Social Power

To fully understand these strange and dangerous times, Jared Yates Sexton takes a hard look at our nation’s history: namely, the abuses committed by those in power and the comforting stories that shaped the way the West has viewed itself up to the present. As reactionaries and authoritarians cling to myths about “Western civilization,” The Midnight Kingdom exposes how political power, religious indoctrination, and economic dominance have been repeatedly weaponized to oppress and exploit, sounding an alarm for what lies ahead as the current order frays.

From kung-fu to tofu, tea to trade routes, sages to silk, China has influenced cuisine, commerce, military strategy, aesthetics, and philosophy across the world for thousands of years. Chinese history is nothing if not messy. Heroes are also villains; prosperity mingles with violence; cultural vibrancy coexists with censorship and repression. Modern China is seen variously as an economic powerhouse, an icon of urbanization, a propaganda state, and an aggressive superpower seeking world domination.

The leviathan is the vast unity of the State. But how are unity, peace, and security to be attained? Hobbes’ answer is sovereignty, but the resurgence of interest today in Leviathan is due less to its answers than its methods: Hobbes sees politics as a science capable of the same axiomatic approach as geometry.

In The Price of Power, award-winning journalist Michael Tackett pulls back the curtain on one of the most influential figures to ever set foot in the American Senate, offering you an intimate, personal view of his life and career. Drawing on thousands of pages of archival materials, letters, and more than 100 interviews with associates, colleagues, and McConnell himself, Tackett pieces together the story of McConnell’s early life, his formative battle with polio as a young child, and details his forty-plus-year career as one of the Senate’s most impactful leaders.

Aggression touches all of our lives. Whether it is a customer or angry coworker, an upset family member, a fellow student at school or college, or a stranger we bump into on the street, all of us, at times, must deal with aggressive people. Ellis Amdur has become well-known for his series of profession-specific books on dealing with aggressive and emotionally disturbed individuals. Words of Power is different. It is written for ordinary people who may, on occasion, have to deal with an angry, even enraged person.

To succeed in a fast-changing world, individuals and companies know they must create a culture of growth, where experimentation and feedback are encouraged, and learning is integrated into the everyday. Yet we often get stuck in a well-worn pattern of habits that don’t move us forward. Why? Because many of us get trapped in the Performance Paradox: the counterintuitive phenomenon that if we focus only on performing, our performance suffers. How can we give ourselves the space to experiment and grow while also delivering high-level results?

Football is the world's most popular sport, and the shirts worn by teams and their supporters are its greatest means of cultural expression. Every year clubs launch new kits with increasingly extravagant marketing campaigns and convoluted explanations of how their designs reflect their history and local community. But football shirts are much more than just a symbol of which club we support.

From the Industrial Revolution to the age of artificial intelligence, The Technology Trap takes a sweeping look at the history of technological progress and how it has radically shifted the distribution of economic and political power among society’s members.

Want to know how to use Facebook's social power and influence to make money? Want to take your online business to the next level and make millions? Need to learn all the tips that are easy and quick and can be implemented right away? Tired of seeing everyone else make online money? What is Facebook advertising? How can Facebook make you money?

We see on all sides men who seem to exert a wonderful and mysterious mental influence upon others - upon those associated with them, or upon the public mind. Leaders spring into prominence, apparently owing their power to some mysterious influence over the minds and wills of others. Some attain power and position - others attain wealth and social state, by reason of some inner force. When we meet certain people, we become at once impressed by a something about them that makes its power and influence felt by us.

Noam Chomsky is widely regarded as the most influential thinker of our time, but never before has he devoted a major book to one topic: income inequality. Requiem for the American Dream is not an essay collection but an entire work of some 70,000 words, based on four years of interviews with Chomsky by the editors. It is a book that makes Chomsky's breadth and depth accessible and at the same time gives us his most powerful political ideas with unprecedented, breathtaking directness.

Since the 1970s, an important new figure has appeared on the center stage of American evangelicalism - the celebrity preacher's wife. Although most evangelical traditions bar women from ordained ministry, many women have carved out unofficial positions of power in their husbands' spiritual empires or their own ministries. The biggest stars - such as Beth Moore, Joyce Meyer, and Victoria Osteen - write best-selling books, grab high ratings on Christian television, and even preach.

War is no way to resolve our most problematic group, community, and societal issues, but neither is a peace that simply sweeps our problems under the rug. To create lasting change, we have to learn to work fluidly with two distinct, fundamental drives that are in tension: power - the single-minded desire to achieve one's solitary purpose - and love - the drive toward unity.... They are seemingly contradictory but in fact complimentary.

From science and technology to business and education, curiosity is often taken for granted as an unquestioned good. And yet, few people can define curiosity. Curiosity Studies marshals scholars from more than a dozen fields not only to define curiosity but also to grapple with its ethics as well as its role in technological advancement and global citizenship. While intriguing research on curiosity has occurred in numerous disciplines for decades, no rigorously cross - disciplinary study has existed - until now.

Forty years ago in China, marriage was universal, compulsory, and a woman's only means to a livelihood. Enter the one-child policy, which despite its horrors, resulted in China's first generations of urban only-daughters - girls who were raised without brothers and pushed to study, achieve, and succeed as if they were sons. Fast forward to the present, where in an urbanized economic powerhouse, enough of these women have decided to postpone marriage - or not marry at all - to spawn a label: "leftovers". Unprecedentedly well-educated and goal-oriented, they struggle to find partners.

In How to Have a Good Day, economist and former McKinsey partner Caroline Webb shows listeners how to use recent findings from behavioral economics, psychology, and neuroscience to transform their approaches to everyday working life. Advances in these behavioral sciences are giving us ever better understanding of how our brains work, why we make the choices we do, and what it takes for us to be at our best.

Self-Love for Teen Girls is your personal roadmap to embracing who you are and loving yourself every day. With gentle guidance and heartfelt advice, this book helps you navigate the tricky world of friendships, social media, and self-image. Learn how to build confidence, set healthy boundaries, and handle the ups and downs of teenage life with grace. Through relatable stories, practical tips, and uplifting exercises, you’ll discover the power of self-love and how to be kind to yourself, no matter what. It’s like having a big sister in your corner, cheering you on every step of the way.

The conventional wisdom has held that China's economic power is very close to America's and that Washington cannot undertake a broad economic cutoff of China without hurting itself as much, or more. In Command of Commerce, Ben A. Vagle and Stephen G. Brooks show the conventional wisdom is wrong on both fronts. The authors argue that America's economic power has been underestimated because conventional economic measures have ignored America's unprecedented control over the world's largest multinational corporations.

Brilliant, listenable, and raw. Maj. (ret.) Danny Sjursen, who served combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at West Point, delivers a true epic and the perfect companion to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.

What is needed now is for humanity to agree on the most important topic in human history. If we do so, we can produce spectacular results, changing life on Earth for the better — forever. This is not out of our reach. In The God Solution, acclaimed spiritual author Neale Donald Walsch explores how we can bring an end to anger, violence, disagreements between people and nations, financial hardships, poverty, starvation, and the suffering of millions.