In Humankind: A Hopeful History author Rutger Bregman makes the argument that humans thrive in a crisis and that our innate kindness and cooperation have been the greatest factors in our long-term success on the planet.   If there is one belief that has united the left and the right, psychologists and philosophers, ancient thinkers and modern ones, it is the tacit assumption that humans are bad. It’s a notion that drives newspaper headlines and guides the laws that shape our lives. Read more…

The Victorian Internet tells the colorful story of the telegraph’s creation and remarkable impact, and of the visionaries, oddballs, and eccentrics who pioneered it, from the eighteenth-century French scientist Jean-Antoine Nollet to Samuel F. B. Morse and Thomas Edison. The electric telegraph nullified distance and shrank the world quicker and further than ever before or since, and its story mirrors and predicts that of the Internet in numerous ways. Read more…

Why Does the World Exist? tackles the “darkest question in all of philosophy” with “raffish erudition” (Dwight Garner, New York Times), Author Jim Holt explores the greatest metaphysical mystery of all: why is there something rather than nothing? This runaway bestseller, which has captured the imagination of critics and the public alike, traces our latest efforts to grasp the origins of the universe. Holt adopts the role of cosmological detective, traveling the globe to interview a host of celebrated scientists, philosophers, and writers, “testing the contentions of one against the theories of the other” (Jeremy Bernstein, Wall Street Journal). Read more…

In Aging Backwards PBS fitness personality and creator of the fitness phenomenon Essentrics, Miranda Esmonde-White offers an eye-opening guide to anti-aging that provides essential tools to help anyone turn back the clock and look and feel younger no matter what age. Miranda Esmonde-White trains everyone from prima ballerinas to professional hockey players to Cerebral palsy patients: what do they all have in common? All of these people are hoping to heal their bodies, prevent further injury, and move optimally and without pain. Read more…

In Covid-19: The Pandemic that Never Should Have Happened and How to Stop the Next One, the veteran science journalist, Debora MacKenzie, lays out the shocking story of how the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic happened and how to make sure this never happens again. Over the last 30 years of epidemics and pandemics, we learned nearly every lesson needed to stop this coronavirus outbreak in its tracks. We heeded almost none of them. The result is a pandemic on a scale never before seen in our lifetimes. Read more…

The Fatburn Fix offers a proven plan to optimize your health by reclaiming your natural ability to burn body fat for fuel. The ability to use body fat for energy is essential to health—but over decades of practice, renowned family physician Catherine Shanahan, M.D., observed that many of her patients could not burn their body fat between meals, trapping them in a downward spiral of hunger, fatigue, and weight gain. In The Fatburn Fix, Dr. Read more…

The Obesity Code is considered a landmark book from New York Times-bestselling author Dr. Jason Fung, one of the world’s leading experts on intermittent fasting for weight-loss and longevity, whose 5-step plan has helped thousands of people lose weight and achieve lasting health. Everything you believe about how to lose weight is wrong. Weight gain and obesity are driven by hormones—in everyone—and only by understanding the effects of insulin and insulin resistance can we achieve lasting weight loss. In this highly readable and provocative book, Dr. Read more…

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and now a documentary from Ken Burns on PBS, The Emperor of All Maladies is a magnificent, profoundly humane “biography” of cancer—from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic battles in the twentieth century to cure, control, and conquer it to a radical new understanding of its essence. Physician, researcher, and award-winning science writer, Siddhartha Mukherjee examines cancer with a cellular biologist’s precision, a historian’s perspective, and a biographer’s passion. Read more…

Why do we do the things we do? Over a decade in the making, this game-changing book by Robert Sapolsky is A genre-shattering attempt to answer that question as fully as perhaps only he could, looking at it from every angle. Sapolsky’s storytelling concept is delightful but it also has a powerful intrinsic logic: he starts by looking at the factors that bear on a person’s reaction in the precise moment a behavior occurs, and then hops back in time from there, in stages, ultimately ending up at the deep history of our species and its genetic inheritance. Read more…

Magisterial in its breadth of perspective and depth of research, The Great Influenza provides us with a precise and sobering model as we confront the epidemics looming on our own horizon. As Jon M. Barry concludes, “The final lesson of 1918, a simple one yet one most difficult to execute, is that…those in authority must retain the public’s trust. The way to do that is to distort nothing, to put the best face on nothing, to try to manipulate no one. Lincoln said that first, and best. A leader must make whatever horror exists concrete. Read more…