The Lure of the North Woods: Cultivating Tourism in the Upper Midwest

Business & Money

Shapiro, Aaron

Economics

Univ. of Minnesota Press

In the late nineteenth century, the North Woods offered people little in the way of a pleasant escape. Rather, it was a hub of production supplying industrial America with vast quantities of lumber and mineral ore. This book tells the story of how northern Minnesota, northern Wisconsin, and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula became a tourist paradise, turning a scarred countryside into the playground we know today.Stripped of much of its timber and ore by the early 1900s, the North Woods experienced deindustrialization earlier than the Rust Belt cities that consumed its resources. In The Lure of the North Woods, Aaron Shapiro describes how residents and visitors reshaped the region from a landscape of exploitation to a vacationland. The rejuvenating North Woods profited in new ways by drawing on emerging connections between the urban and the rural, including improved transportation, promotion, recreational land use, and conservation initiatives. Shapiro demonstrates how this transformation helps explain the interwar origins of modern American environmentalism, when both the consumption of nature for pleasure and the work of the Civilian Conservation Corps in the North Woods and elsewhere led many Americans to cultivate a fresh perspective on the outdoors. At a time when travel and recreation are considered major economic forces, The Lure of the North Woods reveals how leisure—and tourism in particular—has shaped modern America.

Design, Control, Predict: Logistical Governance in the Smart City

Product Description 
An in-depth look at life in the “smart” city Technology has fundamentally transformed urban life. But today’s “smart” cities look little like what experts had predicted. Aaron Shapiro shows us the true face of the revolution in urban technology, taking the reader on a tour of today’s smart city. Along the way, he develops a new lens for interpreting urban technologies—logistical governance—to critique an urban future based on extraction and rationalization. Through ethnographic research, journalistic interviews, and his own hands-on experience, Shapiro helps us peer through cracks in the smart city’s facade. He investigates the true price New Yorkers pay for “free,” ad-funded WiFi, finding that it ultimately serves the ends of commercial media. He also builds on his experience as a bike courier for a food delivery startup to examine how promises of “flexible employment” in the gig economy in fact pave the way for strict managerial control. And he turns his eye toward hot-button debates around police violence and new patrol technologies, asking whether algorithms are really the answer to reforming our cities’ ongoing crises of criminal justice. Through these gripping accounts of the new technological urbanism, Design, Control, Predict makes vital contributions to conversations around data privacy and algorithmic governance. Shapiro brings much-needed empirical research to a field that has often relied on “10,000-foot views.” Timely, important, and expertly researched, Design, Control, Predict doesn’t just help us comprehend urbanism today—it advances strategies for critiquing and resisting a dystopian future that can seem inevitable. 
 Review 
"An enticing and informative book that tells a contemporary story of deception and appropriation of public goods."—Journal of Urban Affairs 
 About the Author 
Aaron Shapiro is assistant professor of technology studies in the Department of Communications at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Politics & Social Sciences

Sociology

An in-depth look at life in the "smart" city Technology has fundamentally transformed urban life. But today's "smart" cities look little like what experts had predicted. Aaron Shapiro shows us the true face of the revolution in urban technology, taking the reader on a tour of today's smart city. Along the way, he develops a new lens for interpreting urban technologies--logistical governance--to critique an urban future based on extraction and rationalization. Through ethnographic research, journalistic interviews, and his own hands-on experience, Shapiro helps us peer through cracks in the smart city's facade. He investigates the true price New Yorkers pay for "free," ad-funded WiFi, finding that it ultimately serves the ends of commercial media. He also builds on his experience as a bike courier for a food delivery startup to examine how promises of "flexible employment" in the gig economy in fact pave the way for strict managerial control. And he turns his eye toward hot-button debates around police violence and new patrol technologies, asking whether algorithms are really the answer to reforming our cities' ongoing crises of criminal justice.&nbsp; Through these gripping accounts of the new technological urbanism, Design, Control, Predict makes vital contributions to conversations around data privacy and algorithmic governance. Shapiro brings much-needed empirical research to a field that has often relied on "10,000-foot views." Timely, important, and expertly researched, Design, Control, Predict doesn't just help us comprehend urbanism today--it advances strategies for critiquing and resisting a dystopian future that can seem inevitable.

