How to Breathe Underwater

The essays and reportage in How to Breathe Underwater offer a panoramic overview of this age of radical change—from the online gambling boom in the Caribbean to Cyberjaya, the Malaysian government’s attempt to build its own Silicon Valley; from video game design to digital-age tabloid journalism to the artistry of The Simpsons; and from the fate of the Great Barrier Reef to Cuba’s economic limbo after the fall of the Soviet empire. In field reports that survey the rise of the internet in the 1990s, analyze the changing nature of mass culture in the digital age, and provide a multifaceted look at how human industry is shaping the planet’s foundations, this collection presents a fractal portrait of a society in rapid flux.