Jeff Jarvis

The remarkable true story of how one Peruvian carpenter led hundreds of Christians to Judaism, sparking a pilgrimage from the Andes to Israel and inspiring a wave of emerging Latin American Jewish communities “If Gabriel García Márquez had written the Old Testament, it might read like Graciela Mochkofsky's staggering true account of a humble Peruvian carpenter's spiritual odyssey from a shack in the Andes, via the Amazon, to the Promised Land of Israel with a community of devoted followers." —Judith Thurman, award-winning author of Isak Dinesen Segundo Villanueva was born in 1927 in a tiny farming village perched in the Andes; when he was seventeen, his father was murdered and Segundo was left with little more than a Bible as his inheritance. This Bible launched Segundo on a lifelong obsession to find the true message of God contained in its pages. He found himself looking for answers outside the Catholic Church, whose hierarchy and colonial roots embodied the gaping social and racial inequities of Peruvian society. Over years of religious study, Segundo explored various Protestant sects and founded his own religious community in the Amazon jungle before discovering a version of Judaism he pieced together independently from his readings of the Old Testament. His makeshift synagogue began to draw in crowds of fervent believers, seeking a faith that truly served their needs. Then, in a series of extraordinary events, politically motivated Israeli rabbis converted the community to Orthodox Judaism and resettled them on the West Bank. Segundo’s incredible journey made him an unlikely pioneer for a new kind of Jewish faith, one that is now attracting masses of impoverished people across Latin America. Through detailed reporting and a deep understanding of religious and cultural history, Graciela Mochkofsky documents this unprecedented and momentous chapter in the history of modern religion. This is a moving and fascinating story of faith and the search for dignity and meaning.

Lead your organizations, solve problems, and sustain your company’s growth with effective practices for complex, uncertain, and unpredictable environments In Move to the Edge, Declare it Center, CEO, entrepreneur, and strategist Everett Harper delivers a powerful and pragmatic take on solving complex problems by, and making decisions through, uncertainty. You’ll learn to discover insights quickly by experimenting, iterating, then building infrastructure to sustain your innovations in your teams and organizations. The author demonstrates a set of practices, processes, and infrastructure that addresses complex problems alongside a set of methods to systematize, scale, and share best practices throughout an organization. In the book, the author offers a new framework for leadership that’s perfectly suited to an increasingly volatile, uncertain, and unpredictable world. You’ll also get: Effective ways to make decisions in situations without complete information Strategies for sustaining your team through highly uncertain times Techniques for managing personal anxiety―a key leadership skill for the next decade Case studies of World Central Kitchen, COVID public health policymakers, and California wildfire responders illustrate the framework, while pragmatic playbooks about salary transparency, remote work, and diversity and inclusion will help leaders apply the framework in their own organizations.  The author shares personal stories and winning strategies that help leaders maintain high performance, avoid burnout, and enable companies to thrive. Move to the Edge, Declare it Center is perfect for business leaders facing complex problems that require immediate decisions in the face of uncertain outcomes. It’s also a must-read for anyone interested in modern leadership and looking for a way to help them make solid decisions with incomplete information.

Finalist, ABA Silver Gavel Award for Books The New York Times bestseller that has cemented Elie Mystal’s reputation as one of our sharpest and most acerbic legal minds “After reading Allow Me to Retort, I want Elie Mystal to explain everything I don’t understand—quantum astrophysics, the infield fly rule, why people think Bob Dylan is a good singer . . .” —Michael Harriot, The Root Allow Me to Retort is an easily digestible argument about what rights we have, what rights Republicans are trying to take away, and how to stop them. Mystal explains how to protect the rights of women and people of color instead of cowering to the absolutism of gun owners and bigots. He explains the legal way to stop everything from police brutality to political gerrymandering, just by changing a few judges and justices. He strips out all of the fancy jargon conservatives like to hide behind and lays bare the truth of their project to keep America forever tethered to its slaveholding past. Mystal brings his trademark humor, expertise, and rhetorical flair to explain concepts like substantive due process and the right for the LGBTQ community to buy a cake, and to arm readers with the knowledge to defend themselves against conservatives who want everybody to live under the yoke of eighteenth-century white men. The same tactics Mystal uses to defend the idea of a fair and equal society on MSNBC and CNN are in this book, for anybody who wants to deploy them on social media. You don’t need to be a legal scholar to understand your own rights. You don’t need to accept the “whites only” theory of equality pushed by conservative judges. You can read this book to understand that the Constitution is trash, but doesn’t have to be.

