Other books that might interest you

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  Death Glitch - How...

  Tamara Kneese

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  An accessible yet erudite deep dive into how platforms are remaking experiences of death 
   
   
    
  Since the internet's earliest days, people have died and mourned online. In quiet corners of past iterations of the web, the dead linger. But attempts at preserving the data of the dead are often ill-fated, for websites and devices decay and die, just as people do. Death disrupts technologists' plans for platforms. It reveals how digital production is always collaborative, undermining the entrepreneurial platform economy and highlighting the flaws of techno-solutionism. 
   
   
    
  Big Tech has authority not only over people's lives but over their experiences of death as well. Ordinary users and workers, though, advocate for changes to tech companies' policies around death. Drawing on internet histories along with interviews with founders of digital afterlife startups, caretakers of illness blogs, and transhumanist tinkerers, the technology scholar Tamara Kneese takes listeners on a vibrant tour of the ways that platforms and people work together to care for digital remains. What happens when commercial platforms encounter the messiness of mortality?

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  Orgsm: A Memoir - Inside the...

  Ruwan Meepagala

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  An insider's true story of the "Orgasm cult” - written in the shadow of the 2025 federal conviction. 
  At twenty-four, he was broke, anxious, and sexually dysfunctional. A postcard advertising a "Meetup on Female Orgasm" seemed absurd. He went anyway. What he found changed everything. 
  Within months, he transformed from socially awkward to confident "stroker" living in an orgasm commune in Manhattan. The women were radiant and sexually empowered. The men possessed an almost supernatural ability to "feel" what others wanted. Every conversation was vulnerable. Every moment alive with sensation. It felt like he'd found the cheat codes to human connection. 
  But there was a price he couldn't see yet. 
  This raw, untold memoir reveals the real story not covered in Netflix's Orgasm Inc. 
  The Netflix documentary told you it was a cult. 
  The Bloomberg investigation exposed the crimes. 
  The FBI built the case. 
  But no one has shown you how it actually worked from the inside - until now. 
  This is the primary source account. Two years inside at the peak. 
  The complete psychological architecture of how intelligent people get seduced, transformed, and nearly destroyed. 
  Not a victim interview looking back. 
  The story shows how intelligent people get trapped in high-control groups. How the same methods used to help people can be weaponized to control them. How trauma and transformation can be impossible to separate. 
  This is the nuanced, uncomfortable truth that most coverage misses.

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  Malta: A Childhood Under Siege

  Linda Peek

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  “Air raid warning, air raid warning. Shut your doors and windows.” 
  The Rediffusion blared out in English and then in Maltese, at 6:55am on the morning of 11 June 1940. 
  This was the first of many times we would hear that warning. The day our lives changed. 
  Margaret Staples was nine years old at the beginning of 1939 when her father was posted to the British colony of Malta with the Royal Engineers. Swimming every day, with blue skies and balmy weather; Margaret and her siblings thought they were in paradise. 
  Everything changed when the Second World War broke out. Hitler wanted to take control of Malta for its strategic position, right in the middle of the Mediterranean. To this end, the Axis powers dropped more bombs on this tiny island than anywhere else on the planet. When that didn’t work, they decided to sink all the supply ships going to the island and force capitulation through starvation. 
  This is Margaret’s story of survival, told by her daughter Linda.

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  A Plane and Simple Connection

  Eskay Kabba

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  Ryan D. Ryder meets Mr. Deep Strokez 
  Rion Matthews is an up-and-coming indie author under the pen name Ryan D. Ryder, named for his favorite sexual position. For research on his newest steamy story, Rion gets on a plane for the first time in his life. 
  Across the aisle is Nicholas Highton, a rich playboy who runs a magazine called Deep Strokez, focusing on sex news, stories, and gossip. 
  During the seven-hour redeye to Heathrow, they instantly connect while sharing life stories, deepest fears, and airplane snacks. When Nick invites Rion to stay with him at his hotel, their new friendship quickly blossoms into a steamy, erotic affair. 
  Rion and Nick explore London-and each other's bodies-for one summer month until the reality of family issues and their very different social standing and economic class pulls them apart. Both have to decide: Is their magnetic connection worth fighting for?

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  Baikonur Man - Space Science...

  Barry L. Stoddard

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  Against the backdrop of the late Cold War, a tiny American start-up company forged a secret deal to place American scientific payloads aboard the Soviet space station MIR. Born out of sheer desperation after the Challenger explosion and grounding of the United States space shuttle program, the agreement was negotiated and approved behind the backs of NASA and Congress, with the help of United States government officials inside the Commerce and Defense departments. 
   
   
   
  On a cold gray morning in February 1988, the company founder met with three graduate students and their professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to put his plans into action. Baikonur Man, written by one of those students, recounts the subsequent five-year saga of how science, comradery, hardship, drama, and occasional lunacy led to the first American experiments and payloads to fly on Russian rockets.

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  Am I Alone Here? - Notes on...

  Peter Orner

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  "Stories, both my own and those I've taken to heart, make up whoever it is that I've become," Peter Orner writes in this collection of essays about reading, writing, and living. Orner reads and writes everywhere he finds himself: a hospital cafeteria, a coffee shop in Albania, or a crowded bus in Haiti. The result is a book of unlearned meditations that stumbles into memoir. 
   
   
   
  Among the many writers Orner addresses are Isaac Babel and Zora Neale Hurston, both of whom told their truths and were silenced; Franz Kafka, who professed loneliness but craved connection; Robert Walser, who spent the last twenty-three years of his life in a Swiss insane asylum, working at being crazy; and Juan Rulfo, who practiced the difficult art of silence. Virginia Woolf, Eudora Welty, Yasunari Kawabata, Saul Bellow, Mavis Gallant, John Edgar Wideman, William Trevor, and Václav Havel make appearances, as well as the poet Herbert Morris—about whom almost nothing is known. 
   
   
   
   
  An elegy for an eccentric late father, and the end of a marriage, Am I Alone Here? is also a celebration of the possibility of renewal. At once personal and panoramic, this book will inspire listeners to return to the essential stories of their own lives.

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