It was Richard Feynman's outrageous and scintillating method of teaching that earned him legendary status among students and professors of physics. From 1961 to 1963, Feynman delivered a series of lectures at the California Institute of Technology that revolutionized the teaching of physics. In Six Not-So-Easy Pieces, taken from these famous Lectures on Physics, Feynman delves into one of the most revolutionary discoveries in twentieth-century physics: Einstein's theory of relativity.

At a moment when America’s tech gods are more influential than ever, Hubris Maximus is a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of lionizing magnetic leaders. Washington Post journalist Faiz Siddiqui offers a gripping, detailed portrait of a singularly messy and lucrative period in Musk’s career, as well as a case study in the power of using one’s platform to shape the public narrative in a world that can’t turn away from its screens.

When AI expert and investigative journalist Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI in 2019, she thought they were the good guys. Founded as a nonprofit with safety enshrined as its core mission, the organization was meant, its leader Sam Altman told us, to act as a check against more purely mercantile, and potentially dangerous, forces. What could go wrong?

Superagency offers a roadmap for using AI inclusively and adaptively to improve our lives and create positive change. While acknowledging challenges like disinformation and potential job changes, the book focuses on AI’s immense potential to increase individual agency and create better outcomes for society as a whole. Imagine AI tutors personalizing education for each child, researchers rapidly discovering cures for diseases like Alzheimer's and cancer, and AI advisors empowering people to navigate complex systems and achieve their goals.

With the gravitas of Joan Biskupic and the irreverence of Elie Mystal, Leah Litman brings her signature wit to the question of what’s gone wrong at One First Street. In Lawless, she argues that the Supreme Court is no longer practicing law; it’s running on vibes. By “vibes,” Litman means legal-ish claims that repackage the politics of conservative grievance and dress them up in robes. Major decisions adopt the language and posture of the law, while in fact displaying a commitment to protecting a single minority: the religious conservatives and Republican officials.

The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts is the first book in The Great Mental Models series designed to upgrade your thinking with the best, most useful and powerful tools so you always have the right one on hand. This volume details nine of the most versatile all-purpose mental models you can use right away to improve your decision making, your productivity, and how clearly you see the world.

In Love and Math, renowned mathematician Edward Frenkel reveals a side of math we've never seen, suffused with all the beauty and elegance of a work of art. In this heartfelt and passionate book, Frenkel shows that mathematics, far from occupying a specialist niche, goes to the heart of all matter, uniting us across cultures, time, and space.

For decades, The Year's Best Science Fiction has been the most widely read short science fiction anthology of its kind. Now, after 35 annual collections comes the ultimate in science fiction anthologies. In The Very Best of the Best, legendary editor Gardner Dozois selects the finest short stories for this landmark collection, including short fiction from authors such as Charles Stross, Michael Swanwick, Nancy Kress, Greg Egan, Stephen Baxter, Pat Cadigan, and any many more.

The German Peasants’ War was the greatest popular uprising in Western Europe before the French Revolution. In 1524 and 1525, it swept across Germany with astonishing speed as well over a hundred thousand people massed in armed bands to demand a new and more egalitarian order. The peasants took control of vast areas of southern and middle Germany, torching and plundering the monasteries, convents, and castles that stood in their way. But they proved no match for the forces of the lords.

Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Ron Chernow illuminates the full, fascinating, and complex life of the writer long celebrated as the father of American literature, Mark Twain.

Every physicist agrees quantum mechanics is among humanity's finest scientific achievements. But ask what it means, and the result will be a brawl. For a century, most physicists have followed Niels Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation and dismissed questions about the reality underlying quantum physics as meaningless. A mishmash of solipsism and poor reasoning, Copenhagen endured, as Bohr's students vigorously protected his legacy, and the physics community favored practical experiments over philosophical arguments.

Famed across the known world, jealously guarded by private collectors, built up over centuries, destroyed in a single day, ornamented with gold leaf and frescoes, or filled with bean bags and children’s drawings - the history of the library is rich, varied, and stuffed full of incident.

Most of us give little thought to the back of the book - it's just where you go to look things up. But as Dennis Duncan reveals in this delightful and witty history, hiding in plain sight is an unlikely realm of ambition and obsession, sparring and politicking, pleasure and play. In the pages of the index, we might find "Butchers, to be avoided", or "Cows that shite Fire", or even catch "Calvin in his chamber with a Nonne". Here, for the first time, is the secret world of the index: an unsung but extraordinary everyday tool, with an illustrious but little-known past.

In Fearless Speech, Dr. Mary Anne Franks emphasizes the distinction between what speech a democratic society should protect and what speech a democratic society should promote. While the First Amendment in theory is politically neutral, in practice it has been legally deployed most visibly and effectively to promote powerful antidemocratic interests: misogyny, racism, religious zealotry, and corporate self-interest—in other words, reckless speech. Instead, Franks argues, we need to focus on fearless speech.

Dumps and landfills around the world are overflowing. Disputes about what to do with the millions of tons of garbage generated every day have given rise to waste wars waged almost everywhere you look. Some are border skirmishes. Others hustle trash across thousands of miles and multiple oceans. But no matter the scale, one thing is true about almost all of them: few people have any idea they're happening.

