Happy pub day to dream team Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff for making sense of the senseless. Already a best-seller in Germany, with great reviews and media on both sides of the pond including the NYT, The Irish Times, NPR’s Morning Edition and early praise from Astra Taylor (“This book is brilliant in ways Elon Musk is not”), Max Read (“Forget the hagiographies and conspiracy theories, this is the only book you need to understand Musk and the world he’s seeking to usher in.”), Cory Doctorow (“Muskism cuts straight to the core of the man and the moment”), Malcolm Harris (“A whirlwind tour though the plans and inspirations of the world’s most self-important man.”), Branko Milanovic (“impeccably researched and splendidly written”). Ben and Quinn at events starting this week…-> and a huge thank you to @srh_hgn@harpercollins
Welcome to our new “country house” in East Rock. @thesamstark is a man of many talents, but I admit to being skeptical that electrician was among them. Happy to be proven quite wrong and even happier to make it official this summer.
Congrats to historian Quinn Slobodian whose Hayek’s Bastards won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Extra special for an agent who cut their teeth in high school debate on the ideas of some of the bastards he writes about in this trenchant, illuminating and very timely book. Hats off!
What an honor and a delight to join the packed house at @politicsprose to hear former Atty General Merrick Garland and Yale Law School professor Justin Driver discuss Justin’s new book The Fall of Afirmative Action. As Wesleyan president Michael Roth wrote in the NYT book review “The siege is well underway, and one can only hope that university leaders, faculty members and students will consult this worthy book as they work to ensure that those commitments survive.”
Sometimes a writer just magically weaves together reporting, memoir, and an entire worldview that causes you to question all that is modern living (and not quite living). Why do countless people need substances to deal with their daily reality? Read this brilliant book and find out. (And what an incredible packed to the gills, line around the block crowd at Powerhouse)
Just a joy to work with the uber-talented @zosiamamet whose captivating account of Hollywood, love, soured love, family, nepo babies, her early attempts to make it as an actor and that one night at Bungalow 8, is as funny as it is earnest. Congratulations to one natural born story-teller and writer.
Happy pub day to Ryan Ruby, here at his sold out reading at McNally Jackson with interlocutor par excellence Christian Lorentzen. Ryan’s book Context Collapse: A Poem Containing a History of Poetry is just out today from Seven Stories Press. An epic event to celebrate an epic undertaking. What anyone who knows Ryan knows is his genius is inimitable and we are all richer to have him writing in our midst. Next up: his Berlin undertaking
I could talk to Megan Hellerer for hours about how we find our purpose in a world that doesn’t teach us to ask the right questions. She knows because she’s been there herself and underfulfilled overachiever who went from Stanford to Google to burnt out she knows that the advice we’ve been given simply doesn’t work. It’s outdated and based on a world that doesn’t exist anymore, if it ever did.
In the last decade, Megan has worked with hundreds of burnt out overachievers, from CEOs and best-selling authors to award-winning scientists and activists (including AOC), helping them get unstuck and discover meaningful, purpose driven work. Directional Living comes from Megan‘s innovative paradigm, one based on the premise that are fulfilling, purpose filled career and life is built by following your sense of direction, not pursuing a fixed destination. Through this revolutionary new blueprint, we learn to find the work. We are uniquely well suited to do in this world, move from misery to meaning, and transform our careers on the way to transforming our lives. Directional Living is both philosophy and practical guide to creating not just a great life, but you are great life – one full of general, genuine purpose, meaning, ease, and authenticity.
“Drawing on her extensive experience as a coach, Megan Hellerer offers an unusually relatable, and practical guide to the pursuit of excellence, meaning, and joy.”-Adam Grant
“We often work really hard to build careers that we don’t really want. Directional living will help you avoid that fate!“ -Kim Scott
“Brimming with practical and actionable guidance to take you from feeling without a compass to finding direction.”-Dr. Samantha Boardman “I’m blown away. This book only looks like a well-behaved self-help book. In fact, it’s radical – nearly anarchic. Lucid, practical, effective and beautiful, Direction Living upends all the common wisdom about ambition, struggle, and building a good life. Try it, transform.” -Virginia Heffenan
Whoo boy, is this book the answer to the problem I have: how to make the most of our precious time here (which involves saying no to so many worthy pursuits). Thank you to Oliver Burkeman for writing such a gem of a book which should be on everyone’s holiday list and to Eric Chinski and the wonderful team at FSG for making the publishing happen!
Addressing the fundamental questions about how to live, Meditations for Mortals offers a powerful new way to take action on what counts: guiding philosophy of life. Oliver Burkeman calls “imperfectionism.”It helps us tackle challenges as they crop up in our daily lives: our finite time, the lure of distraction, the impossibility of doing anything perfectly.
How can we embrace our nonnegotiable limitations? Or make good decisions when there’s always too much to do? How do we shed the illusion that life will really begin as soon as we can “get on top of everything“? Reflecting on quotations drawn from philosophy, religion, literature, psychology, and self-help,Burkeman explores a combination of practical tools and daily shifts in perspective. The result is a life, enhancing and surprising challenge to the much familiar advice – and a profound and entertaining crash course in living more fully. “We should all read this, preferably in the company of others – for the sake of our aching world as well as the state of our souls..” -Krista Tippett
“Meditations for Mortals offers a practical path to personal transformation – one that helps you side step the shallow allure of phonetic busyness and find a liberating joy in the limits and imperfections of life. A must read.” -Cal Newport. Thoughtful, levelheaded and useful…Burkeman doesn’t offer life hacks. He offers thoughts that might nudge us toward changing our underlying attitudes.” -James McConnachie, The Times
As many of you know, in early March 2020 I was shepherding Atossa around to New York publishers for meetings about the book that would become The Hidden Globe. Mid-schedule we had all scattered to the winds and learned how to finish our meetings on zoom. In many ways, the Geneva native had been thinking about the slippery nature of countries and hidden wealth for years. Who are the people working in stealth, manning the warehouses housing billions of dollars of art? Pitching European royalty on space mining? Using flags of convenience and economic zones to flout fair labor standards?. Atossa traces the rise of the hidden globe to 13th century Switzerland, where poor cantons marketed their only commodity:bodies, in the form of mercenary fighters. Over time, economists, theorists, statesman, and consultants evolved ever more sophisticated ways of exporting and exploiting statelessness, in the form of free trade zones, flags of convenience, offshore, detention centers, charter cities controlled by foreign corporations, and even into outer space. By mapping this counter, geography, which decides who wins, and who loses in the new global order and helping us to see how it might be otherwise – the Globe fascinates in rages and inspires. “An impressive achievement” -Starred Publishers Weekly. “A season of unrest looms ahead, and The Hidden Globe lays out the unvarnished truth in a luminous feet of reportage.” -Hamilton Cain, Minneapolis Star Tribune “Eloquently verifies a long inarticulated suspicion: that our world has been invisibly remade” -Pankaj Mishra “Abrahamian is the ideal guide…to this hidden landscape” -Daniel Immerwahr “Reads like a novel yet packs a policy punch.” -Anne-Marie Slaughter
Congratulations to Atossa on this incomparable work of writing and reporting and thank you to Becky Saletan and the great team at Riverhead for their brilliant support
