
The Corporation in the 21st Century
Why (Almost) Everything We Are Told About Business Is Wrong
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
3 months free
Buy for $21.49
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Peter Wicks
-
By:
-
John Kay
About this listen
In the world of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, capitalists built and controlled mills and factories. That relationship between capital and labor continued in the automobile assembly lines and petrochemical plants of the twentieth century.
But no longer: products and production have dematerialized. The goods and services provided by the leading companies of the twenty-first century appear on your screen, fit in your pocket, or occupy your head. Ownership of the means of production is a redundant concept. Workers are the means of production; increasingly, they take the plant home. Capital is a service bought from a specialist supplier with little influence over customer businesses. The professional managers who run modern corporations do not exert authority because they are wealthy; they are wealthy because they exert authority.
John Kay's incisive overhaul of our ideas about business redefines our understanding of successful commercial activity and the corporation—and describes how we have come to "love the product" as we "hate the producer." This is a brilliant and original work from one of the greatest economists.
©2024 John Kay (P)2024 Profile Books, LimitedListeners also enjoyed...
-
The Art of Uncertainty
- How to Navigate Chance, Ignorance, Risk and Luck
- By: David Spiegelhalter
- Narrated by: David Spiegelhalter
- Length: 10 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Renowned statistician David Spiegelhalter shows how we can become better at dealing with what we don't know to make smarter choices in a world so full of puzzling variables. In lucid, lively prose, Spiegelhalter guides us through the principles of probability, illustrating how they can help us think more analytically about everything from medical advice to sports to climate change forecasts.
-
-
Terrific
- By Roger March on 04-01-25
-
Peak Human
- What We Can Learn from History’s Greatest Civilizations
- By: Johan Norberg
- Narrated by: Andrew Cullum
- Length: 15 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
All golden ages are marked by periods of spectacular cultural flourishing, scientific exploration, technological achievement and economic growth; yet no two are the same. Their beliefs, societies and place in the wider world all vary. Despite this, all previous golden ages have ended, whether it be because of external pressures or internal fracturing; too much hubris or too little wariness.
-
-
The consist threads that knit the central theme.
- By C. D. on 06-11-25
By: Johan Norberg
-
The Eurasian Century
- Hot Wars, Cold Wars, and the Making of the Modern Century
- By: Hal Brands
- Narrated by: Tim Fannon
- Length: 11 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Hal Brands argues that a better understanding of Eurasia's strategic geography can illuminate the contours of rivalry and conflict in today's world. The Eurasian Century explains how revolutions in technology and warfare, and the rise of toxic ideologies of conquest, made Eurasia the center of twentieth-century geopolitics—with pressing implications for the struggles that will define the twenty-first.
-
-
Worth the read.
- By Chip Eckert on 02-24-25
By: Hal Brands
-
The Measure of Progress
- Counting What Really Matters
- By: Diane Coyle
- Narrated by: Harrie Dobby
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The ways that statisticians and governments measure the economy were developed in the 1940s, when the urgent economic problems were entirely different from those of today. In The Measure of Progress, Diane Coyle argues that the framework underpinning today's economic statistics is so outdated that it functions as a distorting lens, or even a set of blinkers. When policymakers rely on such an antiquated conceptual tool, how can they measure, understand, and respond with any precision to what is happening in today's digital economy?
By: Diane Coyle
-
Inflation
- A Guide for Users and Losers
- By: Nicolò Fraccaroli, Mark Blyth
- Narrated by: Rebecca H. Lee
- Length: 7 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Inflation is back, and its impact can be felt everywhere, from the grocery store to the mortgage market to the results of elections around the world. Yet the conventional wisdom about inflation is stuck in the past. Since the 1970s, there has only really been one playbook for fighting inflation: raise interest rates, thereby creating unemployment and a recession, which will lower prices. But this simple story hides a multitude of beliefs about why prices go up and how policymakers can wrestle them back down, beliefs that are often wrong, damaging, and have little empirical basis.
