Private equity and AI, oh my! Dive into both, along with a primer on developing creative superpowers and a personal encounter with the miracle of existence, in this week's best new book releases.  

All four titles are available online and on local bookshop shelves today. Interested in buying multiple copies for your team, book club, or employee resource group? Follow the links below or give us a call to purchase the books, or check out our services for bulk book buyers to learn more about how we can help.

Unless otherwise noted, all descriptions of the books below come from the publisher.

The Asset Class: How Private Equity Turned Capitalism Against Itself by Hettie O'Brien, published by Grand Central Publishing

A thrilling, eye opening investigation into private equity, a secretive wing of the finance industry that is so relentlessly destructive, it could potentially undermine our way of life.

For decades, private equity firms have infiltrated every corner of modern life. Wielding debt as a weapon, they push vital services into crisis. Their cover story: that this is merely the "creative destruction" essential to growth. Old-school capitalists say they're dismantling everything that made our economies work. The name itself, "private equity," is its own kind of camouflage, giving no suggestion of the debt involved in its deals, nor of the controversial techniques it uses to generate profits. 

The new owners think they can hide in the shadows. But the owned are fighting back. In The Asset Class, Hettie O'Brien penetrates a hidden empire of billion-dollar deals and covert financial warfare. From Copenhagen to San Francisco, Barcelona to the Yorkshire Dales, she follow the money, the trail of destruction, and the industry’s murky ideological roots from 1970s trips to Moscow to the present day. 

What she find is chilling: private equity isn't just reshaping the economy—it's selling out the foundations of Western society.

Creativity Machine: How to Innovate, Brainstorm, and Hatch Great Ideas on Command by Scott Dikkers, published by Matt Holt Books

A foolproof system for brainstorming innovative solutions—whether you want to disrupt an industry, enhance your team’s productivity, or simply get unstuck—from one of the most influential pioneers in comedy history.

In this outrageously enjoyable guide to productive inspiration, discover a four-step, repeatable process for thinking better, leveraging your mind’s every resource, and developing winning ideas in any context.

The wheels of creativity are spinning faster than ever thanks to the democratization of information, the proliferation of digital platforms, and the rapid rise of AI. In Creativity Machine, bestselling author, comedian, and The Onion’s longest serving editor in chief Scott Dikkers shows you how to make these tools work for you. Discover:

• How an idea-generation structure can yield remarkable outcomes and stronger teams
  
• Ways to utilize these practices everywhere—for business, hobbies, and homemaking
  
• Strategies for incorporating AI in your creative process without diluting the unrivaled power of the human mind
  
• Why “eureka moments” aren’t as important as you think
  
• The vital importance of having fun

With guidance from a mentor to the best of the best delivered with his trademark humor, you’ll tap into a goldmine of amazing creative ideas.

Creativity Machine is a timely roadmap for the future of work in a world that requires more than just everyday creative powers—it demands creative superpowers. Unmask yours in these pages.

How We Disappear: A Personal History of Information by Thomas S. Mullaney, published by W. W. Norton & Company

A brilliant foray into the nature of information, of history, and of making meaning in the face of death and decay.

When world-renowned scholar Thomas S. Mullaney “lost” both his parents, he began thinking of how information—all the stuff that makes us, that we make, and that we leave behind—ultimately disappears. The information that makes up our lives, from mundane official documents, poignant family photos, and sentimental artifacts to the cues embodied in our genes, both defines us, and inevitably decays, no matter the medium. Everything that we put “in formation” eventually collapses into randomness. Never is this more evident than in the wake of a parent’s death. Yet from all these elusive, even evanescent, data points, history is written and a future is made.

How We Disappear is a wide-ranging examination of the micro and macro, toggling between storytelling from Mullaney’s own life and his reflection on the science of entropy and the nature and history of information. Lyrical and poignant, the book offers inspiring and eye-opening insight on the miracle of existence, and on what it means to forge meaning from a chaotic universe.

The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence—Before It's Too Late by Cory Doctorow, published by MCD

A short, provocative guide to what's good, bad, and stupid about AI and the discourse around AI, by the author of Enshittification.

A centaur is a person whose work is assisted by technology, a worker whose tools make them happier and more productive. A reverse centaur, on the other hand, is a worker pressed into service to technology, a person pushed beyond human endurance to work on a machine’s terms. Think of a warehouse worker made to work without food or bathroom breaks, or a programmer made to crank out impossible amounts of code.

There is, to Cory Doctorow, nothing inevitable about the story of AI, about who or what will play which roles. He thinks the technology is useful, even exciting. But AI has arrived surrounded by unprecedented hype, preordained as a world-changing disruption that defies all rational evaluation. Doctorow seeks to puncture that bubble before it’s too late, to help us understand the technology not just for what it actually does—though that, of course, is important—but who it does it to and who it does it for.

From that point of view, the story of AI is indeed dramatic and unprecedented, though it is not the version of the story we have been commonly told. In The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI—as he did so successfully in Enshittification—Doctorow recounts both how we found ourselves in this situation and how we can get through it, to a life “after” AI in which the tools work for us, not the other way around.