A thought-provoking guide to facing global pandemics, climate change, and other modern crises with maturity, humility, and integrity--for fans of Everything Is F*cked and Against Purity

This book is not easy: it contains no quick-fix plan for a better, brighter tomorrow, and gives no ready-made answers. Instead, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira presents us with a challenge: to grow up, step up, and show up for ourselves, our communities, and the living Earth, and to interrupt the modern behavior patterns that are killing the planet we're part of.

Driven by expansion, colonialism, and resource extraction and propelled by neoliberalism and rabid consumption, our world is profoundly out of balance. We take more than we give; we inoculate ourselves in positive self-regard while continuing to make harmful choices; we wreak irreparable havoc on the ecosystems, habitats, and beings with whom we share our planet. But instead of drowning in hopelessness, how can we learn to face our reality with humility and accountability?

Machado de Oliveira breaks down archetypes of cognitive dissonance--the do-gooder who does good enough, then retreats to business as usual; the incognito capitalist who, at first glance, may seem like a radical change-maker--and asks us to dig deeper and exist differently. She explains how our habits, behaviors, and belief systems hold us back . . . and why it's time now to gradually disinvest. Including exercises used with teachers, NGO practitioners, and global changemakers, she offers us thought experiments that ask us to:

- Reimagine how we learn, unlearn, and respond to crisis
- Better assess our surroundings and interact with difference, uncertainty, complexity, and failure
- Expand our capacity to hold personal and collective space for difficult and painful things
- Understand the 5 modern-colonial e's Entitlements, Exceptionalism, Exaltation, Emancipation, and Enmeshment in low-intensity struggle activism
- Interrupt our satisfaction with modern-colonial desires that cause harm
- Create space for change driven neither by desperate hope nor a fear of desolate hopelessness

For fans of adrienne maree brown, Sherri Mitchell, and Arundhati Roy, Hospicing Modernity challenges our assumptions and dares to ask more of us, for the sake of us all.

An acclaimed cultural historian takes readers on an intellectual thrill ride through the kaleidoscopic story of futurology, a surprisingly powerful force in the modern world.

For millennia, predicting the future was the province of priests and prophets, the realm of astrologers and seers. Then, in the twentieth century, futurologists emerged, claiming that data and design could make planning into a rational certainty. Over time, many of these technologists and trend forecasters amassed power as public intellectuals, even as their predictions proved less than reliable. Now, amid political and ecological crises of our own making, we drown in a cacophony of potential futures-including, possibly, no future at all.

A Century of Tomorrows offers an illuminating account of how the world was transformed by the science (or is it?) of futurecasting. Beneath the chaos of competing tomorrows, Adamson reveals a hidden order: six key themes that have structured visions of what's next. Helping him to tell this story are remarkable characters, including self-proclaimed futurologists such as Buckminster Fuller and Stewart Brand, as well as an eclectic array of other visionaries who have influenced our thinking about the world ahead: Octavia Butler and Ursula LeGuin, Shulamith Firestone and Sun Ra, Marcus Garvey and Timothy Leary, and more.

Arriving at a moment of collective anxiety and fragile hope, Adamson's extraordinary book shows how our projections for the future are, always and ultimately, debates about the present. For tomorrow is contained within the only thing we can ever truly know: today.

How will AI change our world within twenty years? A pioneering technologist and acclaimed writer team up for a dazzling (The New York Times) look at the future that brims with intriguing insights (Financial Times). This edition includes a new foreword by Kai-Fu Lee.

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Financial Times

Long before the advent of ChatGPT, Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan understood the enormous potential of artificial intelligence to transform our daily lives. But even as the world wakes up to the power of AI, many of us still fail to grasp the big picture. Chatbots and large language models are only the beginning.

In this inspired collaboration (The Wall Street Journal), Lee and Chen join forces to imagine our world in 2041 and how it will be shaped by AI. In ten gripping, globe-spanning short stories and accompanying commentary, their book introduces readers to an array of eye-opening settings and characters grappling with the new abundance and potential harms of AI technologies like deep learning, mixed reality, robotics, artificial general intelligence, and autonomous weapons.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - Discover the game-changing theory of the cycles of history and what past generations can teach us about living through times of upheaval--with deep insights into the roles that Boomers, Generation X, and Millennials have to play--now with a new preface by Neil Howe.

