Category: Best of 2025

The Ritual Effect, by Michael Norton

Recommended by Alison Wood Brooks, Harvard Business School professor and author of TALK

In The Ritual Effect, Lavin Exclusive Speaker and Harvard Business School behavioral scientist Michael Norton makes the case that meaning doesn’t require dramatic life changes—it can be built into everyday actions. Drawing on a decade of research, Michael shows how ordinary habits become powerful rituals when performed with intention, transforming routine behaviors into sources of productivity, connection, resilience, and joy. For leaders, the insight is practical and hopeful: by redesigning how teams meet, celebrate, and change, organizations can foster belonging and motivation in simple ways.

After the Spike, by Dean Spears and Michael Geruso

Recommended by Katy Milkman, bestselling author of How to Change and host of the Choiceology podcast

In After the Spike, economists Dean Spears and Michael Geruso confront a counterintuitive global crisis: not overpopulation, but rapid depopulation. Drawing on rigorous data, striking visual evidence, and careful economic analysis, they show why falling birth rates threaten long-term prosperity, equity, and innovation—and what we can do to respond. Wharton professor Katy Milkman calls it “the most interesting and important book I’ve read in years,” praising its myth-busting clarity and its practical, research-backed guidance for redesigning work, caregiving, and policy so societies can rebuild our population and sustain our progress.

Flashlight, by Susan Choi

Recommended by Ashton Applewhite, anti-ageism activist and author of This Chair Rocks

In Flashlight, one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year, National Book Award winner Susan Choi uses a haunting family mystery to explore how political history quietly shapes private lives. Spanning postwar Japan, North Korea, and the United States, the novel traces the disappearance of a father whose choices were forged by ideology, migration, and silence—and the daughter left to piece together what can never fully be known. The book’s power lies in its insistence that reckoning matters: by facing inherited histories and structural forces, individuals can reclaim agency, dignity, and connection in the present.

The Collective Edge, by Colin Fisher

Recommended by Modupe Akinola, Columbia Business School professor and host of the TED Business podcast

In The Collective Edge, organizational scholar Colin Fisher shifts the focus of leadership away from individuals and toward group design. Synthesizing decades of research on group dynamics, he shows how norms, incentives, and structures—not personalities—determine whether teams thrive or fracture. Columbia Business School prof Modupe Akinola praises the book for its “truly great insights into how to get the best out of teams,” underscoring its central promise: when leaders work with the invisible forces of group behavior instead of against them, collective performance and wellbeing rise together.

Revenge of the Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell

Recommended by Sabaa Quao, founding president of PlusCo Venture Studio

In Revenge of the Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell returns to the idea of social contagion with a sharper focus on systems, power, and unintended consequences. Moving across crime, public health, education, and inequality, he shows how tipping points are often engineered—not accidental—and how small design choices can cascade into massive social change. Sabaa Quao praises the book for its exploration of history and systems, saying that “All leaders can benefit in the present by stepping away from the present for a moment, reflecting on the components from the past, and projecting into the future in a cool, non-partisan way.”

Big ideas don’t live in silos.

Taken together, these books show that leadership isn’t only forged in boardrooms or policy memos—it’s shaped by habits, systems, stories, and the choices we make every day. Whether rethinking how teams work, how societies care for one another, or how history quietly structures the present, each of these works offers a clear-eyed, hopeful framework for meaningful change. Interested in hearing ideas like these unpacked live, on stage? Get in touch to book these Lavin Exclusive Speakers for your 2026 event.

The New York Times Magazine: “Have We Been Thinking About A.D.H.D. All Wrong?”

As more children across the country are diagnosed with A.D.H.D. and medicated for it, Paul Tough shows how a more hopeful, changeable view of A.D.H.D. is emerging from the science: symptoms often fluctuate, and outcomes can improve when environments fit people better, not only when brains are medicated. Drawing on deep and rigorous research, he highlights growing interest in treating A.D.H.D. as a continuum shaped by biology and context, not a fixed binary label, and shows how we can redesign classrooms, workloads, and supports so more people can thrive.

