Social Society

Thanks to increases in life expectancy, we can now expect to live for a long time. Most of us would welcome an extra day in the week, so why do so many of us view the prospect of additional years with fear and skepticism? The reason is simple: society is not currently structured to support long lives. Rather than thinking in terms of the needs of a rising number of older people, we must instead support the young and middle-aged to prepare differently for the longer futures they can expect.

From one of the world’s leading data scientists, a landmark tour ofthe new science of idea flow, offering revolutionary insights into the mysteries of collective intelligence and social influence.

In this very personal work - adapted from the original number one best seller, which the New York Times calls "as compelling as To Kill a Mockingbird, and in some ways more so" - acclaimed lawyer and social justice advocate Bryan Stevenson offers a glimpse into the lives of the wrongfully imprisoned and his efforts to fight for their freedom.

John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid show us how to look beyond mere information to the social context that creates and gives meaning to it. Arguing elegantly for the important role that human sociability plays, even - perhaps especially - in the digital world, The Social Life of Information gives us an optimistic look beyond the simplicities of information and individuals.

Companies like Facebook and Twitter have redefined social interaction. But what if "machines" like automobiles, bicycles, health monitors, appliances, instruments, and anything else you can connect to the Internet, could all become members of your social network, collect data you care about, and feed it back to you at just the right time?

For too long, scientists have focused on the dark side of our biological heritage: our capacity for aggression, cruelty, prejudice, and self-interest. But natural selection has given us a suite of beneficial social features, including our capacity for love, friendship, cooperation, and learning. Beneath all our inventions - our tools, farms, machines, cities, nations - we carry with us innate proclivities to make a good society.

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.

"L’homme ne peut devenir homme que par l’éducation. (...) L’éducation doit donc discipliner les hommes. La discipliner, c’est chercher à empêcher que ce qu’il y a d’animal en eux n’étouffe ce qu’il y a d’humain, aussi bien dans l’homme individuel que dans l’homme social. La discipline consiste donc simplement à les dépouiller de leur sauvagerie" E. Kant

In Work Mate Marry Love, Harvard Business School professor and former Barnard College president Debora L. Spar offers an incisive and provocative account of how technology has transformed our intimate lives in the past, and how it will do so again in the future. Surveying the course of history, she shows how marriage as we understand it resulted from the rise of agriculture, and that the nuclear family emerged with the industrial revolution. In their day, the street light, the car, and later the pill all upended courtship and sex.

The men involved in secret societies use their special knowledge for the benefit of all mankind. At least, that is what they claim. How are we to know, since their knowledge and actions have been secret? Fortunately, some of it has become public knowledge.

Immigration is one of the most controversial topics in the United States, typically framed as a battle between anti-immigrant conservatives and pro-immigrant liberals. Yet surprisingly, almost no one on either side of this issue seems to understand the true impact that immigrants have on any aspect of American life. In The Truth About Immigration, Wharton School professor Zeke Hernandez provides an accessible, apolitical, and evidence-based look at the effects of immigration on our local communities and our nation.

From the French Revolution of the 18th century to the Mexican, Russian, German, Chinese, anticolonial, and Iranian revolutions of the 20th, Chirot finds that moderate solutions to serious social, economic, and political problems were overwhelmed by radical ideologies that promised simpler, drastic remedies. But not all revolutions had this outcome. The American Revolution didn't, although its failure to resolve the problem of slavery eventually led to the Civil War, and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe was relatively peaceful, except in Yugoslavia.

In The Revenge of Geography, Robert D. Kaplan builds on the insights, discoveries, and theories of great geographers and geopolitical thinkers of the near and distant past to look back at critical pivots in history and then to look forward at the evolving global scene. Kaplan traces the history of the world's hot spots by examining their climates, topographies, and proximities to other embattled lands.

H. G. Wells was an insider with a British group tasked with the revival of their once great empire—this time in conjunction with Venetian Black Nobility Khazar bankers (not mentioned this explicitly in the book). Wells evidently grew less sympathetic to their aims as time went on, and published a version of the plans for public consumption in this and other books.

We live in a world oriented toward greatness, one in which we feel compelled to be among the wealthiest, most powerful, and most famous. This book explains why no one truly benefits from this competitive social order, and reveals how another way of life is possible—a good-enough life for all. Avram Alpert shows how our obsession with greatness results in stress and anxiety, damage to our relationships, widespread political and economic inequality, and destruction of the natural world. He describes how to move beyond greatness to create a society in which everyone flourishes.

Peter Singer is often described as the world's most influential philosopher. Now, in Ethics in the Real World, Singer shows that he is also a master at dissecting important current events in a few hundred words. In this book of brief essays, he applies his controversial ways of thinking to issues like climate change, extreme poverty, animals, abortion, euthanasia, human genetic selection, sports doping, the sale of kidneys, the ethics of high-priced art, and ways of increasing happiness.

The Code of Honor: Embracing Ethics in Cybersecurity delivers a first of its kind comprehensive discussion of the ethical challenges that face contemporary information security workers, managers, and executives. Authors Ed Skoudis, president of the SANS Technology Institute College and founder of the Counter Hack team, and Dr. Paul Maurer, president of Montreat College, explain how timeless ethical wisdom gives birth to the Cybersecurity Code which is currently being adopted by security practitioners and leaders around the world.

The New York Times best-selling true story of an all-American girl and a boy from Zimbabwe and the letter that changed both of their lives forever. It started as an assignment. Everyone in Caitlin's class wrote to an unknown student somewhere in a distant place. Martin was lucky to even receive a pen-pal letter. There were only 10 letters, and 50 kids in his class. But he was the top student, so he got the first one. That letter was the beginning of a correspondence that spanned six years and changed two lives.

In this endlessly fascinating book, New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki explores a deceptively simple idea that has profound implications: large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant. Groups are better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future.

In this insightful travelogue, Robert D. Kaplan, geopolitical expert and bestselling author of Balkan Ghosts and The Revenge of Geography, turns his perceptive eye to a region that for centuries has been a meeting point of cultures, trade, and ideas. He undertakes a journey around the Adriatic Sea, through Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro, Albania, and Greece, to reveal that far more is happening in the region than most news stories let on.