Tag Archives: Books

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Hey, Hun: Sales, Sisterhood, Supremacy, and the Other Lies Behind Multilevel Marketing – Emily Lynn Paulson

She signed up for the sisterhood, free cars, and the promise of a successful business of her own. Instead, she ended up with an addiction, broken friendships, and the rubble of a toppled pyramid . . . scheme.

Hey, Hun: Sales, Sisterhood, Supremacy, and the Other Lies Behind Multilevel Marketing is the eye-opening, funny, and dangerous personal story of author Emily Lynn Paulson rising to the top of the pyramid in the multilevel marketing (MLM) world only to realize that its culture and business practices went beyond a trendy marketing scheme and into the heart of white supremacy in America. A significant polemic on how MLMs operate, Hey, Hun expertly lays out their role in the cultural epidemic of isolation and the cult-like ideologies that course through their trainings, marketing, and one-on-one interactions. Equally entertaining and smart, Paulson’s first-person accounts, acerbic wit, and biting commentary will leave you with a new perspective on those “Hey Hun” messages flooding your inbox.

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Glossy: Ambition, Beauty, and the Inside Story of Emily Weiss’s Glossier – Marisa Meltzer

Called “one of the most disruptive brands in beauty” by Forbes , Glossier revolutionized the beauty industry with its sophisticated branding and unique approach to influencer marketing, almost-instantly making the company a juggernaut with rabid fans lining up for a chance to buy its coveted products. It also taught a generation of business leaders how to talk to Millennial and Gen Z customers and build a cult following online.

At the center of the story lies Emily Weiss, the elusive former Teen Vogue “superintern” on the reality show The Hills turned Into the Gloss beauty blogger who had the vision, guts, and searing ambition needed to launch Glossier. She cannily turned every experience, every meeting into an opportunity to fuel her own personal success. Together with her expensive, signature style and singular vision for the future of consumerism, she could not be stopped. Just how did a girl from suburban Connecticut with no real job experience work her way into the bathrooms and boudoirs of the most influential names in the world and build that access into a 1.9-billion-dollar business? Is she solely responsible for its success? And why, eight years later, at the height of Glossier mania, did she step down?

In Glossy , journalist and author Marisa Meltzer combines in-depth interviews with former Glossier employees, investors, and Weiss herself to bring you inside the walls of this fascinating and secretive company. From fundraising to product launches and unconventional hiring practices, Meltzer exposes the inner workings of Glossier’s culture, culminating in the story of Weiss herself. The Devil Wears Prada for the Bad Blood generation, Glossy is a gripping portrait of not just one of the most important business leaders of her generation, but also a chronicle of an era.

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Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet – Taylor Lorenz

For over a decade, Taylor Lorenz has been the authority on internet culture, documenting its far-reaching effects on all corners of our lives. Her reporting is serious yet entertaining and illuminates deep truths about ourselves and the lives we create online. In her debut book, Extremely Online, she reveals how online influence came to upend the world, demolishing traditional barriers and creating whole new sectors of the economy. Lorenz shows this phenomenon to be one of the most disruptive changes in modern capitalism.

By tracing how the internet has changed what we want and how we go about getting it, Lorenz unearths how social platforms’ power users radically altered our expectations of content, connection, purchasing, and power. Lorenz documents how moms who started blogging were among the first to monetize their personal brands online, how bored teens who began posting selfie videos reinvented fame as we know it, and how young creators on TikTok are leveraging opportunities to opt out of the traditional career pipeline. It’s the real social history of the internet.

Emerging seemingly out of nowhere, these shifts in how we use the internet seem easy to dismiss as fads. However, these social and economic transformations have resulted in a digital dynamic so unappreciated and insurgent that it ultimately created new approaches to work, entertainment, fame, and ambition in the 21st century.

Extremely Online is the inside, untold story of what we have done to the internet, and what it has done to us.

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Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune – Anderson Cooper and Katherine Howe

The story of the Astors is a quintessentially American story—of ambition, invention, destruction, and reinvention.

From 1783, when German immigrant John Jacob Astor first arrived in the United States, until 2009, when Brooke Astor’s son, Anthony Marshall, was convicted of defrauding his elderly mother, the Astor name occupied a unique place in American society.

The family fortune, first made by a beaver trapping business that grew into an empire, was then amplified by holdings in Manhattan real estate. Over the ensuing generations, Astors ruled Gilded Age New York society and inserted themselves into political and cultural life, but also suffered the most famous loss on the Titanic, one of many shocking and unexpected twists in the family’s story.

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The Silent Coup: A History of India’s Deep State – Josy Joseph

‘They were not expected to behave like the terrorists they were hunting. Even in the thickest fog of war, the law-abider and the law-breaker must be distinguished.’

India is justly proud of a parliamentary democracy that has never been threatened by a military coup. This is no mean feat in a neighbourhood where coups are common and notions of constitutionality are shaky. However, for decades now, India’s democratic standing has been steadily declining. An international analysis recently rated the country as only ‘partly free’, while another deemed it an ‘electoral autocracy’.

Josy Joseph investigates this decline and comes away with a key insight: that the process of confronting militancy has warped the system. As insurgencies erupted across India and grew increasingly sophisticated in the 1980s and ’90s, the security establishment struggled to keep up. Increasingly overwhelmed, the police forces, intelligence agencies, federal investigation agencies, tax departments, and the like came up with ingenious—at times sinister—solutions, from faking and framing evidence to staging massive terror attacks and even creating terrorist organisations. Over time, militancy became a flourishing, multi-faceted business enterprise.

From the Kashmiri militancy to the Sri Lankan civil war, from the attack on Mumbai to the long-term unrest in the Northeast, India’s ‘war on terror’ has made its security institutions more nationalistic and chauvinistic and, inevitably, more corrupt. Most dangerously, there is a near-complete capture of the security apparatus, whether investigative agencies, police, or intelligence, by the political executive—serving as stormtroopers with no accountability rather than as defenders of the Constitution.

The result of more than two decades of reporting on insurgencies, terrorism, and the security establishment, The Silent Coup is a wake-up call to the nation. You do not need a military coup to subvert democracy, Joseph says—in India, it has already been subverted.