Norbert Wiener, perhaps better than anyone else, understood the intimate and delicate relationship between control and communication: that messages intended as commands do not necessarily differ from those intended simply as facts. Wiener noted the paradox when the modem computer was hardly more than a laboratory curiosity. Thirty years later, the same paradox is at the heart of a severe identity crisis which con fronts computer programmers. Are they primarily members of "management" acting as foremen, whose task it is to ensure that orders emanating from executive suites are faithfully trans lated into comprehensible messages? Or are they perhaps sim ply engineers preoccupied with the technical difficulties of relating "software" to "hardware" and vice versa? Are they aware, furthermore, of the degree to which their work whether as manager or engineer-routinizes the work of others and thereby helps shape the structure of social class relation ships? I doubt that many of us who lived through the first heady and frantic years of software development-at places like the RAND and System Development Corporations-ever took time to think about such questions. The science fiction-like setting of mysterious machines, blinking lights, and torrents of numbers served to awe outsiders who could only marvel at the complexity of it all. We were insiders who constituted a secret society into which only initiates were welcome. So today I marvel at the boundless audacity of a rank out sider in writing a book like Programmers and Managers."

Between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth century, technology transformed the entertainment industry as much as it did such heavy industries as coal and steel. Among those most directly affected were musicians, who had to adapt to successive inventions and refinements in audio technology--from wax cylinders and gramophones to radio and sound films. In this groundbreaking study, James P. Kraft explores the intersection of sound technology, corporate power, and artistic labor during this disruptive period.

Kraft begins in the late nineteenth century's "golden age" of musicians, when demand for skilled instrumentalists often exceeded supply, analyzing the conflicts in concert halls, nightclubs, recording studios, radio stations, and Hollywood studios as musicians began to compete not only against their local counterparts but also against highly skilled workers in national "entertainment factories." Kraft offers an illuminating case study in the impact of technology on industry and society--and a provocative chapter in the cultural history of America.

In 2011, I wrote a haiku each day. These are those haikus. Dig it.

Lenny and Mel are back -- but they're undercover.
The boys are on the school paper, writing about after-school clubs as only they can ("Chess Team...Fun time or deadly sport?"). The brothers pose as members of the Glee Club, where they question the meaning of "glee"; Debate Club, where they debate the merits of Mel cleaning his room; and Future Farmers of America, where the future looks bleak...and they write about what "really" goes on in these clubs.
"Facts...Are they true...or are they deadly?"

Lenny and Mel know how to celebrate holidays in the best ways possible -- well, pretty much the best ways -- and they're ready to share their secrets with you. In this book, you'll learn how to tempt the Leftover Fairy after Thanksgiving. You'll find out the secret behind the mystical New Year's Eve ball drop. Then you'll see how papier-mâché, ziti, and raisins can come in handy on Presidents' Day and Cinco de Mayo. It's all inside. And there's much, much, much more....

Lenny and Mel kick off their incredible summer vacation by doing something huge, something they haven't done since last summer: nothing. They loaf. They doze. They dig into the fridge and come up with new and exciting lunch foods. They're bored -- and it's great! Then August hits, and it's time to go to the cabin. This means piling into the car with Grandma and their parents at the crack of dawn, and driving miles away to breathe fresh air, climb trees, and play with sticks.

"Yuck."

Dad says it'll be an "adventure." But Lenny and Mel know this is parent code for "bad stuff." Why can't they just do what they want this summer?