By: Nicolò Fraccaroli, and others
-
Other People's Money
- The Real Business of Finance
- By: John Kay
- Narrated by: Walter Dixon
- Length: 11 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The finance sector of Western economies is too large and attracts too many of the smartest college graduates. Financialization over the past three decades has created a structure that lacks resilience and supports absurd volumes of trading. The finance sector devotes too little attention to the search for new investment opportunities and the stewardship of existing ones, and far too much to secondary-market dealing in existing assets. Regulation has contributed more to the problems than the solutions.
-
-
Listened twice. Everyone must read this.
- By Tristan on 01-18-16
By: John Kay
-
The Art of Uncertainty
- How to Navigate Chance, Ignorance, Risk and Luck
- By: David Spiegelhalter
- Narrated by: David Spiegelhalter
- Length: 10 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Renowned statistician David Spiegelhalter shows how we can become better at dealing with what we don't know to make smarter choices in a world so full of puzzling variables. In lucid, lively prose, Spiegelhalter guides us through the principles of probability, illustrating how they can help us think more analytically about everything from medical advice to sports to climate change forecasts.
-
-
Terrific
- By Roger March on 04-01-25
-
Peak Human
- What We Can Learn from History’s Greatest Civilizations
- By: Johan Norberg
- Narrated by: Andrew Cullum
- Length: 15 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
All golden ages are marked by periods of spectacular cultural flourishing, scientific exploration, technological achievement and economic growth; yet no two are the same. Their beliefs, societies and place in the wider world all vary. Despite this, all previous golden ages have ended, whether it be because of external pressures or internal fracturing; too much hubris or too little wariness.
-
-
The consist threads that knit the central theme.
- By C. D. on 06-11-25
By: Johan Norberg
-
The Eurasian Century
- Hot Wars, Cold Wars, and the Making of the Modern Century
- By: Hal Brands
- Narrated by: Tim Fannon
- Length: 11 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Hal Brands argues that a better understanding of Eurasia's strategic geography can illuminate the contours of rivalry and conflict in today's world. The Eurasian Century explains how revolutions in technology and warfare, and the rise of toxic ideologies of conquest, made Eurasia the center of twentieth-century geopolitics—with pressing implications for the struggles that will define the twenty-first.
-
-
Worth the read.
- By Chip Eckert on 02-24-25
By: Hal Brands
-
The Measure of Progress
- Counting What Really Matters
- By: Diane Coyle
- Narrated by: Harrie Dobby
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The ways that statisticians and governments measure the economy were developed in the 1940s, when the urgent economic problems were entirely different from those of today. In The Measure of Progress, Diane Coyle argues that the framework underpinning today's economic statistics is so outdated that it functions as a distorting lens, or even a set of blinkers. When policymakers rely on such an antiquated conceptual tool, how can they measure, understand, and respond with any precision to what is happening in today's digital economy?
By: Diane Coyle
-
Inflation
- A Guide for Users and Losers
- By: Nicolò Fraccaroli, Mark Blyth
- Narrated by: Rebecca H. Lee
- Length: 7 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Inflation is back, and its impact can be felt everywhere, from the grocery store to the mortgage market to the results of elections around the world. Yet the conventional wisdom about inflation is stuck in the past. Since the 1970s, there has only really been one playbook for fighting inflation: raise interest rates, thereby creating unemployment and a recession, which will lower prices. But this simple story hides a multitude of beliefs about why prices go up and how policymakers can wrestle them back down, beliefs that are often wrong, damaging, and have little empirical basis.
By: Nicolò Fraccaroli, and others
-
Other People's Money
- The Real Business of Finance
- By: John Kay
- Narrated by: Walter Dixon
- Length: 11 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The finance sector of Western economies is too large and attracts too many of the smartest college graduates. Financialization over the past three decades has created a structure that lacks resilience and supports absurd volumes of trading. The finance sector devotes too little attention to the search for new investment opportunities and the stewardship of existing ones, and far too much to secondary-market dealing in existing assets. Regulation has contributed more to the problems than the solutions.
-
-
Listened twice. Everyone must read this.
