Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/674910 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Filterworld: How Algorithms Make Everything the Same

Author: Kyle Chayka

Narrator: Kaleo Griffith

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 11 hours 56 minutes

Release date: January 23, 2024

Genres: Business & Career Development

Publisher's Summary:

One of the BBC's most anticipated books for 2024 An i-D non-fiction book of 2024 A Stylist non-fiction book of 2024 'An essential book' i-D What happens when our cultural and artistic lives are dictated to us by an algorithm? What does it mean when shareability supersedes innovation? How can we make a choice when the options have been so carefully arranged for us? From coffee shops to city grids to TikTok feeds and Netflix homepages the world over, algorithmic recommendations prescribe our experiences. This network of mathematically determined choices - the 'Filterworld' - has taken over, almost unnoticed, as we've grown accustomed to an insipid new normal. But to have our tastes, behaviours, and emotions governed by computers calls the very notion of free will into question. Internationally recognized journalist and New Yorker staff writer Kyle Chayka journeys through this ever-tightening web woven by algorithms. He explores how online and offline spaces alike have been engineered for seamless consumption. How the lowest common denominator is promoted at the expense of the complex, diverse or challenging. How users of technology contend with data-driven equations that promise to anticipate their desires but often get them wrong. How the FIlterworld is determining the very shape of culture itself. Chayka skilfully and compellingly traces this creeping, machine-guided curation that influences not just what culture we consume, but what culture is produced. In doing so, he attempts to answer to the most urgent question currently facing us: is personal freedom ever again possible on the Internet? Filterworld is a fascinating history of the rise of the algorithm and an important investigation into where it could take us next - if we let it.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/666343 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Making It in America: The Almost Impossible Quest to Manufacture in the U.S.A. (And How It Got That Way)

Author: Rachel Slade

Narrator: Natalie Duke

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 12 hours 2 minutes

Release date: January 9, 2024

Genres: Business & Career Development

Publisher's Summary:

A moving and eye-opening look at the story of manufacturing in America, whether it can ever successfully return to our shores, and why our nation depends on it, told through the experience of one young couple in Maine as they attempt to rebuild a lost industry, ethically. • From the best-selling author of Into the Raging Sea Ben Waxman spent a decade organizing workers in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Wisconsin, fighting for men and women at a time when national support for unions had sunk to an all-time low. Frustrated with the state of the world, he lands back in his hometown of Portland, Maine, to rethink his life. There, he meets Whitney Reynolds, a restless bartender eager for a challenge. In each other, they see a better future, a version of the American dream they can build together. Ben and Whitney set out to prove that union-made, all-American-sourced apparel manufacturing is possible in the twenty-first century. Their quest takes us across the nation and across time, from the cotton fields of Mississippi to the hollowed-out garment district in New York City to a family-owned zipper company in Los Angeles to the enormous knit-and-dye houses in North Carolina. While battling anti-immigrant hostility, trade wars, and a global pandemic, they grapple with the true meaning of made-in-USA in our globalized world. Making It in America offers a fascinating new take on free-trade economics and manufacturing history. Woven through the Waxmans’ journey is the essential story of textiles and their critical role in shaping capitalism. It was the demand for cheap cloth that sparked the industrial revolution. It was the brutal conditions in New England's textile mills that first drove workers to organize. Making It in America is a deeply personal account of how individual choices shape a nation. Each touchpoint casts a rare, compassionate look at what came before, where we are now, and where we’re going—through the people, places, and ecologies that produce the fabric of our lives.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/676683 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire

Author: Tim Schwab

Narrator: Tim Schwab

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 15 hours 55 minutes

Release date: November 16, 2023

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1

Genres: Business & Career Development

Publisher's Summary:

Brought to you by Penguin. You know him as the founder of Microsoft; the philanthropic, kind-hearted billionaire who has donated endless funds to good causes around the world. But there's another side to Bill Gates. We might like to think of the Gates Foundation as an innocent charity giving away money, collaborating with stakeholders, and listening to the desires of the populations it hopes to help, but that's simply not how it works in practice. The charity internally sets a policy agenda for how to fix the world - based on one man's worldview - then imposes this vision onto the developing world by funding groups that align with it. Combining rich storytelling and ground-breaking reporting, The Good Billionaire offers readers a provocative and timely counter-narrative about one of the world's most widely recognized individuals - a true global celebrity with a truly global audience. But more than that, this book speaks to a vital political question around economic inequality and the erosion of democratic institutions - why should the super-rich be able to transform their wealth into political power, and just how far can they go? ©2023 Tim Schwab (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/676027 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Messy Truth: How I Sold My Business for Millions but Almost Lost Myself

Author: Alli Webb

Narrator: Alli Webb

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 3 hours 45 minutes

Release date: November 14, 2023

Genres: Business & Career Development

Publisher's Summary:

Read by the author. You can be raw, real, and messy and still build a successful career and life. In this entrepreneur's memoir, Alli Webb invites you into her world as a businesswoman, a mother, and a partner, untangling her complicated journey with the wit and humor of a talented storyteller and the authentic wisdom of a woman who's been through it all—all the success and all the chaos.   When Drybar and its world-famous blowouts took off seemingly overnight, she found herself surrounded by celebrity clients like Zooey Deschanel, Jennifer Garner, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Julia Roberts. She was named to multiple prestigious business lists, published a New York Times bestselling book—all before she turned forty. But it wasn't until her marriage fell apart, her teenage son entered rehab unexpectedly, and she no longer found meaning in the wildly successful business she had built that Alli realized she was spiraling into deep depression. She'd lost sight of what made her happy in favor of an aimless push to succeed above all. Something had to give. Piece by piece, Alli began to reinvent her personal and professional life with the goal of accepting her messy truth. She learned how to embrace the honest in lieu of the perfect and realized that most of life happens somewhere in the middle, between the laughter and the tears. Empowering, insightful, and bravely honest, The Messy Truth will encourage you to find your own unique path to success and to understand its darker side as you learn to embrace the mess of life.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/668116 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets

Author: Jeff Horwitz

Narrator: Jeff Horwitz

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 10 hours 17 minutes

Release date: November 14, 2023

Genres: Business & Career Development

Publisher's Summary:

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE • By an award-winning technology reporter for The Wall Street Journal, a behind-the-scenes look at the manipulative tactics Facebook used to grow its business, how it distorted the way we connect online, and the company insiders who found the courage to speak out 'Broken Code fillets Facebook’s strategic failures to address its part in the spread of disinformation, political fracturing and even genocide. The book is stuffed with eye-popping, sometimes Orwellian statistics and anecdotes that could have come only from the inside.' —New York Times Book Review Once the unrivaled titan of social media, Facebook held a singular place in culture and politics. Along with its sister platforms Instagram and WhatsApp, it was a daily destination for billions of users around the world. Inside and outside the company, Facebook extolled its products as bringing people closer together and giving them voice. But in the wake of the 2016 election, even some of the company’s own senior executives came to consider those claims pollyannaish and simplistic. As a succession of scandals rocked Facebook, they—and the world—had to ask whether the company could control, or even understood, its own platforms. Facebook employees set to work in pursuit of answers.  They discovered problems that ran far deeper than politics. Facebook was peddling and amplifying anger, looking the other way at human trafficking, enabling drug cartels and authoritarians, allowing VIP users to break the platform’s supposedly inviolable rules. They even raised concerns about whether the product was safe for teens. Facebook was distorting behavior in ways no one inside or outside the company understood.  Enduring personal trauma and professional setbacks, employees successfully identified the root causes of Facebook's viral harms and drew up concrete plans to address them. But the costs of fixing the platform—often measured in tenths of a percent of user engagement—were higher than Facebook's leadership was willing to pay. With their work consistently delayed, watered down, or stifled, those who best understood Facebook’s damaging effect on users were left with a choice: to keep silent or go against their employer. Broken Code tells the story of these employees and their explosive discoveries. Expanding on “The Facebook Files,” his blockbuster, award-winning series for The Wall Street Journal, reporter Jeff Horwitz lays out in sobering detail not just the architecture of Facebook’s failures, but what the company knew (and often disregarded) about its societal impact. In 2021, the company would rebrand itself Meta, promoting a techno-utopian wonderland. But as Broken Code shows, the problems spawned around the globe by social media can’t be resolved by strapping on a headset.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/671587 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization

Author: Ed Conway

Narrator: Ed Conway

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 15 hours 11 minutes

Release date: November 7, 2023

Genres: Business & Career Development

Publisher's Summary:

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • AN ECONOMIST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • Sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and lithium. These fundamental materials have created empires, razed civilizations, and fed our ingenuity and greed for thousands of years. Without them, our modern world would not exist, and the battle to control them will determine our future. • Finalist for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award The fiber-optic cables that weave the World Wide Web, the copper veins of our electric grids, the silicon chips and lithium batteries that power our phones and cars: though it can feel like we now live in a weightless world of information—what Ed Conway calls “the ethereal world”—our twenty-first-century lives are still very much rooted in the material. In fact, we dug more stuff out of the earth in 2017 than in all of human history before 1950. For every ton of fossil fuels, we extract six tons of other materials, from sand to stone to wood to metal. And in Material World, Conway embarks on an epic journey across continents, cultures, and epochs to reveal the underpinnings of modern life on Earth—traveling from the sweltering depths of the deepest mine in Europe to spotless silicon chip factories in Taiwan to the eerie green pools where lithium originates. Material World is a celebration of the humans and the human networks, the miraculous processes and the little-known companies, that combine to turn raw materials into things of wonder. This is the story of human civilization from an entirely new perspective: the ground up.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/665586 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Greatest Capitalist Who Ever Lived: Tom Watson Jr. and the Epic Story of How IBM Created the Digital Age

Author: Ralph Watson Mcelvenny, Marc Wortman

Narrator: Donald Corren

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 17 hours 18 minutes

Release date: October 24, 2023

Genres: Business & Career Development

Publisher's Summary:

“A compelling new biography… [The Greatest Capitalist Who Ever Lived] spins the Watsons into near-Shakespearean figures, as if ‘Succession’ were set in the era of ‘Mad Men’.”​ ―The New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice  The enduring story of Thomas Watson Jr.—a figure more important to the creation of the modern world than Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, and Morgan.   Nearly fifty years into IBM’s existence, Thomas Watson Jr. undertook the biggest gamble in business history when he “bet the farm” on the creation of the IBM System/360, the world’s first fully integrated and compatible mainframe computer. As CEO, Watson drove a revolution no other company—then or now—would dare, laying the foundation for the digital age that has transformed every society, corporation, and government. The story of Watson being “present at the creation” of the digital age is intertwined with near-Shakespearean personal drama. While he put IBM and its employees at risk, Watson also carried out a family-shattering battle over the future of the company with his brother Dick. This titanic struggle between brothers led to Dick’s death and almost killed Watson Jr. himself. Though he was eventually touted by Fortune magazine as “the greatest capitalist who ever lived,” Watson’s directionless, playboy early years made him an unlikely candidate for corporate titan. How he pulled his life together and, despite personal demons, paved the way for what became a global industry is an epic tale full of drama, inspiration, and valuable lessons in leadership, risk-taking, and social responsibility.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/676241 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Big Fail: How Our Supply Chains Collapsed When We Needed Them Most

Author: Bethany Mclean, Joe Nocera

Narrator: Bethany Mclean, Joe Nocera

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 12 hours 56 minutes

Release date: October 19, 2023

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1

Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1

Genres: Business & Career Development

Publisher's Summary:

Brought to you by Penguin. From the author of the modern business classic The Smartest Guys in the Room comes a damning indictment of late-stage capitalism-and the leaders that were brutally unprepared for a global pandemic. In 2020, the coronavirus pandemic made it painfully clear that governments across the world could not adequately protect their citizens. Millions of people suffered and died in just two years, while administrations around the globe blundered; prize-winning economists overlooked devastating trade-offs from the collapse of trade; and elites escaped to isolated retreats, unaffected by - and worse, even profiting from - the worst healthcare crisis to hit humanity in decades. In this page-turning economic, political and financial history, veteran journalists Bethany McClean and Joseph Nocera analyse the American response to the pandemic as a case study, to offer fresh and provocative answers. With laser-sharp reporting and deep sourcing, they investigate what really happened when governments ran out of PPE due to snarled supply chains; and the shock to the financial system when the world's biggest economies stumbled. They zero in on the effectiveness of wildly polarised approaches across states, and they trace why thousands died in hollowed-out hospital systems and nursing homes run by private equity firms, all in the name of 'maximising shareholder value'. The Big Fail is an expansive, gripping narrative account on what the pandemic did to one economy, and how it forced us to question the fundamental principles of our society ©2023 Bethany McLean & Joe Nocera (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/665594 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time

Author: Seth D. Kaplan

Narrator: Ron Butler

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 6 hours 11 minutes

Release date: October 17, 2023

Genres: Business & Career Development

Publisher's Summary:

This urgent exploration of why American society is in trouble—and how to fix it, starting with the places we call home—is an “essential and engaging read for everyone who wants to better understand the challenges facing our cities, towns and our nation.” (Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class) The neighborhoods we live in impact our lives in so many ways: they determine who we know, what resources and opportunities we have access to, the quality of schools our kids go to, our sense of security and belonging, and even how long we live.   Yet too many of us live in  neighborhoods plagued by rising crime, school violence, family disintegration, addiction, alienation, and despair. Even the wealthiest neighborhoods are not immune; while poverty exacerbates these challenges, they exist in zip codes rich and poor, rural and urban, and everything in between.   In Fragile Neighborhoods, fragile states expert Seth D. Kaplan offers a bold new vision for addressing social decline in America, one zip code at a time. By revitalizing our local institutions—and the social ties that knit them together—we can all turn our neighborhoods into places where people and families can thrive.    Readers will meet the innovative individuals and organizations pioneering new approaches to everything from youth mentoring to urban planning to keeping families intact: people like Dreama, a former lawyer whose organization works with local leaders and educators in rural Appalachia to equip young people with the social support they need to succeed in school; and Chris, whose Detroit-based non-profit turns vacant school buildings into community resource hubs while also organizing local volunteers to repair homes and beautify streets in neighborhoods across the city.   Along the way, Kaplan offers a set of practical lessons to inspire similar work, reminding us that when change is hyperlocal, everyone has the opportunity to contribute.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/678445 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Fashion Killa: How Hip-Hop Revolutionized High Fashion

Author: Sowmya Krishnamurthy

Narrator: Angel Pean

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 7 hours 52 minutes

Release date: October 10, 2023

Genres: Business & Career Development

Publisher's Summary:

A Pitchfork Best Music Book of 2024 This “first comprehensive anthology of the marriage between hip-hop and luxury fashion” (The Cut) draws on exclusive interviews to tell the story of the hip-hop artists, designers, stylists, and unsung heroes who fought the power and reinvented style around the world over the last fifty years. Fashion Killa is a classic tale of a modern renaissance; of an exclusionary industry gate-crashed by innovators; of impresarios—Sean “Diddy” Combs, Dapper Dan, Virgil Abloh—hoisting hip-hop from the streets to the stratosphere; of supernovas—Lil’ Kim, Cardi B, and Kimora Lee Simmons—allying with kingmakers—Anna Wintour, Donatella Versace, Tommy Hilfiger, and Ralph Lauren; of traditionalist fashion houses—Louis Vuitton, Fendi, and Saint Laurent—transformed into temples of rap gods. Journalist Sowmya Krishnamurthy explores the connections between the DIY hip-hop scene and the exclusive upper-echelons of high fashion. She discusses the sociopolitical forces that defined fashion and tracks the influence of music and streetwear on the most exclusive (and exclusionary) luxury brands. “An essential book about US culture” (Booklist, starred review), Fashion Killa commemorates the contributions of hip-hop to music, fashion, and our society at large.