First comes a High, a period of confident expansion. Next comes an Awakening, a time of spiritual exploration and rebellion. Then comes an Unraveling, in which individualism triumphs over crumbling institutions. Last comes a Crisis--the Fourth Turning--when society passes through a great and perilous gate in history.

William Strauss and Neil Howe will change the way you see the world--and your place in it. With blazing originality, The Fourth Turning illuminates the past, explains the present, and reimagines the future. Most remarkably, it offers an utterly persuasive prophecy about how America's past will predict what comes next.

Strauss and Howe base this vision on a provocative theory of American history. The authors look back five hundred years and uncover a distinct pattern: Modern history moves in cycles, each one lasting about the length of a long human life, each composed of four twenty-year eras--or turnings--that comprise history's seasonal rhythm of growth, maturation, entropy, and rebirth. Illustrating this cycle through a brilliant analysis of the post-World War II period, The Fourth Turning offers bold predictions about how all of us can prepare, individually and collectively, for this rendezvous with destiny.

After reading Mitchell's guide, you'll know what you don't know and what other people don't know, even though they claim to know it. And that's invaluable. --The New York Times

A leading computer scientist brings human sense to the AI bubble.

No recent scientific enterprise has proved as alluring, terrifying, and filled with extravagant promise and frustrating setbacks as artificial intelligence. The award-winning author Melanie Mitchell, a leading computer scientist, now reveals AI's turbulent history and the recent spate of apparent successes, grand hopes, and emerging fears surrounding it.

In Artificial Intelligence, Mitchell turns to the most urgent questions concerning AI today: How intelligent--really--are the best AI programs? How do they work? What can they actually do, and when do they fail? How humanlike do we expect them to become, and how soon do we need to worry about them surpassing us? Along the way, she introduces the dominant models of modern AI and machine learning, describing cutting-edge AI programs, their human inventors, and the historical lines of thought underpinning recent achievements. She meets with fellow experts such as Douglas Hofstadter, the cognitive scientist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the modern classic Gödel, Escher, Bach, who explains why he is terrified about the future of AI. She explores the profound disconnect between the hype and the actual achievements in AI, providing a clear sense of what the field has accomplished and how much further it has to go.

Interweaving stories about the science of AI and the people behind it, Artificial Intelligence brims with clear-sighted, captivating, and accessible accounts of the most interesting and provocative modern work in the field, flavored with Mitchell's humor and personal observations. This frank, lively book is an indispensable guide to understanding today's AI, its quest for human-level intelligence, and its impact on the future for us all.

Should we bring new humans into the world? Or would it be better off without us? A renowned philosopher and advisor to NBC's The Good Place offers a thoughtful exploration of humanity's future--or lack thereof.

For more than five years, Todd May was my philosophical advisor. I heartily recommend that he be yours as well. (It helps that he's quite funny.)--Michael Schur, from the Introduction

These days it's harder than ever to watch TV, scroll social media, or even just sit at home looking out of the window without contemplating the question at the heart of philosopher Todd May's Should We Go Extinct? Facing climate destruction and the revived specter of nuclear annihilation even as humans continue to cause untold suffering to our fellow creatures on planet Earth, we are forced each day to contemplate whether the world would be better off in our absence.

In this timely, fascinating examination, May, a renowned philosopher and advisor to the acclaimed TV show The Good Place, reasons both for and against the continuation of our species, trying to help us understand how and whether, the positive and negative tallies of the human ledger are comparable, and what conclusions we might draw about ourselves and our future from doing so. He discusses the value that only humans can bring to the world and to one another as well as the goods, like art and music, that would be lost were we no longer here. On the other side of the ledger, he walks us through the suffering we cause to nature and the non-human world, seeking to understand whether it's possible to justify such suffering against our merits and if not, what changes we could make to reduce the harm we cause.