- By Tristan on 01-18-16
By: John Kay
-
Chokepoints
- American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare
- By: Edward Fishman
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 17 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It used to be that ravaging another country’s economy required blockading its ports and laying siege to its cities. Now all it takes is a statement posted online by the U.S. government. In Chokepoints, Edward Fishman, a former top State Department sanctions official, takes us deep into the back rooms of power to reveal the untold history of the last two decades of U.S. foreign policy, in which America renounced the gospel of globalization and waged a new kind of economic war.
-
-
Impressive
- By Harry Helbock on 06-17-25
By: Edward Fishman
-
China After Mao
- The Rise of a Superpower
- By: Frank Dikötter
- Narrated by: Daniel York Loh
- Length: 14 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Award-winning historian Frank Dikötter explores how the People’s Republic of China was transformed from a backwater economy in the 1970s into the world superpower of today. His account is the first to be based on hundreds of previously unseen archival documents, from the secret minutes of top party meetings to confidential bank reports. Unfolding with great narrative sweep, this riveting, richly detailed chronicle recasts our understanding of an era that both the regime and foreign admirers celebrate as an economic miracle.
-
-
This guy's writing style is trash
- By L YS on 10-06-24
By: Frank Dikötter
-
The Optimist
- By: Keach Hagey
- Narrated by: Will Damron
- Length: 12 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In The Optimist, the Wall Street Journal reporter Keach Hagey presents the most detailed account yet of Altman’s rise, from his precocious childhood in St. Louis to his first, failed startup experience; his time as legendary entrepreneur Paul Graham’s protégé and successor as head of Y Combinator, the start-up accelerator where Altman became the premier power broker in Silicon Valley; the founding of OpenAI and his recruitment of a small yet superior team; and his struggle to keep his company at the cutting edge while fending off determined rivals, including Elon Musk.
-
-
The author is a big fan of Sam
- By Timpboy on 06-28-25
By: Keach Hagey
-
How Countries Go Broke
- The Big Cycle
- By: Ray Dalio
- Narrated by: Jeremy Bobb, Ray Dalio
- Length: 10 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
How Countries Go Broke shows how debt problems are related to the other forces—political within countries, geopolitical between countries, natural (droughts, floods, and pandemics), and technological (most importantly, AI)—that together are causing what Dalio calls the “Overall Big Cycle” changes in the world order. By listening this audiobook, you will improve your understanding of what’s happening now and what to do about it.
-
-
Horrible narration
- By Anonymous on 06-08-25
By: Ray Dalio
-
King Dollar
- The Past and Future of the World's Dominant Currency
- By: Paul Blustein
- Narrated by: David Stifel
- Length: 12 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Prophecies that the dollar will lose its status as the world's dominant currency have echoed for decades—and are increasing in volume. Cryptocurrency enthusiasts claim that Bitcoin or other blockchain-based monetary units will replace the dollar. Foreign policy hawks warn that China's renminbi poses a lethal threat to the greenback. And sound money zealots predict that mounting US debt and inflation will surely erode the dollar's value to the point of irrelevancy.
By: Paul Blustein
-
Iran's Grand Strategy
- A Political History
- By: Vali Nasr
- Narrated by: Fajer Al-Kaisi
- Length: 11 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Iran presents one of the most significant foreign policy challenges for America and the West, yet very little is known about what the country's goals really are. Vali Nasr examines Iran's political history in new ways to explain its actions and ambitions on the world stage, showing how, behind the veneer of theocracy and Islamic ideology, today's Iran is pursuing a grand strategy aimed at securing the country internally and asserting its place in the region and the world.
-
-
well detailed history of modern Iran
- By Fr. S. on 06-28-25
By: Vali Nasr
-
The Unaccountability Machine
- Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions - and How The World Lost its Mind
- By: Dan Davies
- Narrated by: Peter Dickson
- Length: 9 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Illuminating.
- By Amazon Customer on 04-12-25
By: Dan Davies
-
Unit X
- How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War
- By: Raj M. Shah, Christopher Kirchhoff
- Narrated by: Sean Patrick Hopkins, Raj M. Shah, Christopher Kirchhoff
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A vast and largely unseen transformation of how war is fought as profound as the invention of gunpowder or advent of the nuclear age is occurring. Flying cars that can land like helicopters, artificial intelligence-powered drones that can fly into buildings and map their interiors, microsatellites that can see through clouds and monitor rogue missile sites—all these and more are becoming part of America’s DIU-fast-tracked arsenal. Until recently, the Pentagon was known for its uncomfortable relationship with Silicon Valley and for slow-moving processes that acted as a brake on innovation.
