Archives de catégorie : Nonfiction

THE WANDERLUST CREAMERY PRESENTS: THE WORLD OF ICE CREAM d’Adrienne Borlongan

Learn the art of artisanal ice–cream making from the flavor experts at LA–based popular ice cream chain Wanderlust Creamery.

THE WANDERLUST CREAMERY PRESENTS: THE WORLD OF ICE CREAM
by Adrienne Borlongan
Abrams, June 2024

With a family background in ice–cream making and a degree in food science, the flavor chemist behind LA–based Wanderlust Creamery, Adrienne Borlongan, turned her interest in recipe development and travel into a successful ice cream business. She and her husband, JP Lopez, started Wanderlust in 2017, and they now have seven stores that feature a rotating selection of around 400 different seasonal/regional flavors throughout the year. From reinvented classics with Asian flair like macadamia kona latte to bestselling Wanderlust flavors like oolong pineapple cake to « rice creams » like sticky rice mango and more, fans just can’t seem to get enough of their unique concoctions. And with THE WANDERLUST CREAMERY PRESENTS: THE WORLD OF ICE CREAM, ice cream enthusiasts will be able to learn the basics of ice–cream making and the science behind creating balanced flavor profiles. Featuring 80 deeply researched and developed ice cream flavors, this ultimate ice cream guide is full of recipes that celebrate the flavors, ingredients, and cultures from around the world. Making mouthwatering, one–of–a–kind global flavors from the comfort of your own home—no matter your skill level—has never been easier.

Adrienne Borlongan is a food science graduate of California State University Northridge (CSUN) and conceptualizes and crafts all of Wanderlust Creamery’s ice cream flavors. The granddaughter of a flavor chemist from Magnolia Ice Cream, Adrienne developed her palate and understanding of flavor theory while working as a mixologist, crafting multiple cocktail programs for SBE hospitality. She and her husband, JP Lopez, started LA–based Wanderlust Creamery in 2017, and they now have seven stores that feature a rotating selection of around 400 different seasonal/regional flavors throughout the year.

WOMEN MONEY POWER de Josie Cox

From an experienced financial journalist, the story of how women have fought for financial freedom, and the social and political hurdles that have keep them from equality.

WOMEN MONEY POWER
The Rise and Fall of Economic Equality
by Josie Cox
Abrams, March 2024

For centuries, women were denied equal access to money and the freedom and power that came with it. They were restricted from owning property or transacting in real estate. Even well into the 20th century, women could not take out their own loans or own bank accounts without their husband’s permission. They could be fired for getting married or pregnant, and if they still had a job, they could be kept from certain roles, restricted from working longer hours, and paid less than men for equal work.

It was a raw deal, and women weren’t happy with it. So they pushed back. In WOMEN MONEY POWER, financial journalist Josie Cox tells the story of women’s fight for financial freedom. This is an inspirational account of brave pioneers who took on social mores and the law, including the “Rosies” who filled industrial jobs vacated by men and helped win WWII, the heiress whose fortune helped create the birth control pill, the brassy investor who broke into the boys’ club of the New York Stock Exchange, and the namesake of landmark equal pay legislation who refused to accept discrimination.

But as any woman can tell you, the battle for equality—for money and power—is far from over. Cox delves deep into the challenges women face today and the culture and systems that hold them back. This is a fascinating narrative account of progress, women’s lives, and the work still to be done.

Josie Cox is a journalist, editor, and broadcaster with a particular interest in business, workplace culture, and equality. She has an extensive professional network and experience working for a broad range of media outlets in Germany, Switzerland, the UK, and the US, including Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, and The Independent, where she served as business editor. As a freelancer, her work has appeared in The Guardian, Fortune, Forbes, The Times and Sunday Times of London, and other publications. She has appeared as a commentator on CNN, Fox News, Al Jazeera, and Sky News, and is a regular guest on the BBC. Cox was a fully funded 2020/2021 Knight–Bagehot Fellow at Columbia Journalism School. She has an MBA from Columbia Business School and is also an associate instructor within the Strategic Communications program at Columbia’s School of Professional Studies. She lives in New York City.

THE END OF REALITY de Jonathan Taplin

A brilliant takedown and exposé of the great con job of the twenty-first century—the metaverse, crypto, space travel, transhumanism—being sold by four billionaires (Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreesen, Elon Musk), leading to the degeneration and bankruptcy of our society.

THE END OF REALITY:
How Four Billionaires are Selling a Fantasy Future of The Metaverse, Mars, and Crypto
by Jonathan Taplin
PublicAffairs, September 2023
(via Writers House)

At a time when the crises of income inequality, climate, and democracy are compounding to create epic wealth disparity and the prospect of a second American civil war, four billionaires are hyping schemes that are designed to divert our attention away from issues that really matter. Each scheme—the metaverse, cryptocurrency, space travel, and transhumanism—is an existential threat in moral, political, and economic terms.
In THE END OF REALITY¸ Jonathan Taplin provides perceptive insight into the personal backgrounds and cultural power of these billionaires—Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Marc Andreesen (“The Four”) —and shows how their tech monopolies have brought middle-class wage stagnation, the hollowing out of many American towns, a radical increase in income inequality, and unbounded public acrimony. Meanwhile, the enormous amount of taxpayer money to be funneled into the dystopian ventures of « The Four, » the benefits of which will accrue to billionaires, exacerbate these disturbing trends. 
THE END OF REALITY is both scathing critique and reform agenda that replaces the warped worldview of « The Four » with a vision of regenerative economics that seeks to build a sustainable society with healthy growth and full employment.