Perfect for book lovers, this is a fascinating exploration of the history of libraries and the people who built them, from the ancient world to the digital age. Famed across the known world, jealously guarded by private collectors, built up over centuries, destroyed in a single day, ornamented with gold leaf and frescoes, or filled with bean bags and children’s drawings—the history of the library is rich, varied, and stuffed full of incident. In The Library, historians Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen introduce us to the antiquarians and philanthropists who shaped the world’s great collections, trace the rise and fall of literary tastes, and reveal the high crimes and misdemeanors committed in pursuit of rare manuscripts. In doing so, they reveal that while collections themselves are fragile, often falling into ruin within a few decades, the idea of the library has been remarkably resilient as each generation makes—and remakes—the institution anew. Beautifully written and deeply researched, The Library is essential reading for booklovers, collectors, and anyone who has ever gotten blissfully lost in the stacks.

Over the years, tech companies were accustomed to cheerleading coverage of product launches, but in recent years the long tech-press honeymoon ended. It was replaced by a new era of mounting criticism focusing on tech’s negative impact on society. This emerging tech backlash is a story of pendulum swings between tech-utopianism and tech-dystopianism. When and why did media coverage shift to corporate misdeeds, and how did tech companies respond? The Techlash and Tech Crisis Communication provides an in-depth analysis of the evolution of tech journalism and reveals the “inside story” of the Techlash. Furthermore, it shows how Big Tech companies defend themselves from scrutiny by attempting to reduce their responsibility. From employee activism to political pushback, the ramifications are growing. Until now, the interplay between tech journalism and tech PR has been underexplored. Through analysis of both tech media and corporate crisis response, The Techlash and Tech Crisis Communication examines the roots and characteristics of the Techlash. Insightful observations by tech journalists and tech PR professionals are added to the research data, illuminating the profound changes in the power dynamics between the media and the tech giants they cover. Nirit Weiss-Blatt explores theoretical and practical implications for both tech enthusiasts and critics.

To you, perceptive reader, I bequeath my history....Late one night, exploring her father's library, a young woman finds an ancient book and a cache of yellowing letters. The letters are all addressed to "My dear and unfortunate successor," and they plunge her into a world she never dreamed of-a labyrinth where the secrets of her father's past and her mother's mysterious fate connect to an inconceivable evil hidden in the depths of history. The letters provide links to one of the darkest powers that humanity has ever known-and to a centuries-long quest to find the source of that darkness and wipe it out. It is a quest for the truth about Vlad the Impaler, the medieval ruler whose barbarous reign formed the basis of the legend of Dracula. Generations of historians have risked their reputations, their sanity, and even their lives to learn the truth about Vlad the Impaler and Dracula. Now one young woman must decide whether to take up this quest herself-to follow her father in a hunt that nearly brought him to ruin years ago, when he was a vibrant young scholar and her mother was still alive. What does the legend of Vlad the Impaler have to do with the modern world? Is it possible that the Dracula of myth truly existed-and that he has lived on, century after century, pursuing his own unknowable ends? The answers to these questions cross time and borders, as first the father and then the daughter search for clues, from dusty Ivy League libraries to Istanbul, Budapest, and the depths of Eastern Europe. In city after city, in monasteries and archives, in letters and in secret conversations, the horrible truth emerges about Vlad the Impaler's dark reign-and about a time-defying pact that may have kept his awful work alive down through the ages.Parsing obscure signs and hidden texts, reading codes worked into the fabric of medieval monastic traditions-and evading the unknown adversaries who will go to any lengths to conceal and protect Vlad's ancient powers-one woman comes ever closer to the secret of her own past and a confrontation with the very definition of evil. Elizabeth Kostova's debut novel is an adventure of monumental proportions, a relentless tale that blends fact and fantasy, history and the present, with an assurance that is almost unbearably suspenseful-and utterly unforgettable.

