Lenin once said, "There are decades when nothing happens and weeks when decades happen." This is one of those times when history has sped up. CNN host and best-selling author Fareed Zakaria helps readers to understand the nature of a post-pandemic w…
Richard H. Thaler has spent his career studying the radical notion that the central agents in the economy are humans predictable, error-prone individuals. Misbehaving is his arresting, frequently hilarious account of the struggle to bring an academi…
Uber. Airbnb. Amazon. Apple. PayPal. All of these companies disrupted their markets when they launched. Today they are industry leaders. What s the secret to their success?These cutting-edge businesses are built on platforms: two-sided markets that…
Bestselling and much loved author Neil Gaiman, whose novel American Gods has been adapted into a major television series, brings vividly to life the stories of Norse mythology that have inspired his own extraordinary writing in this number one Sunda…
Introducing an instant classic-master storyteller Neil Gaiman presents a dazzling version of the great Norse myths.
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations is David S. Landes's acclaimed, best-selling exploration of one of the most contentious and hotly debated questions of our time: Why do some nations achieve economic success while others remain mired in poverty? The…
Some uncertainties are resolvable. The insurance industry's actuarial tables and the gambler's roulette wheel both yield to the tools of probability theory. Most situations in life, however, involve a deeper kind of uncertainty, a radical uncertaint…
Forty years ago, Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky wrote a series of breathtakingly original studies undoing our assumptions about the decision-making process. Their papers showed the ways in which the human mind erred, systemat…
Every day, funeral director Caitlin Doughty receives dozens of questions about death. What would happen to an astronaut's body if it were pushed out of a space shuttle? Do people poop when they die? Can Grandma have a Viking funeral? In the traditio…
Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz's landmark book, now with a new foreword.
But this book is more than a guide to foreign languages; it goes deep into the roots of all knowledge as it explores the history of speech. It lights up the dim pathways of prehistory and unfolds the story of the slow growth of human expression fro…
It was wonderful to be young and working on Wall Street in the 1980s: never before had so many twenty-four-year-olds made so much money in so little time. After you learned the trick of it, all you had to do was pick up the phone and the money poure…
It was a beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functions without the aid of gods, that religious fear is damaging to human life, that pleasure and virtue are not opposites but intertwined, and that matter is made up of very…
On the night of December 2, 1943, the Luftwaffe bombed a critical Allied port in Bari, Italy, sinking seventeen ships and killing over a thousand servicemen and hundreds of civilians. Caught in the surprise air raid was the John Harvey, an American…
"Guaranteed to make blood boil." --Janet Maslin, New York TimesIn Michael Lewis's game-changing bestseller, a small group of Wall Street iconoclasts realize that the U.S. stock market has been rigged for the benefit of insiders. They band together--…
Mama's Last Hug is a fascinating exploration of the rich emotional lives of animals, beginning with Mama, a chimpanzee matriarch who formed a deep bond with biologist Jan van Hooff. Her story and others like it--from dogs "adopting" the injuries of…
Self-described "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet" Audre Lorde is an unforgettable voice in twentieth-century literature, and one of the first to center the experiences of black, queer women. This essential reader showcases her indelible contrib…
The brain is an absolute marvel--the seat of our consciousness, the pinnacle (so far) of evolutionary progress, and the engine of human experience. But it's also messy, fallible, and about 50,000 years out of date. We cling to superstitions, remembe…
It's happened to all of us at some point. You walk into the kitchen, or flip open your laptop, or stride confidently up to a lectern, filled with purpose--and suddenly haven't the foggiest idea what you're doing. Welcome to your idiot brain.Yes, it…
From the author of The Blind Side and Moneyball, The Big Short tells the story of four outsiders in the world of high-finance who predict the credit and housing bubble collapse before anyone else. The film adaptation by Adam McKay (Anchorman I and I…
Beautifully written and deeply researched, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. In wrestling with the question of wh…
The next big human pandemic--the next disease cataclysm, perhaps on the scale of AIDS or the 1918 influenza--is likely to be caused by a new virus coming to humans from wildlife. Experts call such an event "spillover" and they warn us to brace ourse…
A finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction, Nicholas Carr's bestseller The Shallows has become a foundational book in one of the most important debates of our time: As we enjoy the internet's bounties, are we sacrificing our ability to rea…
On the morning of August 23, 1973, a man wearing a wig, makeup, and a pair of sunglasses walked into the main branch of Sveriges Kreditbank, a prominent bank in central Stockholm. He ripped out a submachine gun, fired it into the ceiling, and shoute…
Fumio Sasaki is not an enlightened minimalism expert or organizing guru like Marie Kondo--he's just a regular guy who was stressed out and constantly comparing himself to others, until one day he decided to change his life by saying goodbye to every…
What separates your mind from an animal's? Maybe you think it's your ability to design tools, your sense of self, or your grasp of past and future-all traits that have helped us define ourselves as the planet's preeminent species. But in recent deca…
How did we come to have minds? For centuries, psychologists, poets, and philosophers have struggled to explain how the human mind developed its unrivaled ability to create, imagine, and think. According to Daniel C. Dennett, a crucial shift in the e…
How did we come to have minds?For centuries, this question has intrigued psychologists, physicists, poets, and philosophers, who have wondered how the human mind developed its unrivaled ability to create, imagine, and explain. Disciples of Darwin ha…
Informing these insights is a new understanding of how Darwinian processes underlie the brain's development and function as well as its evolution. In contrast to much contemporary neuroscience that treats the brain as no more or less than a compute…
For centuries, poets and philosophers extolled the benefits of a walk in the woods: Beethoven drew inspiration from rocks and trees; Wordsworth composed while tromping over the heath; and Nikola Tesla conceived the electric motor while visiting a pa…
Both Helter Skelter and Vincent Bugliosi's subsequent Till Death Us Do Part won Edgar Allan Poe Awards for best true-crime book of the year.
