January 28, 2025

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.)

Here are our choices:

Sally’s pick: Employment Is Dead: How Disruptive Technologies Are Revolutionizing the Way We Work by Deborah Perry Piscione and Josh Drean, Harvard Business Review Press

Business is on the cusp of a profound transformation. Conventional work models are failing to adapt to the evolving needs and expectations of the modern workforce. Simultaneously, the emergence of disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence, coupled with web3 innovations, including the metaverse and decentralized work models, is unlocking a new realm of possibilities. It raises the question: Is the era of traditional employment over?

The tools of tomorrow will amplify human potential, from collaborating in virtual spaces through digital avatars, to managing transactions transparently on blockchain. Those who embrace these technologies—and the ways people want to work—will unleash unprecedented levels of productivity and innovation. But those who don't risk losing out on the best talent, and even becoming obsolete.

Employment Is Dead ventures into unexplored territories to reveal how these innovations can transform work into more democratic, human-centric, and empowering work experiences. Deborah Perry Piscione and Josh Drean bring to life the seismic shifts occurring in the workforce, propelled by employees' growing demand for autonomy, flexibility, and a sense of purpose in their work. The authors challenge leaders to embrace these changes, offering vital insights into navigating this new landscape. With compelling case studies and cutting-edge examples, this book is an essential read for those aiming to stay ahead in a rapidly evolving digital environment and harnessing disruptive technologies to redefine the future of work.

Jasmine’s pick: Pretend We're Dead: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of Women in Rock in the ’90s by Tanya Pearson, Hachette Books

In 2018, during an interview with journalist Tanya Pearson, Shirley Manson lamented: "It’s a blanket fact that after September 11th, nonconformist women were taken off the radio.” This comment echoed a reality Pearson had personally witnessed as a musician and a fan, and launched her into a quest to figure out just what happened to these extraordinary female figures.

Pretend We're Dead seeks to answer two big questions: First, where did all these wildly different, politically conscious, and supremely talented women in rock come from in the 1990s? And second, after their unprecedented breakout, why did they vanish from the mainstream by the early aughts? Along with analysis and narrative, PRETEND WE’RE DEAD is built on exclusive interviews with the unfiltered voices of legends including: Shirley Manson, Melissa Auf der Maur, Patty Schemel, Kate Schellenbach, Nina Gordon, Louise Post, Josephine Wiggs, Tanya Donelly, Kristin Hersh, Tracy Bonham, Donita Sparks, Liz Phair, Zia McCabe, Tracy Bonham, Lori Barbero, Josephine Wiggs, and Jill Emery. Through thought-provoking conversations, these women explore how they fell in love with music and started bands; fought labels, their coverage in the media, and sexism; and wrote deeply political and feminist music. Readers also learn about the effects of Woodstock ’99, the corporatization of the music industry, the rise of Clear Channel and its ties to the Bush administration, and finally the nationalist sentiment after 9/11.

While sonically diverse, these musicians all wrote fierce, socially conscious, feminist lyrics, and PRETEND WE’RE DEAD commemorates and celebrates the overlooked contributions of true trailblazers.

Gabbi’s pick: Start Making Sense: How Existential Psychology Can Help Us Build Meaningful Lives in Absurd Times by Steven J. Heine, Basic Books

These days everyone feels on edge, panicked by climate change, political polarization, and artificial intelligence.

In Start Making Sense, psychologist Steven J. Heine shows how to overcome our angst and live life with purpose. Heine’s field, existential psychology, uses the tools of science to study the kinds of questions famously asked by existential philosophers such as Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir. Who are we? Why do we seek meaning? How do we connect with one another? Drawing on decades of research, Heine provides scientifically grounded answers to these mysteries. He shows that humans evolved to seek meaning: our survival depends on our ability to make sense of an absurd world. Every day, we deploy an arsenal of psychological tactics to make and maintain meaning in our lives, from rationalizing our choices, to waxing nostalgic about the past, to defending our cultural worldviews. By understanding why and how we seek to make sense, we can live authentic lives in times that don’t seem to make sense at all.

This illuminating book transforms the way we understand our search for meaning and provides a blueprint for building a better life.

Dylan’s pick: Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart by Nicholas Carr, W.W. Norton & Company

From the telegraph and telephone in the 1800s to the internet and social media in our own day, the public has welcomed new communication systems. Whenever people gain more power to share information, the assumption goes, society prospers. Superbloom tells a startlingly different story. As communication becomes more mechanized and efficient, it breeds confusion more than understanding, strife more than harmony. Media technologies all too often bring out the worst in us.

A celebrated commentator on the human consequences of technology, Nicholas Carr reorients the conversation around modern communication, challenging some of our most cherished beliefs about self-expression, free speech, and media democratization. He reveals how messaging apps strip nuance from conversation, how “digital crowding” erodes empathy and triggers aggression, how online political debates narrow our minds and distort our perceptions, and how advances in AI are further blurring the already hazy line between fantasy and reality. Even as Carr shows how tech companies and their tools of connection have failed us, he forces us to confront inconvenient truths about our own nature. The human psyche, it turns out, is profoundly ill-suited to the “superbloom” of information that technology has unleashed.

With rich psychological insights and vivid examples drawn from history and science, Superbloom provides both a panoramic view of how media shapes society and an intimate examination of the fate of the self in a time of radical dislocation. It may be too late to change the system, Carr counsels, but it’s not too late to change ourselves.