The New Yorker: “A Tumultuous Spring Semester Finally Comes to a Close”

After a bruising year for higher ed, Jelani Cobb, the dean of Columbia Journalism School, argues the clearest lesson is that universities can’t respond to political pressure as if it’s a normal negotiation. He traces a recurring American cycle of government intrusion into campus life, then shows what institutions can do differently now. And he tells the story of one Howard University president’s refusal to let politicians dictate learning, drawing a connection to our contemporary moment—because “without free inquiry there is no basis for a university to exist.”

The New York Times: “Harvard Derangement Syndrome”

“In my 22 years as a Harvard professor, I have not been afraid to bite the hand that feeds me,” writes public intellectual Steven Pinker (Rationality). “So I’m hardly an apologist for my employer when I say that the invective now being aimed at Harvard has become unhinged.” In this essay, which sparked dialogue across the media, Steven makes a reform-minded case for proportionality: Harvard has real problems, but the fix is diagnosis-and-repair, not burn-it-down punishment that cripples research and undermines democratic norms.

 

The Atlantic: “The Anti-Social Century”

Americans are spending more time alone than ever before—and Derek Thompson argues that this quiet shift is reshaping our lives in ways we’re only beginning to understand. The #1 New York Times bestselling co-author of Abundance frames loneliness as a collective design challenge: one that can be addressed by rebuilding the shared spaces and habits that make democracy feel real. “Our smallest actions create norms,” he writes. “Our norms create values. Our values drive behavior. And our behaviors cascade.”

The Guardian: “If you don’t understand Oklahoma, you can’t understand America”

Oklahoma embodies the deepest contradictions of the American project, argues Caleb Gayle. In this sweeping, immersive essay, the author of Black Moses (named a best book of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and more) traces the state’s history from Indigenous dispossession and Black political ambition to racial violence and cultural erasure. “Oklahoma is a map of America’s legacies,” he writes. “It’s not the place where dreams go to die. It has long been the place where dreams go to collide.”

The Atlantic: “A Post-Literate Age”

In an era of fractured attention and weakened trust, National Book Award Winner George Packer makes a bracing case for the civic power of journalism and literature. Using his own journalistic career and new novel, The Emergency, as a lens, he argues that writing and reading remain essential to democratic life because they cultivate shared reality, imagination, and the capacity to see beyond ourselves. “Fiction does that, if we let it, if we keep it,” he writes. “You wake up from a long and vivid dream to find that the world is clearer, closer.”

In the Same Light: 200 Poems for Our Century from the Migrants & Exiles of the Tang Dynasty, translated by Wong May

Recommended by Stephen Marche, author of The Next Civil War and host of Gloves Off

In In the Same Light, Wong May presents Tang Dynasty poetry as a living political record—written largely by exiles, refugees, monks, officials, and laborers navigating war, famine, displacement, and state collapse. These poems once functioned as a shared civic language, traded in markets and posted in public spaces. Read today, they feel uncannily contemporary: a reminder that cultural survival and collective memory often endure longest not in policy, but in art. “The poetry is a thousand years old,” Stephen tells us, “but incredibly resonant about the madness of a civilization in radical decline.”

The Wayfinder, by Adam Johnson

Recommended by Jeff Chang, social historian and author of Water Mirror Echo

Set in pre-contact Polynesia, Adam Johnson’s gripping novel follows a young girl drawn into an empire on the brink of collapse, where ritual, violence, and loyalty determine survival. Through myth, oral history, and political intrigue, Johnson examines empire, migration, myth, and moral compromise, asking what communities owe one another when the future is uncertain—and when the promises of power begin to rot. Jeff calls it “the kind of widescreen, worlds-spanning tale that used to captivate us when we were kids, but with a lot to say about the times we live in right now.”

