Piero Scaruffi is a poet, cognitive scientist, cultural historian and free thinker. Born in Italy in 1955, he published two collections of poems, L Ultimo (The Last One) and Dialogo degli Amanti (Dialogue of the Lovers) before switching to the English language. Each won a national award. After graduating in 1982 in Mathematics from the University of Turin with a thesis on quarks, he relocated to Silicon Valley to work in the software industry, pioneering Internet-based applications, and later conducting research on Artificial Intelligence at Olivetti s Technology Center and at Stanford University. He has lectured in three continents on Cognitive Science and History of Knowledge, and published several scientific books, notably The Nature of Consciousness (2006). His book Il Terzo Secolo (The Third Century, 1997), an analysis of the society of the USA, structured like a hyper-document, made the Italian best-sellers' list. In the meantime he reviewed music and cinema, first for magazines and then for his own website. His main books on music are: A History of Jazz Music 1900-2000 (2007) and A History of Rock and Dance Music (2009). He pioneered Internet-based journalism. In 1985 he started his first e-zine, distributed by e-mail over the Internet. Between 1986 and 1990 he created an online database, downloadable via ftp. In 1995 that database mutated into his own website scaruffi.com. He has organized several interdisciplinary cultural events in the Bay Area. An avid traveler who spends months on the road, he has visited more than 160 countries of the world. All along he continued writing the poems and essays that are collected here for the first time.