-
-
A how to on navigating Pentagon bureaucracy
- By Gregg on 06-29-25
By: Raj M. Shah, and others
-
Shocks, Crises, and False Alarms
- How to Assess True Macroeconomic Risk
- By: Philipp Carlsson-Szlezak, Paul Swartz
- Narrated by: Jon Vertullo
- Length: 9 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When turmoil hits, executives and investors face notoriously unreliable macroeconomic forecasts, whipsawing data, and contradictory opinions. Are disruptions transient and ephemeral-or permanent and structural? False alarms are costly traps, but so are true structural changes that go undetected. Leaders must also assess the doom-laden public macroeconomic discourse, which habitually presents worst-case scenarios as foregone conclusions.
By: Philipp Carlsson-Szlezak, and others
-
Underground Empire
- How America Weaponized the World Economy
- By: Henry Farrell, Abraham Newman
- Narrated by: L. J. Ganser
- Length: 7 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A deeply researched investigation that reveals how the United States is like a spider at the heart of an international web of surveillance and control, which it weaves in the form of globe-spanning networks such as fiber optic cables and obscure payment systems.
-
-
Good summary
- By Medz on 01-28-25
By: Henry Farrell, and others
-
Empire of AI
- Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI
- By: Karen Hao
- Narrated by: Karen Hao
- Length: 17 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When AI expert and investigative journalist Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI in 2019, she thought they were the good guys. Founded as a nonprofit with safety enshrined as its core mission, the organization was meant, its leader Sam Altman told us, to act as a check against more purely mercantile, and potentially dangerous, forces. What could go wrong?
-
-
Well-researched. Timely. Informative. Karen is brilliant and kind!
- By Kahlil Andrews on 05-25-25
By: Karen Hao
-
Raiders, Rulers, and Traders
- The Horse and the Rise of Empires
- By: David Chaffetz
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 13 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
No animal is so entangled in human history as the horse. The thread starts in prehistory, with a slight, shy animal, hunted for food. Domesticating the horse allowed early humans to settle the vast Eurasian steppe; later, their horses enabled new forms of warfare, encouraged long-distance trade routes, and ended up acquiring deep cultural and religious significance.
-
-
The authors love of his material
- By Jim7 on 05-02-25
By: David Chaffetz
People who viewed this also viewed...
-
The Art of Uncertainty
- How to Navigate Chance, Ignorance, Risk and Luck
- By: David Spiegelhalter
- Narrated by: David Spiegelhalter
- Length: 10 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Renowned statistician David Spiegelhalter shows how we can become better at dealing with what we don't know to make smarter choices in a world so full of puzzling variables. In lucid, lively prose, Spiegelhalter guides us through the principles of probability, illustrating how they can help us think more analytically about everything from medical advice to sports to climate change forecasts.
-
-
Terrific
- By Roger March on 04-01-25
-
Growth
- A History and a Reckoning
- By: Daniel Susskind
- Narrated by: Daniel Susskind
- Length: 10 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Yet prosperity has come at a price: environmental destruction, desolation of local cultures, the rise of vast inequalities, and destabilizing technologies. Faced with such damage, many now claim that the only way forward is through "degrowth," deliberately shrinking our economic footprint. Instead, Daniel Susskind argues, we must keep growth but redirect it, making it better reflect what we truly value.
-
-
Looking for a conclusion that will sell books
- By DCS on 10-05-24
By: Daniel Susskind
-
Strangers and Intimates
- The Rise and Fall of Private Life
- By: Tiffany Jenkins
- Narrated by: Tiffany Jenkins
- Length: 13 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Tiffany Jenkins’s groundbreaking book traces the emergence of private sanctuaries from authority and public opinion to show that private life is a very recent – and hard-won – achievement. Strangers and Intimates is animated by dramatic human confrontations: from the political struggles in the seventeenth century that led to Edmund Coke’s rallying cry that ‘an Englishman’s home is his castle’; to the first modern privacy panic in 1844, when the British government opened private letters sent to the exiled Italian republican Giuseppe Mazzini; and more.
