Taming the Street describes how President Franklin D. Roosevelt battled to regulate Wall Street in the wake of the 1929 stock market crash and the ensuing Great Depression. With deep reporting and vivid storytelling, Diana B. Henriques takes listeners back to a time when America’s financial landscape was a jungle ruled by the titans of vast wealth, largely unrestrained by government. Roosevelt ran for office in 1932 vowing to curb that ruthless capitalism and make the world of finance safer for ordinary savers and investors.

When economist Angus Deaton immigrated to the United States from Britain in the early 1980s, he was awed by America’s strengths and shocked by the extraordinary gaps he witnessed between people. Economics in America explains in clear terms how the field of economics addresses the most pressing issues of our times—from poverty, retirement, and the minimum wage to the ravages of the nation’s uniquely disastrous health care system—and narrates Deaton’s own account of his experiences as a naturalized US citizen and academic economist.

In 2021 cryptocurrency went mainstream. Giant investment funds were buying it, celebrities like Tom Brady endorsed it, and TV ads hailed it as the future of money. Hardly anyone knew how it worked—but why bother with the particulars when everyone was making a fortune from Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, or some other bizarrely named “digital asset”? As he observed this frenzy, investigative reporter Zeke Faux had a nagging question: Was it all just a confidence game of epic proportions? What started as curiosity—with a dash of FOMO—would morph into a two-year globe-spanning quest.

When Michael Lewis first met him, Sam Bankman-Fried was the world’s youngest billionaire and crypto’s Gatsby. CEOs, celebrities, and leaders of small countries all vied for his time and cash after he catapulted, practically overnight, onto the Forbes billionaire list. Who was this rumpled guy in cargo shorts and limp white socks, whose eyes twitched across Zoom meetings as he played video games on the side?

When Elon Musk was a kid in South Africa, he was regularly beaten by bullies. One day a group pushed him down some concrete steps and kicked him until his face was a swollen ball of flesh. He was in the hospital for a week. But the physical scars were minor compared to the emotional ones inflicted by his father, an engineer, rogue, and charismatic fantasist.

Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges was madly in love when his life was shattered by painful heartbreak. But the breakdown that followed illuminated an incontrovertible truth—that love is necessarily imbued with loss, that the one doesn’t exist without the other. German physicist Werner Heisenberg was fighting with the scientific establishment on the meaning of the quantum realm’s absurdity when he had his own epiphany—that there is no such thing as a complete, perfect description of reality.

Marty Baron took charge of The Washington Post newsroom in 2013, after nearly a dozen years leading The Boston Globe. Just seven months into his new job, Baron received explosive news: Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, would buy the Post, marking a sudden end to control by the venerated family that had presided over the paper for 80 years. Just over two years later, Donald Trump won the presidency.

For over a century, The New York Times has been an iconic institution in American journalism, one whose history is intertwined with the events that it chronicles—a newspaper read by millions of people every day to stay informed about events that have taken place across the globe. In The Times, Adam Nagourney, who’s worked at The New York Times since 1996, examines four decades of the newspaper’s history, from the final years of Arthur “Punch” Sulzberger’s reign as publisher to the election of Donald Trump in November 2016.

We are approaching a critical threshold in the history of our species. Everything is about to change. Soon you will live surrounded by AIs. They will organize your life, operate your business, and run core government services. You will live in a world of DNA printers and quantum computers, engineered pathogens and autonomous weapons, robot assistants and abundant energy.

America is undergoing a massive experiment: It is moving, in fits and starts, toward a multiracial democracy, something few societies have ever done. But the prospect of change has sparked an authoritarian backlash that threatens the very foundations of our political system. Why is democracy under assault here, and not in other wealthy, diversifying nations? And what can we do to save it?

Five-year-old Milad Salama is excited for a school trip to a theme park on the outskirts of Jerusalem. On the way, his bus collides with a semitrailer. His father, Abed, gets word of the crash and rushes to the site. The scene is chaos—the children have been taken to different hospitals in Jerusalem and the West Bank; some are missing, others cannot be identified. Abed sets off on an odyssey to learn Milad’s fate. It is every parent’s worst nightmare, but for Abed it is compounded by the maze of physical, emotional, and bureaucratic obstacles he must navigate because he is Palestinian.

