Bøker av Paul Levinson

It's 1996, and in this alternate history novel about the Beatles, disc jockey Pete Fornatale travels downtown to Grand Central Terminal and finds the world of music that he inhabits is very different. The short story this novel is based upon won the Mary Shelley Award for Outstanding Fiction in 2023, and was a Finalist for the Sidewise Award (short form) for Alternate History 2022.

A painter desperate for money finds a way to collect what's owed him from his deadbeat clients -- via teleportation, the tunnels under Fordham University, and the train to Margaretville.

This is my original doctoral dissertation, which I submitted to New York University and successfully defended in 1978. The dissertation presents my "anthropotropic" theory of media evolution (anthropo = human; tropic = towards) which argues that as media evolve, they become increasingly human in function. Thus, telegraph gives way to telephone (we hear words not dots and dashes), photography changes from black-and-white to color, etc. The theory also explains why some media survive the advent of successor media and others do not: radio survived the advent of television because hearing without seeing is a natural mode of human communication (it gets dark every night and we still hear, we can easily close our eyes and continue to hear), whereas silent movies were obliterated by talkies (it is very difficult in the natural world to see without hearing something or other). The theory also predicts the creation of media that will enable us to access all kinds of information from any place in the world, any time, regardless of where we and that information might be - or, exactly what we now do with smartphones.

This essay explores the historical and current context of fake news - with comparisons to government propaganda, and professional and citizen journalism - as well as what impact it may have had on the 2016 and 2020 U.S. Presidential elections, and the COVID pandemic, and what can best be done about it.

Last Dream before Morning features a movie PR agent who, a few years into his job, is implicated in an apparent drug overdose murder in a wealthy household in La. The victim is a young heiress who was his charge in his duties at the studio. Her family is old money. She was a rare starlet, who began her career with connections, both legal and illegal. The agent is conditionally discharged from his work without being directly charged by the police. However, he is driven to uncover her past life to narrow down a field of suspects so he can reestablish himself emotionally and socially. He has to reconcile differences among several stratas of society, people incongruous as friends, but who turn out to be conspiratorial allies in a bigger picture of corruption that needs support from all areas of society in order to exist. He has to review his own life, before and during his career before he solves the murder with the help of some friends, who were also implicated during the affair. Uncompromising, passionate society, past and present, is seen with its violence, hypocrisy and semi-private norms- high-rolling and prone to shootouts.

This seminal book highlights and explains the truly prophetic nature of McLuhan's theories. It shows us why and how the 'Wired' generation is now turning to McLuhan's work to better understand a global village in a digital age.

The Soft Edge is a book on the theories about the evolution of technology, the effects that human choice has on this (r)evolution, and what's in store for us in the future.