Alex Sayf Cummings reveals the significance of North Carolina's Research Triangle Park to the emergence of the high-tech economy in a postindustrial United States. Brain Magnet pinpoints how it sheds new light on the origins of today's urban landscape, in which innovation is lauded as the engine of economic growth against a backdrop of inequality. A stellar contribution to multiple historical subfields, Brain Magnet exemplifies the best of the History of Capitalism. Demystifying the rhetoric of boosters and underscoring the uneven outcomes of postindustrial capitalism, the book adds to the growing urban history literature on the high tech economy,