In the 1950s, an obsessive firearms designer named Eugene Stoner invented the AR-15 rifle in a California garage. High-minded and patriotic, Stoner sought to devise a lightweight, easy-to-use weapon that could replace the M1s touted by soldiers in World War II. What he did create was a lethal handheld icon of the American century.

For almost three decades, Fox News has not only made political careers (see: President Donald J. Trump) but also fundamentally altered the political landscape of the United States. It is a truism: as Fox goes, so goes the nation—into further divisiveness and awash in fake news, a gleefully polarizing company. But just as Fox has pushed America apart, now it too is coming apart. As is the family dynasty behind it.

Today’s Republican party is not a “normal” political party in the American tradition. It has become an autocratic movement masquerading as a political party. As Stuart Stevens argues in The Conspiracy to End America, if we look away from that truth, we greatly increase the likelihood that the America we love will slip away, never to return.

We used to think of failure as the opposite of success. Now, we’re often torn between two “failure cultures”: one that says to avoid failure at all costs, the other that says fail fast, fail often. The trouble is that both approaches lack the crucial distinctions to help us separate good failure from bad. As a result, we miss the opportunity to fail well. After decades of award-winning research, Amy Edmondson is here to upend our understanding of failure and make it work for us. In Right Kind of Wrong, Edmondson provides the framework to think, discuss, and practice failure wisely.

There is no one better qualified to tell us about the failures of the American financial system and the grotesque abuses that have taken place in recent years than John C. Bogle, founder and former chief executive of the Vanguard mutual-fund group. This legendary mutual-fund pioneer has witnessed firsthand the innermost workings of the financial industry for more than 50 years and has set the standards for sound investment strategies and stewardship.

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.

Even after the ruinous financial crisis of 2008, America is still beset by the depredations of an oligarchy that is now bigger, more profitable, and more resistant to regulation than ever. Anchored by six megabanks, which together control assets amounting to more than 60 percent of the country's gross domestic product, these financial institutions (now more emphatically "too big to fail") continue to hold the global economy hostage.

Born in Italy, University of Chicago economist Luigi Zingales witnessed firsthand the consequences of high inflation and unemployment - paired with rampant nepotism and cronyism - on a country’s economy. This experience profoundly shaped his professional interests, and in 1988 he arrived in the United States, armed with a political passion and the belief that economists should not merely interpret the world, but should change it for the better.

Raghuram Rajan was one of the few economists who warned of the global financial crisis before it hit. Now, as the world struggles to recover, it's tempting to blame what happened on just a few greedy bankers who took irrational risks and left the rest of us to foot the bill. In Fault Lines, Rajan argues that serious flaws in the economy are also to blame, and warns that a potentially more devastating crisis awaits us if they aren't fixed.

The international monetary system has collapsed three times in the past hundred years, in 1914, 1939, and 1971. Each collapse was followed by a period of tumult: War, civil unrest, or significant damage to the stability of the global economy. Now James Rickards, the acclaimed author of Currency Wars, shows why another collapse is rapidly approaching - and why this time, nothing less than the institution of money itself is at risk.

Over the past four decades, China's remarkable transformation has garnered admiration but also sparked concern. George Magnus draws on his intimate knowledge of this dynamic nation to uncover the origins of its ascent and show why the economic traps it faces at home and the political challenges it faces abroad pose a serious threat to its continued rise.

When Jean Tirole won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Economics, he suddenly found himself being stopped in the street by complete strangers and asked to comment on issues of the day, no matter how distant from his own areas of research. His transformation from academic economist to public intellectual prompted him to reflect further on the role economists and their discipline play in society. The result is Economics for the Common Good, a passionate manifesto for a world in which economics, far from being a "dismal science," is a positive force for the common good.

A national best-seller, Dead Aid unflinchingly confronts one of the greatest myths of our time: that billions of dollars in aid sent from wealthy countries to developing African nations has helped to reduce poverty and increase growth. In fact, poverty levels continue to escalate and growth rates have steadily declined - and millions continue to suffer. Debunking the current model of international aid promoted by both Hollywood celebrities and policy makers, Dambisa Moyo offers a bold new road map for financing the development of the world's poorest countries.

