The New Cool

A report on genius inventor Dean Kaman's FIRST program follows a team of brilliant, misfit high school students through the program's 2009 robotics competition, during which the teens under the guidance of a dedicated teacher confronted other hopefuls in stadiums throughout the country.

“We are at a crossroads: either we can try to prop up the old, broken marketing model, or we can create a new model, one that is fit for the unique challenges of today.” —From Good Is the New Cool Marketing has an image problem. Media-savvy millennials, and their younger Gen Z counterparts, no longer trust advertising, and they demand increased social responsibility from their brands—while still insisting on cutting-edge products with on-trend design. As always, brands need to be cool—but now they need to be good, too. It’s a tall order, and with new technology empowering consumers to bypass advertisements altogether, it won’t be long before the old, advertising-based marketing model goes the way of the major label. If only there was a new model, one that allowed companies to address environmental, civic, and economic issues in a way that grew their brand and business, while giving back to society, and re-branding branding as a powerful force for good. Enter Good is The New Cool, a bold new manifesto from marketing experts Afdhel Aziz and Bobby Jones. In provocative, whip-smart, and streetwise style, they take aim at conventional marketing, posing the questions few have had the vision and courage to ask: If the system is broken, how can we fix it? Rather than sinking money into advertising, why not create a new model, in which great marketing optimizes life? With seven revolutionary new principles—from “Treat People as Citizens, Not Consumers,” to “Lead with the Cool”—and insights and interviews from a new generation of marketers, social entrepreneurs, and leaders of such brands as Zappos, Citibank, The Honest Company, as well as the culture creators working with artists like Lady Gaga, Pharrell, and Justin Bieber, this rule-breaking book is the new business model for the twenty-first century, and a call to action for anyone committed to building a better tomorrow. This visionary book won’t just change your business—it will change the world.

MEET THE GIRLS OF PROJECT Mc2! McKeyla McAlister: brilliant leader and savvy special agent for NOV8 Adrienne Attoms: culinary chemist and sweet scientist Bryden Bandweth: technology guru and social media maven Camryn Coyle: construction queen and engineer extraordinaire ADORABLE PRINCE XANDER is coming to town for his launch into outer space—and the students of Maywood Glen Academy can’t stop talking about it. No one even notices the mysterious new girl, McKeyla McAlister, who enrolls just before the big event. The smartest girls at school—Adri, Bry, and Cam—think McKeyla is definitely I.A.W.A.T.S.T.—Interesting And Weird At The Same Time. They discover she is an agent for NOV8 (that’s Innovate), a top secret organization of super smart women, and her assignment is to keep the prince safe! With the help of high tech gadgets, cool culinary chemistry, and some awesome teamwork, these girls may just save the world. An Imprint Book Based on a NETFLIX original series. PROJECT Mc2 copyright © by MGA, LLC. All rights reserved.

Based on the creation of every kid's favorite football play: "The Statue of Liberty". A wonderful, underdog story, that shows every kid that being yourself can lead to greatness.

"A kaleidoscopic homage both personal and historical . . . Kamiya's symphony of San Francisco is a grand pleasure." -New York Times Book Review The bestselling love letter to one of the world's great cities, San Francisco, by a life-long Bay Area resident and co-founder of Salon. Cool, Gray City of Love brings together an exuberant combination of personal history, deeply researched history, in-depth reporting, and lyrical prose to create an unparalleled portrait of San Francisco. Each of its 49 chapters explores a specific site or intersection in the city, from the mighty Golden Gate Bridge to the raunchy Tenderloin to the soaring sea cliffs at Land's End. Encompassing the city's Spanish missionary past, a gold rush, a couple of earthquakes, the Beats, the hippies, and the dot-com boom, this book is at once a rambling walking tour, a natural and human history, and a celebration of place itself-a guide to loving any city more faithfully and fully. For readers of E. B. White's Here is New York, Jose Saramago's Journey to Portugal, or Alfred Kazin's A Walker in the City, Cool, Gray City of Love is an ambitious, insightful one-of-a-kind book for a one-of-a-kind city.

