Special Characters

'CNN's former senior tech correspondent shares her front-row seat on the rise of Facebook, Twitter, and other new-media empiresand the geeks turned entrepreneurs who founded them.'PeopleAn unflinching, era-defining story of self-discovery and breaking barriers by award-winning investigative reporter Laurie Segall.In 2008, 23-year-old Laurie Segall was a newly minted assistant at CNN and was living in an East Village walk-up apartment. As Wall Street was crashing down, Segall began discovering a group of scrappy misfits who were rising from the ashes of the recession to change the world: the tech entrepreneurs.A misfit herself, Segall gained entrance to New Yorks burgeoning tech scene, with its limitless cash flow and parties populated by geeks-turned-billionaires. Back at the news desk, she rose through the ranks at CNN, while these entrepreneurs went from minnows to sharks, building companies that would become our democracy and our social fabric: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Uber, Tinder.Over the course of a decade, Laurie Segall became one of the first reporters to give airtime to many of these foundersfrom Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) to Jack Dorsey (Twitter) to Kevin Systrom (Instagram) to Travis Kalanick (Uber)while tracking their evolution and societys cultural shift in the CNN startup beat she created. By the end of her tenure at CNN, she had become its on-air senior technology correspondent and had witnessed the rise of second-wave tech, from the boom to the complicated years to the backlash, as her misfits emerged as some of the worlds most influential leaders.A coming-of-age narrative chronicling an era transformed,Special Characters is, at its core, a young womans origin storyin love, in career, and in lifeand an account of the humans behind the companies that have shaped our modern society. Filled with emotional heft and razor-sharp observations, Segalls empowering memoir is a richly rendered backstage pass to the tech bubble that reimagined the ethos of our social, political, and cultural experience.Fans of Brotopia or anyone who wants a backstage pass to Zuckerberg and some of the biggest co.s of our time, youll devour this. The Skimm