In this moment of rising pessimism about the future, and as many people wonder whether they should bring children into such a dark and difficult world, the questions May tackles in Should We Go Extinct? are hardly theoretical. As he explores the complexities involved with changes such as an end to factory farming, curbing scientific testing of animals, reducing the human population, and seeking to develop empathy with our fellow creatures, May sketches a powerful framework for establishing our responsibilities as a species and gives hope that we might one day find universal agreement that the answer to his title question should be No.

The most dangerous philosopher in the West returns with a rousing and counterintuitive analysis of our global predicament.

Zizek's most urgent and accessible book yet asks us all to imagine that catastrophe is a foregone conclusion--so that we can actually save the world.

We hear all the time that we're moments from doomsday. Around us, crises interlock and escalate, threatening our collective survival: Russia's invasion of Ukraine, with its rising risk of nuclear warfare, is taking place against a backdrop of global warming, ecological breakdown, and widespread social and economic unrest. Protestors and politicians repeatedly call for action, but still we continue to drift towards disaster. We need to do something. But what if the only way for us to prevent catastrophe is to assume that it has already happened-to accept that we're already five minutes past zero hour?

Too Late to Awaken sees Slavoj Zizek forge a vital new space for a radical emancipatory politics that could avert our course to self-destruction. He illuminates why the liberal Left has so far failed to offer this alternative, and exposes the insidious propagandism of the fascist Right, which has appropriated and manipulated once-progressive ideas. Pithy, urgent, gutting and witty Zizek's diagnosis reveals our current geopolitical nightmare in a startling new light, and shows how, in order to change our future, we must first focus on changing the past.

From the author of Future Shock, a striking way out of today's despair . . . a bracing, optimistic look at our new potentials.

The Third Wave makes startling sense of the violent changes now battering our world. Its sweeping synthesis casts fresh light on our new forms of marriage and family, on today's dramatic changes in business and economics. It explains the role of cults, the new definitions of work, play, love, and success. It points toward new forms of twenty-first-century democracy.

Praise for The Third Wave

Magnificent . . . an astonishing array of information.--The Washington Post

Imperishably fresh.--Business Week

Will mesmerize readers, and rightly so.--Vogue

Alvin Toffler . . . has written another blockbuster . . . a powerful book.--The Guardian

Fresh ideas, clearly explained. . . . Toffler has proven again that he is a master.--United Press International

Toffler has imagination and an ability to think of various future possibilities by transcending prevailing values, assumptions and myths.--Associated Press

Once you have walked into his version of the future, you may decide never again to whitewash some of the built-in frailties of the real present.--Financial Post

Rich, stimulating and basically optimistic . . . will unquestionably aid many to a greater understanding of today's] puzzling social changes.--The Globe & Mail

A detailed breathtakingly bold projection of the social changes required if we are to survive. . . . Toffler's vision of a democratic, self-sustaining utopia is a brave alternative to recent grim warnings.--Cosmopolitan

Full of intelligence and insights, as the author gleefully turns ideas upside down to better understand them. . . Replete with lots of nifty, whimsical footnotes, this clever, speculative book challenges our beliefs with jocularity and perspicacity. --Kirkus (starred review)

Klosterman's trademark humor and unique curiosity propel the reader through the book. He remains one of the most insightful critics of pop culture writing today and this is his most thought-provoking and memorable book yet. --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

The tremendously well-received New York Times bestseller by cultural critic Chuck Klosterman, exploring the possibility that our currently held beliefs and assumptions about the world will eventually be proven wrong--now in paperback.

But What If We're Wrong? is a book of original, reported, interconnected pieces, which speculate on the likelihood that many universally accepted, deeply ingrained cultural and scientific beliefs will someday seem absurd. Covering a spectrum of objective and subjective topics, the book attempts to visualize present-day society the way it will be viewed in a distant future. Klosterman cites original interviews with a wide variety of thinkers and experts--including George Saunders, David Byrne, Jonathan Lethem, Alex Ross, Kathryn Schulz, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Brian Greene, Junot Díaz, Amanda Petrusich, Ryan Adams, Dan Carlin, Nick Bostrom, and Richard Linklater. Klosterman asks straightforward questions that are profound in their simplicity, and the answers he explores and integrates with his own analysis generate the most thought-provoking and propulsive book of his career.