By: Tiffany Jenkins
-
Bye Bye I Love You
- The Story of Our First and Last Words
- By: Michael Erard
- Narrated by: Stephen Caffrey
- Length: 13 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
With our earliest utterances, we announce ourselves—and are recognized—as persons ready for social life. With our final ones, we mark where others must release us to death's embrace. In Bye Bye I Love You, linguist and author Michael Erard explores these phenomena, commonly called "first words" and "last words," uncovering their cultural, historical, and biological entanglements and honoring their deep private significance.
-
-
Might be interesting if the narrator could read better
- By Robert K Keim on 07-01-25
By: Michael Erard
-
Other People's Money
- The Real Business of Finance
- By: John Kay
- Narrated by: Walter Dixon
- Length: 11 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The finance sector of Western economies is too large and attracts too many of the smartest college graduates. Financialization over the past three decades has created a structure that lacks resilience and supports absurd volumes of trading. The finance sector devotes too little attention to the search for new investment opportunities and the stewardship of existing ones, and far too much to secondary-market dealing in existing assets. Regulation has contributed more to the problems than the solutions.
-
-
Listened twice. Everyone must read this.
- By Tristan on 01-18-16
By: John Kay
-
Fatherhood
- A History of Love and Power
- By: Augustine Sedgewick
- Narrated by: Feodor Chin
- Length: 9 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Fatherhood, celebrated historian Augustine Sedgewick explains how this style of parenting emerged in the first place, why it has changed over time, and whether it will endure as we know it, despite its extraordinary costs. Told through the lives of emblematic fathers like Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Henry VIII, Thomas Jefferson, Charles Darwin, and Sigmund Freud, this is an ambitious yet intimate look at how masculinity has evolved and how men have come to hold disproportionate power by expanding and reinforcing the power of fathers in times of crisis.
-
The Art of Uncertainty
- How to Navigate Chance, Ignorance, Risk and Luck
- By: David Spiegelhalter
- Narrated by: David Spiegelhalter
- Length: 10 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Renowned statistician David Spiegelhalter shows how we can become better at dealing with what we don't know to make smarter choices in a world so full of puzzling variables. In lucid, lively prose, Spiegelhalter guides us through the principles of probability, illustrating how they can help us think more analytically about everything from medical advice to sports to climate change forecasts.
-
-
Terrific
- By Roger March on 04-01-25
-
Growth
- A History and a Reckoning
- By: Daniel Susskind
- Narrated by: Daniel Susskind
- Length: 10 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Yet prosperity has come at a price: environmental destruction, desolation of local cultures, the rise of vast inequalities, and destabilizing technologies. Faced with such damage, many now claim that the only way forward is through "degrowth," deliberately shrinking our economic footprint. Instead, Daniel Susskind argues, we must keep growth but redirect it, making it better reflect what we truly value.
-
-
Looking for a conclusion that will sell books
- By DCS on 10-05-24
By: Daniel Susskind
-
Strangers and Intimates
- The Rise and Fall of Private Life
- By: Tiffany Jenkins
- Narrated by: Tiffany Jenkins
- Length: 13 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Tiffany Jenkins’s groundbreaking book traces the emergence of private sanctuaries from authority and public opinion to show that private life is a very recent – and hard-won – achievement. Strangers and Intimates is animated by dramatic human confrontations: from the political struggles in the seventeenth century that led to Edmund Coke’s rallying cry that ‘an Englishman’s home is his castle’; to the first modern privacy panic in 1844, when the British government opened private letters sent to the exiled Italian republican Giuseppe Mazzini; and more.
By: Tiffany Jenkins
-
Bye Bye I Love You
- The Story of Our First and Last Words
- By: Michael Erard
- Narrated by: Stephen Caffrey
- Length: 13 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
With our earliest utterances, we announce ourselves—and are recognized—as persons ready for social life. With our final ones, we mark where others must release us to death's embrace. In Bye Bye I Love You, linguist and author Michael Erard explores these phenomena, commonly called "first words" and "last words," uncovering their cultural, historical, and biological entanglements and honoring their deep private significance.
