The Dawn of Everything
David Graeber & David Wengrow
Some books seek to simplify or clarify the past; this one seeks to complicate it.
Braiding Sweetgrass
Robin Wall Kimmerer
Each essay in this collection is a a full-throated declaration of a democracy of species—with humans as the minority voice.
Echopraxia
Peter Watts
Daniel Brüks is a baseline: a human with few enhancements, no cortical inlays, no way to blink and see subtitles in his vision.
Tao Te Ching
Lao Tzu & Ursula K. Le Guin
Turning to these poems at the end of many a dark day has felt like holding the gift of a small, fierce light.
Blindsight
Peter Watts
Siri Keeton, missing half his mind, is sent out on a mission to discover the source of thousands of probes that surrounded Earth and screamed an unintelligible alien signal before burning up in the atmosphere.
The Word for World Is Forest
Ursula K. Le Guin
The Athsheans live among a forest, on a planet that “yumens” are attempting to colonize.
Lost in Work
Amelia Horgan
“Our entrance into work is unfree, and while we’re there, our time is not our own.”
The Problem with Work
Kathi Weeks
A provocative and irresistable argument that the need to “work for a living” is not a natural order but rather an invention—and one that can change.
Bullshit Jobs
David Graeber
An expansion of the immensely popular essay of the same title, here David Graeber takes a long hard look at why so many jobs are rank bullshit, and what can be done about it.
Breaking Things at Work
Gavin Mueller
A brisk read that locates echoes of Luddism in current practices like the free software and right-to-repair movements, and makes the case for rescuing Luddism from the dustheap.
Work Won’t Love You Back
Sarah Jaffe
From the title through every chapter, paragraph, and sentence, this book is a deeply researched polemic against the myth of the “labor of love.”
A Collective Bargain
Jane McAlevey
A brisk, fist-pumping read from veteran labor organizer Jane McAlevey, A Collective Bargain tells stories of unions who won big—and who won during the Trump years, perhaps the darkest time in decades of waning worker power.
Cubed
Nikil Saval
An insightful history of professional work, Nikil Saval’s Cubed interrogates how we work by digging into where we work, and the way those workplaces have changed and evolved.
Uncanny Valley
Anna Wiener
I avoided this book when it first came out because I feared it would hit too close to home. I wasn’t wrong.
How to Blow Up a Pipeline
Andreas Malm
This is a clear-eyed call for the climate movement to go beyond peaceful protest in order to avert ecological collapse.
Under a White Sky
Elizabeth Kolbert
“We live in a world where deliberately dimming the fucking sun might be less risky than not doing it.”
A Civic Technologist’s Practice Guide
Cyd Harrell
This concise and cogent book offers clear and accessible guidance on what it means to do tech work in the public sector.
The Ministry for the Future
Kim Stanley Robinson
Robinson writes science fiction that aspires to be a New Yorker essay. This is not entirely bad.
Several Short Sentences About Writing
Verlyn Klinkenborg
I am rather enamored with this book from Verlyn Klinkenborg, which presumes that most writing instruction is bullshit.
The Unreal and the Real
Ursula K. Le Guin
The titles of the two parts of this selected edition of Le Guin’s stories are Where on Earth and Outer Space, Inner Lands—Le Guin leaves it to the reader to decide which of these is real and which unreal.