Conventional analysis suffers from a profound failure of imagination. It imagines passing clouds to be permanent and is blind to powerful, long-term shifts taking place in full view of the world. --George Friedman

In his long-awaited and provocative new book, George Friedman turns his eye on the future--offering a lucid, highly readable forecast of the changes we can expect around the world during the twenty-first century. He explains where and why future wars will erupt (and how they will be fought), which nations will gain and lose economic and political power, and how new technologies and cultural trends will alter the way we live in the new century.
The Next 100 Years draws on a fascinating exploration of history and geopolitical patterns dating back hundreds of years. Friedman shows that we are now, for the first time in half a millennium, at the dawn of a new era--with changes in store, including:

- The U.S.-Jihadist war will conclude--replaced by a second full-blown cold war with Russia.
- China will undergo a major extended internal crisis, and Mexico will emerge as an important world power.
- A new global war will unfold toward the middle of the century between the United States and an unexpected coalition from Eastern Europe, Eurasia, and the Far East; but armies will be much smaller and wars will be less deadly.
- Technology will focus on space--both for major military uses and for a dramatic new energy resource that will have radical environmental implications.
- The United States will experience a Golden Age in the second half of the century.

Written with the keen insight and thoughtful analysis that has made George Friedman a renowned expert in geopolitics and forecasting, The Next 100 Years presents a fascinating picture of what lies ahead.

For continual, updated analysis and supplemental material, go to www.geopoliticalfutures.com.

A provocative exploration of how humans are wired to seek short-term success at the expense of long-term survival--an evolutionary glitch that explains everything from toxic workplaces to climate change

Essential reading . . . a lively, ultimately hopeful examination of how incentivizing the wrong values and actions has led to some of our most intractable problems.--Eric Ries, New York Times bestselling author of The Lean Startup

When people talk about today's biggest challenges--pollution, misinformation, artificial intelligence, inept CEOs, and politicians--they tend to frame the conversation around bad people doing bad things. But is there more to the story?

Humans, it turns out, are intrinsically wired to seek short-term success at the expense of long-term prosperity. Kristian Rönn, an entrepreneur formerly affiliated with the University of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, calls these deeply rooted impulses Darwinian demons. These forces, a by-product of natural selection, can lead us to act in shortsighted ways that harm others--and even imperil our survival as a species. If this evolutionary glitch is left unchecked, the consequences will grow in magnitude as the power of technology accelerates.

In this eye-opening work, Rönn shows that we must learn to cooperate in new ways if we are to escape these evolutionary traps in our daily lives and solve our biggest existential threats. Evolution may be to blame for the trap--but humans need not fall for it. Our salvation, he writes, will involve the creation of new systems that understand, track, and manage what humankind values most.

Bold, brilliant, and ultimately optimistic, The Darwinian Trap gives readers a powerful new lens on our world and its problems, and invites us to rethink our priorities for the sake of generations to come.

* 2023 Nautilus Book Award Winner: Rising to the Moment: Gold *

World-renowned future forecaster, game designer, and New York Times bestselling author Jane McGonigal gives us the tools to imagine the future without fear.

An accessible, optimistic field guide to the future.--San Francisco Chronicle

Reading this book is like sitting down with a creative, optimistic friend--and getting up as a new version of yourself.--Daniel H. Pink, New York Times bestselling author of When

The COVID-19 pandemic, increasingly frequent climate disasters, a new war--events we might have called unimaginable or unthinkable in the past are now reality. Today it feels more challenging than ever to feel unafraid, hopeful, and equipped to face the future with optimism. How do we map out our lives when it seems impossible to predict what the world will be like next week, let alone next year or next decade? What we need now are strategies to help us recover our confidence and creativity in facing uncertain futures.

