Governments fear—and sometimes fall before—individuals relying only on social media. Major political parties see their power eroded by grassroots forces through online fund-raising. Universities scramble to preserve their student populations in the face of less expensive, more accessible online courses. Print and broadcast news outlets struggle to compete with citizen journalists and bloggers. Is it 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. As our traditional institutions are being disrupted in revolutionary ways, we risk a dark and wildly unstable future, one in which our freedoms and basic human values could be destroyed rather than enhanced. Both hopeful and alarming, The End of Big is a thought-provoking, passionately argued book that offers genuine insight into the ways we are using technology, and how it is radically changing our world in ways we are only now beginning to understand.

Nicco Mele explores the consequences of revolutionary technology. Our ability to connect instantly, constantly, and globally is altering the exercise of power with dramatic speed. Governments, corporations, centers of knowledge, and expertise are eroding before the power of the individual.

Our current government is failing us - the poor most dramatically. Global market forces of information and capital are destroying the old top-down politics. If present trends are allowed to continue, America will stumble into a grim Cyber Future of community breakdown and spiraling inequality - a real-life nightmare reminiscent of the fiction of William Gibson. But James Pinkerton offers hope that we can yet create a prosperous, tolerant, and compassionate society for the next century. Radically streamlined government must be part of the answer, but such transformation must be balanced by a new paradigm of choice, empowerment, inclusiveness, and decentralization that leads to a new spirit of communitarian healing at the grassroots. Pinkerton brings his practical experience in electoral politics to a sharp yet constructive critique of both parties. He warns the rampaging Republicans against culture-war jihads, but he counsels Democrats that they are doomed if they can't break their Faustian bargain with bureaucracy. And if both parties fail, he adds, some new third-party political configuration is inevitable. On the eve of the 1996 elections, no book could be more timely than What Comes Next.

ALICE FEENEYS NEW YORK TIMES AND INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER “Boldly plotted, tightly knotted—a provocative true-or-false thriller that deepens and darkens to its ink-black finale. Marvelous.” —AJ Finn, author of The Woman in the Window My name is Amber Reynolds. There are three things you should know about me: 1. I’m in a coma. 2. My husband doesn’t love me anymore. 3. Sometimes I lie. Amber wakes up in a hospital. She can’t move. She can’t speak. She can’t open her eyes. She can hear everyone around her, but they have no idea. Amber doesn’t remember what happened, but she has a suspicion her husband had something to do with it. Alternating between her paralyzed present, the week before her accident, and a series of childhood diaries from twenty years ago, this brilliant psychological thriller asks: Is something really a lie if you believe it's the truth?

The Beginning and the End of Everything is the whole story as we currently understand it - from nothing, to the birth of our universe, to its ultimate fate. Authoritative and engaging, Paul Parsons takes us on a rollercoaster ride through billions of light years to tell the story of the Big Bang, from birth to death.

A Dream So Big is the story of Steve Peifer, a corporate manager who once oversaw 9,000 computer software consultants, who today helps provide daily lunches for over 20,000 Kenyan school children in thirty-five national public schools, and maintains solar-powered computer labs at twenty rural African schools. Steve and his wife, Nancy, were enjoying a successful management career with one of America’s high tech corporate giants during the dot-com boom of the 1990’s when, in 1997, he and his wife Nancy discovered they were pregnant with their third child. Tragically, doctors said a chromosomal condition left their baby “incompatible with life.” The Peifers only spent 8 days with baby Stephen before he died. Seeking to flee the pain, Steve and Nancy began a pilgrimage that thrust them into a third-world setting where daily life was often defined by tragedy—drought, disease, poverty, hunger, and death. They didn’t arrive in the service of any divine calling, but the truth of their surroundings spoke to their troubled hearts. A short-term, 12-month mission assignment as dorm parents for a Kenyan boarding school turned this ordinary man into the most unlikely internationally recognized hero, and his story will inspire you to pursue similar lives of service.

With a foreword by Bill Gates, this book fascinates, inspires, and gives readers concrete steps for further engagement.