Here are 100 books that Changing the Subject fans have personally recommended if you like
Changing the Subject.
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I’m a lifelong typewriter lover. That passion has taken me down some deep and wonderful rabbit holes, including critiques of digital tech. I’m just as hooked on tech as the average person today, and of course, it has real benefits, but I’m painfully aware of how my addiction damages my attention, privacy, and self-reliance. The books I’ve picked help me articulate the problems, imagine just how bad things can get, and see alternatives. In my day job as a philosophy professor, I think about topics like memory, time, and technology, and specialize in controversial thinker Martin Heidegger (I own his typewriter!).
I devoured this book in a day, and it has kept me thinking for years. Say you can buy a stuffed animal equipped with a camera, and an anonymous user somewhere on the planet can see through that camera, move the toy, and make a rudimentary noise. What could possibly go wrong?
I was fascinated by the range of stories Schweblin imagines: fun, sweet, silly, and absolutely awful. Why can’t people in Silicon Valley think outside the box like this before they release the latest gadget that’s supposed to make our lives better?
A visionary novel about our interconnected world, about the collision of horror and humanity, from the Man Booker-shortlisted master of the spine-tingling tale
A Guardian & Observer Best Fiction Book of 2020 * A Sunday Times Best Science Fiction Book of the Year * The Times Best Science Fiction Books of the Year * NPR Best Books of the Year
World Literature Today's 75 Notable Translations of 2020 * Ebook Travel Guides Best 5 Books of 2020 * A New York Times Notable Book of 2020
They're not pets. Not ghosts or robots. These are kentukis, and they are in…
The dragons of Yuro have been hunted to extinction.
On a small, isolated island, in a reclusive forest, lives bandit leader Marani and her brother Jacks. With their outlaw band they rob from the rich to feed themselves, raiding carriages and dodging the occasional vindictive…
I’m a lifelong typewriter lover. That passion has taken me down some deep and wonderful rabbit holes, including critiques of digital tech. I’m just as hooked on tech as the average person today, and of course, it has real benefits, but I’m painfully aware of how my addiction damages my attention, privacy, and self-reliance. The books I’ve picked help me articulate the problems, imagine just how bad things can get, and see alternatives. In my day job as a philosophy professor, I think about topics like memory, time, and technology, and specialize in controversial thinker Martin Heidegger (I own his typewriter!).
I’ve tried my hand at street poetry with a typewriter and been surprised by the hugs and tears my little efforts sometimes provoke. This book shows me why: people are hungry for someone to listen and care. And something about a mechanical intermediary promotes attention, while digital tech pushes us apart.
I was absorbed by Sonia-Wallace’s stories and jealous of his chance to be Amtrak’s writer-in-residence, typing poems on a train across America.
It might surprise you who’s a fan of poetry — when it meets them where they are.
Before he became an award-winning writer and poet, Brian Sonia-Wallace set up a typewriter on the street with a sign that said “Poetry Store” and discovered something surprising: all over America, people want poems. An amateur busker at first, Brian asked countless strangers, “What do you need a poem about?” To his surprise, passersby opened up to share their deepest yearnings, loves, and heartbreaks. Hundreds of them. Then thousands. Around the nation, Brian’s poetry crusade drew countless converts from all walks of life.…
I’m a lifelong typewriter lover. That passion has taken me down some deep and wonderful rabbit holes, including critiques of digital tech. I’m just as hooked on tech as the average person today, and of course, it has real benefits, but I’m painfully aware of how my addiction damages my attention, privacy, and self-reliance. The books I’ve picked help me articulate the problems, imagine just how bad things can get, and see alternatives. In my day job as a philosophy professor, I think about topics like memory, time, and technology, and specialize in controversial thinker Martin Heidegger (I own his typewriter!).
I could use some hope for the future, and this story by a polymath and “deindustrial” sci-fi writer made me hope. It’s an actual utopia, not the much more popular dystopian genre. Greer lets me imagine how a low-tech, 1950s-ish economy could provide a more sustainable and meaningful life for all. He makes sensible points that cut across our usual political divisions.
After reading Retrotopia, I walked through a 19th-century neighborhood in Cincinnati, admired the small businesses and streetcars, and felt that this is the way things ought to be.
FORWARD TO THE PAST The year is 2065. Decades ago, the United States of America fell apart after four brutal years of civil war, and the fragments coalesced into new nations divided by economic and political rivalries. Most of the post-US America is wracked by poverty and civil strife, with high-tech skyscrapers rising above crowded, starving slums—but one of the new nations, the Lakeland Republic of the upper Midwest, has gone its own way, isolated from the rest by closed frontiers and trade embargoes. Now Peter Carr, an emissary from the newly elected administration in the Atlantic Republic, boards a…
When Annie Thornton, midwife and apprentice witch, falls through time to a 15th-century Yorkshire village with her telepathic cat, Rosamund, she befriends Will and Jack, two soldiers returning from the French Wars. Mistress Meg, Annie’s ancestral aunt living in the 15th century, is…
I’m a lifelong typewriter lover. That passion has taken me down some deep and wonderful rabbit holes, including critiques of digital tech. I’m just as hooked on tech as the average person today, and of course, it has real benefits, but I’m painfully aware of how my addiction damages my attention, privacy, and self-reliance. The books I’ve picked help me articulate the problems, imagine just how bad things can get, and see alternatives. In my day job as a philosophy professor, I think about topics like memory, time, and technology, and specialize in controversial thinker Martin Heidegger (I own his typewriter!).
