Based on a wildly popular UC Berkeley course, how to use scientists’ tricks of the trade to make the best decisions and solve the hardest problems in age of uncertainty and overwhelming information.In our deluge of information, it’s getting harder and harder to distinguish the revelatory from the contradictory. How do we make health decisions in the face of conflicting medical advice? Does the research cited in that article even show what the authors claim? How can...

Based on a wildly popular UC Berkeley course, a primer on how to think critically, make sound decisions, and solve problems—individually and collectively—using scientists’ tricks of the trade.In our deluge of information, it's getting harder and harder to distinguish the revelatory from the contradictory. How do we make health decisions in the face of conflicting medical advice? Does that article on GMOs even show what the authors claim? How can we navigate the nex...

Two New York Times-bestselling psychologists explain the science of cons—and how we can avoid themFrom phishing scams to Ponzi schemes, fraudulent science to fake art, chess cheaters to crypto hucksters, and marketers to magicians, our world brims with deception. In Nobody’s Fool, psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris show us how to avoid being taken in. They describe the key habits of thinking and reasoning that serve us well most o...

Popular science writer Philip Ball explores a range of sciences to map our answers to a huge, philosophically rich question: How do we even begin to think about minds that are not human?Sciences from zoology to astrobiology, computer science to neuroscience, are seeking to understand minds in their own distinct disciplinary realms. Taking a uniquely broad view of minds and where to find them—including in plants, aliens, and God—Philip Ball pulls the pieces together...

An expert on ethical leadership analyzes the complicated history of business people who tried to marry the pursuit of profits with virtuous organizational practices—from British industrialist Robert Owen to American retailer John Cash Penney and jeans maker Levi Strauss to such modern-day entrepreneurs Anita Roddick and Tom Chappell.Today’s business leaders are increasingly pressured by citizens, consumers, and government officials to address urgent social and envi...

In this outstanding collection, essayist Christopher Hitchens's works are shared–a must-have for Hitchens completists seeking a further understanding of his brilliant mind.Anthologized here for the first time, A Hitch in Time is a choice selection of Christopher Hitchens’s finest reviews, diary entries, and essays–along with a smattering of ferocious letters.A Hitch in Time is a banquet of entertaining stories ranging from his thoughts on ...

A seasoned peacebuilder and acclaimed expert on violence explains the five reasons why conflict (rarely) blooms into war and how to interrupt that deadly processIt’s easy to overlook the underlying strategic forces of war, to see it solely as a series of errors, accidents, and emotions gone awry. It’s also easy to forget that war shouldn’t happen—and most of the time it doesn’t. Around the world, there are millions of hostile rivalries, yet only a fraction erupt in...

A soaring intellectual narrative starring the radical, brilliant, and provocative philosophers Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, and Ayn Rand by the critically acclaimed author of Time of the Magicians, Wolfram EilenbergerThe period from 1933 to 1943 was one of the darkest and most chaotic in human history, as the Second World War unfolded with unthinkable cruelty. It was also a crucial decade in the dramatic, intersecting lives of some of hi...

In the spirit of Ben Macintyre’s greatest spy nonfiction, the truly unbelievable and untold story of Frederick Rutland—a debonair British WWI hero, flying ace, fixture of Los Angeles society, and friend of Golden Age Hollywood stars—who flipped to become a spy for Japan in the lead-up to the attack on Pearl Harbor.Frederick Rutland was an accomplished aviator, British WWI war hero, and real-life James Bond. He was the first pilot to take off and land a plane on a s...

“Compelling,” (Cal Newport) “Liberating,” (Amy Dickinson) and “as entertaining as it is important” (Steven Levitt) — How to Do Nothing meets Think Again in this lively and inspiring exploration of how quitting is, counterintuitively, the key to success."If you’re thinking about quitting a job or leaving a marriage, don’t—at least not until you have read Quitting: A Life Strategy. It’s a thoughtful book that challenges con...

Nuclear weapons are, today, as important as they were during the Cold War, and some experts say we could be as close to a nuclear catastrophe now as we were at the height of that conflict. Despite that, conversations about these bombs generally often happen in past tense.In Countdown, science journalist Sarah Scoles uncovers a different atomic reality: the nuclear age's present. Drawing from years of on-the-ground reporting at the nation's nuclear weapons labs, Scoles inte...

**“There are words that are so familiar they obscure rather than illuminate the thing they mean, and ‘learning’ is such a word. It seems so ordinary, everyone does it. Actually it’s more of a black box, which Dehaene cracks open to reveal the awesome secrets within.”—The New York Times Book ReviewAn illuminating dive into the latest science on our brain's remarkable learning abilities and the potential of the machines we program to imitate them**The human brain is ...