Showing results by publisher "Profile Audio" in Politics & Government

Robert Greene is a master guide for millions, distilling ancient wisdom and philosophy into essential texts for seekers of power, understanding and mastery. Now he turns to the most important subject of all - understanding people's drives and motivations, even when they are unconscious of them themselves.

The twentieth century for Palestine and the Palestinians has been a century of denial: denial of statehood, denial of nationhood and denial of history. The Hundred Years War on Palestine is Rashid Khalidi's powerful response. Drawing on his family archives, he reclaims the fundamental right of any people: to narrate their history on their own terms. Beginning in the final days of the Ottoman Empire, Khalidi reveals nascent Palestinian nationalism and the broad recognition by the early Zionists of the colonial nature of their project.

In 2016, an obscure British military contractor turned the world upside down. Funded by a billionaire on a crusade to start his own far-right insurgency, Cambridge Analytica combined psychological research with private Facebook data to make an invisible weapon with the power to change what voters perceived as real. The firm was created to launch the then unknown Steve Bannon's ideological assault on America. But as it honed its dark arts in elections from Trinidad to Nigeria, 24-year-old research director Christopher Wylie began to see what he and his colleagues were unleashing.

When we avoid taking a decision, what happens to it? In The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies examines why markets, institutions and even governments systematically generate outcomes that everyone involved claims not to want. He casts new light on the writing of Stafford Beer, a legendary economist who argued in the 1950s that we should regard organisations as artificial intelligences, capable of taking decisions that are distinct from the intentions of their members.

Ours is the age of the strongman. Russia, India, Turkey and America are ruled by men who, as they have risen to the top, have reshaped their countries around them, creating cults of personality which earn the loyalty of millions. And as they do so, they draw on a playbook of behaviour established by figures such as Benito Mussolini, Muammar Gaddafi and Adolf Hitler.

In Why We're Polarised, Klein reveals the structural and psychological forces behind America's descent into division and dysfunction. Neither a polemic nor a lament, this book offers a clear framework for understanding everything from Trump's rise to the Democratic Party's leftward shift to the politicisation of everyday culture. America is polarised, first and foremost, by identity. Everyone engaged in American politics is engaged, at some level, in identity politics. 

In this groundbreaking audiobook, Atul Gawande makes a compelling argument for the checklist, which he believes to be the most promising method available in surmounting failure. Whether you're following a recipe, investing millions of dollars in a company or building a skyscraper, the checklist is an essential tool in virtually every area of our lives, and Gawande explains how breaking down complex, high pressure tasks into small steps can radically improve everything from airline safety to heart surgery survival rates.  

Democracy has died hundreds of times, all over the world. We think we know what that looks like: chaos descends and the military arrives to restore order, until the people can be trusted to look after their own affairs again. However, there is a danger that this picture is out of date. Until very recently, most citizens of Western democracies would have imagined that the end was a long way off, and very few would have thought it might be happening before their eyes as Trump, Brexit and paranoid populism have become a reality. 

Liberalism - the comparatively mild-mannered sibling to the more ardent camps of nationalism and socialism - has never been so divisive as today. From Putin's populism, the Trump administration and autocratic rulers in democracies the world over, it has both thrived and failed under identity politics, authoritarianism, social media and a weakened free press the world over.

Its vast infrastructure projects now extend from the ocean floor to outer space, and from Africa's megacities into rural America. China is wiring the world, and in doing so, rewriting the global order. As things stand, the rest of the world still has a choice. But the battle for tomorrow will require America and its allies to take daring risks in uncertain political terrain. Unchecked, China will reshape global flows of data to reflect its interests.

When New York Times correspondent Edward Wong arrived in Beijing in 2008, he had a hopeful view of a coming Chinese century. Nearly sixty years earlier, his father held a similarly optimistic vision - and joined the People's Liberation Army to further Mao's revolution. But both men were forced to confront the hard realities of Communist Party rule. Drawing on family interviews and his reporting, Edward Wong unveils the continuous inner history of China under Xi Jinping and Mao. But the parallel journeys of father and son also illustrate startling shifts over the decades.

Roger Scruton looks at the central ideas of conservatism over the centuries. He examines conservative thinking on civil society, the rule of law and the role of the state on the one hand; and freedom (including freedom of expression and association), morality, equality, property and rights on the other. He traces the origins and development of the conservative ideology in the philosophies and thoughts of, among others, John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin, Michael Oakeshott, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and Robert Nozick.

'The Singularity' is what Silicon Valley calls the idea that, eventually, we will be overrun by machines that are able to take decisions and act for themselves. What no one says is that it happened before. A few hundred years ago, humans started building the robots that now rule our world. They are called states and corporations: immensely powerful artificial entities, with capacities that go far beyond what any individual can do, and which, unlike us, need never die. The Handover distils over three hundred years of thinking about how to live with artificial agency.

Thomas Rid, a renowned expert on technology and national security, was one of the first to sound the alarm. Even before the 2016 election, he warned that Russian military intelligence was 'carefully planning and timing a high-stakes political campaign' to disrupt the democratic process. But as crafty as such so-called active measures have become, they are not new. In this astonishing journey through a century of secret psychological war, Rid reveals for the first time some of history's most significant operations - many of them nearly beyond belief.

Everyone knows who you find in bookshops: people who want to buy books. But, as Shaun Bythell reveals, that's really only half the story. Join Shaun as he introduces us to seven bookshop characters, from the Person Who Doesn't Know What They Want (But Thinks It Might Have a Blue Cover) to the harried Parents Secretly After Free Childcare and all the way over to the erotica section, where we'll meet The Person Who Is Up to No Good.

What's the Use? asks why there is such a vast gulf between public perceptions of mathematics and reality. It shows how mathematics is vital, often in surprising ways, behind the scenes of daily life. How politicians pick their voters. How an absurd little puzzle solved 300 years ago leads to efficient methods for kidney transplants. How an Irish mathematician's obsession with a new number system improves special effects in movies and computer games. How SatNav relies on at least six mathematical techniques.

Across the world, and throughout time, there have been people who have risen to the challenge of leading others. Sometimes their power is undeserved, sometimes it's ill used, but always their actions have impact. But do leaders really make history, or does history make leaders? And how might we harness the answers to find and become better leaders today? For the past decade, Moshik Temkin has been exploring these questions at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and at universities around the world. In this book, he offers a deep dive into the nature of leadership.

It feels like the world is falling apart. So how do we keep hold of our optimism? How do we nurture the parts of ourselves that hope, trust and believe in something better? And how can we stay sane in this world of division? In this beautifully written and illuminating polemic, Booker Prize nominee Elif Shafak reflects on our age of pessimism, when emotions guide and misguide our politics and misinformation and fear are the norm.

The coronavirus pandemic has devastated lives and livelihoods around the world - and continues to do so. These personal tragedies will, and must, be told and heard. There is, however, also a truthful and objective scientific narrative to be written about how the virus played out and how the world set about dealing with it. Spike is that story - from the inside. Its author, Jeremy Farrar, is one of the UK's leading scientists and a - member of the SAGE emergency committee.

Scientific research is on the cusp of being able to grow babies outside human bodies, from machines, for the very first time. Claire Horn takes us on a truly radical and urgent deep dive into the most challenging and pertinent questions of our age. Could artificial wombs allow women to redistribute the work of gestating? How do we protect reproductive and abortion rights? And who exactly gets access to this technology, in our vastly unequal world?