From distorted graphs and biased samples to misleading averages, there are countless statistical dodges that lend cover to anyone with an ax to grind or a product to sell. With abundant examples and illustrations, Darrell Huff's lively and engaging…
There's a reason today's ubiquitous pop hits are so hard to ignore--they're designed that way. The Song Machine goes behind the scenes to offer an insider's look at the global hit factories manufacturing the songs that have everyone hooked. Full of…
Although we have heard the music of J. S. Bach in countless performances and recordings, the composer himself still comes across only as an enigmatic figure in a single familiar portrait. As we mark the 250th anniversary of Bach's death, author Chri…
This masterful history encompasses the heart of the Pacific War--the period between mid-1942 and mid-1944--when parallel Allied counteroffensives north and south of the equator washed over Japan's far-flung island empire like a "conquering tide," co…
Psychoanalysis is certainly one of the most contested areas of debate within feminism. This book presents articles on feminine sexuality by Lacan and members of the ecole freudienne, the school of psychoanalysis that Lacan directed in Paris from 196…
The Blind Watchmaker is the seminal text for understanding evolution today. In the eighteenth century, theologian William Paley developed a famous metaphor for creationism: that of the skilled watchmaker. In The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins cra…
Fuchsia Dunlop trained as a chef in China's leading Sichuan cooking school and possesses the rare ability to write recipes for authentic Chinese food that you can make at home. Following her two seminal volumes on Sichuan and Hunan cooking, Every Gr…
Wide Sargasso Sea, a masterpiece of modern fiction, was Jean Rhys's return to the literary center stage. She had a startling early career and was known for her extraordinary prose and haunting women characters. With Wide Sargasso Sea, her last and b…
On the night of the festive holiday of Shrove Tuesday in 1672 Anna Fessler died after eating one of her neighbor's buttery cakes. Could it have been poisoned? Drawing on vivid court documents, eyewitness accounts, and an early autopsy report, histor…
Centuries ago in middle Europe, a coded language appeared, scrawled in graffiti and spoken only by people who were "wiz" (in the know). This hybrid language, dubbed Rotwelsch, facilitated survival for people in flight--whether escaping persecution o…
The Earth teems with life: in its oceans, forests, skies and cities. Yet there's a black hole at the heart of biology. We do not know why complex life is the way it is, or, for that matter, how life first began. In The Vital Question, award-winning…
Fascinated by our pervasive fear of dead bodies, mortician Caitlin Doughty embarked on a global expedition to discover how other cultures care for the dead. From Zoroastrian sky burials to wish-granting Bolivian skulls, she investigates the world's…
In Kenan's fictional territory of Tims Creek, North Carolina, an old man rages in his nursing home, a parson beats up an adulterer, a rich man is haunted by a hog, and an elderly woman turns unwitting miracle worker. A retired plumber travels to Man…
Set during Mussolini's 1935 invasion of Ethiopia, The Shadow King takes us back to the first real conflict of World War II, casting light on the women soldiers who were left out of the historical record. At its heart is orphaned maid Hirut, who find…
Widely heralded on publication as a "must-read" (Military Review) and "important window on America's battle with al-Qaeda" (Washington Post), Ali Soufan's revelatory account of the war on terror as seen from its front lines changed the way we unders…
CIA operations officer Michael Dunne is tasked with infiltrating an Italian news organization that smells like a front for an enemy intelligence service. Headed by an American journalist, the self-styled bandits run a cyber operation unlike anything…
First published in 1968, Weimar Culture is one of the masterworks of Peter Gay's distinguished career. A study of German culture between the two wars, the book brilliantly traces the rise of the artistic, literary, and musical culture that bloomed e…
Passionate and irreverent, Mortal Trash transports the readers into a world of wit, lament, and desire. In a section called "Over the Bright and Darkened Lands," canonical poems are torqued into new shapes. "Except Thou Ravish Me," reimagines John D…