Losing our Cool shows how indoor climate control is colliding with an out-of-control outdoor climate. In America, energy consumed by home air-conditioning, and the resulting greenhouse emissions, have doubled in just over a decade, and energy to cool retail stores has risen by two-thirds. Now the entire affluent world is adopting the technology. As the biggest economic crisis in eighty years rolls across the globe, financial concerns threaten to shove ecological crises into the background. Reporting from some of the world’s hot zones—from Phoenix, Arizona, and Naples, Florida, to southern India—Cox documents the surprising ways in which air-conditioning changes human experience: giving a boost to the global warming that it is designed to help us endure, providing a potent commercial stimulant, making possible an impossible commuter economy, and altering migration patterns (air-conditioning has helped alter the political hue of the United States by enabling a population boom in the red-state Sun Belt). While the book proves that the planet’s atmosphere cannot sustain even our current use of air-conditioning, it also makes a much more positive argument that loosening our attachment to refrigerated air could bring benefits to humans and the planet that go well beyond averting a climate crisis. Though it saves lives in heat waves, air-conditioning may also be altering our bodies’ sensitivity to heat; our rates of infection, allergy, asthma, and obesity; and even our sex drive. Air-conditioning has eroded social bonds and thwarted childhood adventure; it has transformed the ways we eat, sleep, travel, work, buy, relax, vote, and make both love and war. The final chapter surveys the many alternatives to conventional central air-conditioning. By reintroducing some traditional cooling methods, putting newly emerging technologies into practice, and getting beyond industrial definitions of comfort, we can make ourselves comfortable and keep the planet comfortable, too.

Interviews with young Muslims in Chicago explore the complexity of identities formed at the crossroads of Islam and hip hop This groundbreaking study of race, religion and popular culture in the 21st century United States focuses on a new concept, “Muslim Cool.” Muslim Cool is a way of being an American Muslim—displayed in ideas, dress, social activism in the ’hood, and in complex relationships to state power. Constructed through hip hop and the performance of Blackness, Muslim Cool is a way of engaging with the Black American experience by both Black and non-Black young Muslims that challenges racist norms in the U.S. as well as dominant ethnic and religious structures within American Muslim communities. Drawing on over two years of ethnographic research, Su'ad Abdul Khabeer illuminates the ways in which young and multiethnic US Muslims draw on Blackness to construct their identities as Muslims. This is a form of critical Muslim self-making that builds on interconnections and intersections, rather than divisions between “Black” and “Muslim.” Thus, by countering the notion that Blackness and the Muslim experience are fundamentally different, Muslim Cool poses a critical challenge to dominant ideas that Muslims are “foreign” to the United States and puts Blackness at the center of the study of American Islam. Yet Muslim Cool also demonstrates that connections to Blackness made through hip hop are critical and contested—critical because they push back against the pervasive phenomenon of anti-Blackness and contested because questions of race, class, gender, and nationality continue to complicate self-making in the United States.

Cool is a compendium of global youth subcultures and street styles—from Flappers to Swing Kids, to Goths to today’s Normcore—that have shaped the fashion zeitgeist. It’s no secret that the youth of the world buck conventional mainstream culture every chance they get, blazing countercultural trails in the process. Driven by their thirst for art and music, and their environment, young people combine their inspirations with the innate desire to rebel, resulting in a defiant subculture; and mainstream society runs to catch up, to co-opt it, and drag it to the mainstream. Lindy Hoppers of the 1930s, greasers of the 1950s, Rude Boys of the 1960s, glam rockers of the 1970s, club kids of the 1980s: there are countless subculture styles that were born from resisting authority. COOL: Style, Sound, and Subversion is equal parts historical chronicle and handbook of the myriad subcultures—most unknown to mainstream culture—that have influenced style. Authors Greg Foley and Andrew Luecke have compiled a comprehensive list of subcultures that have evolved over more than one hundred years, taking a look at the fashion, the art, the films, the books, the music, and historical context of these style movements, many of which came to influence conventional culture and eventually became a norm. Lavish with original illustrations, COOL references a wealth of ephemera—including a timeline, zeitgeist films, ’zines, secret music scenes, art collectives, and over one hundred music playlists tied to specific subcultures through the years—to give the reader a thoroughly vibrant picture of each movement and their sub-movements. COOL: Style, Sound, and Subversion is sure to appeal to fashionistas, culture mavens, and pop culture fans alike.