The Seventeen Solutions: Bold Ideas for Our American Future


Ralph Nader - 2012
    In these troubling times of intractable fiscal and social distress, Nader offers a new program to help rescue America: The Seventeen Solutions. His powerful, paradigm-shifting proposals address some of the most pressing concerns in our country today—from corporate crime to tax reform to health care and housing—and they should find a receptive audience not only among liberals, progressives, disillusioned Democrats, Rachel Maddow fans, and Occupy Wall Street supporters, but all concerned Americans.

A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention


Matt Richtel - 2014
    On the last day of summer, an ordinary Utah college student named Reggie Shaw fatally struck two rocket scientists while texting and driving along a majestic stretch of highway bordering the Rocky Mountains. Richtel follows Reggie from the moment of the tragedy, through the police investigation, the state's groundbreaking prosecution (at the time there was little precedent to guide the court), and ultimately, Reggie's wrenching admission of responsibility. Richtel parallels Reggie's journey with leading-edge scientific findings regarding human attention and the impact of technology on our brains--showing how these devices, now thoroughly embedded in all aspects of our lives, play to our deepest social instincts and prey on parts of the brain that crave stimulation, creating loops of compulsion, even addiction. A propulsive read filled with fascinating scientific detail, riveting narrative tension, and rare emotional depth, A Deadly Wandering is a book that can change--and save--lives.

Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity


Lawrence Lessig - 2004
    Never before have the cultural powers- that-be been able to exert such control over what we can and can't do with the culture around us. Our society defends free markets and free speech; why then does it permit such top-down control? To lose our long tradition of free culture, Lawrence Lessig shows us, is to lose our freedom to create, our freedom to build, and, ultimately, our freedom to imagine.

The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything


Michael J. Casey - 2018
    The Truth Machine is the best book so far on what has happened and what may come along. It demands the attention of anyone concerned with our economic future." --Lawrence H. Summers, Charles W. Eliot University Professor and President Emeritus at Harvard, Former Treasury SecretaryFrom Michael J. Casey and Paul Vigna, the authors of The Age of Cryptocurrency, comes the definitive work on the Internet's Next Big Thing: The Blockchain.Big banks have grown bigger and more entrenched. Privacy exists only until the next hack. Credit card fraud is a fact of life. Many of the "legacy systems" once designed to make our lives easier and our economy more efficient are no longer up to the task. Yet there is a way past all this--a new kind of operating system with the potential to revolutionize vast swaths of our economy: the blockchain.In The Truth Machine, Michael J. Casey and Paul Vigna demystify the blockchain and explain why it can restore personal control over our data, assets, and identities; grant billions of excluded people access to the global economy; and shift the balance of power to revive society's faith in itself. They reveal the disruption it promises for industries including finance, tech, legal, and shipping.Casey and Vigna expose the challenge of replacing trusted (and not-so-trusted) institutions on which we've relied for centuries with a radical model that bypasses them. The Truth Machine reveals the empowerment possible when self-interested middlemen give way to the transparency of the blockchain, while highlighting the job losses, assertion of special interests, and threat to social cohesion that will accompany this shift. With the same balanced perspective they brought to The Age of Cryptocurrency, Casey and Vigna show why we all must care about the path that blockchain technology takes--moving humanity forward, not backward.

The Stress Test: How Pressure Can Make You Stronger and Sharper


Ian H. Robertson - 2017
    However, the right level of challenge and stress can help people flourish and achieve more than they ever thought possible.In THE STRESS TEST, clinical psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist Ian Robertson, armed with over four decades of research, reveals how we can shape our brain's response to pressure and how stress actually can be a good thing. THE STRESS TEST is a revelatory study of how and why we react to pressure as we do, and how we can change our response to stress to our benefit.