The governments and central banks of the developed world have tried every policy tool imaginable, yet our economies remain sluggish, or worse. How did we get here, and how can we emerge from the longest downturn in recent memory? Daniel Alpert, a progressive Wall Street banker and economist, argues that we are living in the age of oversupply.

In Putinomics, Chris Miller examines the making of Russian economic policy since Vladimir Putin took power in 1999. Miller argues that Putin's economic strategy has functioned far more effectively than most Westerners realize. While acknowledging that part of Putin's successes - above all, quadrupling per capita GDP in just a decade and a half - can be attributed to cashing in on high oil prices, Miller details the government policies that have also been fundamental to Russia's growth.

Wall Street is an unending source of legend - and nightmares. It is a universal symbol of both the highest aspirations of economic prosperity and the basest impulses of greed and deception. Charles R. Geisst's Wall Street is at once a chronicle of the street itself - from the days when the wall was merely a defensive barricade built by Peter Stuyvesant - and an engaging economic history of the United States, a tale of profits and losses, enterprising spirits, and key figures that transformed America into the most powerful economy in the world.

Economics isn't just about numbers: It's about politics, psychology, history, and so much more. We are all economists - when we work, save for the future, invest, pay taxes, and buy our groceries. Yet many of us feel lost when the subject arises. Award-winning professor Timothy Taylor here tackles all the key questions and hot topics of both microeconomics and macroeconomics, so you can understand and discuss economics on a personal, national, and global level.

Many blame today's economic inequality, stagnation, and political instability on the free market. The solution is to rein in the market, right? Radical Markets turns this thinking - and pretty much all conventional thinking about markets, both for and against - on its head. The book reveals bold new ways to organize markets for the good of everyone.

Since the 1970s, and notwithstanding three recessions, the U.S. economy has soared. American capitalism has been a triumph, and it has spread throughout the world. At the same time, argues the former U.S. secretary of labor, Robert B. Reich, the effectiveness of democracy in America has declined. It has grown less responsive to the citizenry, and people are feeling more and more helpless as a result.

A successful Wall Street trader turned Cambridge neuroscientist reveals the biology of boom and bust and how risk taking transforms our body chemistry, driving us to extremes of euphoria and risky behavior or stress and depression. The laws of financial boom and bust, it turns out, have more than a little to do with male hormones. In a series of groundbreaking experiments, Dr. John Coates identified a feedback loop between testosterone and success that dramatically lowers the fear of risk.

Private equity surrounds us. Firms like Blackstone, Carlyle, and KKR are among the largest employers in America and hold assets that rival those of small countries. Yet few understand what these firms are or how they work. In Plunder, Brendan Ballou explains how private equity has reshaped American business by raising prices, reducing quality, cutting jobs, and shifting resources from productive to unproductive parts of the economy.

You make hundreds of decisions every day, from what to eat for breakfast to how you should invest, and not one of them could be made without the essential component of emotion. It has long been held that thinking and feeling are separate and opposing forces in our behavior. But as Leonard Mlodinow, the best-selling author of Subliminal, tells us, extraordinary advances in psychology and neuroscience have proven that emotions are as critical to our well-being as is rational thinking.

Ray Dalio does not want you to listen to this audiobook. Late last year, when the billionaire founder of Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund on the planet, announced that he was stepping down from the company he started out of his apartment nearly 50 years ago, the news made headlines around the world. Dalio cultivated an aura of international admiration and fame thanks to his company’s eye-popping success, coupled with a mystique he encouraged with frequent media appearances, celebrity hobnobbing, and his bestselling book, Principles.

Confused about AI and worried about what it means for your future and the future of the world? You’re not alone. AI is everywhere—and few things are surrounded by so much hype, misinformation, and misunderstanding. In AI Snake Oil, computer scientists Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor cut through the confusion to give you an essential understanding of how AI works, why it often doesn’t, where it might be useful or harmful, and when you should suspect that companies are using AI hype to sell AI snake oil—products that don’t work, and probably never will.