Alexandra Lange

From winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism From building blocks to city blocks, an eye-opening exploration of the ways children's playthings and surroundings affect their development-now featuring the author's Pulitzer Prize-winning essays. Parents obsess over their children's playdates, kindergarten curriculum, and every bump and bruise, but their toys, classrooms, and playgrounds are just as important. These objects and spaces encode decades-even centuries-of ideas about good child-rearing versus bad. What is the Good Toy? Is it wooden, plastic, or even digital? What do youngsters lose when seesaws are deemed too dangerous and slides are designed primarily for safety? How can our built environment help children cultivate self-reliance? In these debates, parents, educators, and kids themselves are often caught in the middle. Now, Pulitzer Prize-winning design critic Alexandra Lange reveals the surprising histories behind the human-made elements of our children's pint-size landscape. Her fascinating investigation shows how the seemingly innocuous universe of stuff affects kids' behavior, values, and health. Along the way, she reveals how years of decisions by toymakers, architects, and urban planners have helped-and hindered-American kids' journeys toward independence. Seen through Lange's eyes, everything from the sandbox to the street becomes vibrant with meaning. The Design of Childhood will change the way you view your children's world-and your own.

Longlisted for the Porchlight Business Book Awards "A smart and accessible cultural history."-Los Angeles Times From Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alexandra Lange, a portrait-by turns celebratory, skeptical, and surprisingly moving-of one of America's most iconic institutions. Few places have been as nostalgized, or as maligned, as malls. Since their birth in the 1950s, they have loomed large as temples of commerce, the agora of the suburbs. In their prime, they proved a powerful draw for creative thinkers such as Joan Didion, Ray Bradbury, and George Romero, who understood the mall's appeal as both critics and consumers. Yet today, amid the aftershocks of financial crises and a global pandemic, as well as the rise of online retail, the dystopian husk of an abandoned shopping center has become one of our era's defining images. Conventional wisdom holds that the mall is dead. But what was the mall, really? And have rumors of its demise been greatly exaggerated? In her acclaimed The Design of Childhood, Alexandra Lange uncovered the histories of toys, classrooms, and playgrounds. She now turns her sharp eye to another subject we only think we know. She chronicles postwar architects' and merchants' invention of the mall, revealing how the design of these marketplaces played an integral role in their cultural ascent. In Lange's perceptive account, the mall becomes newly strange and rich with contradiction: Malls are environments of both freedom and exclusion--of consumerism, but also of community. Meet Me by the Fountain is a highly entertaining and evocative promenade through the mall's rise, fall, and ongoing reinvention, for readers of any generation.

Transformation digitale, disruptions des business models, modifications profondes des pratiques organisationnelles et modes de collaboration. Au coeur de la transformation num rique, les regards se portent sur la fonction RH pour accompagner ces mutations culturelles, technologiques et organisationnelles. Salari s et managers ont-ils le r flexe digital ? Quelle appropriation des nouvelles technologies dans les modes de fonctionnement ? Entre changements profonds et invariants, quel(s) impact(s) du digital sur la posture manag riale ? Comment mobiliser salari s et managers pour relever le d fi d'associer d marches d'innovation et d'am lioration continue ? Quelle place pour l'exp rimentation ? En s'appuyant sur l'observation de la politique RH du Groupe AG2R LA MONDIALE, cet ouvrage propose un retour d'exp rience sur les dispositifs de mobilisations manag riales gagnants l'aune du digital.