Audiobooks by Steven Brill

The Death of Truth: How Social Media and the Internet Gave Snake Oil Salesmen and Demagogues the Weapons They Needed to Destroy Trust and Polarize the World--And What We Can Do

"How did we become a world where facts-shared truths-have lost their power to hold us together as a community, as a country, globally? How have we allowed the proliferation of alternative facts, hoaxes, even conspiracy theories, to destroy our trust in institutions, leaders, and legitimate experts? Best-selling journalist Steven Brill documents the forces and people, from Silicon Valley to Madison Avenue to Moscow to Washington, that have created and exploited this world of chaos and division-and offers practical solutions for what we can do about it. 'A precise description of the punishment cell we have built around our minds and the first few steps back towards light and air.' -Timothy Snyder, Author of On Tyranny and Professor of History, Yale University "A seminal, ground-breaking, documented and honest examination of two of the central dilemmas of our time-what is truth and where to find it." -Bob Woodward, associate editor at The Washington Post As the cofounder of NewsGuard, a company that tracks online misinformation, Steven Brill has observed the rise of fake news from a front-row seat. In The Death of Truth, with startling, often terrifying clarity, he explains how we got here-and how we can get back to a world where truth matters. None of this-conspiracy theories embraced, expertise ridiculed, empirical evidence ignored-has happened by accident. Brill takes us inside the decisions made by executives in Silicon Valley to code the algorithms embedded in their social media platforms to maximize profits by pushing divisive content. He unravels the ingenious creation of automated advertising buying systems that reward that click-baiting content and penalize reliable news publishers, and describes how the use of these ad-financed, misinformation platforms by politicians, hucksters, and conspiracy theorists deceives ordinary citizens. He documents how the most powerful adversaries of America have used American-made social media and advertising tools against us with massive disinformation campaigns-and how, with the development of generative artificial intelligence, everything could get exponentially worse unless we act. The stakes are high for all of us, including Brill himself, whose company's role in exposing Russian disinformation operations resulted in a Russian agent targeting him and his family. Crucially, Brill lays out a series of provocative but realistic prescriptions for what we can do now to reverse course-proposals certain to stir debate and even action that could curb the power of big tech to profit from division and chaos, tamp down polarization, and restore the trust necessary to bring us together."

Steven Brill (Author), Dan Woren (Narrator)

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Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall--and Those Fighting to Reverse It

"In this revelatory narrative covering the years 1967 to 2017, Steven Brill gives us a stunningly cogent picture of the broken system at the heart of our society. He shows us how, over the last half century, America's core values-meritocracy, innovation, due process, free speech, and even democracy itself-have somehow managed to power its decline into dysfunction. They have isolated our best and brightest, whose positions at the top have never been more secure or more remote. The result has been an erosion of responsibility and accountability, an epidemic of shortsightedness, an increasingly hollow economic and political center, and millions of Americans gripped by apathy and hopelessness. By examining the people and forces behind the rise of big-money lobbying, legal and financial engineering, the demise of private-sector unions, and a hamstrung bureaucracy, Brill answers the question on everyone's mind: How did we end up this way? Finally, he introduces us to those working quietly and effectively to repair the damages. At once a diagnosis of our national ills, a history of their development, and a prescription for a brighter future, Tailspin is a work of riveting journalism-and a welcome antidote to political despair."

Steven Brill (Author), Dan Woren (Narrator)

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America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System

"NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • "A tour de force . . . a comprehensive and suitably furious guide to the political landscape of American healthcare . . . persuasive, shocking."-The New York Times America's Bitter Pill is Steven Brill's acclaimed book on how the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, was written, how it is being implemented, and, most important, how it is changing-and failing to change-the rampant abuses in the healthcare industry. It's a fly-on-the-wall account of the titanic fight to pass a 961-page law aimed at fixing America's largest, most dysfunctional industry. It's a penetrating chronicle of how the profiteering that Brill first identified in his trailblazing Time magazine cover story continues, despite Obamacare. And it is the first complete, inside account of how President Obama persevered to push through the law, but then failed to deal with the staff incompetence and turf wars that crippled its implementation. But by chance America's Bitter Pill ends up being much more-because as Brill was completing this book, he had to undergo urgent open-heart surgery. Thus, this also becomes the story of how one patient who thinks he knows everything about healthcare "policy" rethinks it from a hospital gurney-and combines that insight with his brilliant reporting. The result: a surprising new vision of how we can fix American healthcare so that it stops draining the bank accounts of our families and our businesses, and the federal treasury. Praise for America's Bitter Pill "An energetic, picaresque, narrative explanation of much of what has happened in the last seven years of health policy . . . [Brill] has pulled off something extraordinary."-The New York Times Book Review "A thunderous indictment of what Brill refers to as the 'toxicity of our profiteer-dominated healthcare system.' "-Los Angeles Times "A sweeping and spirited new book [that] chronicles the surprisingly juicy tale of reform."-The Daily Beast "One of the most important books of our time."-Walter Isaacson "Superb . . . Brill has achieved the seemingly impossible-written an exciting book about the American health system."-The New York Review of Books"

Steven Brill (Author), Dan Woren (Narrator)

Audiobook

After: How America Confronted the September 12 Era

"After is an astounding, inspiring, and exciting account of America in the first year of the September 12th era. Based on 347 on-the-record interviews and revelations from memos of government meetings, court filings and other documents, award winning journalist Steven Brill takes us inside the critical dramas of the year after the September 11 attacks -- from the Justice Department's drive to find terror cells, to Congress's decision to bail out the airline industry, to a Ground Zero real estate mogul's audacious plan to litigate his way to an extra $3.5 billion in insurance proceeds. In After we go inside the late night audiences that lobbyists get with congressional leaders like Tom DeLay. We're in the White House sub-basement as the mammoth Department of Homeland Security is patched together, agency by agency. And we're in a young widow's living room as she struggles to hold her family together and make sense of the various charities and government funds that may be available to her. But beyond being a masterpiece of reporting, After is a riveting narrative of people -- some well known, others not known at all -- facing the defining challenge of their lives. As their paths cross in a series of surprising alliances and confrontations, Brill finds in their stories the answer to how America changed and prevailed. After is an indelible picture of America and Americans battling their way through a time of crisis. And we see that Americans and their country were anything but soft when it came to standing up the morning after."

Steven Brill (Author), Dennis Boutsikaris (Narrator)

Audiobook

Audiobooks by Steven Brill

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