The bestselling author of A History of the World in 6 Glasses charts an enlightening history of humanity through the foods we eat.Throughout history, food has done more than simply provide sustenance. It has acted as a tool of social transformation, political organization, geopolitical competition, industrial development, military conflict and economic expansion. An Edible History of Humanity is an account of how food has helped to shape and trans...

Throughout human history, certain drinks have done much more than just quench thirst. As Tom Standage relates with authority and charm, six of them have had a surprisingly pervasive influence on the course of history, becoming the defining drink during a pivotal historical period.A History of the World in 6 Glasses tells the story of humanity from the Stone Age to the twenty-first century through the lens of beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and cola. Beer was first made i...

The world can be an amazing place if you know the right questions to ask:How did carrots become orange? What's stopping us from having a four-day week? How can we remove all the broken bits of satellite from orbit? If everything is so terrible, why is the global suicide rate falling?The keen minds of the Economist love to look beyond everyday appearances to find out what really makes things tick. In this latest collection of The Economist Explains, they have gathered togeth...

Nel corso dei secoli il cibo ha rappresentato per l'uomo molto più che un semplice mezzo di sostentamento. E stato di volta in volta la causa di cambiamenti epocali (l'agricoltura è di fatto l'invenzione umana che ha permesso la nascita della civiltà moderna), strumento di potere, apripista delle prime reti commerciali globali, collante tra le società, arma ideologica e causa di conflitti. La sua influenza sulla storia mondiale può essere paragonata, scrive Tom Standage, a una "forchetta" ...

Throughout history, food has done more than simply provide sustenance. It has acted as a tool of social transformation, political organization, geopolitical competition, industrial development, military conflict and economic expansion. In An Edible History of Humanity Tom Standage serves up a hugely satisfying account of ways in which food has, indirectly, helped to shape and transform societies around the world. It is a dazzling account of gastronomic revolutions from pr...

Some questions you never think to ask. Others, you didn't know you didn't know. And some facts are so surprising they cry out for answers.What can a president actually do? Why do cities sink into the ground? Why is Australia seemingly invulnerable to recessions? Why do people in couples do more housework than singletons?The brilliant minds of the Economist collect these questions. Individually, they might seem bite-sized and inconsequential, but taken together they can reveal...

Which James Bond drinks the most martinis?What do Satanists really believe?How do hurricanes get their names?Why are bees disappearing?Is chocolate healthy?...Go Figure has the answers.Bringing together the very best from the clever people at The Economist, Go Figure explains the mind-boggling, the peculiar and the profound, things you might always have quietly wondered about and yet more you didn't know you didn't know...

From the bestselling author of A History of the World in 6 Glasses, an eye-opening road trip through 5,500 years of humans on the go, revealing how transportation inevitably shapes civilization.Hailed for their "colorful, smooth, and wonderfully engaging" writing (Smithsonian), Tom Standage's fleet-footed and surprising global histories have delighted readers and cemented his reputation as one of our leading interpreters of technologies past and present. N...

Tom Standage's fleet-footed and surprising global histories have delighted fans and sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Now, he returns with a provocative account of an overlooked form of technology-personal transportation-and explores how it has shaped societies and cultures over millennia.Beginning around 3,500 BCE with the wheel—a device that didn't catch on until a couple thousand years after its invention—Standage zips through the eras of horsepower, trains, and bicycles, re...

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.

Calling all problem-solvers drawn to the smart, quirky and counter-intuitive.Challenge yourself to join the dots, get your facts straight and sort the genuine from the fake in this puzzle book inspired by the sharpest brains at The Economist.Do stocks with catchy names outperform the market? Is Bohemian Rhapsody really longer than Hey Jude? And can geopolitics affect the popularity of dog breeds? Packed with hidden connections and...

The more we ponder, the odder the world can seem.How do footballers get their shirt numbers?Why does having daughters make couples more likely to divorce?How do you move a horse from one country to another?What counts as a journey into space?The keen minds at The Economist contemplate all these questions and more in their quest for the globe's most extraordinary quandaries and conund...