Future Politics

Taking listeners into secret strategy calls and closed-door meetings from the House to the White House, Politico Playbook writers Jake Sherman and Anna Palmer trace the gamesmanship and the impulsiveness, the dealmaking and the backstabbing, in a blow-by-blow account of the power struggle that roiled Congress.

What will the world look like in 2050? How will complex forces of change—demography, the environment, finance, technology and ideas about governance—affect our global society? And how, with so many unknowns, should we think about the future? One of Europe’s foremost voices on global trends in economics, business and society, Hamish McRae takes us on an exhilarating journey through the next 30 years. Drawing on decades of research, and combining economic judgement with historical perspective, Hamish weighs up the opportunities and dangers we face.

If you had a trillion dollars and a year to spend it for the good of the world and the advancement of science, what would you do? It's an unimaginably large sum, yet it's only around one per cent of world GDP, and about the valuation of Google, Microsoft or Amazon. It's a much smaller sum than the world found to bail out its banks in 2008 or deal with Covid-19. But what could you achieve with $1 trillion? You could solve the problem of the pandemic, for one, and eradicate malaria, and maybe cure all disease. You could end global poverty.

The Theft of a Decade is a contrarian, revelatory analysis of how one generation pulled the rug out from under another and the myriad consequences that has set in store for all of us. The millennial generation was the unfortunate victim of several generations of economic theories that made life harder for them than it was for their grandparents. Then came the crash of 2008, and the boomer generation's reaction to it was brutal: politicians and policymakers made deliberate decisions that favored the interests of the boomer generation over their heirs.

Our planet is suffering from serious environmental problems: coastal flooding due to severe storms caused in part by atmospheric pollution, diminishing natural resources such as clean water, and so on. But while these problems plague planet Earth, two-thirds of our globe is ocean. The seas can be home to pioneers, seasteaders, who are willing to homestead the Blue Frontier. Oil platforms and cruise ships already inhabit the waters; now it's time to take the next step to full-fledged ocean civilizations.

La Révolution bilingue raconte l'histoire de parents et d'éducateurs impliqués dans la création de filières à deux langues dans les écoles publiques de la ville de New York. Convaincus que l’éducation bilingue est un bien public qui devrait être offert à tous les enfants, ces pionniers et leurs récits illustrent bien la capacité de ces filières à transformer positivement une communauté, une école et même un pays. Le livre sert de manuel pour vous permettre de mettre en place votre propre filière bilingue et de lancer ainsi votre propre révolution.

NASA Astrobiologist and renowned scientist Dr. David Grinspoon brings listeners an optimistic message about humanity's future in the face of climate change. For the first time in Earth's history, our planet is experiencing a confluence of rapidly accelerating changes prompted by one species: Humans. Climate change is only the most visible of the modifications we've made - up until this point, inadvertently - to the planet. And our current behavior threatens not only our own future but that of countless other creatures.

Drawing upon history, economics, complexity theory, human immunology, psychology and his own extraordinary experiences, Joshua Ramo puts forth a radical new model for looking at the world, one that embraces its inherent unpredictability--and offers our best hope for dealing with problems and disasters as they emerge.

We are in the middle of a cultural revolution, where the spectrum of gender and sexual identities is seemingly unlimited. So when author and journalist Lisa Selin Davis's six-year-old daughter first called herself a "tomboy", Davis was hesitant. Her child favored sweatpants and T-shirts over anything pink or princess-themed, just like the sporty, skinned-kneed girls Davis had played with as a kid.

This extraordinary book explains the engine that has catapulted the Internet from backwater to ubiquity—and reveals that it is sputtering precisely because of its runaway success. With the unwitting help of its users, the generative Internet is on a path to a lockdown, ending its cycle of innovation—and facilitating unsettling new kinds of control.

In The Progress Illusion, Jon D. Erickson charts the rise of the economic worldview and its infiltration into our daily lives as a theory of everything. Drawing on his own experience as a young economist inoculated in the 1980s era of "greed is good," Erickson shows how pseudoscience came to dominate economic thought. He pokes holes in the conventional wisdom of neo-classical economics, illustrating how flawed theories about financial decision-making and maximizing efficiency ignore human psychology and morality.

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is a master of game theory, which is a fancy label for a simple idea: People compete, and they always do what they think is in their own best interest. Bueno de Mesquita uses game theory and its insights into human behavior to predict and even engineer political, financial, and personal events. His forecasts, which have been employed by everyone from the CIA to major business firms, have an amazing 90 percent accuracy rate.

In 2021, Lauren Markham went to Greece, in search of her own Greek heritage and to cover the aftermath of a fire that burned down the largest refugee camp in Europe. Almost no one had wanted the camp—not activists, not the country’s growing neo-fascist movement, not even the government. But almost immediately, on scant evidence, six young Afghan refugees were arrested for the crime.

Andy Stern, the former president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), spent four years traveling the country and asking economists, futurists, labor leaders, CEOs, investment bankers, entrepreneurs, and political leaders to help envision the US economy 25 to 30 years from now. He vividly reports on people who are analyzing and creating this new economy - such as investment banker Steve Berkenfeld; David Cote, the CEO of Honeywell International; and Andy Grove of Intel.

Before there was Steve Jobs, there was Norman Bel Geddes. A ninth-grade dropout who found himself at the center of the worlds of industry, advertising, theater, and even gaming, Bel Geddes designed everything from the first all-weather stadium to Manhattan's most exclusive nightclub to Futurama, the prescient 1939 exhibit that envisioned how America would look in the not-too-distant 1960s.

Estamos perdiendo nuestra capacidad de no hacer nada. Nuestra existencia está completamente absorbida por la actividad y, por lo tanto, completamente explotada. Dado que solo percibimos la vida en términos de rendimiento, tendemos a entender la inactividad como un déficit, una negación o una mera ausencia de actividad cuando se trata, muy al contrario, de una interesante capacidad independiente.

The history of the American gun is intricately entwined with the history of America itself, and the potential future developments in gun technology could change the world. However, the radical anti-gun lobby stands between innovation and the American people. Bestselling author Frank Miniter describes amazing breakthroughs waiting to happen in gun technology - and how gun grabbers threaten to stop progress in its tracks.

Aerospace journalist Joe Pappalardo has witnessed space rocket launches around the world, from the jungle of French Guiana to the coastline of California. In his comprehensive work Spaceport Earth, Pappalardo describes the rise of private companies in the United States and how they are reshaping the way the world is using space for industry and science. Spaceport Earth is a travelogue through modern space history as it is being made.

Every day, scientists conduct pioneering experiments with the potential to transform how we live. Yet it isn't every day you hear from the scientists themselves! Now, award-winning author Jim Al-Khalili and his team of top-notch experts explain how today's earthshaking discoveries will shape our world tomorrow - and beyond. Pull back the curtain on genomics, robotics, AI, the Internet of Things, synthetic biology, transhumanism, interstellar travel, colonization of the solar system, teleportation, and much more.

Starting off at the Church of Perpetual Life in Florida and exploring the feuding subcultures around the cryonics industry, Peter Ward immerses himself into an eccentric world of startups, scam artists, scientific institutions, and tech billionaires to deliver this deeply reported, nuanced, and sometimes very funny exploration of the race for immortality—and the potentially devastating consequences should humanity realize its ultimate dream.