Black in Blues, by Imani Perry

Recommended by Titus Kaphar, award-winning painter and director of Exhibiting Forgiveness

In Black in Blues, National Book Award winner Imani Perry offers a luminous meditation on the color blue—and its deep, enduring entanglement with Black history, culture, and feeling. Moving fluidly across time and form, Perry traces blue from the indigo-dyed West African cloth traded for human life in the 16th century, to the blues as a foundational American art form born at the crossroads of suffering and joy. Drawing on history, art, music, and her own life, she reveals how blue holds both grief and possibility, melancholy and transcendence. The result is a work of cultural criticism as intimate as it is expansive.

Wild Dark Shore, by Charlotte McConaghy

Recommended by Kathleen Belew, Northwestern history professor and author of Bring the War Home

Set on a remote island near Antarctica, Wild Dark Shore explores what happens when environmental collapse turns stewardship into a political burden few are willing to carry. As a small family safeguards the world’s largest seed bank amid rising seas and intensifying storms, the novel links intimate human relationships to global questions about climate responsibility, scarcity, and who gets to decide what gets saved. With mounting secrecy and moral compromise, McConaghy dramatizes how ecological crisis forces individuals into the same impossible choices now confronting nations.

All We Want Is Everything, by Soraya Chemaly

Recommended by Sarah Kaplan, founding Director of the Institute for Gender and the Economy at Rotman School of Management

All We Want Is Everything is “an archeological dig into the forces of the patriarchy,” Sarah says, showing “how they are present in all the systems that surround us, and how we might begin to resist.” Rather than framing male supremacy as a matter of individual prejudice, Soraya Chemaly exposes it as a political and economic system that organizes power by pitting men against one another while exploiting women and marginalized communities as resources. Moving fluidly from intimate relationships to global politics, the book offers the necessary tools for building more just and sustainable futures.

Big ideas don’t live in silos.

Taken together, these books remind us that politics doesn’t simply live on paper. It lives in poems, stories, art, and humans ourselves. Whether tracing empires in decline, the afterlives of color and culture, or the structures that shape who holds power and who pays the price, each of these works offers tools for thinking more clearly about the world we’re in—and the one we still have a chance to build. Interested in hearing big ideas like these explored live, on stage? Get in touch to book these Lavin speakers for your 2026 event!

Fast Company: “Douglas Rushkoff wants us to use AI to ask better questions”

Most conversations about AI focus on speed, scale, and answers. Douglas Rushkoff wants us to slow down—and rethink the questions themselves. In this wide-ranging Fast Company article, the renowned media theorist argues that AI shouldn’t be treated as an oracle or efficiency engine, but as a tool for expanding human imagination and agency. Used well, AI can help us surface assumptions, challenge default thinking, and imagine radical alternatives to broken systems—if we resist letting it merely automate us.

Big Think: “The boomer–doomer divide within OpenAI, explained by Karen Hao”

AI discourse, Karen Hao argues, is trapped in a false binary: “boomers” who insist AI will save us, and “doomers” who warn it will destroy us. A long-time Silicon Valley insider and the author of the New York Times bestseller Empire of AI, as well as one of TIME‘s 100 most influential people in AI, Karen shows how both narratives serve to position AI as something ordinary people can’t meaningfully influence. The truth, she says, is that each one of us has the power to chart a more hopeful course for the future of AI.

The New York Times: “A.I.’s Environmental Impact Will Threaten Its Own Supply Chain”

AI may feel like magic, but its impacts are very real, says Kate Crawford. In her New York Times opinion video, this AI scholar draws a direct line between the rapid expansion of AI infrastructure and its destructive environmental footprint—which is jeopardizing the very resources that it requires. She argues that the extractive industries that support it—from quartz mining to energy-hungry data centers—are already reshaping landscapes. Using Hurricane Helene as a case study, she reframes AI not as “cloud-based,” but as grounded in land and labor.

The New Yorker: “The End of the English Paper”

“A.I. allows any of us to feel like an expert, but it is risk, doubt, and failure that make us human,” writes Pulitzer Prize-winning author Hua Hsu. Through far-ranging interviews with students, he explores how generative AI has quietly upended one of higher education’s most sacred rituals, forcing professors to rethink what writing assignments are really for. Rather than chasing plagiarism detectors, educators are experimenting with new forms of evaluation that prioritize thinking, synthesis, and voice—suggesting that AI may not end learning, but offer a new way forward.

