Somebody Should Do Something: How Anyone Can Help Create Social Change

Michael Brownstein · Alex Madva · Daniel Kelly

Feb 2026 · Michael Brownstein, Alex Madva, and Daniel Kelly · Narrated by John Keating

About this audiobook

Changing the world is difficult. One reason is that the most important problems, like climate change, racism, and poverty, are structural. They emerge from our collective practices: laws, economies, history, culture, norms, and built environments. The dilemma is that there is no way to make structural change without individual people making different—more structure-facing—decisions. In Somebody Should Do Something, Michael Brownstein, Alex Madva, and Daniel Kelly show us how we can connect our personal choices to structural change and why individual choices matter, though not in the way people usually think.

The authors paint a new picture of how social change happens, arguing that our most powerful personal choices are those that springboard us into working together with others—warehouse worker Chris Smalls’s unionization at Amazon is one powerful example. Taking inspiration from the writer Bill McKibben, they stress how one “important thing an individual can do is be somewhat less of an individual.”

Organized into three main parts, the book first diagnoses the problem of “either/or” thinking about social change, which stems from the false choice of making better personal choices or changing the system. Then it offers a different way to think about social change, anchored in a new picture of human nature emerging across the social sciences. Finally, the authors explore ways of putting this picture into practice. Neither a how-to manual nor an activist’s guide, Somebody Should Do Something pairs stories with science (plus some jokes) to help readers recognize their own power, turning resignation about climate change and racial injustice into actions that transform the world.

About the author

Alex Madva is Professor of Philosophy, Director of the California Center for Ethics & Policy, and Co-Director of the Digital Humanities Consortium at Cal Poly Pomona. His teaching and research explore how developments in technology and the social sciences inform our understanding of the mind and justice. He co-wrote Somebody Should Do Something: How Anyone Can Help Create Social Change (MIT 2025) and co-edited An Introduction to Implicit Bias: Knowledge, Justice, and the Social Mind (Routledge 2020) and The Movement for Black Lives: Philosophical Perspectives (Oxford, 2021). Madva received his BA in Philosophy and English at Tufts University and his MA and PhD from Columbia University, and previously held positions as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at UC-Berkeley (2012-2014) and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Vassar College (2014-2015). He is engaged in ongoing, collaborative research testing classroom-based interventions to reduce achievement gaps, increase belonging, and break down structural barriers for students from underrepresented groups in disciplines such as physics, economics, mathematics, and philosophy. He has run numerous workshops and training sessions on bias, stereotype threat, impostor feelings, Title IX, and intergroup cooperation for schools, courts, and wider audiences. Daniel Kelly is Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University, where he is also the Director of the Cognition, Agency, and Intelligence Center. His research focuses on issues at the intersection of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, moral theory, and evolution. He is the author of Yuck! The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust (MIT 2011). John won the 2019 Callaway Award for best actor in a classical role performed in New York for his work in the O'Casey Cycle at Irish Rep. He is from Tipperary in Ireland and has been a New York based theatre and film actor since 1994. John is married to Laura Knight-Keating and they have two kids.