Crime Culture

From former Vice journalist and executive producer of hit Netflix documentary Fyre comes an eye-opening look at the con artists, grifters, and snake-oil salesmen of the digital age - and why we can’t stop falling for them.

The definitive account of Bill Cosby's transition from revered father figure to convicted criminal, told by a veteran crime reporter and former senior writer for People Magazine.

Humanity is racing to create machine intelligence vastly smarter than the human brain. We will succeed. Blending accessible philosophy with the latest in AI developments, Mind Crime: The Moral Frontier of Artificial Intelligence forces listeners to grapple with the moral questions we can no longer afford to ignore. Are we prepared for the consequences of artificial superintelligence? Will humanity's survival be threatened, perhaps within years? Is digital consciousness possible? Are we sleepwalking into horrific moral catastrophe?

Glasgow, 2015. When Valium addict Felix McAveety's best friend Marina is found murdered in the local park, he goes looking for answers to questions that he quickly forgets. In a haze of uppers, hallucinogens and diazepam, Felix enlists the help of a brilliant but mercurial GP; a bright young trade unionist; a failing screenwriter; semi-celebrity crime novelist Jane Pickford; and his crisis fuelled downstairs neighbour Donnie.

The sequel to Chili Palmer's hit movie Get Leo tanked, and now Chili's itching for a comeback. So when a power-lunch with record label executive and former associate Tommy Athens ends in a mob hit, he soon finds himself in an unlikely alliance with organized crime detective Darryl Holmes and the likely next target of Russian gangsters. But where others see danger, Chili Palmer sees story possibilities.

Murderers, mob bosses, and convicts . . . these guys are not your average neighbors. Unless you live on Alcatraz. It's 1935 and 12-year-old Moose Flanagan and his family have just moved to the infamous island that's home to criminals like notorious escapee Roy Gardner, Machine Gun Kelly, and of course, Al Capone. Now Moose has to try to fit in at his new school, avoid getting caught up in one of the warden's daughter's countless plots, and keep an eye on his sister Natalie, who's not like other kids.

Skating on Thin Ice exposes the culture of toxic masculinity in professional hockey and suggests how sport and society can change the narrative on sexual assault and violence.

Rarely does a week go by without a well-known executive being indicted for engaging in a white-collar crime. Perplexed as to what drives successful, wealthy people to risk it all, Harvard Business School professor Eugene Soltes spent seven years in the company of the men behind the largest corporate crimes in history - from the financial fraudsters of Enron, to the embezzlers at Tyco, to the Ponzi schemers Bernie Madoff and Allen Stanford.

A former US naval intelligence worker, Milton William Cooper published his manifesto Behold a Pale Horse in 1991. Since then it has gone on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies, becoming the number-one best seller in the American prison system. According to Behold a Pale Horse, JFK was assassinated - because he was about to reveal that extraterrestrials were about to take over the earth - by his driver, an alien himself; AIDS is a government conspiracy; and much more.

Journalist Maximillian Potter uncovers a fascinating plot to destroy the vines of La Romance-Conti, Burgundy's finest and most expensive wine. In January 2010, Aubert de Villaine, the famed proprietor of the Domaine de la Romance-Conti, the tiny, storied vineyard that produces the most expensive, exquisite wines in the world, received an anonymous note threatening the destruction of his priceless vines by poison - a crime that in the world of high-end wine is akin to murder - unless he paid a one million euro ransom.

The Dowager Duchess has decided to sell off the less important family possessions. Blotto and Twinks are dispatched to help the valuer. He spies some Egyptian artifacts and in some excitement rushes back to London, leaving Blotto and Twinks alone in the attic, where they are drawn to a sarchophagus decorated with hieroglyphs. Twinks starts to translate: "Anyone who desecrates this shrine will be visited by the Pharoah's curse..." - just as Blotto prises the lid off.

"Boys, let us get up a club." Six restless young men raided the linens at a friend's mansion, pulled pillowcases over their heads, hopped on horses, and cavorted through the streets of Pulaski, Tennessee. The six friends named their club the Ku Klux Klan, and, all too quickly, their club grew into the self-proclaimed Invisible Empire with secret dens spread across the South. This is the story of how a secret terrorist group took root in America's democracy.

Chuck Palahniuk's world has always been, well, different from yours and mine. These pieces from Stranger Than Fiction, his first nonfiction collection, prove just how different, in ways both highly entertaining and deeply unsettling.

Today's extremist violence surges into our lives from what seems like every direction - vehicles hurtling down city sidewalks; cyber-threats levied against political leaders and backed up with violence; automatic weapons unleashed on mall shoppers, students, and the faithful in houses of worship. As varied as the violent acts are the attackers themselves - neo-Nazis, white nationalists, the alt-right, InCels, and Islamist jihadists, to name just a few.

Along with Batman, Spider-Man, and Superman, the Joker stands out as one of the most recognizable comics characters in popular culture. While there has been a great deal of scholarly attention on superheroes, very little has been done to understand supervillains. This is the first academic work to provide a comprehensive study of this villain, illustrating why the Joker appears so relevant to audiences today.

The word spread through the hacking underground like some unstoppable new virus: Someone - some brilliant, audacious crook - had just staged a hostile takeover of an online criminal network that siphoned billions of dollars from the U.S. economy. The FBI rushed to launch an ambitious undercover operation aimed at tracking down this new kingpin. Other agencies around the world deployed dozens of moles and double agents.

Aggie Morton lives in a small town on the coast of England in 1902. Adventurous and imaginative but deeply shy, Aggie hasn't got much to do since the death of her beloved father...until the fateful day when she crosses paths with 12-year-old Belgian immigrant Hector Perot and discovers a dead body on the floor of the Mermaid Dance Room! As the number of suspects grows and the murder threatens to tear the town apart, Aggie and her new friend will need every tool at their disposal - including their insatiable curiosity, deductive skills, and not a little help from their friends.

In this disquieting cyber thriller, Joseph Menn takes readers into the murky hacker underground, traveling the globe from San Francisco to Costa Rica and London to Russia. His guides are California surfer and computer whiz Barrett Lyon and a fearless British high-tech agent. Through these heroes, Menn shows the evolution of cyber-crime from small-time thieving to sophisticated, organized gangs, who began by attacking corporate websites but increasingly steal financial data from consumers.

Cinema emerged alongside the rules that ushered in boxing’s modern age and the “squared circle” proved the ideal stage for cinematic display. The public had its first taste of the new medium in 1894 through a heavyweight bout, recognized today as the world’s first feature film. Smash Hit: Race, Crime, and Culture in Boxing Films uses twenty films as the basis of a hard-nosed exploration as to how the genre held a bloody mirror to twentieth century America’s most prominent social anxieties, elucidating two conjoined mediums that serve as bellwether to an ever-shifting cultural zeitgeist.

Goodbye, Guns N' Roses is a genre-rattling attempt to explain the appeal of America's most divisive rock band. While it includes uncharted history and the self-lacerating connoisseurship of a Guns N' Roses fetishist, it is not a recycled chronicle - this book is a deconstruction of myth, one that blends high and low art sketches to examine how Guns N' Roses impacted popular culture.