The problems of the 21st century are of unprecedented scale. Climate change, financial instability, the housing crisis, the need for health care: all of these are political issues that could be managed with ease on a much smaller scale. But with an enormous global population, that kind of change is no longer an option. As a result, some of the large bodies we once appointed to manage macroscopic problems--such as the government--have begun to fail us. Never was this more clear than during ...

The evidence is irrefutable: global warming is real. While the debate continues about just how much damage spiking temperatures will wreak, we know the threat to our homes, health, and even way of life is dire. So why isn’t America doing anything? Where is the national campaign to stop this catastrophe?It may lie between the covers of this book. Ignition brings together some of the world’s finest thinkers and advocates to jump start the ultimate green revolution. Including...

An “indispensable” (Nation) examination of why "doing what you love" is a recipe for exploitation, creating a new tyranny of work in which we cheerily acquiesce to doing jobs that take over our lives.You're told that if you "do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life."In Work Won't Love You Back, Sarah Jaffe, a preeminent voice on labor, inequality, and social movements, examines this "labor of love" myth—the idea that certain ...

The crisis of the progressive movement is so evident that nothing less than a fundamental rethinking of its basic assumptions is required. Today's progressives now work for professional organizations more comfortable with the inside game in Washington DC (and capitols throughout the West), where they are outmatched and outspent by corporate interests. Labor unions now focus on the narrowest possible understanding of the interests of their members, and membership continues to decline in loc...

Life in America has become fractured—in public and private—across ever-widening fault lines of anger and incivility.The intensity of disagreement between Americans threatens the nation’s well-being, presenting itself as disrespectful and distrusting in politics, culture, and conversations. Confusion, frustration, and hatred permeate politics, social media interactions, and cable news. The dysfunction and distrust also appear on the streets and at dinner tables....

From the New York Times bestselling author of How We Got To Now, Farsighted, and Extra LifeCombining the deft social analysis of Where Good Ideas Come From with the optimistic arguments of Everything Bad Is Good For You, New York Times bestselling author Steven Johnson’s Future Perfect makes the case that a new model of political change is on the rise, transforming everything from local governm...

“Citizenville offers both an impassioned plea for more tech-enabled government and a tour d'horizon of the ways some governments have begun using technology to good effect… a fast-paced and engaging read” --San Francisco ChronicleA rallying cry for revolutionizing democracy in the digital age, Citizenville reveals how ordinary Americans can reshape their government for the better. Gavin Newsom, the lieutenant governor of Californ...

The Internet revolution has come. Some say it has gone. In The Future of Ideas, Lawrence Lessig explains how the revolution has produced a counterrevolution of potentially devastating power and effect. Creativity once flourished because the Net protected a commons on which widest range of innovators could experiment. But now, manipulating the law for their own purposes, corporations have established themselves as virtual gatekeepers of the Net while Congress, in the pocket...

How seemingly innocuous technologies are unsettling the balance of power by putting it in the hands of the masses - and what a world without "big" will mean for all of us.In The End of Big, social media pioneer, political and business strategist, and Harvard Kennedy School faculty member Nicco Mele offers a fascinating, sometimes frightening look at how our ability to stay connected - constantly, instantly, and globally - is dramatically changing our world.G...

Celebrants and skeptics alike have produced valuable analyses of the Internet's effect on us and our world, oscillating between utopian bliss and dystopian hell. But according to Robert W. McChesney, arguments on both sides fail to address the relationship between economic power and the digital world.McChesney's award-winning Rich Media, Poor Democracy skewered the assumption that a society drenched in commercial information is a democratic one. In Digital Disconnect

A collection of essays that "do an incredible job of balancing the wonders and horrors of the force that is Wal-Mart " ( Booklist , starred review).Edited by one of the nation's preeminent labor historians, this book marks an ambitious effort to dissect the full extent of Wal-Mart's business operations, its social effects, and its role in the United States and world economy. Wal-Mart is based on a...