Social Power

In 2021, when news outlets feasted on “the Facebook Files,” Frances Haugen went public as the former employee who blew the whistle on the company by copying tens of thousands of pages of documents. She testified to Congress and spoke to the media. She was hailed at President Biden’s first State of the Union Address. She made sure everyone understood exactly what the documents revealed.

It’s not your imagination: We’re living in a time of moral decline. Publicly, we’re bombarded with reports of government leaders acting against the welfare of their constituents; companies prioritizing profits over health, safety, and our best interests; and technology posing risks to society with few or no repercussions for those responsible. Personally, we may be conflicted about how much privacy to afford our children on the internet; how to make informed choices about our purchases and the companies we buy from; or how to handle misconduct we witness at home and at work.

Michael C. Reichert draws on his 30 years of experience researching the process by which boys become men to provide a road map for parents and educators who hope to help the boys they love and care about grow into strong, emotionally intelligent, and compassionate men.

International best-selling author and leading global expert on mental strength Amy Morin turns her focus to feminism, explaining what it means - and what it takes - to be a mentally strong woman in the age of the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements.

A false king has seized Camelot’s throne, sentencing Tedros, the true king, to death. While Agatha narrowly escapes the same fate, Sophie is caught in King Rhian’s trap. With her wedding to Rhian approaching, she’s forced to play a dangerous game as her friends’ lives hang in the balance. All the while, King Rhian’s dark plans for Camelot are taking shape. Now the students of the School for Good and Evil must find a way to restore Tedros to the throne before their stories - and the future of the Endless Woods - are rewritten...forever.

Do you want more sales? Do you want more website traffic? Do you want to build your own personal influencer brand? But if you want to build a social media marketing plan that is both cost-effective and profitable, then you need to realize that online marketing is more than simply picking the right ad product or platform…social media marketing is all about having a multi-platform mindset.

Cobalt Red is the searing first-ever exposé of the immense toll taken on the people and environment of the Democratic Republic of the Congo by cobalt mining, as told through the testimonies of the Congolese people themselves. Activist and researcher Siddharth Kara has traveled deep into cobalt territory to document the testimonies of the people living, working, and dying for cobalt.

Governments and hundreds of corporations are spying on you and everyone you know. They're not just selling your data. They're selling the power to influence you and decide for you. Even when you've explicitly asked them not to. Reclaiming privacy is the only way we can regain control of our lives and our societies. These governments and corporations have too much power, and their power stems from us - from our data. Privacy is as collective as it is personal, and it's time to take back control.

For much of history, societies have violently oppressed ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities. It is no surprise that many who passionately believe in social justice came to believe that members of marginalized groups need to take pride in their identity to resist injustice.

Over the past thirty years, Gregory Boyle has transformed thousands of lives through his work as the founder of Homeboy Industries, the largest gang-intervention program in the world. The program runs on two unwavering principles: (1) Everyone is unshakably good (no exceptions) and (2) we belong to each other (no exceptions). Boyle believes that these two ideas allow all of us to cultivate a new way of seeing. Every community wants to be a safe place, where people are seen, and then are cherished.

The grid is an accident of history and of culture, in no way intrinsic to how we produce, deliver and consume electrical power. Yet this is the system the United States ended up with, a jerry-built structure now so rickety and near collapse that a strong wind or a hot day can bring it to a grinding halt. The grid is now under threat from a new source: renewable and variable energy, which puts stress on its logics as much as its components.

In Love Your Lady Landscape, Lisa Lister takes us on a revelatory journey through the terrain of what it is to be a woman. It will move you into a fiercely loving and healing relationship with your body and teach you how to use its cycles and signs to create a life of vitality and fulfillment.

History is clear: Whenever the church has aligned itself with worldly, coercive power, it ends up on the wrong side of important justice issues. But when the church cooperates with God's power through his presence among the least powerful, its witness for Jesus transforms the world into a better place. In Reckoning with Power, David Fitch unpacks the difference between worldly power, or power over others, and God's power, which engages not in coercion but in love, reconciliation, grace, forgiveness, and healing.

Written with bracing wit and intelligence, Rachel Maddow's Drift argues that we've drifted away from America's original ideals and become a nation weirdly at peace with perpetual war, with all the financial and human costs that entails. To understand how we've arrived at such a dangerous place, Maddow takes us from the Vietnam War to today's war in Afghanistan.

In her memoir, Power offers an urgent response to the question "What can one person do?" and a call for a clearer eye, a kinder heart, and a more open and civil hand in our politics and daily lives. The Education of an Idealist traces Power’s distinctly American journey from immigrant to war correspondent to presidential Cabinet official. In 2005, her critiques of US foreign policy caught the eye of newly elected senator Barack Obama, who invited her to work with him on Capitol Hill and then on his presidential campaign.

In this eye-opening study, Sidney W. Mintz shows how Europeans and Americans transformed sugar from a rare foreign luxury to a commonplace necessity of modern life and how it changed the history of capitalism and industry. He discusses the production and consumption of sugar and reveals how closely interwoven sugar's origins are as a "slave" crop grown in Europe's tropical colonies, with its use first as an extravagant luxury for the aristocracy, then as a staple of the diet of the new industrial proletariat.

Forty years ago in China, marriage was universal, compulsory, and a woman's only means to a livelihood. Enter the one-child policy, which despite its horrors, resulted in China's first generations of urban only-daughters - girls who were raised without brothers and pushed to study, achieve, and succeed as if they were sons. Fast forward to the present, where in an urbanized economic powerhouse, enough of these women have decided to postpone marriage - or not marry at all - to spawn a label: "leftovers". Unprecedentedly well-educated and goal-oriented, they struggle to find partners.

The Korean sixth sense for winning friends and influencing people, nunchi (pronounced noon-chee) can help you connect with others so you can succeed in everything from business to love. The Power of Nunchi will show you how. Have you ever wondered why your less-skilled coworker gets promoted before you, or why that one woman from your yoga class is always surrounded by adoring friends? They probably have great nunchi. The art of reading a room and understanding what others are thinking and feeling, nunchi is a form of emotional intelligence.

Ellenberg chases mathematical threads through a vast range of time and space, from the everyday to the cosmic, encountering, among other things, baseball, Reaganomics, daring lottery schemes, Voltaire, the replicability crisis in psychology, Italian Renaissance painting, artificial languages, the development of non-Euclidean geometry, the coming obesity apocalypse, Antonin Scalia's views on crime and punishment, the psychology of slime molds, what Facebook can and can't figure out about you, and the existence of God.

First published in 1956, The Power Elite stands as a contemporary classic of social science and social criticism. C. Wright Mills examines and critiques the organization of power in the United States, calling attention to three firmly interlocked prongs of power: the military, corporate, and political elite. The Power Elite can be enjoyed as a good account of what was taking place in America at the time it was written, but its underlying question of whether America is as democratic in practice as it is in theory continues to matter very much today.