Ancestors

In recent years, genetic testing has become easily available to consumers across the globe, making it relatively simple to find out where your ancestors came from. But what do these test results actually tell us about ourselves?

In Ancestors, Pierre Zalloua, a leading authority on population genetics, argues that these test results have led to a dangerous oversimplification of what one’s genetic heritage means.

Custodians of Wonder

A vivid look at the ten key people who are maintaining some of the world's oldest and rarest cultural traditions. Eliot Stein has traveled the globe in search of remarkable people who are preserving some of our rarest cultural rites. In Mali, Sweden, Peru, Italy, India, Taiwan, England, Cuba, Japan, and Germany, these custodians of heritage explain what they do and their concerns for the future.

Hoodwinked

From viral leggings to must-have apps, Dr. Mara Einstein exposes the hidden parallels between cult manipulation and modern marketing strategies in this eye-opening investigation. Drawing from her unique background as both a former MTV marketing executive and a respected media studies professor, she reveals how companies weaponize psychology to transform casual customers into devoted followers.

Conflict Resilience

Conflict Resilience combines practical applications of advanced conflict management and study of the human brain to teach anyone how to turn conflict and negotiation into an act of union. It provides tools for driving agreement when possible and for empowering you to disagree better when the differences cut deep and the relationships matter most. This is a chance to bring people together, and an invitation to radically transform how we interact with anyone with whom we find ourselves in disagreement.

They Poisoned the World

In 2014, after losing several friends and relatives to cancer, an unassuming insurance underwriter in Hoosick Falls, New York, began to suspect that the local water supply was polluted. When he tested his tap water, he discovered dangerous levels of forever chemicals. This set off a chain of events that led to 100 million Americans learning their drinking water was tainted. Although the discovery came as a shock to most, the U.S. government and the manufacturers of these toxic chemicals had known about their hazards for decades.

Please Yell at My Kids

Raising kids in America is difficult—no federally supported parental leave, a lack of mental health support, a crushing combination of workplace pressure and aspirational parental perfection, and the fresh hell that is the playgroup Facebook page. But what if there was another way? Parenting—and specifically motherhood—looks wildly different across nations. Please Yell at My Kids is an around the world journey and a practical guide to rethinking parenting. 

Second Life

At once funny, heartbreaking, and surreal, Second Life is a journey that spans a network of fertility apps, prenatal genetic tests, gender reveal videos, rare disease Facebook groups, “freebirth” influencers, and hospital reality shows. Hess confronts technology’s distortions as they follow her through pregnancy and into her son’s early life. The result is a critical record of our digital age that reveals the unspoken ways our lives are being fractured and reconstituted by technology.

So Very Small

So Very Small follows the thread of human ingenuity and hubris across centuries—along the way peering into microscopes, spelunking down sewers, visiting army hospitals, traipsing across sheep fields, and more—to show how we came to understand the microbial environment and how little we understand ourselves. Levenson traces how and why ideas are pursued, accepted, or ignored—and hence how human habits of mind can, so often, make it terribly hard to ask the right questions.

Stuck

Though for most of world history, your prospects were tied to where you were born, Americans came up with a revolutionary idea: If you didn’t like your lot in life, you could find a better location and reinvent yourself there. Yoni Appelbaum shows us that this idea has been under attack since reformers first developed zoning laws to ghettoize Chinese Americans. The century of legal segregation that ensued has raised housing prices, deepened political divides, emboldened bigots, and trapped generations of people in poverty.

The American Mirage

In an age of growing wealth disparities, politicians on both sides of the aisle are sounding the alarm about the fading American Dream. Yet despite all evidence to the contrary, many still view the United States as the land of opportunity. The American Mirage addresses this puzzle by exposing the stark reality of today’s media landscape, revealing how popular entertainment media shapes politics and public opinion in an increasingly news-avoiding nation.

Girl on Girl

Gilbert paints a devastating picture of an era when a distinctly American confluence of excess, materialism, and power-worship collided with the culture's reactionary, puritanical, and chauvinistic currents. Amid a collective reconsideration of the way women are treated in public, Girl on Girl is a blistering indictment of the matrix of misogyny that undergirded the cultural production of the early twenty-first century, and how it continues to shape our world today.

Watch Your Words

Gérald Garutti pushes for a return to a more constructive and responsible form of speech. He lays the groundwork for a humanistic approach: one which, contrary to the dominant culture of ignoring and humiliating others, emphasizes listening to them and mastering speech as a way of connecting. The arts of speech can contribute to the reconciliation of tensions in our society and to the realization of our full humanity.

Watch Your Words is a stunning manifesto for anyone interested in how we might better communicate with each other.