Social Science

Every child messes up, sometimes in ways that seem sure to wreck their futures: a bad report card, poor sportsmanship, underaged drinking. These are tough moments for parent and child alike, often complicated by the fear that the misstep is also an indictment of our parenting. But what each of these “fails” has in common for our kids is the precious silver lining of a chance for character building and developing more grit—if we help them process their mistake well.

An invaluable playbook for anxious parents everywhere, Eight Setbacks That Can Make a Child a Success offers specific and unexpected advice about what to say, what not to say, and what to do to help children in eight categories of tense situations. Distilled from Michelle Icard’s decades of experience working with tweens, teenagers, and families, it also introduces her signature three-step approach to any kind of failure:

• Contain: Affirm your child, gather the facts, and control the narrative.
• Resolve: Explain what went wrong, define clear consequences, teach them to apologize well, and develop a plan to rebuild trust.
• Evolve: Reaffirm and re-expand their rights, and establish rewards for good behaviors.

With empathy, insight, and optimism, Michelle Icard’s advice ensures that a child’s mistake or rebellion doesn’t become the headline of their childhood, but instead becomes a launch pad to a better future.

An urgent warning of the unprecedented risks that AI and other fast-developing technologies pose to global order, and how we might contain them while we have the chance—from a co-founder of the pioneering artificial intelligence company DeepMind

We are approaching a critical threshold in the history of our species. Everything is about to change.

Soon you will live surrounded by AIs. They will organise your life, operate your business, and run core government services. You will live in a world of DNA printers and quantum computers, engineered pathogens and autonomous weapons, robot assistants and abundant energy.

None of us are prepared.

As co-founder of the pioneering AI company DeepMind, part of Google, Mustafa Suleyman has been at the centre of this revolution. The coming decade, he argues, will be defined by this wave of powerful, fast-proliferating new technologies.

In The Coming Wave, Suleyman shows how these forces will create immense prosperity but also threaten the nation-state, the foundation of global order. As our fragile governments sleepwalk into disaster, we face an existential dilemma: unprecedented harms on one side, the threat of overbearing surveillance on the other.

Can we forge a narrow path between catastrophe and dystopia?

This groundbreaking book from the ultimate AI insider establishes “the containment problem”—the task of maintaining control over powerful technologies—as the essential challenge of our age.