{"title":"Gift Guide 2026 - History \u0026 Political Science","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"values","title":"Values","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eMark Carney\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cb\u003eNATIONAL BESTSELLER\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA bold and urgent argument for the radical, foundational change that is required if we are to build an economy and society based not on market values but on human values.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eOur world is full of fault lines—growing inequality in income and opportunity; systemic racism; health and economic crises from a global pandemic; mistrust of experts; the existential threat of climate change; deep threats to employment in a digital economy with robotics on the rise. Mark Carney argues that these fundamental problems and others like them stem from a common crisis in values. Drawing on the turmoil of the past decade, he shows how “market economies” have evolved into “market societies” where price determines the value of everything.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eWhen we think about what we, as individuals, value most highly, we might list fairness, health, the protection of our rights, economic security from poverty, the preservation of natural diversity, resources, and beauty. The tragedy is, these things that we hold dearest are too often the casualties of our twenty-first century world, where they ought to be our bedrock.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eIn this profoundly important book, Mark Carney offers a vision of a more humane society and a practical manifesto for getting there. How we reform our infrastructure to make things better and fairer is at the heart of every chapter, with outlines of wholly new ideas that can restructure society and enshrine our human values at the core of all that we build for our children and grandchildren.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"PRH","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44052770291998,"sku":"9780771051579","price":28.0,"currency_code":"CAD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0669\/3584\/9246\/products\/Images-2022-11-25T114235.686.jpg?v=1669394569"},{"product_id":"empire-of-ai","title":"Empire of AI","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eKaren Hao\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cb\u003eFrom a brilliant longtime AI insider with intimate access to the world of Sam Altman's OpenAI from the beginning, an eye-opening account of arguably the most fateful tech arms race in history, reshaping the planet in real time, from the cockpit of the company that is driving the frenzy\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eWhen AI expert and investigative journalist Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI in 2019, she thought they were the good guys. 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The g forces pressing down on the people of OpenAI are deforming the judgment of everyone else too—as such forces do. Naked power finds the ideology to cloak itself; no one thinks they’re the bad guy. But in the meantime, as Hao shows through intrepid reporting on the ground around the world, the enormous wheels of extraction grind on. By drawing on the viewpoints of Silicon Valley engineers, Kenyan data laborers, and Chilean water activists, Hao presents the fullest picture of AI and its impact we’ve seen to date, alongside a trenchant analysis of where things are headed. 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From moths that rely on sloths for reproduction to orchids’ partnerships with fungi to our own relationships with the biosphere, Hooper frames lessons from great thinkers across time—scientists, philosophers, and artists—and emphasizes, with wit and joy, William Blake’s claim that “Every thing that lives \/ Lives not alone.” Through page-turning examples, Hooper uses symbiosis to clarify ideas about major scientific topics, including evolution, agriculture, climate change, sustainability, and humanity at large. 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Here she repudiates the prospect of AI as a replacement for democracy. This is the issue of our times, and Lepore is the voice of sanity.” —Jaron Lanier, author of \u003ci\u003eYou Are Not a Gadget\u003c\/i\u003e\n \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Much in history is headlong but few grand transformations have been more precipitate or more heedless than the rise of . . . the Artificial State,” writes Jill Lepore in this passionate account of how rule by machine has ravaged the world. Inspired by Hannah Arendt’s \u003ci\u003eThe Origins of Totalitarianism\u003c\/i\u003e, which argued in 1951 that the machinery of modern life was reshaping the very fundamentals of human existence, Lepore, profoundly disturbed by the technology revolution and by the soulless inundation of artificial intelligence, unfurls a new history for our own twenty-first century.\u003cbr\u003e\n \u003cbr\u003e\n Building on an essay in \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e in 2024, Lepore’s clarion call traces our increasing dependence on and strangulation by data. Political campaigns, awash in an avalanche of fake bots, have been reduced to attention-mining algorithms, while multinational media corporations dictate public discourse, and the era of the liberal nation-state seems to be coming to a rapid end, replaced by billionaire technocrats reliant on autocracy and the tools of AI.\u003cbr\u003e\n \u003cbr\u003e\n With Orwellian overtones, \u003ci\u003eThe Rise and Fall of the Artificial State\u003c\/i\u003e demonstrates how technology has corroded global democracy, leading to the destruction of both human community and capacity for self-government, creating a new form of AI government, a digital citizen’s assembly, where AI will recommend the course of action to humans in place of human-run legislatures. Especially sobering with this proliferation of “dizzying, ever-changing schemes, prophesies, and predictions” is that the Artificial State has come at the expense of the natural world, leading to catastrophic loss of wildlife habitat and biodiversity.\u003cbr\u003e\n \u003cbr\u003e\n Deliberately alarming, \u003ci\u003eThe Rise and Fall of the Artificial State\u003c\/i\u003e, despite its abundance of dire facts, is not a funeral dirge; rather, it’s an inspiring wake-up call, written in Lepore’s typically elegiac prose, which demonstrates that nothing about the Artificial State was inevitable, for it is a “\u003ci\u003egovernment without consent, even government without humans.\u003c\/i\u003e” It can, Lepore asserts, be dismantled. Other heinous systems, like feudalism, fascism, and slavery, have also been dismantled, but disassembly requires identifying the parts, tracing the sources. It requires telling a new history. 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