Technology has made human lives incomparably better. Civilization as we know it would utterly collapse without it. However, if not properly managed, technology can and will be systematically abused and misuse and thereby become one of the biggest threats to humankind. This open access book applies proactive crisis management to the management of technology organizations to make them more sustainable and socially responsible for the betterment of humankind. It forecasts the unintended consequences of technology and offers methods to counteract it.

Activists, pundits, politicians, and the press frequently proclaim today's digitally mediated racial justice activism the new civil rights movement. As Charlton D. McIlwain shows in this book, the story of racial justice movement organizing online is much longer and varied than most people know. In fact, it spans nearly five decades and involves a varied group of engineers, entrepreneurs, hobbyists, journalists, and activists. But this is a history that is virtually unknown even in our current age of Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Black Lives Matter. Beginning with the simultaneous rise of civil rights and computer revolutions in the 1960s, McIlwain, for the first time, chronicles the long relationship between African Americans, computing technology, and the Internet. In turn, he argues that the forgotten figures who worked to make black politics central to the Internet's birth and evolution paved the way for today's explosion of racial justice activism. From the 1960s to present, the book examines how computing technology has been used to neutralize the threat that black people pose to the existing racial order, but also how black people seized these new computing tools to build community, wealth, and wage a war for racial justice.Through archival sources and the voices of many of those who lived and made this history, Black Software centralizes African Americans' role in the Internet's creation and evolution, illuminating both the limits and possibilities for using digital technology to push for racial justice in the United States and across the globe.

One of The Wall Street Journal's Best Non fiction Books of 2011.  From modest beginnings as a tea shop in New York, the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company became the largest retailer in the world. It was a juggernaut, the first retailer to sell $1 billion in goods, the owner of nearly sixteen thousand stores and dozens of factories and warehouses. But its explosive growth made it a mortal threat to hundreds of thousands of mom-and-pop grocery stores. Main Street fought back tooth and nail, enlisting the state and federal governments to stop price discounting, tax chain stores, and require manufacturers to sell to mom and pop at the same prices granted to giant retailers. In a remarkable court case, the federal government pressed criminal charges against the Great A&P for selling food too cheaply—and won.  The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America is the story of a stunningly successful company that forever changed how Americans shop and what Americans eat. It is a brilliant business history, the story of how George and John Hartford took over their father’s business and reshaped it again and again, turning it into a vertically integrated behemoth that paved the way for every big-box retailer to come. George demanded a rock-solid balance sheet; John was the marketer-entrepreneur who led A&P through seven decades of rapid changes. Together, they built the modern consumer economy by turning the archaic retail industry into a highly efficient system for distributing food at low cost.

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER ‘Bella’s brilliant love letter to running turns into an extraordinarily brave and frank account of her battle with anxiety. A compassionate and important book’ Joe Lycett ‘Perfect for resetting a glum January mindset’ Alexandra Heminsley ‘My kind of role model’ Ben Fogle Divorced and struggling with deep-rooted mental health problems, Bella Mackie ended her twenties in tears. She could barely find the strength to get off the sofa, let alone piece her life back together. Until one day she did something she had never done of her own free will – she pulled on a pair of trainers and went for a run. That first attempt didn’t last very long. But to her surprise, she was back out there the next day. And the day after that. She began to set herself achievable goals – to run 5k in under 30 minutes, to walk to work every day for a week, to attempt 10 push-ups in a row. Before she knew it, her mood was lifting for the first time in years. In Jog On, Bella explains with hilarious and unfiltered honesty how she used running to battle crippling anxiety and depression, without having to sacrifice her main loves: booze, cigarettes and ice cream. With the help of a supporting cast of doctors, psychologists, sportspeople and friends, she shares a wealth of inspirational stories, research and tips that show how exercise often can be the best medicine. This funny, moving and motivational book will encourage you to say ‘jog on’ to your problems and get your life back on track – no matter how small those first steps may be.