We are living in an era of big tech platforms, a broken political system, and climate change. To address these challenges, we must know more about them, and to that end, we turn to books. It just so happens that there are three books being released this week from some of today's leading thinkers on these topics. We also to look to the example of Black-owned bookstores and "the role they continue to play as we press forward into a new and uncertain future."

The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity by Tim Wu, published by Knopf

Tech platforms manipulate attention, extract wealth, and deepen inequality. In this new book, Tim Wu explains how we can reclaim control and create a balanced economy that works for everyone.

Our world is dominated by a handful of tech platforms. They provide great conveniences and entertainment, but also stand as some of the most effective instruments of wealth extraction ever invented, seizing immense amounts of money, data, and attention from all of us. An economy driven by digital platforms and AI influence offers the potential to enrich us, and also threatens to marginalize entire industries, widen the wealth gap, and foster a two-class nation. As technology evolves and our markets adapt, can society cultivate a better life for everyone? Is it possible to balance economic growth and egalitarianism, or are we too far gone?

Tim Wu—the preeminent scholar and former White House official who coined the phrase “net neutrality”—explores the rise of platform power and details the risks and rewards of working within such systems. The Age of Extraction tells the story of an internet that promised widespread wealth and democracy in the 1990s and 2000s, only to create new economic classes and aid the spread of autocracy instead.  Wu frames our current moment with lessons from recent history—from generative AI and predictive social data to the antimonopoly and crypto movements—and envisions a future where technological advances can serve the greatest possible good. Concise and hopeful, The Age of Extraction offers consequential proposals for taking back control in order to achieve a better economic balance and prosperity for all.

Black-Owned: The Revolutionary Life of the Black Bookstore by Char Adams, published by Tiny Reparations Books

Longtime NBC News reporter Char Adams offers a deeply compelling and rigorously reported history of Black political movements as told through the lens of the Black-owned bookstore, which have been centers for organizing movements from abolition to Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter.

Black-Owned celebrates the history of Black bookstores and their role as centerpieces of resistance and liberation. Drawn from the author’s in-depth research and reporting, Black-Owned is a story of activism, espionage, violence, and perseverance. Char Adams details Black bookstores’ battles with racist vigilantes, local law enforcement, and federal agents as they fueled Black political movements throughout American history.

This history begins with David Ruggles, the abolitionist who founded the country’s first Black-owned bookshop in New York in 1834, as well as the Black bibliophiles who carried the cause after the bookshop’s violent demise. In the twentieth century, a Black bookstore boom led to the rise of many hubs for Civil Rights and Black Power activism. Malcolm X and W.E.B. DuBois would deliver speeches at the doorstep of National Memorial African Bookstore in Harlem, a place soon dubbed “Speakers Corner.” Many bookstores in the 1960s became targets of the FBI and local law enforcement alike. Amid these struggles, bookshops were also places of celebration; Eartha Kitt and Langston Hughes held autograph parties at their local Black owned bookstore, and Maya Angelou even became the face of National Black Bookstore Week. Now, a new generation of Black activists are joining the radical bookstore tradition, with rapper Noname opening her Radical Hood Library in Los Angeles, and several stores hit national headlines when they were overwhelmed with demand in the wake of the brutal death of George Floyd and the ensuing Black Lives Matter movement.

Today finds Black-owned bookshops in a position of strength—and as Adams will make clear, in an era of increasing division, their presence is needed now more than ever. Populated by vibrant characters, and written with cinematic flair, Black-Owned will be an enlightening story of community, resistance, and joy.

Life on a Little-Known Planet: Dispatches from a Changing World by Elizabeth Kolbert, published by Crown

A landmark collection of Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Kolbert's most important pieces about climate change and the natural world.

"To be a well-informed citizen of Planet Earth," Rolling Stone has advised, "you need to read Elizabeth Kolbert." From her National Magazine Award-winning series The Climate of Man to her Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Sixth Extinction, Kolbert’s work has shaped the way we think about the environment in the twenty-first century. Collected in Life on a Little-Known Planet are her most influential and thought-provoking essays.

An intrepid reporter and a skillful translator of scientific idees, Kolbert expertly captures the wonders of nature and paints vivid portraits of the researchers and concerned citizens working to preserve them. She takes readers all around the globe, from an island in Denmark that’s succeeded in going carbon neutral, to a community in Florida that voted to give rights to waterways, to the Greenland ice sheet, which is melting in a way that has implications for everyone. We meet a biologist who believes we can talk to whales, an entomologist racing to find rare caterpillars before they disappear, and a climatologist who’s considered the "father of global warming," amongst other scientists at the forefront of environmental protection.

The threats to our planet that Kolbert has devoted so much of her career to exposing have only grown more serious. Now is the time to deepen our understanding of the world we are in danger of losing.

Nations Apart: How Clashing Regional Cultures Shattered America by Colin Woodard, published by Viking

The bestselling author of American Nations reveals how centuries-old regional differences have brought American democracy to the brink of collapse and presents a powerful story that can bridge our cultural divisions and save the republic.

Our democracy has been purposefully dismantled, first in the states and now at the federal level. With groundbreaking original data and historical insights, Nations Apart is an essential guide to understanding why Americans are so divided on many hot button issues, creating geographic fissures that have been exploited by authoritarians. Colin Woodard shows how colonial era settlement patterns and the cultural geography they left behind are at the root of our political polarization, economic inequality, public health crises, and democratic collapse.

Drawing on quantitative research from Woodard’s university-based think tank project, Nations Apart exposes the true ideological and cultural divides behind today’s struggles over:

• Gun control
• Immigration
• Health policy
• Abortion
• Climate Change
• History
• Authoritarianism and Democracy

But there is a road map to right the country: a carefully researched, vigorously tested common story for the country built on the mission set forth for us in the document that first bound our regions together, the Declaration of Independence. Combining compelling storytelling with scholarly vigor, Nations Apart offers a blueprint for bridging the rifts that divide us and ensuring the American dream of democratic self-government will reach its 300th birthday.

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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.