Savage Messiah: How Dr. Jordan Peterson Is Saving Western Civilization


Jim Proser - 2020
    Jordan Peterson, by award-winning author Jim Proser.Who is psychologist, professor, bestselling author, and YouTube personality Dr. Peterson? What does he believe in? Who are his followers? And why is he so controversial? These are among the many questions raised in this compelling, exhaustively researched account of his life--from Peterson's early days as a religious-school student in small-town Canada to his tenure at Harvard to his headline-making persona of the present day.In Savage Messiah, we meet an adolescent Peterson who, scoffing at the "fairy tales" being taught in his confirmation class, asks his minister how it's possible to believe the Bible in light of modern scientific theory. Unsatisfied with the answer he's been given, Peterson goes on to challenge other authority figures who stood in his way as he dared to define the world in his own terms. This won Peterson many enemies and more admirers than he could have dreamed of, particularly during the digital era, when his nontraditional views could be widely shared and critically discussed. Still, a fall from grace was never far behind.Peterson had always preached the importance of free speech, which he believed was essential to finding life-saving personal meaning in our frequently nihilistic world. But when he dismissed Canadian parliament Bill C-16, one that compelled the use of newly-invented pronouns to address new gender identities, Peterson found himself facing a whole new world. Students targeted him as a gender bigot. Conservatives called him their hero. Soon Peterson was fixed firmly at the center of the culture wars--and there was no turning back.With exclusive interviews of Dr. Peterson, as well as conversations with his family, friends, and associates, this book reveals the heart and mind, teachings and practices, of one of the most provocative voices of our time.

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future


James Bridle - 2018
    Underlying this trend is a single idea: the belief that our existence is understandable through computation, and more data is enough to help us build a better world.   In actual fact, we are lost in a sea of information, increasingly divided by fundamentalism, simplistic narratives, conspiracy theories, and post-factual politics. Meanwhile, those in power use our lack of understanding to further their own interests. Despite the accessibility of information, we’re living in a new Dark Age.   From rogue financial systems to shopping algorithms, from artificial intelligence to state secrecy, we no longer understand how our world is governed or presented to us. The media is filled with unverifiable speculation, much of it generated by anonymous software, while companies dominate their employees through surveillance and the threat of automation.   In his brilliant new work, leading artist and writer James Bridle excavates the limits of technology and how it aids our understanding of the world. Surveying the history of art, technology, and information systems, he explores the dark clouds that gather over our dreams of the digital sublime.

The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age


Astra Taylor - 2012
    But how true is this claim? In a seminal dismantling of techno-utopian visions, "The People's Platform" argues that for all that we "tweet" and "like" and "share," the Internet in fact reflects and amplifies real-world inequities at least as much as it ameliorates them. Online, just as off-line, attention and influence largely accrue to those who already have plenty of both.What we have seen so far, Astra Taylor says, has been not a revolution but a rearrangement. Although Silicon Valley tycoons have eclipsed Hollywood moguls, a handful of giants like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook remain the gatekeepers. And the worst habits of the old media model--the pressure to seek easy celebrity, to be quick and sensational above all--have proliferated online, where "aggregating" the work of others is the surest way to attract eyeballs and ad revenue. When culture is "free," creative work has diminishing value, and advertising fuels the system. The new order looks suspiciously like the old one.We can do better, Taylor insists. The online world does offer a unique opportunity, but a democratic culture that supports diverse voices and work of lasting value will not spring up from technology alone. If we want the Internet to truly be a people's platform, we will have to make it so.

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success


Ross Douthat - 2020
    But beneath our social media frenzy and reality-television politics, the deeper reality is one of drift, repetition, and dead ends. The Decadent Society explains what happens when a rich and powerful society ceases advancing—how the combination of wealth and technological proficiency with economic stagnation, political stalemates, cultural exhaustion, and demographic decline creates a strange kind of “sustainable decadence,” a civilizational malaise that could endure for longer than we think..

