Future World

Nate Lovejoy is a self-proclaimed nobody, a stay-at-home dad who doesn’t believe he’s important to anyone but his wife and their two daughters. So it’s a shock when members of a powerful secret society kidnap and spirit Nate away to a mansion at the behest of their leader, Vanslow DeGange, who claims to know the future. He’s foreseen that a billion people could die - unless Nate acts. It seems improbable, especially given what DeGange says will set this mass casualty incident in motion: a lawsuit against the biggest power company in Virginia, being brought by Nate’s wife.

We talk about achieving 'LGBTQ+ equality', but around the world, LGBTQ+ people are still suffering discrimination and extreme violence. How do we solve this urgent problem, allowing queer people everywhere the opportunity to thrive? In We Can Do Better Than This, 35 voices explore this question. Through deeply moving stories and provocative new arguments on safety and visibility, dating and gender, care and community, they map new global frontiers in the fight for LGBTQ+ rights.

A journalist returns to her family home in Iran, witnessing enormous political, social, and personal change.

Part historical nonfiction, part big-think book, Challenge Us is the first ever work that encompasses both the history of crowdfunding and challenge prizes, and their implications for the future. While there have been audiobooks in the space that have alluded to crowdfunding and prize competitions in their backdrops, none have unearthed such extensive underpinnings of the practices, or analyzed them in such detail as to provide insights into a rather underreported tool for societal progress.

A unique tour around the world in search of the great thinkers of our time and their next big ideas. With the world at the threshold of profound changes, the questions become: Where are the philosophers? Where are the great thinkers of today? Where is the next Jefferson, Curie, or Mandela? Which technologies and changes in the nature of life will they harness, embrace, or be inspired by?

David Rowan travels the globe in search of the most exciting and pioneering start-ups building the future. He’s got to know the founders of WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Google, Spotify, Xiaomi, Didi, Nest, Twitter and countless other ambitious entrepreneurs disrupting businesses in almost every sector. And yet too often the companies they’re disrupting don’t get it. They think they can innovate through jargon: with talk of change agents and co-creation gurus, ideas portals and webinars, make-a-thons and hackfests, paradigm shifts and pilgrimages to Silicon Valley.

An examination of UK politics and politicians from 1945 to 2023, written for people who hate or ignore both. A manifesto for a political future based on philosophy and wisdom about how our political system should be changed—which, of course, means goodbye to party politics....

Multi-award-winning scientific futurist Dr. Catherine Ball presents insights into how technology and science are providing answers to many of the challenges the world is facing today—food shortages, war and conflict, the decline in local manufacturing, health and ageing, and global warming—and asks why we are not embracing these technologies more widely. Dr. Catherine opens our eyes to the amazing, wide world of technological advancements and explores the role we all have in learning more, owning the conversations, and determining what we want technology to be.

Neither an advocate nor a critic of cultured meat, Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft spent five years researching the phenomenon. In Meat Planet, he reveals how debates about lab-grown meat reach beyond debates about food, examining the links between appetite, growth, and capitalism. Could satiating the growing appetite for meat actually lead to our undoing? Are we simply using one technology to undo the damage caused by another? Like all problems in our food system, the meat problem is not merely a problem of production. It is intrinsically social and political.

In atemberaubendem Tempo haben die Menschen den Planeten ihren Bedürfnissen unterworfen. Im 21. Jahrhundert stehen sie vor den Scherben ihres Tuns: Die natürlichen Ressourcen erschöpft, die Klimaerwärmung eine tödliche Bedrohung, globale Pandemien eine akute Gefahr. Werden wir auch diese Krise meistern? Die Bestsellerautoren Johannes Krause und Thomas Trappe zeigen, was wir aus der Vergangenheit für unser Überleben lernen können - und welche Gefahren in der zügellosen Kraft des Menschen liegen.

Does the idea of progress still apply to our times? If so, what does progress really mean? Today, many believe that progress is a word to be avoided, a relic from a past, the dangerous product of an era of intellectual naivety that would be best forgotten. Yet, the idea of progress is rooted in a human impulse that is both profound and essential, a way of interpreting history without which our ability to plan the future, our very identity would be at stake.

It was a Roman historian and writer, St. Augustine, who coined the phrase "City of God" in a book of the very same title. But the city of God that Augustine was referring to was not in Jerusalem. When Augustine wrote his book, it was hundreds of years after the Jewish city of Jerusalem had been overrun and destroyed by the Roman legions; he was writing of Rome as the city of God and the center of the Roman Catholic faith.

The future of the relationship between Israel and America is deeply uncertain: The current political leadership of each country is hostile to the other, there is no longer a sense of shared strategic focus, and demographic changes are forcing the countries further apart with every passing year. Undermining the relationship between Israel and the US is the fact that it was never clearly defined. The ambiguity has been politically helpful but now threatens the future: There is no treaty, no agreed set of obligations, no mutual dependence.

When it comes to the afflictions of the global economy, almost everyone - and especially Donald Trump - is quick to point the finger of blame at the state of international trade. But what about unconstrained capital flows? Unfettered capital has resulted in a string of financial and economic crises that have left our political systems strained and dialogue corroded. The once perceived benefits of openness have been cast to the wayside and the cracks in the global order can no longer be ignored.

What would the world look like after 10 years? Find out.

Australia is a wealthy nation with the economic profile of a developing country - heavy on raw materials and low on innovation and skilled manufacturing. Once we rode on the sheep’s back for our overseas trade; today we rely on cartloads of coal and tankers of LNG. So must we double down on fossil fuels, now that COVID-19 has halted the flow of international students and tourists? Or is there a better way forward, which supports renewable energy and local manufacturing?

Centuries have passed since the Communist Federation defeated the capitalist Empire, but humanity is still divided. A vast artificial-intelligence network, a psychiatric bureaucracy, and a tiny egalitarian council oversee civil affairs and quash “abnormal” attitudes such as romantic love. Disillusioned civilians renounce the new society and either forego technology to live as “primitives” or enhance their brains with cybernetic implants to become “cybos”.

Australia is on the brink of momentous change, but only if its citizens and politicians can come to new terms with the past. In this inspiring essay, Mark McKenna considers the role of history in making and unmaking the nation. From Captain Cook to the frontier wars, from Australia Day to the Uluru Statement, we are seeing fresh debates and recognitions. McKenna argues that it is time to move beyond the history wars and that truth-telling about the past will be liberating and healing. This is an urgent essay about a nation’s moment of truth.

There are three types of people when it comes to the future: those who will watch what happens, those who will make it happen, and those who will wonder what happened. Which will you be? Our society has widespread and unprecedented access to information, but what do we do with it all? Who do we trust to accurately track our societal trends, interpret them, and see possibilities for the future - and how can we help to shape that future? The answers lie in Futurecast, an insider glimpse of today’s world - and tomorrow’s.

Baya is not sure whether she wants the life her mother has planned for her. She has been prepared her entire life for three trials. That’s all…only three ancient tests in three days. A lifetime worth of work over in a matter of days. Easy right? Then, she will officially be a woman and in line to become the ruler of the world, or she’ll be dead. But, what if she doesn’t want either of those options? If she can survive the trials, that’s when the real challenges will begin.