In Imaginable, Jane McGonigal draws on the latest scientific research in psychology and neuroscience to show us how to train our minds to think the unthinkable and imagine the unimaginable. She invites us to play with the provocative thought experiments and future simulations she's designed exclusively for this book, with the goal to:

1. Build our collective imagination so that we can dive into the future and envision, in surprising detail, what our lives will look like ten years from now
2. Develop the courage and vision to solve problems creatively
3. Take actions and make decisions that will help shape the future we desire
4. Access urgent optimism, an unstoppable force within each of us that activates our sense of agency

Imaginable teaches us to be fearless, resilient, and bold in realizing a world with possibilities we cannot yet imagine--until reading this transformative, inspiring, and necessary book.

A fascinating look at how the Space Barons and Techtitans--heads of companies like Uber, Amazon, Tesla--have hijacked technology, preventing it from being used on behalf of the common good and profiting from the politics of fear and consumerism.

The respected Italian economist and journalist offers a bold and provocative argument that the speed of technological transformation is threatening our future

At the dawn of the digital revolution, the internet was going to be the great equalizer, a global democratic force. Instead, with the money printed electronically to bail out banks, Wall Street ended up funding a new breed of serial capitalists, the Techtitans, who embraced rapid, transformational change while stripping their workers of rights and enriching themselves beyond anybody's wildest imagination; and the Space Barons, who mine new frontiers for precious resources. Then came the gig-economy, another supposed digital equalizer, where everybody was his or her own boss, but it was just another illusion.

Tech pioneers like Google, Facebook, Apple, Uber, and Microsoft never had any intention of spreading democracy. Those who control and own the technology are the absolute masters. As artificial intelligence enters the labor market, companies like Uber are able to cut labor costs to the barest of minimums, by squeezing workers' privileges and rights.

In Technocapitalism, Napoleoni describes these phenomena as the genesis of a new paradigm, born in a period of extraordinary change in which the acceleration of transformational change has caused a dizzying, anxiety-induced paralysis from the FTX collapse to AI, private space companies to the war in Ukraine, from inflation to the dirty environmental truth of EV car batteries. Technological transformation is occurring at a speed that is existentially unbearable for most of us. We must fight for our common good to address today's real challenges of global warming and militarism and the soulessness of capitalist endeavor. Napoleoni shows us how.

In Beyond Civilization, Daniel Quinn thinks the unthinkable. We all know there's no one right way to build a bicycle, no one right way to design an automobile, no one right way to make a pair of shoes, but we're convinced that there must be only one right way to live -- and the one we have is it, no matter what.

Beyond Civilization makes practical sense of the vision of Daniel Quinn's best-selling novel Ishmael. Examining ancient civilizations such as the Maya and the Olmec, as well as modern-day microcosms of alternative living like circus societies, Quinn guides us on a quest for a new model for society, one that is forward-thinking and encourages diversity instead of suppressing it. Beyond Civilization is not about a New World Order but a New Personal World Order that would allow people to assert control over their own destiny and grant them the freedom to create their own way of life right now -- not in some distant utopian future.

The brilliant and daringly original (The New York Times) critique of digital networks from the David Foster Wallace of tech (London Evening Standard)--asserting that to fix our economy, we must fix our information economy.Jaron Lanier is the father of virtual reality and one of the world's most brilliant thinkers. Who Owns the Future? is his visionary reckoning with the most urgent economic and social trend of our age: the poisonous concentration of money and power in our digital networks. Lanier has predicted how technology will transform our humanity for decades, and his insight has never been more urgently needed. He shows how Siren Servers, which exploit big data and the free sharing of information, led our economy into recession, imperiled personal privacy, and hollowed out the middle class. The networks that define our world--including social media, financial institutions, and intelligence agencies--now threaten to destroy it. But there is an alternative. In this provocative, poetic, and deeply humane book, Lanier charts a path toward a brighter future: an information economy that rewards ordinary people for what they do and share on the web.

