Gary Wolf – författare

As you read this, five million Americans are day-trading. Not since gold was discovered in California have more people dropped out of their old lives and come running for the promise of a big score. For a time, Joey Anuff was among them. He has emerged-enriched, enlightened, and exhausted-to share his story.        In a marriage of Anuff''s own experiences with the brilliant investigative work of his Wired and Suck colleague Gary Wolf, Dumb Money explores and explains the world of day-trading as has never been done before. No strategy is too crackpot to try, no news break too dubious to play off, no so-called guru too shady, no online chat room too pathetic. Using the rhythms of a day trader''s typical day as its frame, Dumb Money is a dispatch from the front lines of the stock-market revolution, a brutally Darwinian battleground on which some become wildly rich and more become part of the body count. It is essential reading for online investors, off-line investors, voyeurs, concerned citizens, and adrenaline freaks alike.

The year is 2030. The place is Centerville, a typical city.

Clifton Pembroke is a young professional with a promising career in the field of "disability advocacy." He helps people raise their disability profile-a single index that encompasses every variety of injustice and disadvantage that may befall an individual.

Raising one''s disability profile can bring a host of benefits, including subsidies and preferential treatment. But some people are no longer satisfied with these benefits. They assert that their very birth was an injustice, that a fundamental travesty has occurred, that in fact they should have been a different person.

They even know who that other person is, and they intend to receive their just compensation-by obtaining the legal right to seize the other''s identity.

Clifton becomes entangled in ethical dilemmas that run to the core of what it means to be human. In choosing sides, he must make difficult, even dangerous decisions. In his search for answers, he gropes in the darkness until he meets the people who are building the workshop of the second self.

An ancient scroll unearthed in Sicily contains an epic tale about an advanced civilization that existed tens of thousands of years before the common era. This hyper-cerebral culture, in which people arecalled mind carriers, produced works of art, literature, and philosophy that have yet to be surpassed.

The mind carriers are instructed by tradition that the entire universe is actually a brain of cosmic dimensionsotherwise known as the Omnificent Cerebrum. The visible world is but a cell within it; a multitude of additional cells, populated by other races of mind carriers, fill the remaining gray matter. In order to ensure that the Omnificent Cerebrum functions harmoniously, society must strive continually to create works of genius in arts and letters.

Not everyone, however, is satisfied with this state of affairs. A new movement, Bioprimalism, challenges the pre-eminence of logic and reason. The Bioprimalists instead proclaim the dominance of raw feelings, animal instincts, and the natural environment.

The ensuing strife threatens the cohesion of the Omnificent Cerebrum. Who will carry the daythe partisans of intellect or those who revere Mother Earth above all else?

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test for our own age, the story of a dreamer who turned American media upside down—and suffered the consequencesLouis Rossetto had no money, no home, no job. Five years later he owned the hottest magazine in America and was poised to become an international tycoon, with America’s most powerful financiers by his side. Rossetto was the founder and editor of Wired, whose hyperactive Day-Glo pages proclaimed that every American institution was obsolete. Instantly, Wired, was everywhere—on television, passed around the halls of Congress, displayed in the office of the president of the United States. Wired,’s headquarters in San Francisco became a pilgrimage site for everybody who wanted to be at the white-hot center of the digital revolution. Not since the early days of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone had anybody so brilliantly channeled the enthusiasms of his era. But this was only the beginning. Wired cast an uncanny spell, creating a feedback loop that grew stunningly out of control. Wired,’s online site, HotWired, designed and sold the first banner advertisements for the World Wide Web, unleashing a commercial frenzy. Wired, reached for empire, with a book-publishing company, a broadcast division, and foreign editions all over the globe. But as the market’s enthusiasm outstripped the limits of reason, Rossetto faced a battle over the fate of Wired that would prove the ultimate test of his radical ideas.Gary Wolf, one of Wired,’s most popular writers, takes no prisoners in this insider’s account, telling a story that is alternately thrilling, hilarious, heartbreaking, and absurd. Now that bumper stickers read-ing please god–just one more bubble have been sighted on the highways of California, Wired—A Romance goes beyond the dot.com clichés and paints a deeply affecting portrait of the boom.From the Hardcover edition.