The Wall Street Journal: “I Built an AI Career Coach. I’ve Never Had a Better Coach.”

What happens when career coaching becomes judgment-free—and available 24/7? Alexandra Samuel explains how she built an AI coach that helped surface patterns, anxieties, and ambitions more honestly than many human conversations allow. (Her AI coach, Viv, eventually became the co-host for her podcast, Me + Viv!) The takeaway isn’t that AI should replace mentors, but that it can lower the friction of self-reflection, creating a private space to think out loud about work, identity, and what comes next.

Doctors Without Borders

Founded in 1971 by doctors and journalists, Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières) is an international medical humanitarian organization that delivers emergency healthcare wherever needs are greatest. MSF provides neutral, impartial, and independent medical care to people affected by conflict, disease, natural disasters, and exclusion from healthcare—often in the world’s most challenging environments.

Today, approximately 68,000 staff work with MSF across more than 77 countries, with the majority hired locally in the communities they serve. Their teams provide lifesaving care ranging from emergency surgery and epidemic response to vaccination campaigns, nutrition programs, mental health support, and the operation of hospitals and clinics. Alongside medical care, MSF also bears witness—speaking out about humanitarian crises and amplifying the voices of patients and frontline staff.

MSF’s work is made possible by a global network of supporters who enable its teams to respond quickly, independently, and wherever care is needed most.

Join us in donating to Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières).

Parkdale Community Food Bank

Located only 15 minutes away from the Lavin offices, the Parkdale Community Food Bank has been serving its community since 2007. Founded by volunteers, the organization provides barrier-free access to food with choice, dignity, and respect. The food bank supports more than 13,000 families every month, powered by the dedication of over 300 volunteers. Beyond food access, the organization also plays an advocacy role—helping community members navigate issues related to housing, social services, and economic reintegration.

Parkdale allows community members to select groceries that meet their household size, dietary needs, and preferences. In addition to its drop-in program, the food bank runs a delivery service for individuals who are unable to leave their homes due to illness, disability, or other barriers.

Importantly, the food bank receives no direct government funding and relies entirely on donations from individuals and supporters. Contributions directly support this vital, community-driven work.

Find your local food bank here.

From all of us at The Lavin Agency…

We wish you a joyful holiday season and a wonderful start to 2026. We look forward to the adventures the new year will bring!

Empire of AI, by Karen Hao

Recommended by Alexandra Samuel, AI workplace expert and host of Me + Viv

A thrilling look behind the scenes of OpenAI and the biggest tech arms race in history, Empire of AI “instantly struck a cultural nerve” (TIME). Author Karen Hao is a long-time Silicon Valley insider and one of TIME‘s 100 most influential people in AI. In her New York Times bestseller, she exposes how power, profit, and ideology shape today’s industry, and argues that the power to shape the future of AI is in our hands. Journalist Alexandra Samuel interviewed Karen, a fellow Lavin Exclusive Speaker, for her podcast Me + Viv. “She convinced me in our interview that you don’t necessarily have to be an intensive AI user in order to understand how AI works… but if you’re not going to use AI, you need to read Empire of AI so that you can be an informed non-user,” Alex tells us. Fellow Lavin Exclusive Speaker Jeff Chang, the social historian behind Water Mirror Echo, calls Empire of AI “the most important book of the past decade, or any other.“

The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game, by C. Thi Nguyen

Recommended by Jordan Ellenberg, mathematician and New York Times bestselling author of How Not to Be Wrong

“You wouldn’t expect that careful thinking about games and how they work would produce bracing new insights about how powerful forces reach in and modify our values without our even noticing, and what we can do about it,” writes Jordan Ellenberg, New York Times bestselling author and expert on the math behind AI. “But that’s because you haven’t read C. Thi Nguyen’s The Score. You probably should.” In this forthcoming book (out January 2026), the author examines how scoring systems, incentives, and game-like structures subtly train us to care about specific things. Exploring video games, sports, board games, cooking, gardening, running, and much more, he argues that metrics don’t capture what really matters—only what’s easy to measure. And he asks whether this is the game we really want to play.

