MICHAEL GROSS

A compelling call to action to focus on what connects us in nature to solve today s problems In nature everything is connected from microscopic bacteria and soaring trees to animals struggling for survival amid thriving humanity Yet many of today s toughest problems from environmental destruction to divisive politics stem from fundamental disconnections In Intertwined science writer Michael Gross explains how the natural world can be a powerful reminder of our interdependence Using examples based on recent scientific discoveries across a broad range of ecosystems and species Gross shares important and often surprising stories about the sophisticated web of connections in nature From plant cooperation to turtle communication he highlights crucial lessons we can apply to solve complex problems caused by human disturbances to these connections Gross provides ample evidence of the far reaching impacts of both natural and anthropogenic phenomena from coevolution and nutrient cycles to species domestication and extinction We live in a complex world endangered by simplistic thinking as the escalating climate crisis and loss of biodiversity demonstrate To address these issues we must recognize the wonder and ubiquity of the self regulating network that enab

Calendario 2016

Die Gottesfrage ist sicher die wichtigste Herausforderung unserer Zeit. Sie lasst sich nicht theoretisch-spekulativ losen, sondern erfahrt eine Antwort nur durch das Erschlieen ihrer praktischen Relevanz, nur durch das konkrete Tun.Dazu ermutigt diese Textsammlung. Sie regt an, wie Jakob mit dem Unfassbaren und Unbekannten zu ringen und IHN nicht loszulassen, wenn ER nicht Segen zurucklasst (vgl. Gen 32, 23-31). So wird der Weg in die Zukunft moglich, trotz neuer und beschwerlicher Herausforderungen.

What if everything we thought we knew about reality was backwards? This groundbreaking book presents a revolutionary new understanding of quantum mechanics that places timenot observationat the center of realitys creation. Through accessible explanations and stunning implications, "The Time Collapse" reveals how temporal pressure drives the universe to make its quantum choices. Discover how this temporal framework unlocks: - Revolutionary energy systems that harvest power from collapsed possibilities - Digital consciousness that can survive across time itself - Quantum propulsion engines that need no fuel - The pathway to true digital immortality through temporal threading From the quantum realm to cosmic consciousness, this book bridges cutting-edge physics with practical technologies that could transform civilization. Based on decades of research into temporal dynamics, it offers both deep scientific insights and a vision of humanitys incredible future. The age of temporal collapse has begun. The question isnt whether this revolution will transform our worldits whether youll be ready to participate in shaping what comes next.

Can life exist in the Antarctic ice, in the deep subsurface, in dilute sulfuric acid, in hot springs-even on Mars? What degree of high or low temperature, pressure, or salt concentration can living cells tolerate? In recent years, scientists have discovered many single-cell creatures that exist in-in fact, are perfectly adapted to-extreme environments that were considered uninhabitable just one or two decades ago. In Life on the Edge, author Michael Gross explores how microorganisms adapt to their hostile environments and how they affect our current definition of the "normal" conditions for life. He also describes the vast implications of these extremophiles and other amazing creatures-from potential breakthroughs in medicine and biotechnology to the search for life elsewhere in the universe.

Our lives are about to be changed by new technologies that operate on a scale too small to be seen by even the most powerful optical microscopes. Devices measured in nanometers-billionths of a meter-have set off a nanotechnology revolution. In Travels to the Nanoworld, Michael Gross takes us deep into this miniature universe and describes natural processes and new technologies that will make modern machines look like relics from the Stone Age. Starting with the model of the living cell, whose vital processes are directed and carried out by structures with dimensions on the nanometer scale, Gross shows how biochemists are beginning to understand the mechanisms of the "nanotechnology of nature." Soon science will have the knowledge and technology to generate artificial systems that will perform similar tasks, and through them will find new treatments for disease, substitutes for toxic waste, and alternatives to carbon fuel.

This thoroughly absorbing narrative dazzles with the most profound investigation and research. Focus is an enthralling and riveting read. Tim GunnSmart, well-researchedengagingcanny (New York Times Book Review), Focus is a fast-pacedand clearly insiderlook at the rarefied, sexy world of fashion photography (Lauren Weisberger, author of The Devil Wears Prada). New York Times bestselling author Michael Gross brings to life the wild genius, egos, passions, and antics of the men (and a few women) behind the camera, probing the lives, hang-ups, and artistic triumphs of more than a dozen of fashion photographys greatest visionaries, including Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Bill King, Helmut Newton, Gilles Bensimon, Bruce Weber, Steven Meisel, and Bob and Terry Richardson. Tracing the highs and lows of fashion photography from the late 1940s to today, Focus takes you behind the scenes to reveal the revolutionary creative processes and fraught private passions of these visionary magicians, delving deep into the fascinating rivalries (The Daily News) between photographers, fashion editors, and publishers like Conde Nast and Hearst. Weaving together candid interviews, never-before-told insider anecdotes and insights born of his three decades of front-row and backstage reporting on modern fashion, Focus is simply unrivaleda sensation.Gross is a modern-day Vasari, giving us The Lives of the Artists in no small measure (CraveOnline).

