**AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!An NPR Best Book of 2022"The questions throughout What If? 2 are equal parts brilliant, gross, and wonderfully absurd and the answers are thorough, deeply researched, and great fun. . . . Science isn’t easy, but in Munroe’s capable hands, it surely can be fun." —TIMEThe #1 New York Times bestselling author of What If? and How To answers more of the weirdest questions you nev...

A special 10th anniversary edition of the million-copy bestseller What If? from the creator of the wildly popular webcomic xkcd—revised and annotated with brand-new illustrations and answers to the most absurd hypothetical questions you never thought to ask.Fans of xkcd ask Munroe a lot of strange questions: What if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90 percent the speed of light? How fast can you hit a speed bump while driving and li...

AN INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER**“How To will make you laugh as you learn…With How To, you can't help but appreciate the glorious complexity of our universe and the amazing breadth of humanity's effort to comprehend it. If you want some lightweight edification, you won't go wrong with How To.” —CNET“[How To] has science and jokes in it, so 10/10 can recommend.” —Simone Giertz...

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of What If? and How To answers more of the weirdest questions you never thought to askThe millions of people around the world who read and loved What If? still have questions, and those questions are getting stranger. Thank goodness xkcd creator Randall Munroe is here to help. Planning to ride a fire pole from the Moon back to Earth? The hardest part is sticking the landing. Hopin...

A special tenth anniversary edition of the million-copy bestseller What If? from the creator of the wildly popular webcomic xkcd—revised and annotated with answers to important questions you never thought to ask.Fans of xkcd ask Munroe a lot of strange questions: What if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at ninety percent the speed of light? How fast can you hit a speed bump while driving and live? If there was a robot apocalypse, how l...

The world's most entertaining and useless self-help guide, from the brilliant mind behind the wildly popular webcomic xkcd and the #1 New York Times bestsellers What If? and Thing ExplainerFor any task you might want to do, there's a right way, a wrong way, and a way so monumentally complex, excessive, and inadvisable that no one would ever try it. How To is a guide to the third kind of approach. It's full of highly impractical a...

A collection of twenty pieces that represent the best science and nature writing published the previous year and explores our ever-changing world.On his selections for this year’s The Best American Science and Nature Writing, Randall Munroe writes, “Rather than simply telling people facts, I leaned toward articles that explained why we knew those facts, and why we cared, sharing portraits of people trying earnestly to understand the world around t...

Romans! Madrigals! The Dark Ages! Revolutions! Trumpets! The Oranges of The First World War! All of this (except trumpets) and more, is covered in this definitive, easy-clean history of all world history so far, written by the 21st Century's leading historian, philosopher and thinkerer Philomena Cunk.Focussing on the inventions, art, and brainboxes that made the modern world the unbearable place it is today, The World According To Cunk is the history book ...

Tokyo, 1960s. An unassuming but respected homicide detective, Eitaro Imanishi has a knack for both writing haiku and solving crimes. But when a mysterious unidentified body appears on the tracks of a rail yard, Imanishi has his work cut out for him. Soon, he finds himself on a strange chase that takes him from the hip hangouts of avant-garde Tokyo to a spa in rural Honshu. And all the while, the body count is climbing.“First-rate … In the classic tradition of Georges Simenon’s Insp...

Brought to you by Penguin.From the former director of GCHQ, learn the methodology used by the British intelligence agencies to reach judgements, establish the right level of confidence and act decisively.Intelligence officers discern the truth. They gather information - often contradictory or incomplete - and, with it, they build the most accurate possible image of the world. With the stakes at their absolute highest, they must then decide ...

WINNER OF THE 2024 SOMERSET MAUGHAM AWARDIts name means 'centre of the world', and since the dawn of history the Mediterranean Sea has formed the shared horizon of innumerable cultures. Here, history has blurred with legend. The glittering surface of the sea conceals the remnants of lost civilisations, wrecked treasure ships and the bones of long-drowned sailors, traders and modern refugees.Of the many cities that dot this ancient coastline, Tyre, Carthage,...

Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings reveals for the first time the unorthodox culture behind one of the world's most innovative, imaginative, and successful companiesThere has never before been a company like Netflix. It has led nothing short of a revolution in the entertainment industries, generating billions of dollars in annual revenue while capturing the imaginations of hundreds of millions of people in over 190 countries. But to reach these great heights, Netflix,...