The Taking of Getty Oil: Pennzoil, Texaco, and the Takeover Battle That Made History


Steve Coll - 1987
    Pulitzer Prize–winning author Steve Coll is renowned for “his ability to take complicated, significant business stories and turn them into quick-reading engaging narratives” (Chicago Tribune). Coll is at the height of his talents in this “riveting” tale of one of the most spectacular—and catastrophic—corporate takeovers of all time (Newsday).   As the head of a sprawling oil empire, J. Paul Getty was once the world’s richest man. But by 1984, eight years after his death, Getty’s legacy was in tatters: His children were locked in a bitter feud over the family trust and the company he founded was riven by boardroom turmoil. Then Pennzoil made an agreement with Getty’s son, Gordon, to purchase Getty Oil. It was a done deal—until Texaco swooped in to claim the $10 billion prize.   What followed was an epic legal battle that pit “good ole boy” J. Hugh Liedtke of Pennzoil against the Wall Street brokers behind Texaco’s offer. The scandalous details of the case would shock the business world and change the landscape of the oil industry forever.   With a large cast of colorful characters and the dramatic pacing of a novel, The Taking of Getty Oil is a “suspenseful” and “always intriguing” chronicle of one of the most fascinating chapters in American corporate history (Publishers Weekly).

Readings about the Social Animal


Elliot Aronson - 1973
    Organized to illustrate the major themes of Elliot Aronson's The Social Animal, this collection of classic and contemporary readings explores the most important ideas, issues, and debates in social psychology today.

Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence


Ajay Agrawal - 2018
    But facing the sea change that AI will bring can be paralyzing. How should companies set strategies, governments design policies, and people plan their lives for a world so different from what we know? In the face of such uncertainty, many analysts either cower in fear or predict an impossibly sunny future.But in Prediction Machines, three eminent economists recast the rise of AI as a drop in the cost of prediction. With this single, masterful stroke, they lift the curtain on the AI-is-magic hype and show how basic tools from economics provide clarity about the AI revolution and a basis for action by CEOs, managers, policy makers, investors, and entrepreneurs.When AI is framed as cheap prediction, its extraordinary potential becomes clear: Prediction is at the heart of making decisions under uncertainty. Our businesses and personal lives are riddled with such decisions. Prediction tools increase productivity--operating machines, handling documents, communicating with customers. Uncertainty constrains strategy. Better prediction creates opportunities for new business structures and strategies to compete. Penetrating, fun, and always insightful and practical, Prediction Machines follows its inescapable logic to explain how to navigate the changes on the horizon. The impact of AI will be profound, but the economic framework for understanding it is surprisingly simple.

Man vs. the Welfare State


Henry Hazlitt - 1969
    

Price Action Market Traps: 7 Trap Strategies Market Psychology Minimal Risk & Maximum Profit


Ray Wang - 2017
     I have described the fundamental concepts of Price Action in the Part I, the basic knowledge which any trader needs. In Part II, I have illustrate seven TRAP setups you can find on any chart, along with examples and studies for you to better understand the TRAP concept. The only consistent setup you will find on every day, every market and every time frame. • Common Trap • The “Stop-Loss” Trap • “The Giant” Trap • “Failed Breakout” Trap • “Back to Back” Trap (Double-Trap) • News Trap • Morning Specials Trap setups come with minimal risk and maximum potential reward. It’s very simple to understand and exploit. This EBook is written in simplest English, that everybody can understand the complexity of market within 1 week.

Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution Of Global Intelligence


George Dyson - 1997
    Dyson traces the course of the information revolution, illuminating the lives and work of visionaries - from the time of Thomas Hobbes to the time of John von Neumann - who foresaw the development of artificial intelligence, artificial life, and artificial mind. This book derives both its title and its outlook from Samuel Butler's 1863 essay "Darwin Among the Machines." Observing the beginnings of miniaturization, self-reproduction, and telecommunication among machines, Butler predicted that nature's intelligence, only temporarily subservient to technology, would resurface to claim our creations as her own. Weaving a cohesive narrative among his brilliant predecessors, Dyson constructs a straightforward, convincing, and occasionally frightening view of the evolution of mind in the global network, on a level transcending our own. Dyson concludes that we are in the midst of an experiment that echoes the prehistory of human intelligence and the origins of life. Just as the exchange of coded molecular instructions brought life as we know it to the early earth's primordial soup, and as language and mind combined to form the culture in which we live, so, in the digital universe, are computer programs and worldwide networks combining to produce an evolutionary theater in which the distinctions between nature and technology are increasingly obscured. Nature, believes Dyson, is on the side of the machines.