“Finally something that doesn’t tell me to journal more” – Diana, Berlin
Library & other cool stuff
Intuition > Fear
The first Activity Book for Adults Done Giving Up. Part research, part scrapbook. Contains the keys to your inner compass. Scissors and glue optional but recommended.
Somewhere around age six, you appointed an inner committee to run the rest of your life. Nobody remembers voting. One member knows exactly what she wants and has never once explained why. One is hard to fool and quietly furious about the state of things (mostly correctly). One learned to write in pencil, so someone else could hold the red pen. The voice that argues you out of everything isn't stupid. She's SOPHISTICATED. Is it time to question her role on the committee? Find out.
Discomfort + Courage
The second Activity Book for Adults Done Giving Up. Part research, part scrapbook. Contains your kryptonite, mine too. You need a pen, grab the red one.
You have a Marlin. Maybe several people, including your mother, your boss and yourself. Everyone is telling you that the ocean is full of predators (kindly), because one once took something from them. Is that fear, or is it just old water? Grab a pen, tick the boxes you grew up with. Underline your kryptonite. Find out if you'd rather be underestimated than disappointing, because most of us choose that without ever deciding to, and it can feel as urgent as rent or visas even when it isn't. Forget feeling ready.
What if > What is
Time Travel has 5 rules. Rob Hopkins wrote them. He's done this multiple times: visited the future, brought back what he saw, turned it into something usable. My favourite rule? Pastsplaining is not allowed. Because it blocks everything. The voice that says "we tried that" or "that's not how it works" kills imagination before it starts.
PS: Rob has been to the future. We won.
Gamechanging
Most sustainability books are written for people who already agree. This one isn't. Elena Doms and Luba Zaritskaia, both born in the Arctic, went looking for the CEOs already changing how their companies operate, not the ones promising to.
The result is a field guide for sustainability that survives contact with quarterly earnings. Read it if you've been told that's not how the real world works and stopped believing it.
We are the majority
Stories or data? I'd pick stories every time. But why choose, when both exist? This is the data the school is built on. The largest study ever conducted on climate willingness, turned into nine pages you can read in five minutes and use in the next conversation. We are alone in a room of people who agree with us. Let's fix that.
Download the numbers
Researching Fear
Naomi Klein kept getting confused with Naomi Wolf, the feminist turned pandemic conspiracist. Most writers in her position would have spent the book defending the difference. Klein did the opposite. She went into Wolf's world to ask a different question: what is the right reacting to that the rest of us have been allowed not to notice? The answer turns out to be a shadow world, of extraction, exhaustion and displacement, that holds up the comfort we call normal. The book is the case for noticing.
Learning from History
Twenty lessons in 128 pages. Rule one: do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism, Snyder argues, is freely given by people quietly anticipating what the new power wants and offering it before being asked.
The other nineteen lessons are variations on the same theme: refuse the small daily compliances that make the wrong story easier to tell. Read this when just keep your head down starts sounding like advice. The graphic edition (illustrated by Nora Krug) is the one to get.
Asking the right questions
As the first journalist inside OpenAI while it still thought it was the good guys, Karen Hao documented in real time how a nonprofit built on "beneficial AI" became a power-consolidating, resource-extracting empire. She changed who counts as a stakeholder in that story.
The book moves between Silicon Valley engineers, Kenyan data laborers earning less than $2 an hour, and Chilean water activists fighting data center expansion. She made the supply chain of AI legible to the people it was happening to, not just the people building it.
Rewilding
Isabella Tree and her husband farmed an English estate into near-bankruptcy in the 1990s. Then they did something unreasonable: they stopped. Pulled out the equipment, brought in free-roaming animals, let 3,500 acres go feral.
Within a decade, nightingales were breeding on land that had been silent for fifty years. She didn't argue for rewilding in policy papers. She made one farm impossible to ignore, and the policy followed.
