In the face of unprecedented global change, New York Times bestselling author Alec Ross proposes a new social contract to restore the balance of power between government, citizens, and business in The Raging 2020s. For 150 years, there has been a contract. Companies hold the power to shape our daily lives. The state holds the power to make them fall in line. And the people hold the power to choose their leaders. But now, this balance has shaken loose. As the market consolidates, the lines between big business and the halls of Congress have become razor-thin. Private companies have become as powerful as countries. As Walter Isaacson said about Alec Ross’s first book, The Industries of the Future, “The future is already hitting us, and Ross shows how it can be exciting rather than frightening.” Through interviews with the world’s most influential thinkers and stories of corporate activism and malfeasance, government failure and renewal, and innovative economic and political models, Ross proposes a new social contract—one that resets the equilibrium between corporations, the governing, and the governed.

"Innovation expert Alec Ross explains what's next for the world, mapping out the advances and stumbling blocks that will emerge in the next ten years--for businesses, governments, and the global community--and how we can navigate them"--

The pressure to generate big ideas can feel overwhelming. We know that bold innovations are critical in these disruptive and competitive times, but when it comes to breakthrough thinking, we often freeze up. Instead of shooting for a $10-billion payday or a Nobel Prize, the most prolific innovators focus on Big Little Breakthroughs—small creative acts that unlock massive rewards over time. By cultivating daily micro-innovations, individuals and organizations are better equipped to tackle tough challenges and seize transformational opportunities. How did a convicted drug dealer launch and scale a massively successful fitness company? What core mindset drove LEGO to become the largest toy company in the world? How did a Pakistani couple challenge the global athletic shoe industry? What simple habits led Lady Gaga, Banksy, and Lin-Manuel Miranda to their remarkable success? Big Little Breakthroughs isn’t just for propeller-head inventors, fancy-pants CEOs, or hoodie-donning tech billionaires. Rather, it’s a surpassingly simple system to help everyday people become everyday innovators.

New York Times Bestseller COVID-19 is speeding up history, but how? What is the shape of the world to come? Lenin once said, "There are decades when nothing happens and weeks when decades happen." This is one of those times when history has sped up. CNN host and best-selling author Fareed Zakaria helps readers to understand the nature of a post-pandemic world: the political, social, technological, and economic consequences that may take years to unfold. Written in the form of ten "lessons," covering topics from natural and biological risks to the rise of "digital life" to an emerging bipolar world order, Zakaria helps readers to begin thinking beyond the immediate effects of COVID-19. Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World speaks to past, present, and future, and, while urgent and timely, is sure to become an enduring reflection on life in the early twenty-first century.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER After a decade abroad, the National Book Award– and Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Evan Osnos returns to three places he has lived in the United States—Greenwich, CT; Clarksburg, WV; and Chicago, IL—to illuminate the origins of America’s political fury. Evan Osnos moved to Washington, D.C., in 2013 after a decade away from the United States, first reporting from the Middle East before becoming the Beijing bureau chief at the Chicago Tribune and then the China correspondent for The New Yorker. While abroad, he often found himself making a case for America, urging the citizens of Egypt, Iraq, or China to trust that even though America had made grave mistakes throughout its history, it aspired to some foundational moral commitments: the rule of law, the power of truth, the right of equal opportunity for all. But when he returned to the United States, he found each of these principles under assault. In search of an explanation for the crisis that reached an unsettling crescendo in 2020—a year of pandemic, civil unrest, and political turmoil—he focused on three places he knew firsthand: Greenwich, Connecticut; Clarksburg, West Virginia; and Chicago, Illinois. Reported over the course of six years, Wildland follows ordinary individuals as they navigate the varied landscapes of twenty-first-century America. Through their powerful, often poignant stories, Osnos traces the sources of America’s political dissolution. He finds answers in the rightward shift of the financial elite in Greenwich, in the collapse of social infrastructure and possibility in Clarksburg, and in the compounded effects of segregation and violence in Chicago. The truth about the state of the nation may be found not in the slogans of political leaders but in the intricate details of individual lives, and in the hidden connections between them. As Wildland weaves in and out of these personal stories, events in Washington occasionally intrude, like flames licking up on the horizon. A dramatic, prescient examination of seismic changes in American politics and culture, Wildland is the story of a crucible, a period bounded by two shocks to America’s psyche, two assaults on the country’s sense of itself: the attacks of September 11 in 2001 and the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Following the lives of everyday Americans in three cities and across two decades, Osnos illuminates the country in a startling light, revealing how we lost the moral confidence to see ourselves as larger than the sum of our parts.

