We're wrapping up our collection of summery Book Bites with a few lessons from Smiley Poswolsky's "Friendship in the Age of Loneliness: An Optimist's Guide to Connection."• Subscribe to our newsletter• Download our app• Join our club (code DAILY gets you 10% off)• Send us an email

Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at UC Berkeley who helped Pixar make “Inside Out,” explores the history and science of awe.

When David Pogue (CBS Sunday Morning) realized that we are already living through the beginnings of climate chaos, he decided to write a book full of action plans for riding out every climate catastrophe that Mother Nature might throw at us.• Download the Next Big Idea app: nextbigideaclub.com/app/

Ice ice baby! Today, journalist and historian Amy Brady shares the astonishing 200-year history of ice in America, from ice rinks to ice cream to modern-day miracles like cryotherapy breast-cancer treatments.

We're trying something different this week. Instead of hearing from one author, you'll hear from five. Together, they'll help you figure out how to have the perfect summer. Up first: comedian and podcaster Jamie Loftus shares a few tasty insights from her New York Times bestseller "Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs."• Use code DAILY to get 10% off your subscription at nextbigideaclub.com

What can the global response to climate change tell us about the health of modern democratic states?• Ben Ansell is professor of comparative democratic institutions at Oxford and author of “Why Politics Fail”• Want to go behind the scenes of this show? Sign up for our newsletter• To hear more interviews, audio e-courses, and hundreds of author-read book summaries, download the Next Big Idea app

Today, Ben explains why democracy and security are such uneasy bedfellows.• Ben Ansell is professor of comparative democratic institutions at Oxford and author of “Why Politics Fail”• Want to go behind the scenes of this show? Sign up for our newsletter• To hear more interviews, audio e-courses, and hundreds of author-read book summaries, download the Next Big Idea app

Why is it so hard to create a sense of national unity and civic responsibility here in the Divided States of America?• Ben Ansell is professor of comparative democratic institutions at Oxford and author of “Why Politics Fail”• Want to go behind the scenes of this show? Sign up for our newsletter• To hear more interviews, audio e-courses, and hundreds of author-read book summaries, download the Next Big Idea app

Why has the American political system failed to arrest accelerating inequality, and is there anything we can do about it?• Ben Ansell is professor of comparative democratic institutions at Oxford and author of “Why Politics Fail”• Want to go behind the scenes of this show? Sign up for our newsletter• To hear more interviews, audio e-courses, and hundreds of author-read book summaries, download the Next Big Idea app

As you may have noticed, modern democracies aren’t doing so hot. In country after country, income inequality soars while solidarity plummets. Resentment simmers while national unity cools. In places like the US and the UK, beacons of liberal democracy, words like “autocracy” and “anarchy” are thrown around with alarming regularity. Meanwhile, our ability to take action on existential threats like AI and climate change is stymied by sniping politicians who are obsessed with point-scoring and eerily disinclined to agree on a shared set of facts.Given all this, it’s not unreasonable to wonder: Are we doomed?This week, on the 247th anniversary of America’s birthday — and the dawn of the modern democratic experiment — we’ll get to the bottom of that unsettling question with Ben Ansell, professor of comparative democratic institutions at Oxford and author of “Why Politics Fail.”