{"product_id":"wonderland-isbn-9780399184499","title":"Wonderland","description":"\u003cb\u003e\u003cb\u003e“A house of wonders itself. . . . \u003ci\u003eWonderland \u003c\/i\u003einspires grins and well-what-d'ya-knows” —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e From the \u003ci\u003eNew York Times–\u003c\/i\u003ebestselling author of \u003ci\u003eHow We Got to Now \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eExtra Life, \u003c\/i\u003ea look at the world-changing innovations we made while keeping ourselves entertained.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e This lushly illustrated history of popular entertainment takes a long-zoom approach, contending that the pursuit of novelty and wonder is a powerful driver of world-shaping technological change. Steven Johnson argues that, throughout history, the cutting edge of innovation lies wherever people are working the hardest to keep themselves and others amused. \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Johnson’s storytelling is just as delightful as the inventions he describes, full of surprising stops along the journey from simple concepts to complex modern systems. He introduces us to the colorful innovators of leisure: the explorers, proprietors, showmen, and artists who changed the trajectory of history with their luxurious wares, exotic meals, taverns, gambling tables, and magic shows.  \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e In \u003ci\u003eWonderland\u003c\/i\u003e, Johnson compellingly argues that observers of technological and social trends should be looking for clues in novel amusements. You’ll find the future wherever people are having the most fun.“A house of wonders itself. . . . \u003ci\u003eWonderland \u003c\/i\u003einspires grins and well-what-d'ya-knows” —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A rare gem. . . . Our illogical, enduring fascination with play remains one of life’s great mysteries. That is precisely what makes the subject so fascinating, and \u003ci\u003eWonderland\u003c\/i\u003e such a compelling read.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “The parade of humanity Johnson presents in this lively (and generously illustrated) work leads us to the reassuring conclusion that history is often made not by nerds in lab coats, but by ingenious humans hankering for more intriguing ways to pass the time.” —\u003ci\u003eO, The Oprah Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Johnson’s writing derives its appeal from his ability to illuminate complex ideas in unpretentious language . . . Johnson’s prose is nimble, his knowledge impressive . . . \u003ci\u003eWonderland\u003c\/i\u003e is original and fun, as well it should be, given the subject.” —\u003ci\u003eThe San Francisco Chronicle\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eWonderland\u003c\/i\u003e brims with. . .tidbits, memorable moments, and bits of information that light up the mind. . . .[Johnson] surprises and delights as he traces the path of how various objects of fun and fancy—mechanized dolls, follies, and music boxes—drove advances.\" —\u003ci\u003eThe Boston Globe\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e   \u003cbr\u003e “Mr. Johnson’s narrative is crammed with elegantly told vignettes from the history of ideas. . . . The book is full of excellent facts.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Wall Street Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Johnson . . . provides a compelling counterintuitive argument that the Industrial Revolution, democracy, and the computer age were all driven by diversions and appetites that historians too often ignore.” —\u003ci\u003eKirkus \u003c\/i\u003e(starred review)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“In an entertaining and accessible style, he takes tangents that arrive at sometimes startling conclusions, like a magician practicing misdirection…Johnson connects the dots in a way that sheds new light on everyday concepts.” —\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e (starred review)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Johnson is a master storyteller, weaving disparate elements together into a rich and seamless tapestry of technology and human history.” —\u003ci\u003eBooklist \u003c\/i\u003e(starred review)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“An engaging survey full of unexpected connections that readers of a historical or sociological bent will find particularly riveting.” —\u003ci\u003eLibrary Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003eSteven Johnson\u003c\/b\u003e is the bestselling author of thirteen books, including \u003ci\u003eWhere Good Ideas Come From\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eHow We Got to Now\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Ghost Map\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eExtra Life\u003c\/i\u003e. He’s the host and cocreator of the Emmy-winning PBS\/BBC series \u003ci\u003eHow We Got to Now\u003c\/i\u003e, the host of the podcast \u003ci\u003eThe TED Interview, \u003c\/i\u003eand the author of the newsletter \u003ci\u003eAdjacent Possible\u003c\/i\u003e. