Nothing seems more real than the minds of other people. When you consider what your boss is thinking or whether your spouse is happy, you are admitting them into the "mind club". It's easy to assume other humans can think and feel, but what about a cow, a computer, a corporation? What kinds of minds do they have? Daniel M. Wegner and Kurt Gray are award-winning psychologists who have discovered that minds - while incredibly important - are a matter of perception.

We all spend a lot of energy trying to get people to listen to us, and despite our best efforts, we often fail. But what if the secret to influencing others was to demonstrate acceptance? Enter validation—communication where one accepts and sees the validity in another person’s experience. Research on validation shows that it has profound effects, from improving relationships and de-escalating conflicts to increasing one’s influence and self-compassion.

For many people, a good life is a stable life, a comfortable life that follows a well-trodden path. This is the case for Shigehiro Oishi's father, who has lived in a small mountain town in Japan for his entire life, putting his family's needs above his own, like his father and grandfather before him. But is a happy life, or even a meaningful life, the only path to a good life? In Life in Three Dimensions, Shige Oishi enters into a debate that has animated psychology since 1984, when Ed Diener (Oishi's mentor) published a paper that launched happiness studies.

Award-winning professor, management consultant, and virtual communications expert Andrew Brodsky is here to tell you that, yes, that meeting could have been an email. And that email? Maybe it should have been a voice note (really!). And your camera—it’s okay to turn it off; sometimes it’s even better. If you’re crushed under the weight of your inbox or exhausted from back-to-back-to-back video calls, then Ping is here to help workers at all levels and of all stripes—remote, hybrid, and in person—who use communication technologies as part of their jobs.

Throughout the book, powell shares personal reflections as well as practices to help you begin bridging wherever you are—in your community, friendships, family, workplace—even with those whom you might never have imagined you could find common ground.

Many of us comply much more than we realize. How many times have you wanted to object, disagree, or opt out of something but ended up swallowing your words, shaking your head, and just going along? Analyzing cases ranging from corporate corruption and sexual abuse to everyday acquiescence at work, the doctor’s office, and in our personal lives, award-winning organizational psychologist Dr. Sunita Sah delves deep into why the pressure to comply is a corrosive and often invisible force in our society.

To make organizations more fair, many well-meaning individuals and companies invest their time and resources in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. But because inequity is built into the structures, processes, and environments of our workplaces, adding these programs has been ineffective and often becomes a burden passed off to the individuals they are meant to help. In Make Work Fair, behavioral scientist and author of What Works Iris Bohnet and gender expert Siri Chilazi offer data-backed, actionable solutions that build fairness into the very fabric of the workplace.

In The Tech Coup, Marietje Schaake explains how technology companies crept into nearly every corner of our lives and our governments. She takes us beyond the headlines to high-stakes meetings with human rights defenders, business leaders, computer scientists, and politicians to show how technologies have gone from being heralded as utopian to undermining the pillars of our democracies.

When we’re in the Certainty Trap, we tend to view people who disagree with us as hateful, ignorant, or just plain stupid. When it comes to heated social and political issues in particular, many of us know this feeling well—a consuming state of righteous indignation and moral outrage. By committing to challenging and clarifying our thinking—by avoiding the trap certainty sets for us—we can increase social trust, reduce political polarization, and better address the world’s pressing challenges.

In 1979, Loretta Ross was a single mother who’d had to drop out of Howard University. She was working at Washington, DC’s Rape Crisis Center when she got a letter from a man in prison saying he wanted to learn how to not be a rapist anymore. At first, she was furious. As a survivor of sexual violence, she wanted to write back pouring out her rage. But instead, she made a different choice, a choice to reject the response her trauma was pushing her towards, a choice that set her on the path towards developing a philosophy that would come to guide her whole career.

Humanity is on the precipice of a great climate migration, and Americans will not be spared. Tens of millions of people are likely to be driven from the places they call home. Poorer communities will be left behind, while growth will surge in the cities and regions most attractive to climate refugees. America will be changed utterly.

An award-winning mathematician shows how we prove what’s true, and what to do when we can’t.

The Three Languages of Politics is a profoundly illuminating exploration of communication in America’s political landscape. Progressives, conservatives, and libertarians are like tribes speaking different languages. This is an accessible, precise, and insightful guide to lowering the barriers coarsening our politics. This is not a book about one ideology over another. Instead, it is a book about how we communicate issues and ideologies and how language intended to persuade instead divides.

Since the Mayflower sidled up to Plymouth Rock, cult ideology has been ingrained in the DNA of the United States. In this eye-opening book, journalist Jane Borden argues that Puritan doomsday belief never went away; it went secular and became American culture. From our fascination with cowboys and superheroes to our allegiance to influencers and self-help, susceptibility to advertising, and undying devotion to the self-made man, Americans remain particularly vulnerable to a specific brand of cult-like thinking.

Why are we devastated by a word of criticism even when it’s mixed with lavish praise? Because our brains are wired to focus on the bad. This negativity effect explains things great and small: why countries blunder into disastrous wars, why couples divorce, why people flub job interviews, how schools fail students, why football coaches stupidly punt on fourth down. All day long, the power of bad governs people’s moods, drives marketing campaigns, and dominates news and politics.