-
-
Might be interesting if the narrator could read better
- By Robert K Keim on 07-01-25
By: Michael Erard
-
Other People's Money
- The Real Business of Finance
- By: John Kay
- Narrated by: Walter Dixon
- Length: 11 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The finance sector of Western economies is too large and attracts too many of the smartest college graduates. Financialization over the past three decades has created a structure that lacks resilience and supports absurd volumes of trading. The finance sector devotes too little attention to the search for new investment opportunities and the stewardship of existing ones, and far too much to secondary-market dealing in existing assets. Regulation has contributed more to the problems than the solutions.
-
-
Listened twice. Everyone must read this.
- By Tristan on 01-18-16
By: John Kay
-
Fatherhood
- A History of Love and Power
- By: Augustine Sedgewick
- Narrated by: Feodor Chin
- Length: 9 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Fatherhood, celebrated historian Augustine Sedgewick explains how this style of parenting emerged in the first place, why it has changed over time, and whether it will endure as we know it, despite its extraordinary costs. Told through the lives of emblematic fathers like Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Henry VIII, Thomas Jefferson, Charles Darwin, and Sigmund Freud, this is an ambitious yet intimate look at how masculinity has evolved and how men have come to hold disproportionate power by expanding and reinforcing the power of fathers in times of crisis.
-
Jesus Wept
- Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church
- By: Philip Shenon
- Narrated by: Richard Cohen
- Length: 22 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When the jolly Italian peasant-turned-cardinal Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli of Venice was elected Pope John XXIII in 1958, change was in the air. The Church, many said, had refused to enter the twentieth century. In response, Pope John launched Vatican II, an “ecumenical council” that summoned hundreds of church leaders to Rome. It marked one of the most progressive turns the Church had taken in centuries: “medicine of mercy,” as Pope John called it. Yet not everyone in the Church was prepared to accept this modernization.
-
-
Too long by 3x
- By Road Reader on 04-21-25
By: Philip Shenon
-
The Optimist
- By: Keach Hagey
- Narrated by: Will Damron
- Length: 12 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In The Optimist, the Wall Street Journal reporter Keach Hagey presents the most detailed account yet of Altman’s rise, from his precocious childhood in St. Louis to his first, failed startup experience; his time as legendary entrepreneur Paul Graham’s protégé and successor as head of Y Combinator, the start-up accelerator where Altman became the premier power broker in Silicon Valley; the founding of OpenAI and his recruitment of a small yet superior team; and his struggle to keep his company at the cutting edge while fending off determined rivals, including Elon Musk.
-
-
The author is a big fan of Sam
- By Timpboy on 06-28-25
By: Keach Hagey
-
More and More and More
- An All-Consuming History of Energy
- By: Jean-Baptiste Fressoz
- Narrated by: Richard Trinder
- Length: 8 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
We have long been taught that humanity’s relationship with energy is one of progress, with wood superseded by coal, coal by oil, oil by nuclear—until at some future point everything will be replaced by “green” energy. But the long-held belief in transition and sustainability is completely untrue, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz argues. More and More and More demolishes this disastrous fallacy, showing how our industrial age and beyond has in fact been powered by an ever-greater accumulation of each major energy source feeding off the others.
-
Doctored
- Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer's
- By: Charles Piller
- Narrated by: Lyle Blaker
- Length: 10 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Nearly seven million Americans live with Alzheimer’s disease, a tragedy that is already projected to grow into a $1 trillion crisis by 2050. While families suffer and promises of pharmaceutical breakthroughs keep coming up short, investigative journalist Charles Piller’s Doctored shows that we’ve quite likely been walking the wrong path to finding a cure all along—led astray by a cabal of self-interested researchers, government accomplices, and corporate greed.
-
-
A biased accounting of scientific bias
- By Yuval Z. on 06-25-25
By: Charles Piller
-
The Unaccountability Machine
- Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions - and How The World Lost its Mind
- By: Dan Davies
- Narrated by: Peter Dickson
- Length: 9 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Illuminating.