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and Marin County, California, with his wife and three sons.1 \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFashion and Shopping\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Calico Madams\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe sea snail \u003ci\u003eHexaplex trunculus \u003c\/i\u003elives  in shallow waters and tidal pools along the coast of the Mediterranean,  and along the shores of the Atlantic, from Portugal down to the western  Sahara. To the untrained eye, the murex snail, as it is also called,  looks like an ordinary mollusk, housed in a conical shell ringed by  bands of spikes. Millions of years ago, the snail evolved a kind of  bioweapon used to sedate prey and defend itself against predators: an  inky secretion that contains a rare compound called dibromoindigo.  Almost four thousand years ago, the Minoan civilization based in the  Aegean islands discovered that the murex snail secretion could be used  as a dye to create one of the rarest of shades: the color purple.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOver  time, the purple dye took on the name of a town in southern Phoenicia,  Tyre, where it was mass-produced. The exact procedure for manufacturing  Tyrian purple is unknown today, although Pliny the Elder included a  fragmentary recipe in his \u003ci\u003eNatural History\u003c\/i\u003e. Modern attempts to  re-create the dye suggest that more than ten thousand snails were  required to produce just one gram of Tyrian dye. But if the production  techniques remain a mystery, the historical record is clear about one  thing: Tyrian purple endured as a symbol of status and affluence for at  least a thousand years. Bands of Tyrian purple were woven into the  tunics of Roman senators; a child conceived by one of the emperors of  Byzantium was given the honorific \u003ci\u003ePorphyrogenitus—\u003c\/i\u003eliterally,  “born in the purple.” Over the millennium that passed from the age of  the Phoenicians to the fall of Rome, an ounce of Tyrian purple dye was  worth significantly more than an ounce of gold, a valuation that  compelled sailors to explore the entire coastline of the Mediterranean  for colonies of murex snails.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEventually, though, the supply of \u003ci\u003eHexaplex trunculus \u003c\/i\u003ein  the Mediterranean could not keep up with the demand for Tyrian purple,  and a few intrepid Phoenician sailors began to contemplate more  ambitious voyages in search of the mollusk, beyond the placid waters of  the inland sea, out onto the gray, turbulent waves of the Atlantic  itself. The Phoenicians had already passed through the Strait of  Gibraltar in search of alluvial tin deposits, their distinctive  cedar-planked ships, powered by thirteen oarsmen on each side, hugging  the coast of Spain through waters that, technically speaking, belonged  to the Atlantic. But it was the murex snail that compelled them to take  on the towering waves and uncharted waters of the open ocean. They  ventured down the coast of North Africa, where they eventually  discovered a bounty of sea snails that would keep the aristocracy  cloaked in purple well into the Dark Ages. The legacy of these voyages  -extends far beyond simple fashion. The passage out of the Mediterranean  into the vast mystery of the Atlantic marked a true threshold moment in  the history of human exploration. “The Phoenicians’ now-proven aptitude  for sailing the North African coast was to be the key that unlocked the  Atlantic for all time,” Simon Winchester writes. “The fear of the great  unknown waters beyond the Pillars of Hercules swiftly dissipated.”  Think of all the ways the world would be transformed by vessels launched  from Mediterranean countries, exploring the Atlantic and beyond. Those  vessels would eventually leave in search of gold, or religious freedom,  or military conquest. But the first siren song that lured them onto the  open ocean was a simple color.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eGarment design has driven  technological innovation from the very beginning of human existence.  Shears, sewing needles, and scrapers for converting animal skins into  protective coverings for the body are among the oldest tools recovered  from the Paleolithic age. To be sure, much of that innovation was  utilitarian in nature. Ascots and hoop skirts aside, most clothing has  some functional value, and certainly our ancestors fifty thousand years  ago were making clothes with the explicit aim of keeping warm and dry  and protected from potential threats. The fact that so much  technological innovation—from the first knitting needles to hand looms  to the spinning jenny—has emerged out of textile production can seem, at  first glance, more a matter of necessity’s invention. And yet the  archeological record is replete with early examples of purely decorative  toolmaking: a shell necklace discovered in the Sikul Cave in Israel was  crafted more than a hundred thousand years ago. As soon as humans  became toolmakers, they were making jewelry.