Big ideas don’t live in silos.

These books reflect the breadth of thinking that defines today’s leading AI experts—and why their work resonates far beyond Silicon Valley.

Interested in hearing these thinkers unpack ideas like these live, on stage? Get in touch to book these Exclusive Lavin Speakers for your next event!

The Atlantic: “Why I Run”

In this deeply personal essay, Nicholas Thompson, the CEO of The Atlantic and an American record-holding distance runner, explores how running became both a bond with his complicated father and a safeguard against repeating his midlife unraveling. Drawing on his book, The Running Ground, Nick weaves together themes of leadership, discipline, grief, and how to keep moving forward, offering a powerfully motivating meditation for any leader. “My father led a deeply complicated and broken life,” he writes. “But he gave me many things, including the gift of running—a gift that opens the world to anyone who accepts it.”

CNBC: “I work with execs at Google, Nike and Disney—here’s the No. 1 ‘overlooked’ skill I teach them”

Do adults need to play? Cas Holman says yes: “Play may be the single most overlooked skill that sets leaders apart.” A world-renowned toy designer and consultant for companies like Google and Lego, as well as author of the acclaimed book Playful, Cas argues that play unlocks creativity, resilience, and better decision-making in environments defined by uncertainty. In a culture obsessed with productivity, this article makes the case that play may be the most serious leadership skill of all, and offers 5 ways that leaders can leverage the power of play in their everyday lives.

Fast Company: “You control hidden markets at work—it’s time to start acting like it”

“Your inbox is brimming with new emails, and you need to decide which to reply to quickly and which to ignore,” writes Judd Kessler. “You try to schedule something for next week, but your calendar is already packed with recurring meetings.” These are “hidden markets,” where rules and goals decide who gets what, rather than price alone. A Wharton professor and the author of Lucky By Design, which Lin-Manuel Miranda calls “that rarest of things: an economics page-turner,” Judd shows leaders how to keep their organization running smoothly by optimizing these markets for efficiency, equity, and ease.

The New York Times: “What Women Really Want: To Not Answer Work Emails at 10 p.m.”

Traditional wisdom says that working women want flexibility. But Wharton economist Corinne Low argues that it’s not flexibility but boundaries that makes all the difference. Drawing on rigorous economic research, the author of Having It All shows that workers would give up nearly 40% of their pay to avoid jobs with unpredictable, always-on demands, while valuing clear boundaries far more than remote work. Her conclusion: redesign work with hard stops and predictable schedules, and women won’t have to choose between ambition and sanity—which means you’ll get the best out of everyone.

The Telegraph: “A neuroscientist’s guide to banishing stress, self-doubt and loneliness”

Forget wellness fads. You can get happier by understanding your closest partner: your brain. Neuroscientist Rachel Barr, author of How to Make Your Brain Your Best Friend and a science communicator with over 2 million followers, cuts through pop-psychology noise to explain how stress, self-doubt, and loneliness actually work in the brain, and how to interrupt them using evidence-based habits: from experimenting with your identity to “microdosing delight.” Treat your brain like a partner, not a problem to hack, she says, and small, consistent practices will outperform any miracle cure.

The Boston Globe: “Should you trust your gut instincts? Ask these questions first.”

“Gut feel isn’t a scream—it’s a whisper,” says Laura Huang, author of You Already Know. In this clear-eyed guide to decision-making, the Northeastern distinguished professor explains how true intuition differs from emotion, anxiety, or ego—and how to tell which one is speaking. She offers practical tips that leaders can use to train and harness their intuition, from keeping a record of gut feel decisions to checking yourself in the moment with simple questions. By reframing intuition as a trainable skill built through feedback and reflection, Laura offers a smarter way to trust your instincts without being ruled by them.