We live in an age of ignorance. This book offers a guide to how we got here—and how we might escape.From obfuscations of climate science to the myriad deceptions inhering in language, Ignorance Unmasked explores how agnotology—the study of ignorance—can help us better grasp: Why don't we know what we don't know? What are the obstacles to knowledge, and how might those be overcome?Ignorance has countless agents and authors; it gets deliberately manu...

A favorite icon for cigarette manufacturers across China since the mid-twentieth century has been the panda, with factories from Shanghai to Sichuan using cuddly cliché to market tobacco products. The proliferation of panda-branded cigarettes coincides with profound, yet poorly appreciated, shifts in the worldwide tobacco trade. Over the last fifty years, transnational tobacco companies and their allies have fueled a tripling of the world's annual consumption of cigarettes. At the forefron...

From the candy bar to the cigarette, records to roller coasters, a technological revolution during the last quarter of the nineteenth century precipitated a colossal shift in human consumption and sensual experience. Food, drink, and many other consumer goods came to be mass-produced, bottled, canned, condensed, and distilled, unleashing new and intensified surges of pleasure, delight, thrill—and addiction.In Packaged Pleasures, Gary S. Cross and Robert N. Proctor delve in...

The cigarette is the deadliest artifact in the history of human civilization. It is also one of the most beguiling, thanks to more than a century of manipulation at the hands of tobacco industry chemists. In Golden Holocaust, Robert N. Proctor draws on reams of formerly-secret industry documents to explore how the cigarette came to be the most widely-used drug on the planet, with six trillion sticks sold per year. He paints a harrowing picture of tobacco manufacturers conspiring t...

Please note that this is a Chinese language edition.A favorite icon for cigarette manufacturers across China since the mid-twentieth century has been the panda, with factories from Shanghai to Sichuan using cuddly cliché to market tobacco products. The proliferation of panda-branded cigarettes coincides with profound, yet poorly appreciated, shifts in the worldwide tobacco trade. Over the last fifty years, transnational tobacco companies and their allies have fuele...

"Empowering and thoroughly researched, this book offers useful contemporary analysis and possible solutions to one of the greatest threats to democracy." — Kirkus ReviewsEditors' choice, The New York Times Book ReviewRecommended reading, Scientific AmericanWhy should we care about having true beliefs? And why do demonstrably false beliefs persist and spread despite bad, even fatal, consequenc...

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERA NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2018ONE OF THE ECONOMIST'S BOOKS OF THE YEARIf you think the world is coming to an end, think again: people are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, and while our problems are formidable, the solutions lie in the Enlightenment ideal of using reason and science. By the author of the new book, Rationality.Is the w...

The landmark, prize-winning, international bestselling examination of how a gender gap in data perpetuates bias and disadvantages women.#1 International Bestseller * Winner of the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award * Winner of the Royal Society Science Book PrizeData is fundamental to the modern world. From economic development to health care to education and public policy, we rely on numbers to allocate resources ...

INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • “A cri de coeur that takes aim at the tech industry for abandoning its history of helping America and its allies.”—The Wall Street JournalFrom the Palantir co-founder, one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People of 2025, and his deputy, a critically-acclaimed and sweeping indictment of the West’s culture of complacency, arguing that timid leadership, intellectual ...

In March 2020, liberal democracy ground to a sudden stop.Like the Reichstag Fire of 1933, historians may never know how SARS-CoV-2 came about. For scientists, exploring its origins would be a rewarding endeavor if it weren't precluded by an immovable force-the jackboot of Xi Jinping's Chinese Communist Party.But while intelligence agencies spent months investigating the virus's origins, the world employed an unprecedented response that proved far more devastating than the v...

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • "A stunning exposé of why Black people in our society 'live sicker and die quicker'—an eye-opening game changer."—Oprah DailyFrom an award-winning writer at the New York Times Magazine and a contributor to the 1619 Project comes a landmark book that tells the full story of racial health disparities in America, revealing the toll racism takes on individuals and the health of our nation.In 2018, Lin...

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for CriticismHow neoliberals turned to nature to defend inequality after the end of the Cold WarNeoliberals should have seen the end of the Cold War as a total victory—but they didn’t. Instead, they saw the chameleon of communism changing colors from red to green. The poison of civil rights, feminism, and environmentalism ran through the veins of the body politic and they needed an antidote.