Social Change

With all the whiz, bang, pop, and shimmer of a glowing arcade, volume 1 of The Ultimate History of Video Games reveals everything you ever wanted to know and more about the unforgettable games that changed the world, the visionaries who made them, and the fanatics who played them. Starting in arcades then moving to televisions and handheld devices, the video game invasion has entranced kids and the young at heart for nearly fifty years. And gaming historian Steven L. Kent has been there to record the craze from the very beginning.

In the 1960s Ram Dass was a Harvard professor who turned to Eastern religion to answer the questions troubling his generation. He shared his story in the landmark classic, Be Here Now, which instantly captured the spiritual longings of his contemporaries. In Still Here, Ram Dass once again brings understanding, common sense, and reassurance for those of us facing the final season of life.

It Takes Chutzpah is an inspirational call to action by a senior U.S. politician, describing how Americans of all age groups, persuasions, and occupations can defy convention, chart new pathways for their communities, schools, at work and in life. US Senator Ron Wyden is widely praised for coming up with sensible-sounding ideas no one else had thought of and making the counter-intuitive political alliances that prove helpful in passing bills. In It Takes Chutzpah, he offers a progressive leader’s manifesto for being a courageous warrior during turbulent times.

Merchants of Doubt has been praised—and attacked—around the world, for reasons easy to understand. This book tells, with “brutal clarity” (Huffington Post), the disquieting story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades.

Lyme disease is spreading rapidly around the globe as ticks move into places they could not survive before. The first epidemic to emerge in the era of climate change, the disease infects half a million people in the US and Europe each year, and untold multitudes in Canada, China, Russia, and Australia. Mary Beth Pfeiffer shows how we have contributed to this growing menace and how modern medicine has underestimated its danger.

In these new essays, Williams explores the concept of erosion: of the land, of the self, of belief, of fear. She wrangles with the paradox of desert lands and the truth of erosion: What is weathered, worn, and whittled away through wind, water, and time is as powerful as what remains. Our undoing is also our becoming.

In today’s political climate, it’s hard not to get discouraged. Isolated, doom scrolling, lacking a sense of purpose or community...it’s easy to become overwhelmed by the dire state of American democracy and do nothing, because why try when the odds are never in our favor?

In the wake of World War II, four agents were critical in helping build a new organization that we now know as the CIA. Adelaide Hawkins, Mary Hutchison, Eloise Page, and Elizabeth Sudmeier, called the “wise gals” by their male colleagues because of their sharp sense of humor and even quicker intelligence, were not the stereotypical femme fatale of spy novels.

The air conditioner is often hailed as one of the modern world's greatest inventions—yet nearly as often blamed for global disaster. It has changed everything from architecture to people's food habits; saved countless lives, and caused countless deaths. First appearing in 1902, when Willis Carrier, an engineer barely out of college, developed the "Apparatus for Treating Air," everyone assumed it would instantly change the world. But the story of air conditioning and its rise to ubiquity is far from simple.

Drought-hit regions bleeding those who for whom a rural life has become untenable. Coastlines diminishing year on year. Wildfires and hurricanes leaving widening swaths of destruction. The culprit, most of us accept, is climate change, but not enough of us are confronting one of its biggest, and most present, consequences: a total reshaping of the earth’s human geography. As Gaia Vince points out early in Nomad Century, global migration has doubled in the past decade, on track to see literal billions displaced in the coming decades.

When your work is inextricable from your identity, your community, and your own liberation, you need a unique praxis of care to sustain it—and for mission-driven activists, organizers, and changemakers working under oppressive systems, making space to center vital needs like rest, self-care, and healthy boundaries isn’t as simple as clocking out. Practicing Liberation reorients collective justice work toward a model that transforms the effects of injustice, harm, and oppressive systems into resilience, joy, and community care.

Today, in an instant, leaders can find themselves face-to-face with crisis. An active shooter. A media controversy. A data breach. In You're It, the faculty of the National Preparedness Leadership Initiative at Harvard University takes you to the front lines of some of the toughest decisions facing our nation's leaders - from how to mobilize during a hurricane or in the aftermath of a bombing to halting a raging pandemic. They also take listeners through the tough decision-making inside the world's largest companies, hottest startups, and leading nonprofits.

Quietly and steadily, the number of women making six figures or more is increasing and continues to rise at a rate faster than for men. From entrepreneurs to corporate executives, from white-collar professionals to freelancers and part-timers, women are forging careers with considerable financial success. In Secrets of Six-Figure Women, Barbara Stanny, journalist, motivational speaker, and financial educator, identifies the seven key strategies of female high earners.

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.

This guidebook describes a framework called the Progressive Outcomes Scale Logic Model which helps organizations analyze and address racial inequities in their programs and initiatives by explicitly considering the perspectives and experiences of people of color, essentially allowing them to identify how their work might unintentionally perpetuate systemic racism and actively work to dismantle it, which is crucial in the fight against poverty as racial disparities often contribute significantly to poverty rates. The guidebook encourages organizations to actively engage with communities of ...

With the new edition of Unsettled, Steven Koonin draws on decades of experience—including as a top science advisor to the Obama administration—to clear away the fog and explain what science really says (and doesn’t say). With a new introduction, this edition now features reflections on an additional three years of eye-opening data, alternatives to unrealistic “net zero” solutions, global energy inequalities, and the energy crisis arising from the war in Ukraine.

It’s one of the iconic photographs of American history: A Black teenager, a policeman and his lunging German Shepherd. Birmingham, Alabama, May of 1963. In May of 2020, as reporter Paul Kix stared at a different photo–that of a Minneapolis police officer suffocating George Floyd–he kept returning to the other photo taken half a century earlier, haunted by its echoes. What, Kix wondered, was the full legacy of the Birmingham photo? And of the campaign it stemmed from?

Companies everywhere face two major challenges today: getting noticed and getting paid. To confront these obstacles, Bharat Anand examines a range of businesses around the world, from The New York Times to The Economist, from Chinese Internet giant Tencent to Scandinavian digital trailblazer Schibsted, and from talent management to the future of education.

Enter Frank: a collective of eight beings from a distant planet who know what we’re going through because they’ve been there, too. Their civilization, once beset by many of the same challenges we face, has now advanced to a point where they can offer an informed and compassionate perspective on our trials, tribulations, and triumphs here on Earth. Speaking to Mike Dooley, one of today’s most celebrated New Thought leaders, with medium Tracy Farquhar serving as their channel, Frank answers our questions.

Based on Mackenzi Lee's popular weekly Twitter series of the same name, Bygone Badass Broads features 52 remarkable and forgotten trailblazing women from all over the world. With tales of heroism and cunning, in-depth bios and witty storytelling, Bygone Badass Broads gives new life to these historic female pioneers. Starting in the fifth century BC and continuing to the present, the book takes a closer look at bold and inspiring women who dared to step outside the traditional gender roles of their time.