In Sapiens, he explored our past. In Homo Deus, he looked to our future. Now, one of the most innovative thinkers on the planet turns to the present to make sense of today’s most pressing issues....

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Guns, Germs and Steel examines the rise of civilization and the issues its development has raised throughout history....

Award-winning psychologist Jonathan Haidt, the author of The Righteous Mind, shows how a deeper understanding of the world's philosophical wisdom and its enduring maxims can enrich and even transform our lives....

From best-selling writer David Graeber, a powerful argument against the rise of meaningless, unfulfilling jobs and their consequences....

Here, anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom: He shows that before there was money, there was debt....

"What should we have for dinner?" To one degree or another, this simple question assails any creature faced with a wide choice of things to eat....

A brilliant new theory of how and why some nations recover from trauma and others don't, by the author of the landmark best sellers Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse....

You might have trouble imagining life without your social media accounts, but virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier insists that we’re better off without them....

Evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors actually responsible for history's broadest patterns....

For over 40 years, Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan has inspired audiences to expand their world view beyond traditional Western forms....

Traveling in a canoe along the Yukon River with the migrating salmon, a three-month journey through untrammeled wilderness, Adam Weymouth traces the profound interconnectedness of the people and the Chinook....

Standing between you and the man you can be is one thing: The Mask of Masculinity....

On Not Dying is an anthropological, historical, and philosophical exploration of immortality as a secular and scientific category. Based on an ethnography of immortalist communities - those who believe humans can extend their personal existence indefinitely through technological means - and an examination of other institutions involved at the end of life, Abou Farman argues that secular immortalism is an important site to explore the tensions inherent in secularism.

 
In The WEIRDest People in the World, Joseph Henrich draws on cutting-edge research in anthropology, psychology, economics, and evolutionary biology to explore these questions and more. He illuminates the origins and evolution of family structures, marriage, and religion, and the profound impact these cultural transformations had on human psychology. Mapping these shifts through ancient history and late antiquity, Henrich reveals that the most fundamental institutions of kinship and marriage changed dramatically under pressure from the Roman Catholic Church.  

In Material, Kary takes listeners along with him to visit some of the places where modern artisans are preserving, and in some cases passing on, the old craft skills. His vivid descriptions and eye for detail make this book a rich and delightful listen, and the natural and cultural history he imparts along the way provides an important context for understanding our own past and the roots of our industrial society. Personal, engaging, and filled with memorable people, landscapes, and scenes, Material is a rich celebration of what it means to imagine and create.

For three decades, the renowned author of The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization and The Ingenuity Gap: Can We Solve the Problems of the Future? has examined the threats to our future security - predicting a deteriorating global environment, extreme economic stresses, mass migrations, social instability, and wide political violence if humankind continued on its current course. He was called the Doom Meister, but we now see how prescient he was. 

In Kindred, Neanderthal expert Becky Wragg Sykes shoves aside the cliché of the shivering ragged figure in an icy wasteland and reveals the Neanderthal you don’t know, who lived across vast and diverse tracts of Eurasia and survived through hundreds of thousands of years of massive climate change. Using a thematic rather than chronological approach, this book will shed new light on where they lived, what they ate and the increasingly complex Neanderthal culture that is being discovered.

A searing, on-the-ground examination of the collapsing coal industry - and the communities left behind - in the midst of an economic and environmental crisis. The past few years have highlighted the paradox at the heart of coal country. Despite fueling a century of American progress, the people at the heart of coal country are being left behind, suffering from unemployment, the opioid epidemic, and environmental crises often at greater rates than anywhere else in the country. But what if Appalachia’s troubles are just a taste of what the future holds for all of us?