A critical biography of the seventeenth-century scientist’s expansive life and work. Robert Hooke was England’s first professional scientist and a pioneer of science communication. He was also one of the earliest to write a guide for how others might...

A suitably engrossing investigation of attention through many disciplines and ways of life, from neuroscience to surfing. If there is one thing we are short on these days, it’s attention. Attention is central to everything we do and think, yet it is...

The “remarkable” story of America's secret post-WWII science programs (The Boston Globe), from the New York Times bestselling author of Area 51. In the chaos following World War II, the U.S. government faced many difficult decisions, including what to do...

A tour of Mars in the human imagination, from ancient astrologers to modern explorers. Mars and its secrets have fascinated and mystified humans since ancient times. For the Love of Mars surveys the red planet’s place in the human imagination, beginning...

For the first time, the story of how and why we have plumbed the mysteries of reading, and why it matters today. Reading is perhaps the essential practice of modern civilization. For centuries, it has been seen as key to both personal fulfillment and...

A New Yorker and Economist Best Book of the Year Two hundred years of modern science and culture told through one family history. This momentous biography tells the story of the Huxleys: the Victorian natural historian T. H. Huxley (“Darwin’s Bulldog”)...

A contemporary defense of conservationist Aldo Leopold’s vision for human interaction with the environment. Informed by his experiences as a hunter, forester, wildlife manager, ecologist, conservationist, and professor, Aldo Leopold developed a view he...

A Nobel laureate offers a brief lesson on physics’ biggest mystery, accessibly explaining the two quantum revolutions that changed our understanding of reality. At the start of the twentieth century, the first quantum revolution upset our vision of the...

"Our civilization has the odd habit of printing books full of lines. We call these notebooks "ruled". It's an orderly, lawful word, as befits an orderly, lawful document. Of course, in a ruled notebook, the rules are there to invite writing, drawing, and...

“Brilliant. . . . An absorbing read and a potent lesson in moral behavior—both of rodents and of humans.”—Deborah Blum, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Poison Squad • “A fascinating read about an immensely influential scientist.”—Robert M. Sapolsky,...

An essential investigation that pulls back the curtain on automation, like AI, to show human workers' hidden labor. Artificial Intelligence fuels both enthusiasm and panic. Technologists are inclined to give their creations leeway, pretend they're...

The instant New York Times bestseller!A Wall Street Journal Best Science Book of the Year!A Popular Science Best Science Book of the Year!From a top scientist and the creator of the hugely popular web comic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, a...

An instant classic: The most urgent story of our times, brilliantly reframed, beautifully toldBy 1979, we knew all that we know now about the science of climate change--what was happening, why it was happening, and how to stop it. Over the next ten...

In our digital world, we are confused by privacy – what is public, what is private? We are also challenged by it, the conditions of privacy so uncertain we become unsure about our rights to it. We may choose to share personal information, but often do so...

We are now acutely aware, as if all of the sudden, that data matters enormously to how we live. How did information come to be so integral to what we can do? How did we become people who effortlessly present our lives in social media profiles and who are...

Science and technology have immense authority and influence in our society, yet their working remains little understood. The conventional perception of science in Western societies has been modified in recent years by the work of philosophers,...

We are a weird species. Like other species, we have a culture. But by comparison with other species, we are strangely unstable: human cultures self-transform, diverge, and multiply with bewildering speed. They vary, radically and rapidly, from time to...

Haas, Mary R.

A masterful, timely, fully authorized biography of the great and hugely influential biologist and naturalist E. O. Wilson, one of the most ground-breaking and controversial scientists of our time—from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of...

When Christa Kuljian arrived on the Harvard College campus as a first-year student in the fall of 1980 with copies of Our Bodies, Ourselves and Ms. magazine, she was concerned that the women’s movement had peaked in the previous decade. She soon learned,...