The conventional wisdom on how technology will change the future is wrong. Mark Mills lays out a radically different and optimistic vision for what’s really coming. The mainstream forecasts fall into three camps. One considers today as the “new normal,” where ordering a ride or food on a smartphone or trading in bitcoins is as good as it’s going to get. Another foresees a dystopian era of widespread, digitally driven job- and business-destruction. A third believes that the only technological revolution that matters will be found with renewable energy and electric cars. But according to Mills, a convergence of technologies will instead drive an economic boom over the coming decade, one that historians will characterize as the “Roaring 2020s.” It will come not from any single big invention, but from the confluence of radical advances in three primary technology domains: microprocessors, materials, and machines. Microprocessors are increasingly embedded in everything. Materials, from which everything is built, are emerging with novel, almost magical capabilities. And machines, which make and move all manner of stuff, are undergoing a complementary transformation. Accelerating and enabling all of this is the Cloud, history’s biggest infrastructure, which is itself based on the building blocks of next-generation microprocessors and artificial intelligence. We’ve seen this pattern before. The technological revolution that drove the great economic expansion of the twentieth century can be traced to a similar confluence, one that was first visible in the 1920s: a new information infrastructure (telephony), new machines (cars and power plants), and new materials (plastics and pharmaceuticals). Single inventions don’t drive great, long-cycle booms. It always takes convergent revolutions in technology’s three core spheres—information, materials, and machines. Over history, that’s only happened a few times. We have wrung much magic from the technologies that fueled the last long boom. But the great convergence now underway will ignite the 2020s. And this time, unlike any previous historical epoch, we have the Cloud amplifying everything. The next long boom starts now.

A blistering exposé of the National Rifle Association, revealing its people, power, corruption, and ongoing downfall, from acclaimed NPR investigative reporter Tim Mak “Tenacious, careful and incisive.”—Jonathan Swan • “Deeply and meticulously reported, colorfully and precisely written.”—Olivia Nuzzi • “Nonstop revelations are told with gripping detail and intimate insider knowledge.”—David Frum • “Fantastic.”—Chris Hayes The NRA once compelled respect—even fear—from Republicans and Democrats alike. Once a grassroots club dedicated to gun safety, the NRA ballooned into a powerful lobbyist organization that maintained an iron hold on gun legislation in America. This influential nonprofit raised millions in small fees from members across the country, which funded hidden, lavish lifestyles of designer suits, private jets and yachts, martini lunches and Champagne dinners—while the group manipulated legislators and flirted with a Russian spy. Yet in 2012, the NRA’s grip on Washington began to loosen in the wake of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary. Facing nationwide outrage, NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre gave a speech claiming the solution was not fewer guns, but more guns, in schools. The group’s rhetoric only escalated from there, a misstep that sparked a backlash and invited the scrutiny of the government. Unveiled here for the first time ever are surprising, revelatory details spotlighting decades of poor leadership and mismanagement by LaPierre; the NRA’s long association with marketing firm Ackerman-McQueen; NRA executives’ 2015 trip to Moscow, a by-invitation affair packed with meetings with Russian government officials, diplomats, and oligarchs seeking influence in American politics; as well as the power struggle between LaPierre and former NRA president Oliver North that fractured the organization. Misfire is the result of a four-year investigation by journalist Tim Mak, who scoured thousands of pages of never-before-publicized documents and cultivated dozens of confidential sources inside the NRA's orbit to paint a vivid picture of the gun group's rampant corruption and slow decline, marking a sea change in the battle over gun rights and control in America.