High Public

All of us are faced countless times with the challenge of persuading others, whether we're trying to win a trivial argument with a friend or convince our coworkers about an important decision. Instead of relying on untrained instinct - and often failing as a result - we'd win more arguments if we learned the timeless art of verbal persuasion, or rhetoric.

A Human Algorithm: How Artificial Intelligence Is Redefining Who We Are examines the immense impact intelligent technology will have on humanity. These machines, while challenging our personal beliefs and our socio-economic world order, also have the potential to transform our health and well-being, alleviate poverty and suffering, and reveal the mysteries of intelligence and consciousness. International human rights attorney Flynn Coleman deftly argues that it is critical we instill values, ethics, and morals into our robots, algorithms, and other forms of AI.

After 1991, international organizations from the Red Cross to Greenpeace sought to help the victims, yet found themselves stymied by post-Soviet political circumstances they did not understand. International diplomats and scientists allied to the nuclear industry evaded or denied the fact of a wide-scale public health disaster caused by radiation exposure. Efforts to spin the story about Chernobyl were largely successful; the official death toll ranges between 31 and 54 people. In reality, radiation exposure from the disaster caused between 35,000 and 150,000 deaths in Ukraine alone.

In the spring of 1926, the Soderbjerg brothers, Ray and Roy, plunge into radio by founding Station WLT (With Lettuce and Tomato) in order to rescue their failing restaurant and become the Sandwich Kings of South Minneapolis. For the next 25 years, the "Friendly Neighbor" station produces a dazzling array of shows and stars: Dad Benson, Wingo Beals, Slim Graves and his Blue Movers, chain-smoking child star Little Becky, and household-tips maven Lucille Larson (who repeatedly broadcasts in her underwear).

We're Doomed, Now What? addresses the crisis that is our time through a series of brilliant, moving, and original essays on climate change, war, literature, and loss from one of the most provocative and iconoclastic minds of his generation.

From Joseph Romm, Chief Science Advisor for National Geographic's Years of Living Dangerously series and one of Rolling Stone's "100 people who are changing America," Climate Change offers user-friendly, scientifically rigorous answers to the most difficult (and commonly politicized) questions surrounding what climatologist Lonnie Thompson has deemed "a clear and present danger to civilization."

Hackers have a bad reputation, as shady deployers of bots and destroyers of infrastructure. In Coding Democracy, Maureen Webb offers another view. Hackers, she argues, can be vital disruptors. Hacking is becoming a practice, an ethos, and a metaphor for a new wave of activism in which ordinary citizens are inventing new forms of distributed, decentralized democracy for a digital era. Confronted with concentrations of power, mass surveillance, and authoritarianism enabled by new technology, the hacking movement is trying to "build out" democracy into cyberspace.

During his years as a public official, Mitchell Weiss was told that government can't do new things or solve tough challenges - it's too big and slow and bureaucratic. Sadly, this is what so many of us have come to believe. But in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings, he and his city hall colleagues raced to support survivors in new, innovative ways. This kind of entrepreneurial spirit and savvy in government is growing, transforming the public sector's response to big problems at all levels.

Small Wars, Big Data provides groundbreaking perspectives for how small wars can be better strategized and favorably won to the benefit of the local population.

When we think about the future of war, the military and Washington and most everyone gets it backwards. We think in terms of buying single military systems, such as fighter jets or aircraft carriers. And when we think about modernizing those systems, we think about buying better versions of the same things. But what really matters is not the single system but "the battle network"—the collection of sensors and shooters that enables a military to find an enemy system, target it, and attack it.

From the millions of listeners who follow the tales of Lake Wobegon and A Prairie Home Companion every Saturday night on public radio, and for fans of Garrison Keillor's literary take on life in our times, this audiobook will be most welcome.

Our baffling new multipolar world grows ever more complex, desperately calling for new ways of thinking, particularly when it comes to political risk. To Dare More Boldly provides those ways, telling the story of the rise of political risk analysis, both as a discipline and a lucrative high-stakes industry that guides the strategic decisions of corporations and governments around the world. It assesses why recent predictions have gone so wrong and boldly puts forward 10 analytical commandments that can stand the test of time.

In a fascinating account combining policy expertise with compelling on-the-ground reporting, Susan Crawford reveals how the giant corporations that control cable and Internet access in the United States use their tremendous lobbying power to tilt the playing field against competition, holding back the infrastructure improvements necessary for the country to move forward. And she reveals how cities and towns are fighting monopoly power to bring the next technological revolution to their communities.

Blending history and cutting-edge economic analysis, and writing in lively and jargon-free prose, Saez and Zucman dissect the deliberate choices (and sins of indecision) that have brought us to today: the gradual exemption of capital owners; the surge of a new tax avoidance industry; and the spiral of tax competition among nations. With clarity and concision, they explain how America turned away from the most progressive tax system in history to embrace policies that only serve to compound the wealth of a few.

The world must reach negative greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change. Yet no single plan has addressed the full scope of the problem - until now. In The 100% Solution, Solomon Goldstein-Rose - a leading millennial climate activist and a former Massachusetts state representative - makes clear what needs to happen to hit the 2050 target: the manufacturing booms we must spur, the moonshot projects we must fund, the amount of CO2 we'll have to sequester from the atmosphere, and much more.

For Chinese immigrant Wong Chut King, surviving in San Francisco meant a life in the shadows. His passing on March 6, 1900, would have been unremarkable if a city health officer hadn't noticed a swollen black lymph node on his groin - a sign of bubonic plague. Empowered by racist pseudoscience, officials rushed to quarantine Chinatown while doctors examined Wong's tissue for telltale bacteria. If the devastating disease was not contained, San Francisco would become the American epicenter of an outbreak that had already claimed 10 million lives worldwide.

In the first half of the 20th century, Dunbar was an academically elite public school, despite being racially segregated by law. By the 1950s, Dunbar High School was sending 80 percent of its students to college. Today, as with too many troubled urban public schools, the majority of Dunbar students struggle with reading and math. Journalist and author Alison Stewart, whose parents were both Dunbar graduates, tells the story of the school’s rise, fall, and path toward resurgence.

From colonial times into the 20th century, our laws and court cases ignored atheism, assuming that all good Americans were religious. Only in the 20th century, with the passage of laws allowing for conscientious objection to war, did nonbelief enter debates about religious liberty. Still, today every one of the 20 states has God written into its constitution. God is everywhere in American public life. R. Laurence Moore and Isaac Kramnick explore both God's omnipresence and the dramatic rise in nonbelievers that has led to an "atheist awakening" intent on holding the country to its secular principles.

Queen Victoria's reign was an era of breathtaking social change, but it did little to create a platform for women. But not so within the social sphere of the seance - a mysterious, lamp-lit world on both sides of the Atlantic, in which women who craved a public voice could hold their own. Out of the Shadows tells the stories of the enterprising women whose supposedly clairvoyant gifts granted them fame, fortune, and, most important, influence, as they crossed rigid boundaries of gender and class as easily as they passed between the realms of the living and the dead.

Queen Victoria's reign was an era of breathtaking social change, but it did little to create a platform for women to express themselves. But not so within the social sphere of the seance - a mysterious, lamp-lit world on both sides of the Atlantic. Out of the Shadows tells the stories of the enterprising women whose supposedly clairvoyant gifts granted them fame, fortune, and, most important, influence, as they crossed rigid boundaries of gender and class as easily as they passed between the realms of the living and the dead.