An irreverent new take on the Renaissance, which reveals it as anything but Europe's golden age. From the darkness of a plagued and war-torn Middle Ages, the Renaissance (we're told) heralds the dawning of a new world--a halcyon age of art, prosperity, and rebirth. Hogwash! or so says award-winning novelist and historian Ada Palmer. In Inventing the Renaissance, Palmer turns her witty and irreverent eye on the fantasies we've told ourselves about Europe's not-so-golden age, myths she sets right with sharp clarity. Palmer's Renaissance is altogether desperate. Troubled by centuries of conflict, she argues, Europe looked to a long-lost Roman Empire (even its education practices) to save them from unending war. Later historians met their own political challenges with a similarly nostalgic vision, only now they looked to the Renaissance and told a partial story. To right this wrong, Palmer offers fifteen provocative portraits of Renaissance men and women (some famous, some obscure) whose lives reveal a far more diverse, fragile, and wild Renaissance than its glowing reputation suggests.

Discover the joy and power of walking in the footsteps of Jesus. There is an image of Jesus we often possess in our minds, and there is a Jesus of the Scriptures. Unfortunately the two aren't always consistent. Often the emphasis in preaching, teaching, and writing is placed on Christ's death and resurrection. These aspects of Jesus's ministry are obviously essential, but so is His life. Through Christ's death we received forgiveness and reconciliation; however, His life provides us with something that is equally an example. Without His example, godliness becomes a nebulous notion that can mutate into a religion that doesn't reflect its founder. Re-Present Jesus identifies twelve core character traits of Jesus and coaches the reader into discerning how these traits can be applied to their own lives and contexts. Covering attributes such as His love, wisdom, grace, generosity, and humility, Daniels presents a picture of Jesus that people will want to follow.

The spine-tingling bestseller that has taken Japan by storm—an eerie fresh take on horror for fans of Hidden Pictures and Junji Ito, in which a series of seemingly innocent pictures draws you into a disturbing web of unsolved mysteries and shattered psyches. An exploration of the macabre, where the seemingly mundane takes on a terrifying significance. . . . A pregnant woman's sketches on a seemingly innocuous blog conceal a chilling warning. A child's picture of his home contains a dark secret message. A sketch made by a murder victim in his final moments leads an amateur sleuth down a rabbithole that will reveal a horrifying reality. Structured around these nine childlike drawings, each holding a disturbing clue, Uketsu invites readers to piece together the mystery behind each and the over-arching backstory that connects them all. Strange Pictures is the internationally bestselling debut from mystery horror YouTube sensation Uketsu—an enigmatic masked figure who has become one of Japan's most talked about contemporary authors.

A revelatory new history of the Irish Great Famine, showing how the British Empire caused Ireland’s most infamous disaster In 1845, European potato fields from Spain to Scandinavia were attacked by a novel pathogen. But it was only in Ireland, then part of the United Kingdom, that the blight’s devastation reached apocalyptic levels, leaving more than a million people dead and forcing millions more to emigrate. In Rot, historian Padraic X. Scanlan offers the definitive account of the Great Famine, showing how Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom and the British Empire made it uniquely vulnerable to starvation. Ireland’s overreliance on the potato was a desperate adaptation to an unstable and unequal marketplace created by British colonialism. The empire’s laissez-faire economic policies saw Ireland exporting livestock and grain even as its people starved. When famine struck, relief efforts were premised on the idea that only free markets and wage labor could save the Irish. Ireland’s wretchedness, before and during the Great Famine, was often blamed on Irish backwardness, but in fact, it resulted from the British Empire’s embrace of modern capitalism. Uncovering the disaster’s roots in Britain’s deep imperial faith in markets, commerce, and capitalism, Rot reshapes our understanding of the Great Famine and its tragic legacy.

