We Are Capable of Better: Essays on People, Power & Planet & Why Inevitability Is a Lie

For readers of Matthew Syed, Malcolm Gladwell and Sarah Wilson.

Some things look inevitable. The school that was never designed for your child. The governance failures hiding in plain sight. The prevention that is always cheaper than the cure — and never happens. The systems that exhaust the people inside them while protecting the people at the top.

M.B. Baker doesn’t accept inevitable.

In essays spanning education, health, justice, power, the living world, and the quiet architecture of ordinary life, Baker moves between the systemic and the deeply personal — from Post Office governance failures to cancer wards, from neurodiversity in classrooms to what we owe the unborn, from the cost of professional silence to the question of what we are each stewarding with the power and time we have.

This is not a book that argues everything is broken. It is a book that argues we are too quick to call what is broken inevitable — and that the people inside our institutions, our systems, and our own lives are capable of choosing differently. What is designed can be designed better.

Enter the collection anywhere. Each essay stands alone. Together, they make the case that we are capable of better.

For the curious and reflective, at any age.