Heligo

What happens when our cultural and artistic lives are dictated to us by an algorithm? What does it mean when shareability supersedes innovation? How can we make a choice when the options have been so carefully arranged for us? From coffee shops to city grids to TikTok feeds and Netflix homepages the world over, algorithmic recommendations prescribe our experiences. This network of mathematically determined choices - the 'Filterworld' - has taken over, almost unnoticed, as we've grown accustomed to an insipid new normal. But to have our tastes, behaviours, and emotions governed by computers calls the very notion of free will into question. Internationally recognized journalist and New Yorker staff writer Kyle Chayka journeys through this ever-tightening web woven by algorithms. He explores how online and offline spaces alike have been engineered for seamless consumption. How the lowest common denominator is promoted at the expense of the complex, diverse or challenging. How users of technology contend with data-driven equations that promise to anticipate their desires but often get them wrong. How the FIlterworld is determining the very shape of culture itself. Chayka skilfully and compellingly traces this creeping, machine-guided curation that influences not just what culture we consume, but what culture is produced. In doing so, he attempts to answer to the most urgent question currently facing us: is personal freedom ever again possible on the Internet? Filterworld is a fascinating history of the rise of the algorithm and an important investigation into where it could take us next - if we let it.

On 2 November 2023, in one of the largest fraud trials in history, Sam Bankman-Fried was found guilty of stealing billions of dollars from the customers of his crypto-exchange, FTX. How did this 31-year-old Californian in shorts and a T-shirt manage to become one of the most famous CEOs in the world? How did greed, fear and free money inflate the crypto bubble until it finally popped with devastating consequences for millions of people who lost money in the crash? Who were the enablers, investors and innovators who transformed the original promise of crypto into a digital Wild West? Hype Machine is the definitive story of the boom and bust of crypto, written by award-winning Financial Times journalist Joshua Oliver. Expansive, nuanced and eminently entertaining, it demystifies the crypto circus by following the journeys of its most influential participants and the trajectory of SBF, its enigmatic ringmaster. Oliver, who reported on the crypto crash with extensive access to SBF himself, introduces readers to the people and ideas that shaped crypto's wild rise and fall, including Arthur Hayes, Changpeng Zhao and the coterie of acolytes who surrounded FTX. Through exclusive interviews, compelling research and with ringside seats at the trial of the decade, he paints a vivid, detailed and tragi-comic picture of this defining financial moment of our times.

Master of Change is offers a captivating and compelling new framework for negotiating our changing world and workplace, and going on to thrive within uncertainty. While we see change as an exception and instability as something to overcome, change is actually an enduring principle of all our lives. Indeed, research shows that, on average, people experience thirty-six major 'disorder events' in the course of their adulthood. The mark of success is how we can flourish not by fighting but by embracing change. Borrowing from the high-performance world of business, resilience-training and mindset-hacking, science and spirituality, philosophy and psychology, bestselling author and coach Brad Stulberg equips the reader with 'rugged flexibility' - a revelatory new framework to help overcome the challenge of change. When we start to implement rugged flexibility, we learn to view change as ongoing cycle of order, disorder, and reorder, and we become adept at thriving in the midst of flux. The result of becoming a master of change is to be less stressed, less anxious and more confident, to experience sustained performance at work and beyond, and be happier and more fulfilled in life.