Sometimes, I’m in the mood for dystopias and want to imagine where the trends that Birkerts describes may take us. So I was pleasingly horrified by Shteyngart’s story of a near future where books are smelly embarrassments, people’s credit ratings are displayed on signs as they walk by, and Internet deprivation is grounds for suicide.
Oh, and I won’t be signing up for high-tech life extension procedures after seeing where that goes …
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A deliciously dark tale of America’s dysfunctional coming years—and the timeless and tender feelings that just might bring us back from the brink.
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times • The Washington Post • The Boston Globe • San Francisco Chronicle • The Seattle Times • O: The Oprah Magazine • Maureen Corrigan, NPR • Salon • Slate • Minneapolis Star Tribune • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • The Kansas City Star • Charlotte Observer • The Globe and Mail • Vancouver Sun • Montreal Gazette • Kirkus…
I have worked all my adult life trying to understand the implications of the insight that the economy depends on the environment for all its materials, energy, and assimilation of all its wastes. What began as academic curiosity developed into concern about the urgency of a transition to a post-growth economy, especially in rich countries. Justice requires that those most responsible for ecological overshoot reduce their demands on nature furthest and fastest so that those least responsible but suffering the worst consequences can also flourish. I hope you find the books I have chosen will help you take informed action to bring about the transition to a post-growth society.
My understanding of how the world works has been greatly influenced by my study of economics. However, economists often make overly optimistic assumptions about technology and resources that are not grounded in fact and experience.
Smil's book on how the world really works is a powerful antidote to the wishful thinking of those, not just economists, who believe that technology will solve the problems of overshoot, poverty, inequality, conflict, and whatever else may be ailing us.
I love Smil's grasp of physical, biological, and technological fundamentals and his ability to communicate his wisdom about how the world really works simply and with conviction.
'There is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil' Bill Gates __________
We have never had so much information at our fingertips and yet most of us don't know how the world really works. This book explains seven of the most fundamental realities governing our survival and prosperity. From energy and food production, through our material world and its globalization, to risks, our environment and its future, How the World Really Works offers a much-needed reality check - because before we can tackle problems effectively, we must understand the facts.
I have spent most of my adult life using entrepreneurial business practices and principles to redesign and transform nonprofits. From my very first nonprofit organizational acceleration, I was hooked. The wealth one receives from helping other people is so much richer and more satisfying than money–altruism is truly life's greatest pleasure. You know the movie The Sixth Sense where the little kid sees dead people everywhere? I am the same way, except everywhere I look, I see uncaptured opportunities for social impact. I live and breathe social impact strategy, governance, financing, evaluation, and change management. Because by fixing problems in those areas, organizations are able to do more to make the world a better place.
Good to Great is one of the best business books written, but it doesn't tell the full story. While Collins has other books, the most important companion to my prior recommendation is Great By Choice. Really, these books should be seen as a Part 1 and a Part 2.
The elements in this book are every bit as important–specifically, the "20 Mile March" piece is one that continues to resonate with me. More battle-tested wisdom from one of the world's greatest business scholars.
THE NEW QUESTION Ten years after the worldwide bestseller Good to Great, Jim Collins returns with another groundbreaking work, this time to ask: Why do some companies thrive in uncertainty, even chaos, and others do not? Based on nine years of research, buttressed by rigorous analysis and infused with engaging stories, Collins and his colleague, Morten Hansen, enumerate the principles for building a truly great enterprise in unpredictable, tumultuous, and fast-moving times.
THE NEW STUDY Great by Choice distinguishes itself from Collins's prior work by its focus not just on performance, but also on the type of unstable environments faced…
Chasing Light is a lyrical meditation on grief, memory, and the fragile beauty of everyday life. At its core, it is a story of resilience, forgiveness, and the transformational power of human connection. It sheds light on the overlooked realities of homelessness and addiction, while emphasizing the importance of compassion…
Since 2008, I have conducted research on themes related to International Political Economy. I am currently the co-chair of the research committee on this topic at the International Political Science Association (IPSA) and am passionate about making sense of the interplay between material and symbolic factors that shape capitalism and globalisation. Being based in Brazil, I was stuck when the country—which did not have salient identity cleavages in politics—came to be, after 2008, a hotspot of religious-based right-wing populism associated with the defence of trade liberalisation as globalisation started to face meaningful backlash from White-majority constituencies who are relatively losers of the post-Cold War order in the advanced industrialised democracies.
In a time when industrial policy is no longer taboo, even in the West, I would recommend this book to remember the pivotal role that state policies play in promoting development.
More than being the result of self-made people, crucial innovations like the smartphone result from the research backbone that the state provides.
The book is, therefore, thought-provoking as it debunks myths of state decline during the so-called neoliberal age, although recognises that private firms have acquired excessive power.