A beautifully illustrated tour of the world's most influential buildings. "Architecture is an all-embracing adventure without end," declares Dan Cruickshank in the introduction to A History of Architecture in 100 Buildings. Cruickshank's selection represents key moments in architectural history and it is truly global in scope. It includes many of the world's best-known structures, and many less obvious ones, the unsung heroes of this great and fascinating story. Having visited most of the featured buildings himself, his book is both authoritative and intimate. From the evocative remains of ancient civilizations to towering New York skyscrapers, Cruickshank's A History of Architecture in 100 Buildings is organized in seven themes. Examples are: Pioneers -- Pantheon (Rome), National Library (Paris), Flatiron Building (New York), Norkomfin Housing (Moscow), Casa Malaparte (Capri) Buildings of Vision -- Sculpture, Gate of Lions (Greece), Krak des Chevaliers (Syria), Maori Meeting House (New Zealand), Assembly Buildings (Bangladesh), Moscow Metro (Russia) Follies -- Bishop's Castle (Colorado), Falling Water (Pennsylvania), Sagrada Familia (Barcelona) Ancient, Lost and Disappearing Worlds -- Uruk (Iraq), Mud City of Chan Chan (Peru), Mesa Verde (Colorado), R.F. Scott's Hut (Antarctica), Oratory of Gallerus (Ireland) Scale: Where Size Matters -- Burj Khalif (Dubai), Crystal Island Complex (Moscow), Towers Of San Gimignano (Italy), Pyramid of the Sun and Ciudadela (Teotihuacan, Mexico), Ulm Minster (Germany) Rhetoric and Meaning -- Ise Inner Shrine (Japan), Christ in the Attic (Amsterdam), Taj Mahal (India), Crystal Island Complex (Russia), The Palace of Ctesiphon (Iraq) Survivals and Revivals -- Slave Cabins (New Orleans), Catherine Palace (Russia), Carcassonne (France) Watson's Hotel (Mumbai), Eastern State Penitentiary (Philadelphia). Architects, historians, travelers and inquisitive readers will enjoy this beautiful, sumptuously illustrated book.

An Instant New York Times Bestseller“Excellent and deeply reported.” —Tim Wu, The New York Times“Startling and intensely researched . . . an essential account of how OpenAI and ChatGPT came to be and the catastrophic places they will likely take us.” —Vulture“Hao’s reporting inside OpenAI is exceptional, and she’s persuasive in her argument that the public should focus less on A.I.’s putative ‘sentience’ and more on its implications for labor and the environment.” —Benjamin Wallace-Wells, New YorkerFrom a brilliant longtime AI insider with intimate access to the world of Sam Altman's OpenAI from the beginning, an eye-opening account of arguably the most fateful tech arms race in history, reshaping the planet in real time, from the cockpit of the company that is driving the frenzyWhen AI expert and investigative journalist Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI in 2019, she thought they were the good guys. Founded as a nonprofit with safety enshrined as its core mission, the organization was meant, its leader Sam Altman told us, to act as a check against more purely mercantile, and potentially dangerous, forces. What could go wrong?Over time, Hao began to wrestle ever more deeply with that question. Increasingly, she realized that the core truth of this massively disruptive sector is that its vision of success requires an almost unprecedented amount of the “compute” power of high-end chips and the processing capacity to create massive large language models, the sheer volume of data that needs to be amassed at scale, the humans “cleaning up” that data for sweatshop wages throughout the Global South, and a truly alarming spike in the usage of energy and water underlying it all. The truth is that we have entered a new and ominous age of only a small handful of globally scaled companies can even enter the field of play. At the head of the pack with its ChatGPT breakthrough, how would OpenAI resist such temptations?Spoiler it didn’t. Armed with Microsoft’s billions, OpenAI is setting a breakneck pace, chased by a small group of the most valuable companies in human history—toward what end, not even they can define. All this time, Hao has maintained her deep sourcing within the company and the industry, and so she was in intimate contact with the story that shocked the entire tech industry—Altman’s sudden firing and triumphant return. The behind-the-scenes story of what happened, told here in full for the first time, is revelatory of who the people controlling this technology really are. But this isn’t just the story of a single company, however fascinating it is. The g forces pressing down on the people of OpenAI are deforming the judgment of everyone else too—as such forces do. Naked power finds the ideology to cloak itself; no one thinks they’re the bad guy. But in the meantime, as Hao shows through intrepid reporting on the ground around the world, the enormous wheels of extraction grind on. By drawing on the viewpoints of Silicon Valley engineers, Kenyan data laborers, and Chilean water activists, Hao presents the fullest picture of AI and its impact we’ve seen to date, alongside a trenchant analysis of where things are headed. An astonishing eyewitness view from both up in the command capsule of the new economy and down where the real suffering happens, Empire of AI pierces the veil of the industry defining our era.

Before Grand Master Elmore Leonard earned his well-deserved reputation as “the best writer of crime fiction alive” (Newsweek), he penned some of the finest western fiction to ever appear in print. (The classics Hombre, Valdez is Coming, and 3:10 to Yuma were just a few of his notable works.) With his extraordinary Cuba Libre, Leonard ingeniously combines all of his many talents and delivers a historical adventure/caper/western/noir like none other. The creator of U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens, star of Raylan, Pronto, Riding the Rap, and TV’s Justified, spins a gloriously exciting yarn about an American horse wrangler who escapes a date with a Cuban firing squad to join forces with a powerful sugar baron’s lady looking to make waves and score big in and around Spanish-American War-torn Havana in 1898. Everything you love about Leonard’s fiction—and more—is evident in Cuba Libre.