This week's new book releases show the benefits of embracing refugee communities and investing in them, why beginning right where you are, with what "you already know, love, and do" is the best way to start making a positive impact, how we can more effectively tackle economic gender inequality today, and what we need to do to begin reversing the corrosive impact big tech has had on global democracy and the natural world. 

All four of the following titles hit local bookshop shelves and online 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.

Banking on Belonging: Why Investing in Refugee Entrepreneurs Benefits Everyone by John Kluge Jr. & Christine Mahoney, published by Columbia University Press

A visionary roadmap that shows how investing in refugees not only empowers displaced communities but also builds more prosperous and resilient economies worldwide.

More than one hundred million people are displaced worldwide today, and political backlash against refugees has slashed vital humanitarian aid. When given the chance, however, many displaced people have proved themselves to be resourceful entrepreneurs who can drive growth. Investing in refugee-led enterprises, companies supporting refugees, and the communities welcoming them transforms tragedy into economic and social gain for all.

John Kluge Jr., a social entrepreneur, and Christine Mahoney, a public policy expert, demonstrate that refugees are not burdens but instead benefit host societies through job creation, tax revenue, and innovation. They tell the powerful stories of resilient entrepreneurs displaced from places such as Iraq, South Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, and Venezuela, exploring their contributions from New York to North Dakota, Poland to Jordan, Mexico to Uganda.

Banking on Belonging presents the Refugee Lens Investing framework, a pioneering system for classifying opportunities such as refugee-owned businesses and funds targeting displaced talent. Blending on-the-ground narratives and case studies with empirical data and concrete tools, it makes the moral and practical case for private investment as a sustainable alternative to humanitarian aid. At once a hands-on guide and an inspiring global saga, this book delivers a fresh, hopeful vision of inclusion and prosperity.

Editor's Note: You can read an adapted excerpt from this book, "A Blueprint for Belonging: Scaling Refugee Lens Investing Worldwide," in our ChangeThis series.

Better Good: A Simple System for Creating Lasting Impact by Scott M. Curran, published by Simon Acumen

A proven framework for making an impact in your life and work using the resources you already have from the former General Counsel for the Clinton Foundation.

Almost everyone wants to do good in some form—in their communities, through their work, or for a cause they care about. And yet, these dreams often get pushed aside by the pressing needs of daily life, and we give up before we even start. The good news is, you don’t need extra time or money to make the world better. Instead, you can start where you are, with what you already know, love, and do.

Better Good teaches you exactly where and how to begin. Using the same framework reflected in the work of leading companies, global nonprofits, and changemakers, you’ll learn how to leverage your PPP (Profile, Platform, and Passion) and TTT (Time, Talent, and Treasure) to deepen and expand your impact in your life and organization. An actionable, practical guide for both leaders and individuals, you’ll learn:

• What levers make up your unique platform, and how to pull those levers to 10x your impact.
  
• How to use Transformative Time, Found Extra Time, and even No Extra Time to do more good, and do it better.
  
• Why more isn’t always better—better is better—when it comes to making an impact, and how to ensure that your efforts are the highest and best use of your PPP and TTT to contribute in new (and not redundant or insignificant) ways.

When faced with challenges and inequities, too many of us think, “Somebody should do something about that.” This book shows you that you are as much somebody as anybody, and you have more power than you realize to make your corner of the world, better.

How Economics Discovered Women: Bringing Gender Economics into the Twenty-First Century by Shelly Lundberg, published by University of California Press

Rethinking the economics of gender.

In the 1970s, as women started to enter the labor force in unprecedented numbers, economists began to examine their roles as economic actors. The result was the rise of gender economics, now a major subfield with powerful data and new methods comparing the economic lives of men and women. Yet despite decades of progress, many of the most consequential questions about gender inequality remain unresolved.

In this bold and reflective book, renowned economist and demographer Shelly Lundberg argues that the problem is not a lack of evidence but a failure to challenge entrenched economic models and outmoded assumptions about markets and gender that have limited what the field can explain.

Why does occupational segregation persist? Why do "women's jobs" pay less? Why are men falling behind in education? And why do policies like paternity leave fail to change behavior? Drawing on more than five decades in the field and integrating insights from other social sciences, Lundberg explains signs of recent progress and charts a path toward a more realistic, socially grounded economics capable of meeting the challenges of gender inequality today.

The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State by Jill Lepore, published by Liveright

“Lepore is our best scholar of the culture of governance, and our most vital historian. 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 You Are Not a Gadget

“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 The Origins of Totalitarianism, 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.

Building on an essay in The New Yorker 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.

With Orwellian overtones, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State 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.

Deliberately alarming, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, 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 “government without consent, even government without humans.” 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. This is the purpose of The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State.