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhatever mix of  playfulness and practicality drove early human garment design, the  invention of Tyrian purple announced a fundamental shift toward delight  and surprise—a shift, in a sense, from function to fashion. No one \u003ci\u003eneeds \u003c\/i\u003ethe  color purple. It does not protect you against malaria, or supply useful  proteins, or reduce the chances that you will die in childbirth. It  just looks nice, particularly if you live in a world where purple  garments happen to be rare.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYou might reasonably object at this  point that those Phoenician snail wranglers—and the oarsmen that first  took them past the Strait of Gibraltar—were motivated by financial gain,  and not some sublime aesthetic response to purple itself. That is  certainly the -canonical way of telling it. As soon as we invented  liquid currencies, human beings were suddenly willing to take on  improbably -ambitious and dangerous schemes if the price happened to be  right. People left the safety of the Mediterranean because there was  money in it—a -motivation that was certainly powerful, but not  particularly newsworthy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA comparable argument might be made for  the importance of status in the display of those purple garments. Humans  evolved in hierarchical societies and most of us acknowledge that  status-seeking is a common, if sometimes regrettable, driver of human  behavior. The Phoenician aristocracy wanted to dye their clothes in  shades of Tyrian purple so they could display their superiority over the  commoners, and they were willing to pay for the privilege. Again, the  causal chain is a familiar one: people will go to great lengths to  satisfy the needs of the ruling elite if they are amply compensated for  their labor. The fact that this labor involved harvesting thousands of  snails may be an intriguing historical yarn, but does it really tell  us anything new about the deep-seated forces that drive historical  change?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWith all due respect to Occam’s razor, I think in this  case the simpler story is not correct, or at least it fails to include  the most interesting part of the explanation. The financial gain or  status symbols were secondary effects; the initial fixation with purple  was the prime mover. Take away the purely aesthetic response to the  Tyrian dye, and the whole chain of exploration, invention, and profit  falls apart. This turns out to be a recurring pattern in the history of  play. Because delightful things are valuable, they often attract  commercial -speculation, which funds and cultivates new technologies or  markets or geographic exploration. When we look back at that process, we  tend to talk about it in terms of the money and markets or the vanity  of the ruling elite driving the new ideas. But the money has its own  masters, and in many cases the dominant one is the human appetite for  surprise and novelty and beauty. If you dig past the archeological  layers of technological invention, profit motive, conquest, and  -status--seeking, you will often find an unlikely stratum that lies  beneath the more -familiar layers: the simple pleasure of a new  experience—in this case, the red and blue cones of our retinas  registering a strange hybrid shade almost never found in nature. Somehow  the story gets cast in the retelling as a tale of heroic inventors or  efficient capital markets or brutal exploitation. That initial moment of  delight becomes an afterthought, a footnote to the master narrative.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNowhere  is this oversight more glaring than in the story behind the greatest  technological upheaval of modern times: the industrial revolution.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn  the last few decades of the seventeenth century, a new pattern became  visible—arguably for the first time in history—on the streets of a few  select neighborhoods in London: St. James, Ludgate Hill, Bank Junction. A  row of shops, each offering tantalizing collections of fabric, or  jewelry, or home furnishings, clustered together on a few city blocks.  The shopfronts featured large glass window displays, with merchandise  arranged in visually arresting styles. The interiors were festooned with  pillars, elaborate mirrors and lighting, sculpted cornices, and  draperies. An observer from the early 1700s described them as “perfectly  gilded theaters.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAll of this theatrical elegance was designed  to create a new kind of aura around the simple act of buying goods.  