- By Amazon Customer on 04-12-25
By: Dan Davies
-
The Measure of Progress
- Counting What Really Matters
- By: Diane Coyle
- Narrated by: Harrie Dobby
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The ways that statisticians and governments measure the economy were developed in the 1940s, when the urgent economic problems were entirely different from those of today. In The Measure of Progress, Diane Coyle argues that the framework underpinning today's economic statistics is so outdated that it functions as a distorting lens, or even a set of blinkers. When policymakers rely on such an antiquated conceptual tool, how can they measure, understand, and respond with any precision to what is happening in today's digital economy?
By: Diane Coyle
-
Righting Wrongs
- Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments
- By: Kenneth Roth
- Narrated by: Kenneth Roth
- Length: 14 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In three decades under the leadership of Kenneth Roth, Human Rights Watch grew to a staff of more than 500, conducting investigations in 100 countries to uncover abuses—and pressuring offending governments to stop them. Roth has grappled with the worst of humanity, taken on the biggest villains of our time, and persuaded leaders from around the globe to stand up to their repressive counterparts.
By: Kenneth Roth
-
Chokepoints
- American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare
- By: Edward Fishman
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 17 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It used to be that ravaging another country’s economy required blockading its ports and laying siege to its cities. Now all it takes is a statement posted online by the U.S. government. In Chokepoints, Edward Fishman, a former top State Department sanctions official, takes us deep into the back rooms of power to reveal the untold history of the last two decades of U.S. foreign policy, in which America renounced the gospel of globalization and waged a new kind of economic war.
-
-
Impressive
- By Harry Helbock on 06-17-25
By: Edward Fishman
-
Supremacy
- AI, ChatGPT, and the Race that Will Change the World
- By: Parmy Olson
- Narrated by: Lisa Flanagan
- Length: 9 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In November 2022, a webpage was posted online with a simple text box. It was ChatGPT, and was unlike any app people had used before. It was more human than a customer service agent, more convenient than a Google search. Behind the scenes, battles for control and prestige between the world’s two leading AI firms, OpenAI and DeepMind, who now steers Google's AI efforts, has remained elusive—until now.
-
-
Author doesn’t understand AI
- By David on 09-30-24
By: Parmy Olson
-
Peak Human
- What We Can Learn from History’s Greatest Civilizations
- By: Johan Norberg
- Narrated by: Andrew Cullum
- Length: 15 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
All golden ages are marked by periods of spectacular cultural flourishing, scientific exploration, technological achievement and economic growth; yet no two are the same. Their beliefs, societies and place in the wider world all vary. Despite this, all previous golden ages have ended, whether it be because of external pressures or internal fracturing; too much hubris or too little wariness.
-
-
The consist threads that knit the central theme.
- By C. D. on 06-11-25
By: Johan Norberg
-
Adventures in the Louvre
- How to Fall in Love with the World's Greatest Museum
- By: Elaine Sciolino
- Narrated by: Lynn Bradford
- Length: 10 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Louvre is the most famous museum in the world, attracting millions of visitors every year with its masterpieces. In Adventures in the Louvre, Elaine Sciolino immerses herself in this magical space and helps us fall in love with what was once a forbidding fortress. Exploring galleries, basements, rooftops, and gardens, Sciolino demystifies the Louvre, introducing us to her favorite artworks, both legendary and overlooked, and to the people who are the museum's lifeblood.
-
-
Easy Recommendation for Travelers to Paris
- By Jim Kane on 04-27-25
By: Elaine Sciolino
-
Empire of AI
- Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI
- By: Karen Hao
- Narrated by: Karen Hao
- Length: 17 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When AI expert and investigative journalist Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI in 2019, she thought they were the good guys. Founded as a nonprofit with safety enshrined as its core mission, the organization was meant, its leader Sam Altman told us, to act as a check against more purely mercantile, and potentially dangerous, forces. What could go wrong?
-
-
Well-researched. Timely. Informative. Karen is brilliant and kind!
- By Kahlil Andrews on 05-25-25
By: Karen Hao
Disjointed and disappointing.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.