A Seminal Work of Visionary Hope, Updated for the 21st Century

In this era of government gridlock, economic and ecological devastation, and seemingly intractable global violence, our future is ever more ripe for -- and in need of -- fresh, creative reimagining. With her clear-eyed, inspiring, and sweeping vision of a possible global renaissance in the new millennium, Barbara Marx Hubbard shows us that our current crises are not the precursors of an apocalypse but the natural birth pains of an awakened, universal humanity. This is our finest hour. Conscious Evolution highlights the tremendous potential of newfound scientific knowledge, technological advances, and compassionate spirituality and illustrates the opportunities that each of us has to fully participate in this exciting stage of human history. As we do, we will bring forth all that is within us and not only save ourselves, but evolve our world.

THE MOST FRIGHTENING TRUE STORY EVERY TOLD On March 20, 1969, Dr. Lawrence Dunegan listened as a member of The Order delivered a hair-raising speech to a room full of doctors. He and the others were told not to record what they were hearing but, instead to take notes. The speaker insisted that he was doing the doctors a favor by explaining how the world was going to change. He said he believed if they knew, they would be better prepared to accept the coming changes. Anyone can read this book and know these changes are well underway. What we didn't know was where these changes have been taking us. Until now Lock the doors, pull the curtains and prepare to see what you may never have realized. Once you understand the plan, you cannot help but to see it advancing all around you. The biggest question of all is not should we but, how can we... stop what is happening? Inside these pages is the transcript of three taped interviews on the New Order of Barbarians, referred to on the tapes simply as the new world system. Tapes one and two are the reminiscences by Dr. Lawrence Dunegan of a speech given in 1969 by an insider of The Order, Dr. Richard Day, whose credentials are listed as Chairman of the Department of Pediatrics for the University of Pittsburgh; Medical Director of Planned Parenthood Federation of America and member of The Order.

Surviving the Future is a story drawn from the fertile ground of the late David Fleming's extraordinary Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It. That hardback consists of four hundred and four interlinked dictionary entries, inviting readers to choose their own path through its radical vision.

Recognizing that Lean Logic's sheer size and unusual structure can be daunting, Fleming's long-time collaborator Shaun Chamberlin has selected and edited one of these potential narratives to create Surviving the Future. The content, rare insights, and uniquely enjoyable writing style remain Fleming's, but are presented here at a more accessible paperback-length and in conventional read-it-front-to-back format.

The subtitle--Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy--hints at Fleming's vision. He believed that the market economy will not survive its inherent flaws beyond the early decades of this century, and that its failure will bring great challenges, but he did not dwell on this: We know what we need to do. We need to build the sequel, to draw on inspiration which has lain dormant, like the seed beneath the snow.

Surviving the Future lays out a compelling and powerfully different new economics for a post-growth world. One that relies not on taut competitiveness and eternally increasing productivity--putting the grim into reality--but on the play, humor, conversation, and reciprocal obligations of a rich culture. Building on a remarkable breadth of intellectual and cultural heritage--from Keynes to Kumar, Homer to Huxley, Mumford to MacIntyre, Scruton to Shiva, Shakespeare to Schumacher--Fleming describes a world in which, as he says, there will be time for music.

This is the world that many of us want to live in, yet we are told it is idealistic and unrealistic. With an evident mastery of both economic theory and historical precedent, Fleming shows that it is not only desirable, but actually the only system with a realistic claim to longevity. With friendliness, humor, and charm, Surviving the Future plucks this vision out of our daydreams and shows us how to make it real.

What will planet Earth be like in twenty years? At mid-century? In the year 2100? Prescient and convincing, this book is a must-read for anyone concerned about the future. Never has the world offered more promise for the future and been more fraught with dangers. Attali anticipates an unraveling of American hegemony as transnational corporations sever the ties linking free enterprise to democracy. World tensions will be primed for horrific warfare for resources and dominance. The ultimate question is: Will we leave our children and grandchildren a world that is not only viable but better, or in this nuclear world bequeath to them a planet that will be a living hell? Either way, he warns, the time to act is now.