Culture Power

Mark Twain founded the American voice. His works are a living national treasury: taught, quoted, and reprinted more than those of any writer except Shakespeare. His awestruck contemporaries saw him as the representative figure of his times, and his influence has deeply flavored the 20th and 21st centuries.

In an increasingly secular, fragmented, and distracted culture, nothing brings Americans together quite like sports. On Sundays in September, more families worship at the altar of the NFL than at any church. This appeal, which cuts across all demographic and ideological lines, makes sports perhaps the last unifying mass ritual of our era, with huge numbers of people all focused on the same thing at the same moment. That timeless, live quality makes sports very powerful, and very lucrative. And the media spectacle around them is only getting bigger, brighter, and noisier.

Your employees and teams may be quite capable of handling their specific areas of focus, but unless you get them to work together, your products, services, and profits will suffer. While progress has been made, maximizing collaboration is still a challenge for many companies. They need a new approach. Over the last quarter century, California's Silicon Valley has become synonymous with building complex, successful businesses. Companies and leaders there have succeeded because they did more than apply existing business models - they created a new model.

For the past five decades Ms. has been the nation’s most influential source of feminist ideas, and it remains at the forefront of feminism today, affecting thought and culture with a younger-than-ever readership (ages 16-20!). Here are essays, profiles, conversations with and features by: Alice Walker, Cynthia Enloe, Pauli Murray, Nancy Pelosi, bell hooks, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Brittney Cooper, and Joy Harjo, as well as fiction and poetry by Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, Adrienne Rich, Rita Dove, and Sharon Olds, and many others.

In Lies the Government Told You, Judge Andrew P. Napolitano reveals how America's freedom, as guaranteed by the US Constitution, has been forfeited by a government more protective of its own power than its obligations to preserve our individual liberties.

Empathy has become a gaping fault line in American culture. Pioneering programs aim to infuse our legal and educational systems with more empathic thinking, even as pundits argue over whether we should bother empathizing with our political opposites at all. Meanwhile, we are inundated with the buzzily termed "empathic marketing" - which may very well be a contradiction in terms. In I Feel You, Cris Beam carves through the noise with a revelatory exploration of how we perform empathy, how it is learned, what it can do - indeed, what empathy is in the first place.

A worldwide race is on to perfect the next engine of economic growth, the advanced lithium-ion battery. It will power the electric car, relieve global warming, and catapult the winner into a new era of economic and political mastery. Can the United States win? Steve LeVine was granted unprecedented access to a secret federal laboratory outside Chicago, where a group of geniuses is trying to solve this next monumental task of physics. But these scientists - almost all foreign born - are not alone.

As the speed and complexity of the world increases, governments and nonprofit organizations need new ways to effectively tackle the critical challenges of our time-from pandemics and global warming to social media warfare. In Power to the Public, Tara Dawson McGuinness and Hana Schank describe a revolutionary new approach - public interest technology - that has the potential to transform the way governments and nonprofits around the world solve problems.

After five years of ground-breaking research, Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom share some unexpected answers, gripping stories, and a tapestry of unlikely connections. The Starfish and the Spider argues that organizations fall into two categories: traditional “spiders,” which have a rigid hierarchy and top-down leadership, and revolutionary “starfish,” which rely on the power of peer relationships. The Starfish and the Spider explores what happens when starfish take on spiders (such as the music industry vs. Napster, Kazaa, and the P2P services that followed).

In Contagious Culture, Anese Cavanaugh proved that it's possible to create an energized and engaged organizational culture that spreads from person to person. Now, in Contagious You, she hones in on the individual, showing us how each of us is contagious in our own way and stressing the importance of leading with intention to achieve positive results.

In Invisible Strings, poet, professor, and dedicated Swiftie Kristie Frederick Daugherty has brought together 113 contemporary poets, each contributing an original poem that responds to a specific Taylor Swift song.

As geek culture goes mainstream - from Game of Thrones to the Avengers - it's never been more important to look at the role women play in it and the future they're helping to create. And Kameron is the smart, funny, and profane voice we need to guide listeners through the world of fandom and the coming revolution in pop culture.

Kindness isn’t merely about getting along with people and being nice. It’s a game changer in business, the door opener to opportunity, and the key to authenticity and confidence. It’s a superpower that can be honed through an intentional lifestyle of kindness and is especially important in these divisive times.

Using numerous examples, Robinson and Schroeder argue that the employees who interact directly with your customers, make your products, and provide your services are in the best position to see where problems exist and what improvements and new offerings would have the most impact.

James Meredith's 1966 march in Mississippi began as one man's peaceful protest for voter registration and became one of the South's most important demonstrations of the civil rights movement. It brought together leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Stokely Carmichael, who formed an unlikely alliance that resulted in the Black Power movement, which ushered in a new era in the fight for equality. The retelling of Meredith's story opens on the day of his assassination attempt and goes back in time to recount the moments leading up to that event and its aftermath.

This updated and expanded edition is the first and only book to offer a leadership model firmly based on the Latino experience and culture. By 2045, Latinos will make up one in four Americans. They are projected to be 78 percent of the new entries into the labor force in the next 10 years.

Technology has revolutionized the business sector. Whether you're an entrepreneur, employee, CEO, or executive, you're likely feeling the effects of less humanity and more technology. Our minds are distracted, our attention spans are shortened, we want everything on demand, in boxes are never empty, our energy is frequently negative, we're addicted to social media, and we're sleep deprived. This cannot be the new normal. Breath is the antidote! Breathe to Succeed shares the transformative power of breath in business.

We've decided by consensus that consensus is good. In In Defense of Troublemakers, psychologist Charlan Nemeth argues that this principle is completely wrong: left unchallenged, the majority opinion is often biased, unoriginal, or false. It leads planes and markets to crash, causes juries to convict innocent people, and can quite literally make people think blue is green. In the name of comity, we embrace stupidity. We can make better decisions by embracing dissent. Dissent forces us to question the status quo, consider more information, and engage in creative decision-making.

Feminine traits that were once disparaged as weaknesses—such as sensitivity, intuition, and feeling emotional—are reclaimed as powerful strengths that can be embraced as the keys to a happier life for everyone.

From one of the co-founders of the Black Lives Matter movement comes a poetic memoir and reflection on humanity. Necessary and timely, Patrisse Cullors’ story asks us to remember that protest in the interest of the most vulnerable comes from love. Leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement have been called terrorists, a threat to America. But in truth, they are loving women whose life experiences have led them to seek justice for those victimized by the powerful.