial intelligence — has been viewed as a main driver of prosperity, working in the public interest.

The mastermind behind Apple sheds his low profile and steps forward to tell his story for the first time....

From Paleolithic flax to 3D knitting, explore the global history of textiles and the world they weave together in this enthralling and educational guide....

An insider look at the Large Language Models (LLMs) that are revolutionizing our relationship to technology, These Strange New Minds explores their surprising history, what they can and should do for us today, and where they will go in the future—from an AI pioneer and neuroscientist.

A celebrated commentator on the human consequences of technology, Nicholas Carr reorients the conversation around modern communication, challenging some of our most cherished beliefs about self-expression, free speech, and media democratization.

In this fully revised and updated edition of his internationally best-selling book, pioneering theorist and entrepreneur Matthew Ball goes beyond the hype cycle to present a definitive account of the future of the internet.