“Persuasive and insightful, this cutting portrait of America on the verge of oligarchy hits home.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

Jonathan Taplin is a public intellectual, writer, film producer, and scholar. He is the director emeritus of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California and professor at the USC Annenberg School from in the field of international communication management and digital media entertainment. His extraordinary journey has put him at the crest of every major cultural wave in the past half century: he was tour manager for Bob Dylan and the Band, producer of major films such as Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets, an executive at Merrill Lynch, creator of the Internet’s first video-on-demand service  and a cultural critic and author writing about technology in the new millennium. His book Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy (Little Brown 2017) was nominated by the Financial Times as one of the Best Business Books of 2017. His commentary has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time magazine, the Huffington Post, the Guardian, Medium, the Washington Monthly, and the Wall Street Journal.

DESPERATELY SEEKING SOMETHING de Susan Seidelman

From the director of Desperately Seeking Susan and the pilot of Sex and the City comes DESPERATELY SEEKING SOMETHING, a charming and insightful memoir from Susan Seidelman, who blazed a trail in the early 1980s for a future generation of women filmmakers.

DESPERATELY SEEKING SOMETHING
by Susan Seidelman
Macmillan, June 2024
(via Writers House)

In the early 1970s, Susan Seidelman left the ordinary suburb in which she was raised and moved to New York City to become someone different. The city was bankrupt, crumbling, cheap… and the Lower East Side was evolving into a creative playground for artists and misfits looking to reinvent themselves. There, Seidelman would break boundaries: first as an award winning independent film director of Smithereens (the first independent film nominated at the Cannes Film Festival), then as a much sought after studio director when Hollywood was still run as an all-boys club. Her work would become an important part of the zeitgeist that influenced the music, fashion, and pop culture of America in the 1980s and 90s as she unapologetically challenged the male gaze that permeated most movies of that time.

A story about feminism and creativity, and a fascinating look behind the scenes, DESPERATELY SEEKING SOMETHING is a treat for cinephiles, aspiring filmmakers, feminists, gender studies scholars, pop culture enthusiasts, New York City history lovers, punks, “bad girls,” aging Baby Boomers, and everyone and anyone who believes in the power of reinvention.

Susan Seidelman began her directorial career in the 1980s when her low budget film Smithereens became the first American Independent film accepted into the Official Competition at the Cannes Film Festival. It went on to garner awards at several major international festivals and is currently distributed by the “Criterion Collection”. Susan’s next endeavor Desperately Seeking Susan (starring Madonna and Rosanna Arquette) was a critical and commercial success that helped launch the screen careers of many emerging actors of that time. The film premiered at Cannes in 1985, was nominated for a French “Cesar” for Best Foreign Film and voted one of the top 100 films of all times by the BBC. Directing the pilot and early episodes of HBO’s hit series Sex and the City are among the highlights of Seidelman’s TV career, which also includes two Emmy nominations for her Showtime movie A Cooler Climate.

THE TIME OF AI de Kate Crawford

A riveting, intellectual journey through the history of artificial intelligence and how it has shaped culture and the workplace.

THE TIME OF AI
How Generative AI is Changing Culture, Work, Politics and Time
by Kate Crawford
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2026
(via The Gernert Company)

A leading scholar of artificial intelligence explores the ways in which AI is shaping contemporary culture: how it will change our lives, for better and for worse, and what it means to live in this crucial, watershed moment. The book will be structured around five parts, each centered on a basic ingredient of human creation: Words, Images, Sounds, Motion, and Systems. The chapters contend with how each element is transformed by AI systems, and how the industries that depend upon it are changing, Asking what does this mean for us, as individuals and as a society, Professor Crawford posits that the best way to understand the cultural metamorphosis underway is to start with how AI makes things for us, and what we are making of it. In this way, the book speaks to changes at the foundational level of human creation, as well as addressing a dramatic series of simultaneous industrial shifts.

Kate Crawford is a leading international scholar of artificial intelligence. She is a Distinguished Professor at USC Annenberg in Los Angeles, a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, and the inaugural Visiting Chair for AI and Justice at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. She has founded multiple research groups including FATE at Microsoft Research, the AI Now Institute at New York University, and the Knowing Machines Group at the University of Southern California. Her last book, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (Yale University Press, 2021), won multiple awards including the prestigious Sally Hacker Prize, and was described by the Financial Times and New Scientist as one of the best books of the year.