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Operation Valhalla collects eighteen texts by German media theorist Friedrich Kittler on the close connections between war and media technology. In these essays, public lectures, interviews, literary analyses, and autobiographical musings, Kittler outlines how war has been a central driver of media's evolution, from Prussia's wars against Napoleon to the so-called War on Terror. Covering an eclectic array of topics, he charts the intertwined military and theatrical histories of the searchlight and the stage lamp, traces the microprocessor's genealogy back to the tank, shows how rapid-fire guns brought about new standards for optics and acoustics, and reads Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow to upset established claims about the relationship between war, technology, and history in the twentieth century. Throughout, Operation Valhalla foregrounds the outsize role of war in media history as well as Kittler's importance as a daring and original thinker.

A history of modern mindfulness meditation and a critique of it as a practice that deeply misunderstands human consciousness.

Mindfulness meditation is often presented as a simple practice of turning inward and quieting the world to discover an authentic “inner voice,” but the very idea that consciousness contains such a voice depends on a slew of contradictory beliefs about Buddhism, neuroscience, and more. In Out of Mind, R. John Williams challenges the core (and misguided) assumptions about human nature that shaped the development of modern meditation, revealing how they were informed by nineteenth-century theosophy, German idealism, Buddhist modernism, Heideggerian mindfulness, Cold War brainwashing, and even phenomena like sensory deprivation tanks. Against the notion that truth lies hidden in our brains, Williams argues that we are never sealed off from the world. Our consciousness extends beyond our own minds—into the intricate web of language, literature, art, and other people to which we are intimately connected.