Earlier in the seventeenth century, shopping galleries like the New  Exchange and Westminster Hall had created bustling, immersive spaces for  commercial transactions, but the new shops added a measure of grandeur  and elegance that made the galleries seem cramped and oppressive by  comparison. In the exchanges, each vendor’s space was small and largely  unfurnished, closer to the stalls of a traveling fair or street  peddlers. The new shops created a much more sumptuous environment, as  though the consumer were entering the drawing room of a minor lord  instead of bargaining with a street hawker. For the first time, the  design of the shop became a part of the marketing message. Indeed, in an  age that predates the modern craft of advertising, those shop designs  were among the very first forms of marketing ever concocted. “The  seductive design of shops was intended to encourage customers to stay  and to look around, to see shopping as a leisurely pursuit and an  exciting experience,” writes historian Claire Walsh. “The more time a  customer spent in the shop, the more attentively and persuasively they  could be served, and in this sense the design of the shop was very much a  part of the sales process.” They made the act of shopping an end, and  not just a means.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSome contemporary observers, mostly men,  denounced the new shops as palaces of deception, designed to weave a  spell over their customers. Describing the new fashionable shops in the  resort town of Bath in the early 1700s, Abbé Prévost complained that  they took advantage of “a kind of enchantment which blinds everyone in  these realms of enjoyment, to sell for their weight in gold trifles one  is ashamed of having bought after leaving the place.” In his 1727 survey  of British commercial practice, \u003ci\u003eThe Compleat English Tradesman\u003c\/i\u003e,  Daniel Defoe devoted an entire chapter to the new practice of outfitting  shops with such lavish trappings, a custom that appears to have baffled  Defoe: “It is a modern custom, and wholly unknown to our  ancestors . . . to have tradesmen lay out two-thirds of their fortune in  fitting up their shops . . . in painting and gilding, fine shelves,  shutters, boxes, glass-doors, sashes, and the like,” he wrote. “The  first inference to be drawn from this must necessarily be, that this age  must have more fools than the last: for certainly fools only are most  taken with shows and outsides.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDefoe ultimately decided that  there must be some kind of functional motive behind these seemingly  excessive displays: “Painting and adorning a shop seems to intimate,  that the tradesman has a large stock to begin with; or else the world  suggests he would not make such a show.” Defoe’s perplexity here is  almost touching: you can see his mind working in overdrive to come up  with a logical explanation for the frivolities of fine shelves and  sashes. From our modern perspective, we can see clearly how the  messaging embodied in the lavish shop decor obviously signaled more than  just a large inventory; it created an envelope of luxury and high  fashion that elevated the act of shopping itself into a form of  entertainment. The consumers flocking to these new commercial spaces  weren’t just there for the goods they could purchase. They were there  for the wonderland of the space itself.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhere shopping for  clothes had previously been a straightforward, no-frills series of  exchanges, bartering with street vendors or tradesmen— -no different  from buying eggs or milk—now the practice of browsing and “window  shopping” became its own sought-after experience. Before the rise of  these lavish London shops, one went to market when one had something  specific to purchase. Bazaars and open-air markets existed, of course,  but they lacked the sumptuous displays of these new London shops. These  “perfectly gilded theaters” transformed the journey of shopping into its  own reward. A 1709 contributor to \u003ci\u003eFemale Tatler \u003c\/i\u003edescribes the  phenomenon—now ubiquitous in the developed world—with fresh eyes: “This  afternoon some ladies, having an opinion of my fancy in cloaths, desired  me to accompany them to Ludgate-hill, which I take to be as agreeable  an amusement as a lady can pass away three or four hours in.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe  language here—“agreeable amusements”—doesn’t fully do justice to the  eventual magnitude of the transformation it was describing. It was a  subtle shift, hard to notice if you weren’t a proprietor of one of these  shops, or a customer. To the untutored eye, those shops seemed like  just a minor twist on the peddlers and tradesmen who had sold goods in  the city for hundreds of years. In fact, the shift was so subtle that  very few records were kept to document its existence. Like so many  cultural revolutions that would follow, the modern experience of  shopping trickled into the world as a minor subculture, enjoyed by a  tiny fraction of the overall population, ignored by the mainstream—until  one day when the mainstream woke and found that it had been profoundly  redirected by this strange new tributary. Every now and then, the creek  floods the river.","brand":"Riverhead Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304664256741,"sku":"NP9780399184499","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780399184499.jpg?v=1767744505","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/wonderland-isbn-9780399184499","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}