Over his long career as witness to an extreme twentieth century, National Book Award-winning psychiatrist, historian, and public intellectual Robert Jay Lifton has grappled with the profound effects of nuclear war, terrorism, and genocide. Now he shifts to climate change, which, Lifton writes, "presents us with what may be the most demanding and unique psychological task ever required of humankind," what he describes as the task of mobilizing our...

"An unflinching chronicle of gentrification in the twenty-first century, and a love letter to lost New York, by the creator of the popular and incendiary blog Vanishing New York. For generations, New York City has been a mecca for artists, writers, and other hopefuls longing to be part of its rich cultural exchange and unique social fabric. But today, modern gentrification is transforming the city from an exceptional, iconoclastic metropolis into...

"Palila v Hawaii. New Zealand's Te Urewera Act. Sierra Club v Disney. These legal phrases hardly sound like the makings of a revolution, but beyond the headlines portending environmental catastrophes, a movement of immense import has been building--in courtrooms, legislatures, and communities across the globe. Cultures and laws are transforming to provide a powerful new approach to protecting the planet and the species with whom we share it. Lawyers...

"Can the world stop climate change? The prognosis is bleak. Most efforts to tackle the problem have focused on treaties that require virtually global consensus, yet meaningful consensus has been elusive because deep cuts in emissions are expensive and antagonize well-organized interests. Predictably, diplomacy has swung between gridlock and superficial agreements with little impact. After three decades of sustained negotiations on global warming,...

Chef José Andrés arrived in Puerto Rico four days after Hurricane Maria ripped through the island. The economy was destroyed and for most people there was no clean water, no food, no power, no gas, and no way to communicate with the outside world. Andrés addressed the humanitarian crisis the only way he knew how: by feeding people, one hot meal at a time. From serving sancocho with his friend José Enrique at Enrique's ravaged restaurant in San...

"From world-renowned economist Paul Collier, a candid diagnosis of the many failures of the greatest economic system in history, and a pragmatic and realistic vision for how we can repair it. Western society, once thriving, is being torn apart by deep new rifts in its social and economic fabric. It's now populous cities versus rural counties; the highly skilled elite versus the less educated; wealthy versus developing countries. As these breaks have...

"Thiel starts from the bold premise that we live in an age of technological stagnation, even if we're too distracted by our new mobile devices to notice. Progress has stalled in every industry except computers, and globalization is hardly the revolution people think it is. It's true that the world can get marginally richer by building new copies of old inventions, making horizontal progress from "1 to n." But true innovators have nothing to copy....

"A history of how an international effort to outlaw war gave way to an effort to regulate it, with an emphasis on the role played by the United States"-- Provided by publisher.

"An eminent sociologist--and coauthor, with Aziz Ansari, of the #1 New York Times bestseller Modern Romance--makes the provocative case that the future of democratic societies rests not only on shared values but also on shared "social infrastructure": the libraries, childcare centers, bookstores, coffee shops, pools, and parks that promote crucial, sometimes life-saving connections between people who might otherwise fail to find common cause"-- Provided...

A leading economist challenges dominant theories on global inequality, discussing why wealth persistently remains in the hands of a few and how technological development threatens to create a scarcity of unskilled jobs that will lead to even greater inequality. "In his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, economist Thomas Pikkety argued that the contemporary phenomenon of rising inequality across the globe is a function of the inheritance of...