For seventy-five years, its been Manhattans richest apartment building, and one of the most lusted-after addresses in the world. One apartment had 37 rooms, 14 bathrooms, 43 closets, 11 working fireplaces, a private elevator, and his-and-hers saunas; another at one time had a live-in service staff of 16. To this day, it is steeped in the purest luxury, the kind most of us could only imagine, until now. The last great building to go up along New Yorks Gold Coast, construction on 740 Park finished in 1930. Since then, 740 has been home to an ever-evolving cadre of our wealthiest and most powerful families, some of Americas (and the worlds) oldest moneythe kind attached to names like Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Bouvier, Chrysler, Niarchos, Houghton, and Harknessand some whose names evoke the excesses of todays monied elite: Kravis, Koch, Bronfman, Perelman, Steinberg, and Schwarzman. All along, the building has housed titans of industry, political power brokers, international royalty, fabulous scam-artists, and even the lowest scoundrels.The book begins with the tumultuous story of the buildings construction. Conceived in the bubbling financial, artistic, and social cauldron of 1920s Manhattan, 740 Park rose to its dizzying heights as the stock market plunged in 1929the building was in dire financial straits before the first apartments were sold. The builders include the architectural genius Rosario Candela, the scheming businessman James T. Lee (Jacqueline Kennedy Onassiss grandfather), and a raft of financiers, many of whom were little more than white-collar crooks and grand-scale hustlers. Once finished, 740 became a magnet for the richest, oldest families in the country: the Brewsters, descendents of the leader of the Plymouth Colony; the socially-registered Bordens, Hoppins, Scovilles, Thornes, and Schermerhorns; and top executives of the Chase Bank, American Express, and U.S. Rubber. Outside the walls of 740 Park, these were the people shaping America culturally and economically. Within those walls, they were indulging in all of the Seven Deadly Sins. As the social climate evolved throughout the last century, so did 740 Park: after World War II, the buildings rulers eased their more restrictive policies and began allowing Jews (though not to this day African Americans) to reside within their hallowed walls. Nowadays, it is full to bursting with new money, people whose fortunes, though freshly-made, are large enough to buy their way in. At its core this book is a social history of the American rich, and how the locus of power and influence has shifted haltingly from old bloodlines to new money. But its also much more than that: filled with meaty, startling, often tragic stories of the people who lived behind 740s walls, the book gives us an unprecedented access to worlds of wealth, privilege, and extraordinary folly that are usually hidden behind a scrim of money and influence. This is, truly, how the other halfor at least the other one hundredth of one percentlives.

A hugely entertaining social history of the elite and exclusive Caribbean island of St. Barthélemy from the New York Times bestselling author of Model and 740 Park.St. Barthelemy is revered for its luxury, its stunning beaches and its VIP fans. Those whove either been there or hope to go, know St. Bartsor St. Barth, depending on your level of Francophiliaas the place for the beautiful people, the ultimate see-and-be-seen scene.Over three decades, acclaimed social chronicler Michael Gross has taken dozens of extended trips to this gorgeous, sultry paradise and knows it almost as a local. In his captivating and detailed history, this premier chronicler of the rich (Gay Talese) reveals how the island grew from a barren volcanic island with sometimes in-bred, impoverished residents and no creature comforts to an elite port of call where entertainment, tech, and fashion celebrities, old money, nouveau riche, and international oligarchs vie for tables in chic, expensive restaurants; where pristine beaches, superyachts, and spectacular hotels and lavish private villas are playgrounds for the American, European, and Asian upper class. And some locals have gotten rich off them all.This is an enticing and entertaining work that combines impeccable reporting and delicious commentary. It is essential reading for everybody who is anybodyor wants to be.

