New Book Releases | March 31, 2026
Looking for a new book to read? The last week of March offers some serious reading.
AI, the care economy, climate change, and the labor market. You aren't going to find four more important topics, and you can dive deeper into each in this week's best new releases.
All four 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 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 book descriptions are from the publisher.
The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, Deepmind, and the Quest for Superintelligence by Sebastian Mallaby, published by Penguin Press
From one of our leading chroniclers of the intersection of innovation and capitalism, a landmark reckoning—based on unprecedented access—with one of the world’s most brilliant and driven tech visionaries, and his game-changing company.
Even by the standard of a tech industry stacked with so-called geniuses, Demis Hassabis is a special case. Born poor in North London to immigrant parents, a chess prodigy by age five and wizard coder in his teens, he turned down a seven figure offer before turning 18 to feed his insatiable scientific curiosity at Cambridge. Later, he added a neuroscience PhD to his computer science skills to pursue the dream of artificial general intelligence, the ultimate goal being to unravel the mysteries of biology and theoretical physics and to usher in super-abundance. Alongside a small group of fellow travelers, that is the path he is still on, leading the AI research at Google, winning a Nobel Prize along the way, and imagining machines that will compound, or possibly supplant, the human understanding of the universe.
Hassabis has given Sebastian Mallaby a great deal of his time, sitting for over thirty hours of conversation. But Mallaby has also drawn from Hassabis's detractors, such as his estranged cofounder Mustafa Suleyman; from his rivals, such as OpenAI's leading scientist Ilya Sutskever; and from academic pioneers who now fear for human survival, such as Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton. The result is a revelatory account of a singular figure and his company and a profound reckoning with this protean field as it leaps from the periphery to the center of our consciousness.
No one questions Hassabis’s brilliance. There are those who, like Elon Musk, have at times regarded him as an "evil genius." He is in a game where the stakes are matched only by the exorbitant costs—for talent, and for compute. Celebrated scientists pursue the technology because they cannot resist the sweetness of discovery. Others pursue it for money or power. The inventors believe they control their technology, but often, the technology controls them.
Despite Hassabis’s pivotal role inside Google’s engine room, this is not a Silicon Valley story. Hassabis deals with the Valley and takes its money, but remains outside and furiously critical of it, lambasting its leaders in conversation with Mallaby. The end of this race cannot be known, but as this great book shows us, Hassabis's quest to will a new form of cognition into the world is a defining story for our era.
Making Care Work: Why Our Economy Should Put People First by Nancy Folbre, published by Unliversity of California Press
A bold critique of conventional economics that reveals why the time and money we devote to care work is vital to our economic future.
Our economy is much bigger than the dollar value of things we buy and sell. It depends on us—our health, our creativity, and our moral commitments. These capabilities don't have price tags but are crucial to a sustainable future. We need to acknowledge and reward the value of caring for ourselves and others, especially our children, our elderly, and those experiencing illness or disability.
From leading feminist economist Nancy Folbre, Making Care Work provides a compelling historical and economic account of care provision in the United States. Folbre traces the long and colorful history of resistance to bogus claims that only paid work "counts" and that employees in care services are always paid what they deserve. Explaining why care providers remain economically vulnerable today, she argues that more attention to the public benefits of care provision could help build the political coalitions needed to implement policies that put people first.
In this comprehensive and bold book, Folbre upends conventional economic thinking and maps a hopeful path toward a more equitable and sustainable economy.
Radically Reframing Climate Change: A Guide to Saving Ourselves by Will Hackman, published by Bloomsbury Academic
An inspirational guide to discussing and fighting climate change for millennial and GenZ voters that cuts through the usual myths and scare tactics to provide practical advice.
Will Hackman is a Millennial, and he is pissed. Two wars, two global economic catastrophes, and a pandemic combined with a ballooning cost-of-living crisis and crushing student loan debt can do that to a person. But there’s one thing that compounds these challenges that is unequaled in human history: the ticking time bomb of fossil fuel emissions. Millennials and Gen-Zers will be left to deal with the worst of the climate change fallout well after those responsible have passed away. And we have never been more divided.
In Radically Reframing Climate Change: A Guide to Saving Ourselves, Will Hackman identifies three main obstacles to solving climate change: polarization, paralysis, and stale, ineffective messaging. He empowers readers to turn their anxiety or apathy into passion, and anger into action at the personal, community, and government levels. The climate rallying cries to “Save the Planet” no longer work in our hyper-partisan world, nor do images of polar bears on melting glaciers. The problem isn’t scientific, fact-based, or even technological. It’s political, emotional, and ideological. Hackman provides a path forward for engagement and voter mobilization that combats apathy, dread, and resentment, and builds greater issue identification.
Hackman reframes the climate crisis as a humanity crisis, arguing that we must change how we think and talk about climate change, both in our conversations with non-believers and among those who care. Assuring humanity’s place on a changing planet will require a near universal level of public support we will never reach if we keep making the same mistakes. We know how to do this. But the stakes have never been higher and time is running out.
The Wage Standard: What's Wrong in the Labor Market and How to Fix It by Arindrajit Dube, published by Dutton
"The go-to guy on minimum wage" (Nobel Laureate and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman) tackles one of the thorniest social issues of our times—income inequality—from a new vantage point with field-leading economics.
How did the labor market stop working for so many Americans? Why did wages at the bottom and the middle of the pay scale become untethered from the rest of the economy—which saw a 60% gain in net productivity and an equal or better bump in wages among the top 5% of earners? What can we do about it now? The Wage Standard is a deep dive into these very questions, which Arin Dube has studied for over two decades. Think Evicted for minimum wage.
Since the 1970s, the economy around us has changed in dramatic, fundamental ways—making America much richer—whereas the wages paid to most American workers have barely budged since 1979. Indeed, when it comes to low- or middle-wage earners, their purchasing power has stagnated and even fallen. They remain painfully frozen in time.
Dube presents three keys to unlocking this conundrum. To start with, a strong minimum wage can be an important part of the resolution. Second, in the study of low-wage America there lies an argument for building up wage standards more generally. Lastly, he presents a hopeful message—rooted in data—that doesn’t require us to fix the broken politics of Washington, D.C. So long as there is political will, public engagement, and persistence, we can reset the labor market and improve the lives of American workers today.
