Social Science Power

Today, burnout and depression are at record levels, driven by a combination of intense workplace competition, oppressively ubiquitous social media encouraging comparisons with others, the quest for elite credentials, and helicopter parenting. Society continually broadcasts the need to want more, and to be perfect. Gathering a wide range of contemporary evidence, Curran calls for both introspection and broader, societal change. He shows what we can do as individuals to resist the modern-day pressure to be perfect, and in so doing, win for ourselves a more purposeful and contented life.

In 2007, a short blogpost by Gawker Media outed PayPal founder and billionaire investor Peter Thiel as gay. Thiel's sexuality had been known to close friends and family, but he didn't consider himself a public figure, and believed the information was private. This post would be the casus belli for a meticulously plotted conspiracy that would end nearly a decade later with a $140 million dollar judgment against Gawker and its bankruptcy. Only later would the world learn that Gawker's demise was not incidental - it had been masterminded by Thiel.

A brilliant investigative narrative: How six average Soviet men rose to the pinnacle of Russia's battered economy. David Hoffman, former Moscow bureau chief for

The Washington Post, sheds light onto the hidden lives of Russia's most feared power brokers: the oligarchs. Focusing on six of these ruthless men Hoffman reveals how a few players managed to take over Russia's cash-strapped economy and then divvy it up in loans-for-shares deals.

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.

In Trajectory of Power, leading political scientists William Howell and Terry Moe provide a sweeping account of the historical rise of presidential power, arguing that it has now grown to the point where, in the wrong hands, it threatens to subvert American democracy and replace it with a de facto system of strongman rule, whether led by Donald Trump or someone else.

Over the last 40 years our choices have narrowed, our opportunities have shrunk, and our lives have become governed by a handful of very large and very powerful corporations. Today, practically everything we buy, everywhere we shop, and every service we secure comes from a heavily concentrated market. This is a world where four major banks control most of our money, four airlines shuttle most of us around the country, and four major cell phone providers connect most of our communications.

For over a decade, Taylor Lorenz has been the authority on internet culture, documenting its far-reaching effects on all corners of our lives. Her reporting is serious yet entertaining and illuminates deep truths about ourselves and the lives we create online. In her debut book, Extremely Online, she reveals how online influence came to upend the world, demolishing traditional barriers and creating whole new sectors of the economy. Lorenz shows this phenomenon to be one of the most disruptive changes in modern capitalism.

From one of the most admired reporters covering China today comes a vital new account of the life and political vision of Xi Jinping, the authoritarian leader of the People’s Republic whose hard-edged tactics have set the rising superpower on a collision with Western liberal democracies. Party of One shatters the many myths that shroud one of the world’s most secretive political organizations and its leader. Many observers misread Xi during his early years in power, projecting their own hopes that he would steer China toward more political openness, rule of law, and pro-market economics.

With To Be a Man, this acclaimed psychotherapist and relationship expert offers a groundbreaking and deeply insightful guide to masculine power and fulfillment. He shares what’s needed to enter a manhood as empowered as it is vulnerable, as emotionally literate as it is unapologetically alive - a manhood at home with truly intimate relationship.

Renowned media scholar Sherry Turkle investigates how a flight from conversation undermines our relationships, creativity, and productivity - and why reclaiming face-to-face conversation can help us regain lost ground. We live in a technological universe in which we are always communicating. And yet we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection. Preeminent author and researcher Sherry Turkle has been studying digital culture for over 30 years. Long an enthusiast for its possibilities, here she investigates a troubling consequence.

Today just about everything we've known and relied on (our natural environment, economy, societies, cultures and institutions) is changing dramatically—too often for the worse. Without radical new approaches, our planet will become unrecognizable as well as poorer, more violent, more authoritarian. Thomas Homer-Dixon calls on his extraordinary knowledge of complexity science, of how societies work and can evolve, and of our capacity to handle threats, to show that we can shift human civilization onto a new path if we mobilize our minds, spirits, imaginations and collective values.

Women are the future of American business. According to a recent Nielsen report, women will control two-thirds of American consumer wealth in less than a decade. And yet almost all business and success literature is still written for men - dispensing advice that doesn't take into account women's unique strengths or address the demands of family life on mothers.

In Happiness, Matthieu Ricard demonstrated that true happiness is not tied to fleeting moments or sensations, but is an enduring state of soul rooted in mindfulness and compassion for others. Now he turns his lens from the personal to the global, with a rousing argument that altruism - genuine concern for the well-being of others - could be the saving grace of the 21st century. It is, he believes, the vital thread that can answer the main challenges of our time.

Richard J. Evans's gripping narrative ranges across a century of social and national conflicts, from the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 to the unification of both Germany and Italy, from the Russo-Turkish wars to the Balkan upheavals that brought this era of relative peace and growing prosperity to an end. The first single-volume history of the century, this comprehensive and sweeping account gives the listener a magnificently human picture of Europe in the age when it dominated the rest of the globe.

A moving example of unconditional love in difficult times, the best-selling author of Tattoos on the Heart, Father Gregory Boyle, shares what three decades of working with gangs in Los Angeles has taught him about faith, compassion, and the enduring power of radical kinship.

Based on her inspiring, viral 2018 commencement speech to Barnard College’s graduates in New York City, New York Times best-selling author, two-time Olympic gold medalist, and FIFA World Cup champion Abby Wambach delivers her empowering rally cry for women to unleash their individual power, unite with their pack, and emerge victorious together.

Byung-Chul Han, a star of German philosophy, continues his passionate critique of neoliberalism, trenchantly describing a regime of technological domination that, in contrast to Foucault’s biopower, has discovered the productive force of the psyche.

Why do some women still expect men to buy their dinner? Why do some men feel depressed after masturbating? What the hell is going on with porn? Comedian Sara Pascoe explores the complex connections between sex, power and money. This audiobook is a thoughtful and entertaining journey through anatomy and arousal, dating and sex work, animals and technology, and Pascoe makes our most baffling human behaviours less mysterious.

A new industrial revolution has begun. Like mechanization or electricity before it, artificial intelligence will touch every aspect of our lives—and cause profound disruptions in the balance of global power, especially among the AI superpowers: China, the United States, and Europe. Autonomous weapons expert Paul Scharre takes listeners inside the fierce competition to develop and implement this game-changing technology and dominate the future.

For nearly two centuries, international relations have been premised on the idea of the “Great Powers.” As the thinking went, these mighty states—the European empires of the nineteenth century, the United States and the USSR during the Cold War—were uniquely able to exert their influence on the world stage because of their overwhelming military capabilities. But as military historian Phillips Payson O’Brien argues in War and Power, this conception of power fails to capture the more complicated truth about how wars are fought and won.