Social Change

Humans are venturing up and out, and we’re taking our competitive spirit with us. Soon, what happens in space will shape human history as much the mountains, rivers, and seas have impacted civilizations around the world. It’s no coincidence that Russia, China, and the USA are leading the way. The next fifty years will change the face of global politics and the world order as we know it. In this must-listen work, bestselling author Tim Marshall navigates the new astropolitical reality to show how we got here and where we’re heading.

Far more than a rhetorical exercise, this book is designed to inform, inspire, and spur action. Based on Sachs' 14 years as director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and as special advisor to the United Nations Secretary-General on the Millennium Development Goals and Sustainable Development Goals, The Age of Sustainable Development is a landmark publication and a clarion call for all who care about our planet and global justice.

How can we summon a moment of lift for human beings - and especially for women? Because, when you lift up women, you lift up humanity. For the last 20 years, Melinda Gates has been on a mission to find solutions for people with the most urgent needs, wherever they live. Throughout this journey, one thing has become increasingly clear to her: If you want to lift society up, you need to stop keeping women down.

As this book shows, human beings are wired to care, and we can become more empathic with practice. Empathy increases dopamine, reduces stress, boosts self-esteem, heightens the immune system, and enriches our relationships. Empathy also improves business key performance indicators. This means that leveraging empathy on purpose can lead to better health, happier and more productive workplaces, and a more meaningful life. That's why empathy is our superpower.

What is anger? Who is allowed to be angry? How can we manage our anger? How can we use it? It might seem like a day doesn’t go by without some troubling explosion of anger, whether we’re shouting at the kids, or the TV, or the driver ahead who’s slowing us down. In this audiobook, the first of its kind, Dr. Ryan Martin draws on 20 years plus of research, as well as his own childhood experience of an angry parent, to take an all-round view on this often-challenging emotion.

Imagine turning what could be a contentious conversation with a family member, a friend, or a coworker into a fruitful exchange that enlightens everyone’s minds and inches both of you toward a solution. Steven T. Collis, one of the world’s leading experts on civil discourse, reveals ten practical habits that can help you navigate the potential minefields of hard topics and leave you and those you converse with feeling thoughtful and productive.

The Capitalist and the Activist offers an engaging and thoughtful look at the new reality of corporate social activism - its driving forces, promises and perils, and implications for our businesses and personal lives. Weaving deep research and fascinating stories that span business, entertainment, history, science, and politics, Tom Lin provides an insightful road map for how society arrived here and a practical compass for moving forward.

As we grapple with news stories about our country’s racial fault lines, our challenge is not just to learn about the past, but also to cope with the “belief grief” that unlearning requires. If you are on the emotional journey of reckoning with the past, such as the massacre of Black Americans in Tulsa, the killing of Native American children in compulsory “residential schools” designed to destroy their culture, and the incarceration of Japanese Americans, you are not alone.

"Regime change" did not begin with the administration of George W. Bush, but has been an integral part of U.S. foreign policy for more than one hundred years. Starting with the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893 and continuing through the Spanish-American War and the Cold War and into our own time, the United States has not hesitated to overthrow governments that stood in the way of its political and economic goals.

The Anti-Ableist Manifesto defines ableism as discrimination in favor of non-disabled people and helps listeners understand that ending discrimination begins with self-reflection. Tiffany Yu celebrates the power of stories and lived experiences to foster the proximity, intimacy, and humanity of disability identities that have far too often been “othered” and rendered invisible.

An energizing case for hope about the climate comes from Rebecca Solnit, called “the voice of the resistance” by the New York Times, and climate activist Thelma Young Lutunatabua, along with a chorus of voices calling on us to rise to the moment. Not Too Late is the book for anyone who is despondent, defeatist, or unsure about climate change and seeking answers. As the contributors to this volume make clear, the future will be decided by whether we act in the present—and we must act to counter institutional inertia, fossil fuel interests, and political obduracy. T

Based on her inspiring, viral 2018 commencement speech to Barnard College’s graduates in New York City, New York Times best-selling author, two-time Olympic gold medalist, and FIFA World Cup champion Abby Wambach delivers her empowering rally cry for women to unleash their individual power, unite with their pack, and emerge victorious together.

In an illuminating analysis, Dr. Genevieve Guenther shows that the climate debate is not, in fact, neatly polarized, with Republicans obstructing climate action and Democrats advancing climate solutions. Partisans on the right and the left often repeat the same fossil-fuel talking points, and this repetition produces a centrist consensus upholding the status quo, even as global heating accelerates. Weaving this analysis through fascinating critical histories of the terms that dominate the language of climate politics Dr. Guenther shows how this consensus is established.

Racial and ethnic hostility is one of the most pervasive problems the church faces. It hinders our effectiveness as one body of believers. It damages our witness. Why won't this problem just go away? Because it is a spiritual battle. In response, we must employ spiritual weapons - prayer, repentance, forgiveness. In this book Brenda Salter McNeil and Rick Richardson provide a model of racial reconciliation, social justice, and spiritual healing that creates both individual and communal transformation.

National leader Stacey Abrams has written the guide to harnessing the strengths of being an outsider and succeeding anyway. Leadership is hard. Convincing others - and yourself - that you are capable of taking charge and achieving more requires insight and courage. Lead from the Outside is the handbook for outsiders, written with an eye toward the challenges that hinder women, people of color, the working class, members of the LGBTQ community, and millennials ready to make change.

Today just about everything we've known and relied on (our natural environment, economy, societies, cultures and institutions) is changing dramatically—too often for the worse. Without radical new approaches, our planet will become unrecognizable as well as poorer, more violent, more authoritarian. Thomas Homer-Dixon calls on his extraordinary knowledge of complexity science, of how societies work and can evolve, and of our capacity to handle threats, to show that we can shift human civilization onto a new path if we mobilize our minds, spirits, imaginations and collective values.

In today’s society, games are fulfilling real human needs in ways that reality is not. Hundreds of millions of people globally - 174 million in the United States alone - regularly inhabit game worlds because they provide the rewards, stimulating challenges and epic victories that are so often lacking in the real world. Jane McGonigal argues that we need to figure out how to make the real world—our homes, our businesses and our communities—engage us in the way that games do.

Growth has been both an unspoken and an explicit aim of our individual and collective striving. It governs the lives of microorganisms and galaxies; it shapes the capabilities of our extraordinarily large brains and the fortunes of our economies. Growth is manifested in annual increments of continental crust, a rising gross domestic product, a child's growth chart, the spread of cancerous cells. In this magisterial book, Vaclav Smil offers systematic investigation of growth in nature and society, from tiny organisms to the trajectories of empires and civilizations.

With this thirty-day approach, you can develop your empathy skills as tools for self-love and empowerment. Empathy expert and entrepreneur Michael Tennant weaves together scholarly research with his personal journey of loss, substance use, anxiety, and depression to explore how empathy can benefit both our inner lives and our larger community.

Temperatures are rising all over the world, leading to wildfires, droughts, animal extinctions, and ferocious storms - climate change is real. But how did we get to this state, and what can we do next? What if we could work to protect the planet, while also taking action to make life fairer and more equal for the people who live on it? We can - if we're willing to change everything.