From the simple to the intricate and the audacious to the absurd, Adam Kucharski reveals the long and tangled history between betting and science and explains why gambling continues to generate insights into luck and decision making today. Covering exploits and ideas from across the globe, he meets the teams behind hedge funds that capitalize on inaccurate sports betting odds and explains how PhD-level pundits are using methods originally developed for the US nuclear program to predict sports results.

In Love and Math, renowned mathematician Edward Frenkel reveals a side of math we've never seen, suffused with all the beauty and elegance of a work of art. In this heartfelt and passionate book, Frenkel shows that mathematics, far from occupying a specialist niche, goes to the heart of all matter, uniting us across cultures, time, and space.

When Shakespeare has the Three Witches cast Macbeth’s lot, he uses something very weird to do it: not simply “eye of newt and toe of frog,” but the number seven. And when Hamlet claims, “To be or not to be, that is the question,” Shakespeare reaches for eleven. For Shakespeare, prime numbers were magical. And he is not alone. As Marcus du Sautoy showcases in Blueprints, creativity is inseparable from mathematics.

These days, whenever anything spreads, whether it's a YouTube fad or a political rumor, we say it went viral. But how does virality actually work? In The Rules of Contagion, epidemiologist Adam Kucharski explores topics including gun violence, online manipulation, and, of course, outbreaks of disease to show how much we get wrong about contagion, and how astonishing the real science is. Why did the president retweet a Mussolini quote as his own? Why do financial bubbles take off so quickly?

Brimming with energy and lively examples, How Things Are Made maps the awe-inspiring global system of manufacturing that enables virtually every aspect of our existence. By making sense of this surprising and hidden world, we are able to make better choices for ourselves, our communities, and the planet.

A vital book for leaders and decision makers, The Evolution of Cooperation reveals how cooperative principles help us think better about everything from military strategy, to political elections, to family dynamics.

“An elegant, wide-ranging history” (The New York Review of Books) of the centuries-long quest to discover the critical role of germs in disease that reveals as much about human reasoning—and the pitfalls of ego—as it does about microbes.

From midwifing new lambs to harvesting basil, Jessica Gigot invites the listener into her life on a small farm and the uncommon road that led her there. Fascinated by farming and the burgeoning local food movement, she spent her twenties wandering the Pacific Northwest, interning at small farms and doing graduate work in horticulture, always with an eye towards learning as much as she could about how and why people farm.

Brain: An Owner’s Guide is an informative and practical guide to all aspects of brain health, from maximizing your mental well-being today to protecting your brain against future serious health issues. Leading neuroscientist Eli Ricker explains how the brain works, discusses how you can take care of and protect your brain, and explains what you can do to improve your memory and concentration at any age.

A drought lasts for decades, a disease rips through a city, a civilization collapses. When we finally uncover the ruins, we ask: What happened? The good news is, we’ve been here before. History is long, and people have already confronted just about every apocalypse we’re facing today. But these days, archaeologists are getting better at seeing stories of survival, transformation, and even progress hidden within those histories of collapse and destruction. Perhaps, we begin to see, apocalypses do not destroy worlds, but create them anew.

In 1898, on the eve of the Spanish-American War, the US Army seemed minuscule and ill-equipped for global conflict. Yet over the next fifteen years, its soldiers defeated Spain and pacified nationalist insurgencies in both Cuba and the Philippines. Despite their lack of experience in colonial administration, American troops also ruled and transformed the daily lives of the 8 million people who inhabited these tropical islands.

The library of Ashurbanipal, Assyria’s last great king, held an astonishing collection at the forefront of knowledge in its day, from ancient traditions in religion and literature to the latest developments in magic and medicine. When the Assyrian empire fell, the library burned to the ground, and its contents, clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform writing, lay buried for thousands of years until a team of Victorian archaeologists discovered the remnants in modern-day Iraq. The clay had baked and hardened; the very fire that consumed the library had helped its texts to survive for millennia.

Drawing from decades of experience in the craft of language, both Dimópulos and Coetzee face the reality that when it comes to self-expression, some things will always get lost in translation. Speaking in Tongues finally emerges as an engaging and accessible work of philosophy, shining a light on some of the most important linguistic and philological issues of our time.

In popular memory, the Second World War was an unalloyed victory for freedom over totalitarianism, marking the demise of the age of empires and the triumph of an American-led democratic order. In Scorched Earth, historian Paul Thomas Chamberlin dispatches the myth of World War II as a good war. Instead, he depicts the conflict as it truly was: a massive battle beset by vicious racial atrocities, fought between rival empires across huge stretches of Asia and Europe.

In Greek mythology, plants were used for tools, intoxication, warfare, food, medicine, magic, and rituals. When Prometheus stole fire from the Olympian gods and gave it to mankind, he hid it in a stalk of giant fennel. Ancient Greeks waiting to question the oracles were given cannabis as part of their cleansing rituals. A quince fruit started the Trojan war. The goddess Demeter was so distraught when Hades kidnapped her daughter that she caused winter to blanket the earth, killing all plants.