In this sharp and controversial expose, Mariana Mazzucato debunks the pervasive myth that the state is a laggard, bureaucratic apparatus at odds with a dynamic private sector. She reveals in detailed case studies, including a riveting chapter on the iPhone, that the opposite is true: the state is, and has been, our boldest and most valuable innovator. Denying this history is leading us down the wrong path. A select few get credit for what is an intensely collective effort, and the US government has started disinvesting from innovation. The repercussions could stunt economic growth and increase inequality. Mazzucato teaches us…
There never was nor ever could be a better fair, and that is the memory I’ve carried since that family vacation brought us to the Queens fairgrounds in 1964. Though I do not remember much, what remains in my heart is a sense of wonder and happiness. Over the years, the memory faded until I took a class on Renaissance Sculpture for my master’s studies. It amazed me that Michelangelo’s Pietà could have ever been shipped to Queens–I began researching and was deeply moved by the story that unfolded.
I was taken back in time reading this account of the World’s Fair along with the cultural and political background Tirella provided. It gave me a broader view of the seismic societal changes that were starting to hit the country.
I also enjoyed another take on the fair–everyone has an opinion, even if it doesn’t necessarily match my own. World’s fairs are cultural Petri dishes, telling us much about the society we live in, and this book proves it.
This New York Times bestseller is a vivid account of the 1964-65 World's Fair in New York City, a spectacle that embodied the innovation, lunacy, hope, and fear of a dramatic twenty-first century decade-and one that pitted Robert Moses vs. Andy Warhol, brought the vision of Walt Disney together with the Merry Pranksters, featured an Audio-Animatronic Abraham Lincoln and real-life LBJ in the midst of the Civil Rights struggle, and featured much, much more. Tomorrow-Land entertains, informs, and illustrates how the 1964-65 World's Fair-inside its gates and just outside its gates-represents the cultural and political pivots taken by New York…
I have had a long, fruitful career as a business leader, entrepreneur, and inventor in the energy and chemicals industry with seven scientific patents. I'm the founder/CEO of Chem Systems, Inc., lectured at MIT about entrepreneurship and innovation, and recently wrote a book exploring industrial inventions tracing back to the Industrial Revolution. All inventors share the same qualities: they see opportunities, stay persistent, and maintain their faith in the value of their innovation. The books on this list celebrate those qualities and honor the innovators who embody them. The authors highlight the common threads binding past, present, and future together, showing how humanity's progress depends on innovation.
There are plenty of books on Edison, but what I love about Freeberg's telling is that he focuses on more than just the invention itself but its impacts. This book gives a powerful sense of how exciting Edison's incandescent light bulb was and how it transformed America—one light, one household, and one business at a time.
It's also a book that brings history to life, something I really appreciate as an author, not just an inventor. In the "age" of Edison, the late nineteenth century, the world was on the cusp of modernity. It's remarkable to consider just how far we've come in such a short amount of time.
A sweeping history of the electric light revolution and the birth of modern America
The late nineteenth century was a period of explosive technological creativity, but more than any other invention, Thomas Edison's incandescent light bulb marked the arrival of modernity, transforming its inventor into a mythic figure and avatar of an era. In The Age of Edison, award-winning author and historian Ernest Freeberg weaves a narrative that reaches from Coney Island and Broadway to the tiniest towns of rural America, tracing the progress of electric light through the reactions of everyone who saw it and capturing the wonder Edison's…
Portrait of an Artist as a Young Woman
by
Alexis Krasilovsky,
Kate from Jules et Jim meets I Love Dick.
A young woman filmmaker’s journey of self-discovery, set against a backdrop of the sexual liberation movement of the 1970s and 1980s. In Portrait of an Artist as a Young Woman, we follow Ana Fried as she faces the ultimate…
I love a story filled with interesting characters and a plot that reels me in. I know how challenging it is to construct a plotline and create breadcrumbs (not too many, so the solution isn’t obvious)–all driven by intriguing characters. I am also a sucker for the “good guys” winning but with no guarantees. The characters must have depth, and I want to learn something new about a situation I am unfamiliar with or how a great story is told.
I admit that I am intrigued by the ingenuity and the training of the Israeli Defense Forces. This is a thriller of a different kind.
I read this book to research and understand how the Israelis evolved their “we have no choice but to be the best” ethic. This is not a book about politics or moral judgments. It is an objective overview of how the army came into being and how, to this day, they discard conventional military thinking in defending their country—whether through battlefield strategy, innovation in defense technology, or intelligence services.
I found the book fascinating, especially the Israelis’ lateral thinking, encouragement, and application of ideas.
A world-leading military strategist and an IDF insider explain the improbable success of the Israeli armed forces.
When the Israel Defense Forces was established in May 1948, it was small, poorly equipped, and already at war. Lacking sufficient weaponry or the domestic industrial base to produce it, the newborn military was forced to make do with whatever it could get its hands on. That spirit of improvisation carried the IDF to a decisive victory in the First Arab-Israeli War.
Today the same spirit has made the IDF the most powerful military in the Middle East and among the most capable…
