The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30)

DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education

Anya Kamenetz · 196 pages

BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google

John Palfrey · 288 pages

Libraries today are more important than ever. More than just book repositories, libraries can become bulwarks against some of the most crucial challenges of our age: unequal access to education, jobs, and information. In BiblioTech, educator and technology expert John Palfrey argues that anyone seeking to participate in the 21st century needs to understand how to find and use the vast stores o

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

Neil Postman · 184 pages

Amusing Ourselves to Death is a prophetic look at what happens when politics, journalism, education, and even religion become subject to the demands of entertainment. It is also a blueprint for regaining control of our media, so that they can serve our highest goals.

So You've Been Publicly Shamed

Jon Ronson · 313 pages

"From the internationally bestselling author of The Psychopath Test, a captivating and brilliant exploration of one of our world's most overlooked forces. For the past three years, Jon Ronson has been immersing himself in the world of modern-day public shaming-meeting famous shamees, shamers, and bystanders who have been impacted. This is the perfect time for a modern-day Scarlet Letter-a radicall

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

Douglas Rushkoff · 296 pages

"An award-winning author explores how the world works in our age of "continuous now". Back in the 1970s, futurism was all the rage. But looking forward is becoming a thing of the past. According to Douglas Rushkoff, "presentism" is the new ethos of a society that's always on, in real time, updating live. Guided by neither history nor long term goals, we navigate a sea of media that blend the past

That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back

Thomas L. Friedman, Michael Mandelbaum · 400 pages

America has a huge problem. It faces four major challenges, on which its future depends, and it is failing to meet them. In That Used to Be Us, Thomas L. Friedman, one of our most influential columnists, and Michael Mandelbaum, one of our leading foreign policy thinkers, analyze those challenges -- globalization, the revolution in information technology, the nation's chronic deficits, and its patt

The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan · 457 pages

A prescient warning of a future we now inhabit, where fake news stories and Internet conspiracy theories play to a disaffected American populace “A glorious book . . . A spirited defense of science . . . From the first page to the last, this book is a manifesto for clear thought.”—Los Angeles Times How can we make intelligent decisions about our increasingly technology-driven lives if we don

The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld

Jamie Bartlett

Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI

Madhumita Murgia · 320 pages

The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire

Tim Schwab · 496 pages

Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools

Monique Morris · 277 pages

"Fifteen-year-old Diamond stopped going to school the day she was expelled for lashing out at peers who constantly harassed and teased her for something everyone on the staff had missed: she was being trafficked for sex. After months on the run, she was arrested and sent to a detention center for violating a court order to attend school. Black girls represent 16 percent of female students but almo

Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age is Revolutionizing Life, Business, and Society

Jeff Jarvis · 267 pages

Argues that the growth of social networking and increased openness online is beneficial in the digital age and can lead to increased collaboration and changes in the way people organize, govern, teach, and learn.

The Prize: Who's in Charge of America's Schools?

Dale Russakoff · 246 pages

"Mark Zuckerberg, Chris Christie, and Cory Booker were ready to reform our failing schools. They got an education. When Mark Zuckerberg announced in front of a cheering Oprah audience his $100 million pledge to transform the Newark Schools -- and to solve the education crisis in every city in America -- it looked like a huge win for then-mayor Cory Booker and governor Chris Christie. But their pla

Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives

John Palfrey, Urs Gasser

We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec Anonymous

Parmy Olson

*We Are Anonymous* is the first full account of how a loosely assembled group of hackers scattered across the globe formed a new kind of insurgency, seized headlines, and tortured the feds -- and the ultimate betrayal that would eventually bring them down. Parmy Olson goes behind the headlines and into the world of Anonymous and LulzSec with unprecedented access, drawing upon hundreds of conversat

Enshittification

Cory Doctorow

The author of “The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI” describes how decisions by tech leaders made services worse.

What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

Randall Munroe · 312 pages

Millions of people visit xkcd.com each week to read Randall Munroe's iconic webcomic. His stick-figure drawings about science, technology, language, and love have a large and passionate following. Fans of xkcd ask Munroe a lot of strange questions. What if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90 percent the speed of light? How fast can you hit a speed bump while driving and live? If there was a

Modern Romance

Aziz Ansari, Eric Klinenberg · 288 pages

From NYU Wagner: At some point, every one of us embarks on a journey to find love. We meet people, date, get into and out of relationships, all with the hope of finding someone with whom we share a deep connection. This seems standard now, but it’s wildly different from what people did even just decades ago. Single people today have more romantic options than at any point in human history. Wit

The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity

Tim Wu · 224 pages

Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn

Cathy N. Davidson · 342 pages

Documents a 2003 experiment at Duke University where the author had free iPods issued to the freshman class to see how the device could be used academically, in a report that reveals other technological ideas that are revolutionizing education.

Think: Straight Talk for Women to Stay Smart in a Dumbed-Down World

Lisa Bloom · 277 pages

According to Lisa Bloom, the women and girls of today represent a stark paradox. While American women excel in education at every level, they likewise obsessively focus on celebrity media. While women outperform their male counterparts in employment in urban areas for the first time in history, they simultaneously spend countless hours staring in the mirror contemplating plastic surgery. Lisa Bloo

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You

Eli Pariser · 300 pages

The hidden rise of personalization on the Internet is controlling--and limiting--the information we consume. In 2009, Google began customizing its search results. Instead of giving you the most broadly popular result, Google now tries to predict what you are most likely to click on. According to MoveOn.org board president Eli Pariser, this change is symptomatic of the most significant shift to tak

The Googlization of Everything

Siva Vaidhyanathan

End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World

Naomi Klein, Astra Taylor