Michael Grosss new bookpacks [in] almost as many stories as there are apartments in the building. The Jackie Collins of real estate likes to map expressions of power, money and ego Even more crammed with billionaires and their exploits than 740 Park (Penelope Green, The New York Times).With two concierge-staffed lobbies, a walnut-lined library, a lavish screening room, a private sixty-seat restaurant offering residents room service, a health club complete with a seventy-foot swimming pool, penthouses that cost almost $100 million, and a tenant roster thats a roll call of business page heroes and villains, Fifteen Central Park West is the most outrageously successful, insanely expensive, titanically tycoon-stuffed real estate development of the twenty-first century.In this stunning (CNN) and deliciously detailed (Booklist, starred review) New York Times bestseller, journalist Michael Gross turns his gimlet eye on the new-money wonderland thats sprung up on the southwest rim of Central Park. Mixing an absorbing business epic with hilarious social comedy, Gross takes another gossip-laden bite out of the upper crust (Sam Roberts, The New York Times), whichincludes Denzel Washington, Sting, Norman Lear, top executives, and Russian and Chinese oligarchs, to name a few. And he recounts the legendary buildings inspired genesis, costly construction, and the flashy international lifestyle it has brought to a once benighted and socially declasse Manhattan neighborhood.More than just an apartment building, 15CPW represents a massive paradigm shift in the lifestyle of New Yorks rich and famousand is a bellwether of the citys changing social and financial landscape.

Behind almost every painting is a fortune and behind that a sin or a crime.With these words as a starting point, Michael Gross, leading chronicler of the American rich, begins the first independent, unauthorized look at the saga of the nations greatest museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In this endlessly entertaining follow-up to his bestselling social history 740 Park, Gross pulls back the shades of secrecy that have long shrouded the upper classs cultural and philanthropic ambitions and maneuvers. And he paints a revealing portrait of a previously hidden face of American wealth and power.The Metropolitan, Gross writes, is a huge alchemical experiment, turning the worst of mans attributesextravagance, lust, gluttony, acquisitiveness, envy, avarice, greed, egotism, and prideinto the very best, transmuting deadly sins into priceless treasure. The book covers the entire 138-year history of the Met, focusing on the museums most colorful characters. Opening with the lame-duck director Philippe de Montebello, the museums longest-serving leader who finally stepped down in 2008, Rogues Gallery then goes back to the very beginning, highlighting, among many others: the first director, Luigi Palma di Cesnola, an Italian-born epic phony, whose legacy is a trove of plundered ancient relics, some of which remain on display today; John Pierpont Morgan, the greatest capitalist and art collector of his day, who turned the museum from the plaything of a handful of rich amateurs into a professional operation dedicated, sort of, to the public good; John D. Rockefeller Jr., who never served the Met in any official capacity but who, during the Great Depression, proved the only man willing and rich enough to be its benefactor, which made him its behind-the-scenes puppeteer; the controversial Thomas Hoving, whose tenure as director during the sixties and seventies revolutionized museums around the world but left the Met in chaos; and Jane Engelhard and Annette de la Renta, a mother-daughter trustee tag team whose stories will astonish you (think Casablanca rewritten by Edith Wharton).With a supporting cast that includes artists, forgers, and looters, financial geniuses and scoundrels, museum officers (like its chairman Arthur Amory Houghton, head of Corning Glass, who once ripped apart a priceless and ancient Islamic book in order to sell it off piecemeal), trustees (like Jayne Wrightsman, the Hollywood party girl turned society grand dame), curators (like the aging Dietrich von Bothmer, a refugee from Nazi Germany with a Bronze Star for heroism whose greatest acquisitions turned out to be looted), and donors (like Irwin Untermyer, whose collecting obsession drove his wife and children to suicide), and with cameo appearances by everyone from Vogue editors Anna Wintour and Diana Vreeland to Sex Pistols front man Johnny Rotten, Rogues Gallery is a rich, satisfying, alternately hilarious and horrifying look at Americas upper class, and what is perhaps its greatest creation.

A fascinating and comprehensive look into the life of American fashion designer Ralph Lauren, now with an afterword.Deep-dish...sharp-clawed...honestly admiring.New York TimesThere are at least two Ralph Laurens. To the public hes a gentle, modest, yet secure and purposeful man. Inside the walls of Polo Ralph Lauren, though, he was long seen by some as a narcissist, an insecure ditherer, and, at times, a rampaging tyrant. Michael Gross, author of the bestsellers Model and 740 Park, lays bare the truths of this fashion emperors rise, and reveals not only the secrets of his meteoric success in marketing our shared fantasies, but also a widely unknown side thats behind the designers chic façade.An Unauthorized Biography: Go behind the chic façade to meet the two Ralph Laurensthe modest public figure and the man seen by insiders as a rampaging tyrant. Rags to Riches Story: Discover how Ralph Lifshitz, a kid from the Bronx, reinvented himself and built a global fashion empire on the American dream. The Business of Aspiration: Uncover the secrets to his meteoric success, a masterclass in lifestyle marketing that sold not just clothes, but a carefully constructed fantasy. The Man and the Brand: This sharp-clawed portrait lays bare the truths of his rise and the complex reality behind the world of Polo Ralph Lauren.