Future Politics

Author J. D. Kraus offers practical advice to his peers, so they can get the most out of middle school and high school, both academically and socially. From sensory sensitivity to awkwardness, dating to driving, he tackles it all.

In a world expected to reach a staggering population of 10 billion by 2050, and with global temperatures rising fast, humanity must fundamentally change the way it grows and consumes food. Uncertain Harvest brings together scientists, chefs, activists, entrepreneurs, farmers, philosophers, and engineers working on the global future of food to answer questions on how to make a more equitable, safe, sustainable, and plentiful food future.

Step into the mind of one of history's most influential thinkers as Nietzsche takes you on a profound journey through morality, truth, and the nature of human existence. This groundbreaking work, brought to life in captivating audio format, explores Nietzsche's bold and revolutionary ideas that continue to resonate in our modern world.

Out in the Pacific Ocean, there is a war taking place. It is a "warm war", a shoving match between the United States, since World War II the uncontested ruler of the seas, and China, which now possesses the world's largest navy. The Chinese regard the Pacific, and especially the South China Sea, as their ocean, and they're ready to defend it. Each day the heat between the two countries increases as the Chinese try to claim the South China Sea for their own, and the United States insists on asserting freedom of navigation.

Las valiosas reflexiones del político más querido del mundo y del más importante pensador contemporáneo, reunidos por primera vez en Uruguay para llamar a la acción.

In 2018, I had a dream of a coming second American Revolution/Civil War. In this dream, I saw events that are now unfolding at a rapid pace. I saw the conclusion of our present trauma, and the triumph over the evil that has been subduing our land. I saw how this victory will be accomplished. This is what I saw.

Changement climatique, migrations massives, nouvelles guerres, pandémies, capitalisme autoritaire : l'humanité est confrontée à des crises mondiales majeures. Plutôt que de céder au découragement, il est temps d'agir. Fort de son expérience de haut diplomate, d'expert dans le domaine de l'éducation et des affaires, Tom Fletcher nous propose une voie à suivre dans ce manifeste pratique.

In Artificial You, Susan Schneider says that it is inevitable that AI will take intelligence in new directions but urges that it is up to us to carve out a sensible path forward. As AI technology turns inward, reshaping the brain, as well as outward, potentially creating machine minds, it is crucial to beware. Homo sapiens, as mind designers, will be playing with "tools" they do not understand how to use: the self, the mind, and consciousness.

The Problem with Solutions combines an analysis of the rise of tech company solution culture with findings from actual research on the sector's ill-informed attempts to address the problems of food and agriculture.

Technology rules us as much as laws do. It shapes the legal, social, and ethical environments in which we act. Every time we cross a street, drive a car, or go to the doctor, we submit to the silent power of technology. Yet, much of the time, the influence of technology on our lives goes unchallenged by citizens and our elected representatives. Our embrace of novel technological pathways, Sheila Jasanoff shows, leads to a complex interplay among technology, ethics, and human rights.

In this uncompromising essay, Jonathan Crary presents the obvious but unsayable reality: our "digital age" is synonymous with the disastrous terminal stage of global capitalism and its financialization of social existence, mass impoverishment, ecocide, and military terror. Scorched Earth surveys the wrecking of a living world by the internet complex and its devastation of communities and their capacities for mutual support.

Since the beginning of civilization, humans have built cities to wall nature out, then glorified it in beloved but quite artificial parks. In Urban Jungle Ben Wilson—the author of Metropolis, a seven-thousand-year history of cities that the Wall Street Journal called “a towering achievement”—looks to the fraught relationship between nature and the city for clues to how the planet can survive in an age of climate crisis.

Mark Penn has boldly argued that the future is not shaped by society's broad forces but by quiet changes within narrow slices of the population. Ten years ago, he showed how the behavior of one small group can exert an outsized influence over the whole of America. His best-selling Microtrends highlighted dozens of tiny, counterintuitive trends that have since come to fruition, from the explosion of Internet dating to the recent split within the Republican Party. Today, the world is in perplexing upheaval, and microtrends are more influential than ever

Politics, manners, humor, sexuality, wealth, even our definitions of success are periodically renegotiated based on the new values society chooses to use as a lens to judge what is acceptable. Are these new values randomly chosen or is there a pattern? Pendulum chronicles the stuttering history of western society; that endless back-and-forth swing between one excess and another, always reminded of what we left behind.

In 2018, Myisha T. Hill created the @ckyourprivilege handle on Instagram to undo the harm created between White women and women of the global majority. After years of living in the micro- and macro-aggressions of White culture, Myisha was tired of staying silent. But she wanted to do more than fight back—she wanted to heal forward. Heal Your Way Forward: The Co-Conspirator's Guide to an Antiracist Future is the trumpet call to White and White-identifying folks, guiding them to recognize their antiracism work as intergenerational healing.

In Future Histories, public interest lawyer and digital specialist Lizzie O'Shea argues that we need to stop looking forward and start looking backwards. Weaving together histories of computing and progressive social movements with modern theories of the mind, society, and self, O'Shea constructs a "usable past" that can help us determine our digital future. What, she asks, can the Paris Commune tell us about earlier experiments in sharing resources - like the internet - in common?

Growing up in the Bronx, Joél Leon was taught that being soft, being vulnerable, could end your life. Shaped by a singular view of Black masculinity espoused by the media, by family and friends, and by society, he learned instead to care about the gold around his neck and the number of bills in his wallet. He absorbed the “facts” that white was always right and Black men were seen as threatening or great for comic relief but never worthy of the opening credits. It wasn’t until years later that Joél understood he didn’t have to be defined by these things.

Astounding is the landmark account of the extraordinary partnership between four controversial writers - John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and L. Ron Hubbard - who set off a revolution in science fiction and forever changed our world.

Do you worry that you've lost patience for anything longer than a tweet? If so, you're not alone. Digital-age pundits warn that as our appetite for books dwindles, so too do the virtues in which printed, bound objects once trained us: the willpower to focus on a sustained argument, the curiosity to look beyond the day's news, the willingness to be alone. The shelves of the world's great libraries, though, tell a more complicated story. Examining the wear and tear on the books that they contain, English professor Leah Price finds scant evidence that a golden age of reading ever existed.

In the digital age of instant communication, handwriting is less necessary than ever before, and indeed fewer and fewer schoolchildren are being taught how to write in cursive. Signatures - far from John Hancock's elegant model - have become scrawls. In her recent and widely discussed and debated essays, Anne Trubek argues that the decline and even elimination of handwriting from daily life does not signal a decline in civilisation, but rather the next stage in the evolution of communication.