New Book Releases | January 6
To start the new year, our book recommendations span topics from personal productivity to systemic economic change.
This week's new releases feature a book that will help you meet your new year's resolutions not by increasing your willpower, but by becoming more intentional—a lesson that also applies to creating a more powerful brand by using it as a tool for influence, advocacy, and activism. We then turn our attention to two university presses and two books that explore the larger forces shaping our economic lives, and how we can expand the middle class and usher in an era of mass flourishing.
These are the four books we have our eyes on for the start of 2026.
Branding as a Cultural Force: Purpose, Responsibility, and Resonance by Robin Landa, published by Columbia Business School Publishing
The most powerful brands don’t just capture attention—they ignite change.
Branding as a Cultural Force invites readers to reimagine branding as a force for good, one that shapes culture, sparks movements, and drives meaningful social impact.
Going beyond traditional branding, Robin Landa explores how companies play pivotal roles in shaping culture, advancing causes, and forging emotional connections with their audiences. While most branding guides focus on commercial success, this book emphasizes how brands can align with their audiences’ values to drive social transformation. Through real-world case studies and practical strategies, it reframes branding as a tool for influence, advocacy, and activism.
A standout feature of this book is a series of exclusive interviews with leading voices in branding, design, and advertising. These creative professionals share how they craft resonant campaigns, establish cultural legacies, and stay grounded in core values, offering insights for building brands that stand for more than just profit.
Branding as a Cultural Force provides actionable guidance on telling authentic brand stories, aligning with consumer values, and creating shareworthy campaigns. With a distinctive focus on the intersection of brand purpose and cultural impact, this book challenges readers to rethink branding as a vehicle for systemic change.
Intentional: How to Finish What You Start by Chris Bailey, published by Penguin Life
Setting goals is easy. Following through on them? A whole lot harder.
It turns out, the secret to finishing what you start isn’t sheer willpower or the latest productivity hack. It’s becoming more intentional.
With Intentional, bestselling author Chris Bailey distills a decade of deep research on productivity to deliver a profound, practical, and counterintuitive road map to getting things done. Forget extensive to-do lists and a never-ending workload. To reach your goals, you must structure your daily actions around what’s most important to you—and let go of the rest. This way, getting things done becomes second nature.
Integrating the science of desire, values, and procrastination with the wisdom of Buddhist monks, Bailey lays out step-by-step strategies for intentional accomplishment, covering how to:
- Structure short-term goals to increase the likelihood of completion
- Make unappealing, boring, or frustrating tasks more attractive
- Lower the chance of procrastinating on long-term goals
- Create a system for tracking progress
- Know when a goal isn’t for you—and when it’s time to let it go
What matters most to you? Intentional shows that the answer has the power to unlock not just greater productivity but a deeper and more satisfying sense of accomplishment.
The Middle-Class New Deal: Restoring Upward Mobility and the American Dream by A. Mechele Dickerson, published by University of California Press
An expansive policy blueprint for meaningfully expanding the middle class for the first time in a century.
The US middle class was a product of state and federal policies enacted in the wake of the Great Depression. But since the 1980s, lawmakers have undermined what they once built, shredding the social safety net and instituting laws that virtually guarantee downward mobility for all but the most privileged. How can we restore what has been lost?
Rigorous and highly readable, The Middle-Class New Deal breaks down the policies that have decimated working families and proposes reforms to reverse this trend. As Mechele Dickerson shows, part of the problem is that politicians disingenuously conflate the middle class with the "White lower rich." Such propaganda hides how state and federal lawmakers consistently favor education, labor, housing, and consumer-credit laws that erode the bank accounts of lower- and middle-income people—especially those who are not White and don't have college degrees. Weaving together the latest research with the personal stories of Americans struggling to make ends meet, Dickerson provides a clarion call for political leaders to enact a bold agenda like the one that created the middle class almost a century ago.
The Permanent Problem: The Uncertain Transition from Mass Plenty to Mass Flourishing by Brink Lindsey, Oxford University Press
An examination of what John Maynard Keynes termed the "permanent problem"—the idea that despite increasing material plenty, the ultimate human aim of mass flourishing is still a distant goal.
The advanced capitalist democracies of the 21st century are the richest, freest, healthiest, best educated, and best governed societies in history. Why then does it seem like everything is falling apart? Economic stagnation is spreading, class divisions are deepening, birth rates are collapsing, mental health problems are on the rise, faith in democracy is in decline, and pessimism about the future abounds.
In The Permanent Problem, Brink Lindsey argues that these gathering difficulties reflect the stresses and strains of a great and uncompleted historical transition—from mass material prosperity to mass human flourishing. Capitalism's immense productive powers have raised our expectations of what life can be, but for most of us reality is coming up short. What's more, the arrival of mass prosperity has pushed both economic and cultural change in directions that make the transition to mass flourishing much harder to achieve.
According to Lindsey, 21st century capitalism is in the grip of three interrelated crises: a crisis of inclusion, as vital social ties and personal connections are breaking down; a crisis of dynamism, as capitalism's engines of innovation and wealth creation have begun to sputter and seize; and a crisis of politics, as the mechanisms for collective decision-making needed to address capitalism's growing problems have been degraded by the very same dynamics that underlie those problems.
A much brighter future is possible, and Lindsey charts an intriguing path to get there. There is no need to concoct a radical new social system. Instead, capitalism needs to be refocused on its core mission of extending the technological frontier, and rebalanced through the revitalization of face-to-face communities. Weaving together insights from history, economics, sociology, and philosophy, The Permanent Problem offers a synoptic overview of our fateful present moment and a provocative glimpse at what may lie ahead.
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The Porchlight staff members choosing new books each week are Porchlight's Managing Director, Sally Haldorson, and the marketing team of Gabriella Cisneros and Dylan Schleicher.
Unless otherwise noted, all book descriptions are from the publisher.
