September 10, 2024

Finding the right book at the right time can transform your life or your organization. We help you discover your next great read by showcasing four recently released titles each week.

The books are chosen by Porchlight's Managing Director, Sally Haldorson, and the marketing team: Dylan Schleicher, Gabbi Cisneros, and Jasmine Gonzalez. (Book descriptions are provided by the publisher unless otherwise noted.)

This week, our choices are:

Dylan’s pick: The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World by Christine Rosen, W.W. Norton & Company

We embraced the mediated life—from Facetune and Venmo to meme culture and the Metaverse—because these technologies offer novelty and convenience. But they also transform our sense of self and warp the boundaries between virtual and real. What are the costs? Who are we in a disembodied world?

In The Extinction of Experience, Christine Rosen investigates the cultural and emotional shifts that accompany our embrace of technology. In warm, philosophical prose, Rosen reveals key human experiences at risk of going extinct, including face-to-face communication, sense of place, authentic emotion, and even boredom. Considering cultural trends, like TikTok challenges and mukbang, and politically unsettling phenomena, like sociometric trackers and online conspiracy culture, Rosen exposes an unprecedented shift in the human condition, one that habituates us to alienation and control. To recover our humanity and come back to the real world, we must reclaim serendipity, community, patience, and risk.

Jasmine’s pick: Friendship First: From New Sparks to Chosen Family, How Our Friends Pave the Way for Lifelong Happiness by Gyan Yankovich, The Experiment

Despite modern technology and the ample ways we have to keep in touch, we risk neglecting our relationships with the people who have the most profound effect on our well-being: our friends.

Weaving together personal stories, interviews with experts, and social research, Friendship First empowers you to nurture relationships with friends both new and old. Journalist Gyan Yankovich reveals how friendships play a vital role in our happiness with insights on how to:  

• Deepen workplace friendships outside the office 

• Invite friends into activities typically reserved for families 

• Use social media to strengthen connections 

• Maintain friendships through major life transitions. 

An ode to group chats and chosen family, Friendship First invites you to care for and count on those who matter most.

Gabbi’s pick: Non-Obvious Thinking: How to See What Others Miss by Rohit Bhargava and Ben Dupont, Ideapress Publishing

In Non-Obvious Thinking, bestselling futurist Rohit Bhargava and pioneering venture capitalist, Ben duPont come together to offer a concise four step method to think bigger.

From the termite mounds of Zimbabwe to an undiscovered Australian island that seemingly disappeared overnight, this book blends fascinating stories with highly actionable daily lessons. This is not an intimidating theory-filled business book. It’s a digestible roadmap to being more observant and unlocking the potential of your best ideas.

Learn how to: 

• Create space for new ideas and thinking. 

• Uncover insights by training your powers of observation. 

• Hone your focus to isolate the details that matter most. 

• Define a twist to make your thinking original and unique. 

These are the four components of the SIFT framework– a groundbreaking method designed to unlock your creative potential in four simple steps. Whether you're dreaming of entrepreneurial success, seeking creative inspiration, or simply aiming to break free from conventional thought, Non-Obvious Thinking will help you learn to see what others miss.

The world needs more non-obvious thinkers. This book is your guide to becoming one yourself.

Sally’s pick: Shame on You: How to Be a Woman in the Age of Mortification by Melissa Petro, G.P. Putnam’s Sons

For millions of women, shame is a vicious predator. It tells us we are less than, that we are unworthy. We try everything to escape shame—ignoring it, intellectualizing it, and even, ironically, shaming ourselves for feeling it. The reality is that women experience shame more frequently and more intensely than men—a direct result, as acclaimed journalist Melissa Petro explains, of a patriarchal culture that “urges women to feel bad about themselves, and then punishes them when they do.” Why can’t we figure out how to break the shame cycle once and for all?

In Shame on You, Petro takes on the issue of women’s shame directly with an unflinching look at the social systems that encourage women to believe we are deeply inadequate. From shame’s beginnings ( Maybe she’s born with it? Nope, it’s misogyny.) to its effect on our lives as adults (How the humiliation of “bad women” affects us all.), shame poisons our friendships, romantic relationships, and work lives. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Blending investigative reporting, science, literature, and hundreds of women’s personal stories—including her own shameful account of winding up as an unwitting New York Post cover girl—Petro offers us a new way forward. No matter what you do, she explains, there is no escaping being judged. And yet, the women we can become—sometimes as a consequence of shame, rather than in spite of it—are powerful indeed. And maybe that’s what others are afraid of.