University of Minnesota Press

If you're still chasing customers online, you're looking at the challenge backward. Aaron Shapiro helps companies build thriving digitally driven businesses. In his firm's extensive study of the Fortune 1000, a clear pattern emerged: the most successful companies drive sales by focusing on users instead of just customers. This is a fundamental strategic shift.
Rather than trying to get people to buy stuff online, these companies home in on the user experience. They've realized that building relationships between people and their brand has huge value, even if those users aren't spending a dime on their products (yet).
It's no secret that Internet-based companies like Google and Facebook thrive by building their user base before turning to monetization. Shapiro's big insight is that offline companies can successfully do the same, integrating offline products with an online presence and building platforms that create a lasting relationship between their brand and their users. Shapiro provides a strategic approach to refocusing your business in every way, from technology infrastructure and management to product design and marketing.

Users, Not Customers: Who Really Determines the Success of Your Business

Management & Leadership

Portfolio

If you still think "the customer is king," you're falling behind. Today's most powerful growth engine is users--people who interact with a company through digital media and technology even if they have never spent a dime. Become indispensable to users and the profits will follow. As CEO of the digital marketing agency Huge, Aaron Shapiro goes inside blue-chip companies to advise them on how to thrive in this new business reality. He led an extensive study of the Fortune 1000 and found that the most successful companies focus on users first. Look at Facebook and Google. They built their businesses before they even figured out what they were selling, let alone who their customers were. Shapiro argues that every business needs to stop obsessing about customers and start creating powerful user experiences. For instance: Mint.com made the easiest and most effective interface for controlling your personal finances, and once there, you can follow ads that let you improve your financial performance even more. And Netflix took down Blockbuster by treating its subscribers as users, not customers. It continually changed and improved its technology to create the best possible experience instead of maximizing rental fees and late fees.

Writing―The Sacred Art: Beyond the Page to Spiritual Practice (The Art of Spiritual Living)

Push your writing through the trite and the boring to something fresh, something transformative.
"Writing as spiritual practice has nothing to do with readers per se. You aren't writing to be read; you are writing to be freed. Writing as spiritual practice is conspiratorial rather than inspirational. It conspires to strip away everything you use to maintain the illusion of certainty, security and self-identity. Where spiritual writing seeks to bind you all the more tightly to the self you imagine yourself to be, writing as spiritual practice intends to free you from it." ―from Rami’s Preface
This isn’t about how to write spiritual books. It isn’t about the romance of writing. It doesn’t cover the ins and outs of publishing and building a brand. Instead, this fresh and unapologetic guide to writing as a spiritual practice approaches writing as a way to turn the spiral of body, heart, mind, soul and spirit that leads to spiritual awakening.
Lead by renowned spirituality teacher Rami Shapiro and award-winning writer and writing coach Aaron Shapiro―and featuring over fifty unique, practical exercises―it takes you beyond assigning inspirational words to the page. It shows you how to use your writing to unlock the joy of life and the infinite perspectives and possibilities that living provides.

Self-Help

Shapiro, Rabbi Rami

Personal Transformation

SkyLight Paths

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Shapiro, Aaron. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Shapiro, Aaron

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Shapiro, Aaron. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Lure of the North Woods: Cultivating Tourism in the Upper Midwest

The Lure of the North Woods: Cultivating Tourism in the Upper Midwest

Design, Control, Predict: Logistical Governance in the Smart City

Design, Control, Predict: Logistical Governance in the Smart City

Users, Not Customers: Who Really Determines the Success of Your Business

Users, Not Customers: Who Really Determines the Success of Your Business

Writing―The Sacred Art: Beyond the Page to Spiritual Practice (The Art of Spiritual Living)

Writing―The Sacred Art: Beyond the Page to Spiritual Practice (The Art of Spiritual Living)