Future Politics

London, 2044. Britain is a republic. President Jan Polak has vanished overnight from Buckingham Palace, just weeks before an election. Has he been kidnapped? Or even killed? One man is determined to find out - as soon as he's had his breakfast. His name is Pond. Howie Pond - the president's official spokesperson and wannabe secret agent. With just a love of James Bond films to guide him, Howie sets out on a mission to solve the missing-president mystery.

A vision of the first decade of socialism in the United States. The diverse multinational working class has achieved political supremacy and is actively eliminating bigotry, racism, and national oppression as it expands economic, social, and political democracy.

Exploring well beyond the banal newspaper headlines that have caricatured Charles over the years, the book debunks the myths about the man who will be King, telling his full, true story; exploring his complex character, his profoundly held beliefs and deep thinking about religion - including Islam - politics, the armed services, monarchy, and the English constitution, providing an illuminating portrait of what kind of monarch Charles III will inevitably be. Although this book is not an official biography, the Prince's office, Clarence House, has agreed to cooperate with the author.

In Across That Bridge, Congressman John Lewis draws from his experience as a prominent leader of the civil rights movement to offer timeless wisdom, poignant recollections, and powerful principles for anyone interested in challenging injustices and inspiring real change toward a freer, more peaceful society. The civil rights movement gave rise to the protest culture we know today, and the experiences of leaders like Congressman Lewis, a close confidant to Martin Luther King, Jr., have never been more relevant.

THE EARLY 2000s conjures images of inflatable furniture, flip phones, and low-rise jeans. It was a new millennium and the future looked bright, promising prosperity for all. The internet had arrived, and technology was shiny and fun. For many, it felt like the end of history: no more wars, racism, or sexism. But then history kept happening. Twenty-five years after the ball dropped on December 31st, 1999, we are still living in the shadows of the Y2K Era.

Since the dawn of the twenty-first century, the West has been in crisis. Social unrest, political polarization, and the rise of other great powers - especially China - threaten to unravel today's Western-led world order. Many fear this would lead to global chaos. But this is a Western illusion. Surveying five thousand years of global history, political scientist Amitav Acharya reveals that world order existed long before the rise of the West.

What does it mean to be a human in a world that is increasingly built by and for machines? In Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation, New York Times technology columnist Kevin Roose lays out a hopeful, pragmatic vision of how people can succeed in the machine age by making themselves irreplaceably human. He shares the secrets of people and organizations that have survived technological change, and explains how we can protect our own futures.

Spontaneous remission, the placebo effect, and energy healing — these phenomena have baffled the medical community for decades. What do all these marvels tell us? “Our current models of medicine fall short of understanding the depths of our human healing potential,” says Dr. Shamini Jain. “We are on the cusp of finally becoming awake to our human healing potential. A growing number of scientists are exploring a new path — a true expansion of science joined with understandings from ancient concepts of spirituality.”

Tim Marshall's global best seller Prisoners of Geography showed how every nation’s choices are limited by mountains, rivers, seas and concrete. Since then, the geography hasn’t changed. But the world has. In this revelatory new book, Marshall explores 10 regions that are set to shape global politics in a new age of great-power rivalry: Australia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UK, Greece, Turkey, the Sahel, Ethiopia, Spain and space.

The COVID-19 pandemic, increasingly frequent climate disasters, a new war—events we might have called “unimaginable” or “unthinkable” in the past are now reality. Today it feels more challenging than ever to feel unafraid, hopeful, and equipped to face the future with optimism. How do we map out our lives when it seems impossible to predict what the world will be like next week, let alone next year or next decade? What we need now are strategies to help us recover our confidence and creativity in facing uncertain futures.

The era of the coronavirus has tested America, and our leaders and institutions have conspicuously failed. That failure shouldn’t be surprising: Beneath social-media frenzy and reality-television politics, our era’s deep truths are elite incompetence, cultural exhaustion, and the flight from reality into fantasy. The Decadent Society explains what happens when a powerful society ceases advancing - how the combination of wealth and technological proficiency with economic stagnation, political stalemate, and demographic decline creates a unique civilizational crisis.

There are an infinite number of possible futures that lie ahead of us—like threads stretching out into the distance. Rob Hopkins, cofounder of the international Transition Network movement, invites us to travel to future worlds we would actually want to live in.

The Democratic Party left rural America behind. This urgent rallying cry shows how Democrats can win back and empower overlooked communities that have been pushing politics to the right—and why long-term progressive political power depends on it.

This book is not easy: It contains no quick-fix plan for a better, brighter tomorrow, and gives no ready-made answers. Instead, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira presents us with a challenge: to grow up, step up, and show up for ourselves, our communities, and the living Earth, and to interrupt the modern behavior patterns that are killing the planet we’re part of.

We live in an anxious age. Long-held certainties, cherished beliefs, and social trust are crumbling. Don’t expect things to get better. For too long we have taken our Christian heritage—the heritage upon which America was built—for granted. But we’re rapidly, and now inevitably, losing the Christian culture that shaped the American republic. What will take its place is a despotism—and a new paganism, worse than the old, because it will be based on a hatred of Christianity.

Predicting society’s present addiction to technology, our challenges with data privacy, and the dramatic increase in drug overdoses and depression that have accompanied a technology-induced lack of purpose, The Unabomber’s vision of the future has become our reality. Of course, his means were disgusting and condemnable. But his message is more important than ever. If we want to thrive in an age where automation and artificial intelligence and rapidly making humans obsolete, it is our responsibility to understand and prepare for the technological machine we are up against.

In Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche attacks past philosophers for their alleged lack of critical sense and their blind acceptance of Christian premises in their consideration of morality. The work moves into the realm "beyond good and evil" in the sense of leaving behind the traditional morality, which Nietzsche subjects to a destructive critique, in favor of what he regards as an affirmative approach that fearlessly confronts the contextual nature of knowledge.

We human beings share 98 percent of our genes with chimpanzees. Yet humans are the dominant species on the planet - having founded civilizations and religions, developed intricate and diverse forms of communication, learned science, built cities, and created breathtaking works of art - while chimps remain animals concerned primarily with the basic necessities of survival. What is it about that two percent difference in DNA that has created such a divergence between evolutionary cousins?

George Friedman has forecasted the coming trends (politics, technology, population, and culture) of the next century in The Next 100 Years, and focused his predictions on the coming ten years in The Next Decade. Now, in Flashpoints, Friedman zooms in on the region that has, for 500 years, been the cultural hotbed of the world - Europe - and examines the most basic and fascinating building block of the region: culture.

Once upon a time, any mention of California triggered unpleasant reminders of Ronald Reagan and right-wing tax revolts, ballot propositions targeting undocumented immigrants, and racist policing that sparked two of the nation's most devastating riots. In fact, California confronted many of the challenges the rest of the country faces now - decades before the rest of us. Today, California is leading the way on addressing climate change, low-wage work, immigrant integration, overincarceration, and more.