Books like Empire of illusion by Chris Hedges

Neil Postman’s classic analysis shows how entertainment pressures transform politics, journalism, education, and religion, and offers a plan to reclaim media for public good.

Explores how mass media shape public opinion by presenting news through an elite consensus, influencing global perceptions of events.

Shoshana Zuboff explains how digital data is turned into a new market form—surveillance capitalism—where corporations predict and shape behavior for profit, reshaping power, privacy, and democracy in the digital age.

Barry Schwartz explains how an excess of choices can create anxiety, dissatisfaction, and paralysis, offering practical strategies to limit options and enhance satisfaction.

Jane Mayer investigates how a network of wealthy right‑wing ideologues, led by figures like the Kochs and the Scaifes, pours billions into the U.S. political system to shape policy and expand economic inequality.

Barry Glassner analyzes how politicians, advocacy groups, and the media amplify crime, drug, and disease fears to shape public opinion and profit, urging a return to rationality.

Jeremy Rifkin argues that we are entering a new phase in history - one characterized by the steady and inevitable decline of jobs. The world, says Rifkin, is fast polarizing into two potentially irreconcilable forces: on one side, an information elite that controls and manages the high-tech global economy; and on the other, the growing numbers displaced workers, who have few prospects and little hope for meaningful employment in an increasingly automated world. The end of work could mean the demise of civilization as we have come to know it, or signal the beginning of a great social transformation and a rebirth of the human spirit.

A collection of essays analyzing America's counterculture during the 1960s and 1970s. Topics include sixties-era communes, films, attitudes towards sex, and issues facing Indians, blacks, and homosexuals.

"From the beet fields of North Dakota to the National Forest campgrounds of California to Amazon's CamperForce program in Texas, employers have discovered a new, low-cost labor pool, made up largely of transient older Americans. Finding that social security comes up short, often underwater on mortgages, these invisible casualties of the Great Recession have taken to the road by the tens of thousands in late-model RVs, travel trailers, and vans, forming a growing community of nomads: migrant laborers who call themselves "workampers." In a secondhand vehicle she christens "Van Halen," Jessica Bruder hits the road to get to know her subjects more intimately. Accompanying her irrepressible protagonist, Linda May, and others, from campground toilet cleaning to warehouse product scanning to desert reunions, then moving on to the dangerous work of beet harvesting, Bruder tells a compelling, eye-opening tale of the dark underbelly of the American economy--one that foreshadows the precarious future that may await many more of us. At the same time, she celebrates the exceptional resilience and creativity of these quintessential Americans who have given up ordinary rootedness to survive. Like Linda May, who dreams of finding land on which to build her own sustainable "Earthship" home, they have not given up hope."--Jacket flap.