Many of us comply much more than we realize. How many times have you wanted to object, disagree, or opt out of something but ended up swallowing your words, shaking your head, and just going along? Analyzing cases ranging from corporate corruption and sexual abuse to everyday acquiescence at work, the doctor’s office, and in our personal lives, award-winning organizational psychologist Dr. Sunita Sah delves deep into why the pressure to comply is a corrosive and often invisible force in our society.

Award-winning professor, management consultant, and virtual communications expert Andrew Brodsky is here to tell you that, yes, that meeting could have been an email. And that email? Maybe it should have been a voice note (really!). And your camera—it’s okay to turn it off; sometimes it’s even better. If you’re crushed under the weight of your inbox or exhausted from back-to-back-to-back video calls, then Ping is here to help workers at all levels and of all stripes—remote, hybrid, and in person—who use communication technologies as part of their jobs.

We all spend a lot of energy trying to get people to listen to us, and despite our best efforts, we often fail. But what if the secret to influencing others was to demonstrate acceptance? Enter validation—communication where one accepts and sees the validity in another person’s experience. Research on validation shows that it has profound effects, from improving relationships and de-escalating conflicts to increasing one’s influence and self-compassion.

Bill Adair knows a lie when he hears one. Since 2008, the site he founded, PolitiFact, has been the go-to spot for media members and political observers alike to seek the truth in an increasingly deceitful world. Since the site’s launching, politics’ tenuous relationship with the truth has only gotten weaker—and weirder. In this groundbreaking book, Adair reveals how politicians lie and why.

In 1979, Loretta Ross was a single mother who’d had to drop out of Howard University. She was working at Washington, DC’s Rape Crisis Center when she got a letter from a man in prison saying he wanted to learn how to not be a rapist anymore. At first, she was furious. As a survivor of sexual violence, she wanted to write back pouring out her rage. But instead, she made a different choice, a choice to reject the response her trauma was pushing her towards, a choice that set her on the path towards developing a philosophy that would come to guide her whole career.

Why do people who have so much—leading comfortable lives filled with unprecedented freedom, choice, and abundance—often feel so unhappy and unfulfilled? This phenomenon is a defining paradox of our time and one we endlessly seek to solve. In The Social Paradox, psychologist William von Hippel argues that we need to think about this problem in a new way. By changing our perspective, we might finally see the solution, bringing us greater happiness and more satisfying relationships. The key is to understand the interplay between our two most basic psychological needs—for connection and autonomy.

Whether it’s anxiety about going to the doctor, boiling rage when we’re stuck in traffic, or devastation after a painful break-up, our lives are filled with situations that send us spiraling. But as difficult as our emotions can be, they are also a superpower. Far from being “good” or “bad,” emotions are information. When they’re activated in the right ways and at the right time, they function like an immune system, alerting us to our surroundings, telling us how to react to a situation, and helping us make the right choices. But how do we make our emotions work for us rather than against us?

Superagency offers a roadmap for using AI inclusively and adaptively to improve our lives and create positive change. While acknowledging challenges like disinformation and potential job changes, the book focuses on AI’s immense potential to increase individual agency and create better outcomes for society as a whole. Imagine AI tutors personalizing education for each child, researchers rapidly discovering cures for diseases like Alzheimer's and cancer, and AI advisors empowering people to navigate complex systems and achieve their goals.

Two former Harvard faculty—one an internationally-recognized negotiator and conflict management expert from Harvard Law, the other a leading behavioral neurologist and cutting-edge scientist from Harvard Med—join forces to introduce conflict resilience: the radical act of sitting in and growing from conflict to break the bad habits that sabotage our politics, workplaces, and most important relationships.

From the telegraph and telephone in the 1800s to the internet and social media in our own day, the public has welcomed new communication systems. Whenever people gain more power to share information, the assumption goes, society prospers. Superbloom tells a startlingly different story. As communication becomes more mechanized and efficient, it breeds confusion more than understanding, strife more than harmony. Media technologies all too often bring out the worst in us.

Life is never easy. But even in the most challenging times, we have the ability to rise above—and thrive. In this engaging and hopeful book, renowned psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman unpacks the victim mindset and shines a light on the many ways we can empower ourselves.

In this illuminating debut, Yoni Appelbaum, historian and journalist for The Atlantic, shows us that this idea has been under attack since reformers first developed zoning laws to ghettoize Chinese Americans in nineteenth-century Modesto, California. The century of legal segregation that ensued—from the zoning laws enacted to force Jewish workers back into New York’s Lower East Side to the private-sector discrimination and racist public policy that trapped Black families in Flint, Michigan to Jane Jacobs’ efforts to protect her vision of the West Village.

In Fluke, myth-shattering social scientist Brian Klaas takes a deep-dive into the phenomenon of random chance and the chaos it can sow, taking aim at most people’s neat and tidy version of reality. The book’s argument is that we willfully ignore a bewildering truth: but for a few small changes, our lives—and our societies—could be radically different.

In Talk, Brooks shows why conversing a little more effectively can make a big difference in the quality of our close personal relationships as well as our professional success. Drawing on the new science of conversation, Brooks distills lessons that show how we can better understand, learn from, and delight each other.

For thousands of years, people have argued about whether humanity is selfish or generous, cruel or kind. But recently, our answers have changed. In 1972, half of Americans agreed that most people can be trusted; by 2018, only a third did. Different generations, genders, religions, and political parties can’t seem to agree on anything, except that they all think human virtue is evaporating.