Social Power

Traditionally, when we get sick, health care professionals ask, “What’s the matter with you?” But around the world, teams of doctors, nurses, therapists, and social workers have started to flip the script, asking “What matters to you?” Instead of solely pharmaceutical prescriptions, they offer ‘social prescriptions’—referrals to community activities and resources, like photography classes, gardening groups, and volunteering gigs. The results speak for themselves.

The Bible predicts that in the last days a charismatic leader will establish a global following in the name of peace. The Qur’an also predicts that a man will rise up to lead the nations, pledging to usher in an era of peace. The man in the Qur’an is called the Mahdi, or Islam’s savior. However, the man in the Bible is the Antichrist. Joel Richardson’s stunning research and analysis suggest that the Mahdi and the Antichrist are actually one and the same.

Twitter seems like a perfect start-up success story. In barely six years, a small group of young, ambitious programmers in Silicon Valley built an $11.5 billion business out of the ashes of a failed podcasting company. Today Twitter boasts more than 200 million active users and has affected business, politics, media, and other fields in innumerable ways.

A revolutionary work since its publication, Black Power exposed the depths of systemic racism in this country and provided a radical political framework for reform: true and lasting social change would only be accomplished through unity among African-Americans and their independence from the preexisting order.

In this remarkable book, Malidoma Some explores the essential role ritual plays in maintaining community and examines the structure common to all ritual. By telling stories of the rituals of his native West African Dagara culture, and his own experiences in the tribal community, he makes a convincing case that the lack of ritual in the Western world is a fundamental reason that the fabric of society is unravelling.

Placing the West's failure to acknowledge the most successful slave revolt in history alongside denials of the Holocaust and the debate over the Alamo, Michel-Rolph Trouillot offers a stunning meditation on how power operates in the making and recording of history.

Hey, smart girl! Are you looking to boost that GPA even more? Believe it or not, yoga can help you do that. Learn all the best yoga poses for building your mental muscle and staying healthy at the same time.

Are you an introvert or loner who feels painfully different from others and unable to fit into society? Do you often feel misunderstood and alienated from those around you? Do you find yourself opposing conventional beliefs and society’s values? Do you feel deeply frustrated and alien to this world, like you don’t belong here? You are not alone.

If you’ve ever felt ineffective, invisible, or inarticulate, chances are you weren’t actually any of those things. Those feelings may instead have been the result of a lack of awareness we all seem to have for how our words, actions, and even our mere presence affect other people. In You Have More Influence Than You Think, social psychologist Vanessa Bohns draws from her original research to illustrate why we fail to recognize the influence we have, and how that lack of awareness can lead us to miss opportunities or accidentally misuse our power.

Teach your children the power of Kindness, one of the most important skills a child can learn. Are you one of 90 percent of parents, saying that their top priorities for their kids is to be caring? This makes sense: Kindness and concern for others are held as moral virtues in nearly every society and every major religion. The best social-emotional learning (SEL) book for raising kind children. This charming story with peaceful rhymes will explain to your child that it is okay to make a mistake and say I’m sorry.

To have power over another one must first have power over one’s self. The Power Bible teaches how power operates on both an interpersonal, individual level, and a societal level. Arming the listener with tactics and skills on how to triumph in the contest of life. The Power Bible is an instrument to teach you how to win; to bend, disregard, and strategically break the rules that bind you. Cultivating an awareness for which battles to fight, which ones to pass on, and how to win the moments that matter.

In How to Have a Good Day, economist and former McKinsey partner Caroline Webb shows listeners how to use recent findings from behavioral economics, psychology, and neuroscience to transform their approaches to everyday working life. Advances in these behavioral sciences are giving us ever better understanding of how our brains work, why we make the choices we do, and what it takes for us to be at our best.

Michael Wood has travelled the length and breadth of China, the world's oldest civilization and longest lasting state, to tell a thrilling story of intense drama, fabulous creativity, and deep humanity that stretches back thousands of years.

Struggling with a recession... European nations at risk of defaulting on their loans... A possible global financial crisis. It happened before, in the 1970s. The Oil Kings is the story of how oil came to dominate U.S. domestic and international affairs. Brilliantly reported and filled with astonishing details about some of the key figures of the time, this is the history of an era that we thought we knew, an era whose momentous reverberations still influence events at home and abroad today.

Power and Persuasion stands apart for its critical evaluation of the concepts, doctrines, and activities that the US Department of Defense and Department of State employ for the art of strategic communication including psychological operations, military information support operations, propaganda, and public diplomacy.

In this groundbreaking treatise, Palantir co-founder and CEO Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska offer a searing critique of our collective abandonment of ambition, arguing that in order for the U.S. and its allies to retain their global edge—and preserve the freedoms we take for granted—the software industry must renew its commitment to addressing our most urgent challenges, including the new arms race of artificial intelligence. The government, in turn, must embrace the most effective features of the engineering mindset that has propelled Silicon Valley’s success.

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 Happiness, Matthieu Ricard demonstrated that true happiness is not tied to fleeting moments or sensations, but is an enduring state of soul rooted in mindfulness and compassion for others. Now he turns his lens from the personal to the global, with a rousing argument that altruism - genuine concern for the well-being of others - could be the saving grace of the 21st century. It is, he believes, the vital thread that can answer the main challenges of our time.

Barack Obama campaigned on a promise of change from George W. Bush's "global war on terror". Yet from indefinite detention and drone strikes to surveillance and military tribunals, Obama ended up continuing - and in some cases expanding - many policies he inherited. What happened? In Power Wars, Charlie Savage looks inside the Obama administration's national security legal and policy team in a way that no one has before.

In his short life, the Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the leading thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution, leading movements in North America, South America, the African continent, and the Caribbean. In each locale, Rodney found himself a lightning rod for working class Black Power. His deportation catalyzed 20th century Jamaica's most significant rebellion, the 1968 Rodney riots, and his scholarship trained a generation how to think politics at an international scale.