Science Winning

For centuries, Dalemark has been a land divided by the warring earldoms of the North and South. Now, with the help of the Undying, the mysterious gods of Dalemark, four extraordinary young people must join forces to reunify their beloved land.

In the future, nuclear war has destroyed nearly all humankind. An alien race intervenes, saving the small group of survivors from certain death. But their salvation comes at a cost. The Oankali are able to read and mutate genetic code, and they use these skills for their own survival, interbreeding with new species to constantly adapt and evolve. They value the intelligence they see in humankind but also know that the species—rigidly bound to destructive social hierarchies—is destined for failure.

Data engineering has grown rapidly in the past decade, leaving many software engineers, data scientists, and analysts looking for a comprehensive view of this practice. With this practical book, you'll learn how to plan and build systems to serve the needs of your organization and customers by evaluating the best technologies available through the framework of the data engineering lifecycle.

In 2014, Ian Haney Lopez in Dog Whistle Politics named and explained the coded racial appeals exploited by right-wing politicians over the last half century-and thereby anticipated the 2016 presidential election. Now the country is heading into what will surely be one of the most consequential elections ever. Some want to focus on racial justice head-on; others insist that a race-silent focus on class avoids alienating white voters. Can either approach build the progressive supermajorities necessary to break political gridlock and fundamentally change the country's direction?

In this revolutionary book, renowned MIT economists Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo take on this challenge, building on cutting-edge research in economics explained with lucidity and grace. Original, provocative, and urgent, Good Economics for Hard Times makes a persuasive case for an intelligent interventionism and a society built on compassion and respect. It is an extraordinary achievement, one that shines a light to help us appreciate and understand our precariously balanced world.

These 11 stories, including five Chinese Galaxy Award winners, are a blazingly original ode to planet Earth, its pasts, and its futures. Liu's fiction takes the listener to the edge of the universe and the end of time, to meet stranger fates than we could have ever imagined. With a melancholic and keen understanding of human nature, Liu's stories show humanity's attempts to reason, navigate, and above all, survive in a desolate cosmos.

Artificial Intelligence has been “just around the corner” for decades, continually disappointing those who long believed in its potential. But now, with the emergence and growing use of ChatGPT, Gemini, and a rapidly multiplying number of other AI tools, many are wondering: Has AI’s moment finally arrived? In AI Valley, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gary Rivlin brings us deep into the world of AI development in Silicon Valley. Over the course of more than a year, Rivlin closely follows founders and venture capitalists trying to capitalize on this AI moment.

In the stunning first novel in Marlon James' Dark Star trilogy, myth, fantasy, and history come together to explore what happens when a mercenary is hired to find a missing child. Tracker is known far and wide for his skills as a hunter: "He has a nose," people say. Engaged to track down a mysterious boy who disappeared three years earlier, Tracker breaks his own rule of always working alone when he finds himself part of a group that comes together to search for the boy.

The Candy House opens with the staggeringly brilliant Bix Bouton, whose company, Mandala, is so successful that he is “one of those tech demi-gods with whom we’re all on a first name basis.” Bix is forty, with four kids, restless, and desperate for a new idea, when he stumbles into a conversation group, mostly Columbia professors, one of whom is experimenting with downloading or “externalizing” memory. Within a decade, Bix’s new technology, “Own Your Unconscious”—which allows you access to every memory you’ve ever had, and to share your memories in exchange for access to the memories of others—has seduced multitudes.

Buck O'Neil once described him as "Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, and Tris Speaker rolled into one". Among experts, he is regarded as the best player in Negro Leagues history. During his prime, he became a legend in Cuba and one of Black America's most popular figures. Yet even among serious sports fans, Oscar Charleston is virtually unknown today.

Thara Celehar has lost his ability to speak with the dead. When that title of Witness for the Dead is gone, what defines him? While his title may be gone, his duties are not. Celehar contends with a municipal cemetery with fifty years of secrets, the damage of a revethavar he’s terrified to remember, and a group of miners who are more than willing to trade Celehar’s life for a chance at what they feel they’re owed. Celehar does not have to face these impossible tasks alone.

In the authoritarian Federation, there is a plot to assassinate and replace the President, a man who has downloaded his mind to a succession of new bodies to maintain his grip on power. Meanwhile, on the fringes of a Western Europe that has renounced human governance in favor of ostensibly more efficient, objective, and peaceful AI Prime Ministers, an experimental artificial mind is malfunctioning, threatening to set off a chain of events that may spell the end of the Western world.

More than anything, Joel wants to be a Rithmatist. Chosen by the Master in a mysterious inception ceremony, Rithmatists have the power to infuse life into two-dimensional figures known as Chalklings. Rithmatists are humanity's only defense against the Wild Chalklings—merciless creatures that leave mangled corpses in their wake. Having nearly overrun the territory of Nebrask, the Wild Chalklings now threaten all of the American Isles.

First published in 1979, Joan Didion's The White Album records indelibly the upheavals and aftermaths of the 1960s. Examining key events, figures, and trends of the era—including Charles Manson, the Black Panthers, and the shopping mall—through the lens of her own spiritual confusion, Joan Didion helped to define mass culture as we now understand it. Written with a commanding sureness of tone and linguistic precision, The White Album is a central text of American reportage and a classic of American autobiography.

I was a nobody gamer working a dead-end tech support job. But then, I was pulled into this strange fantasy world, and I’ve learned that I possess a power that makes me, quite literally, a god walking among mere mortals. Now, I always win every fight. Now, I always get the best girls in my harem.

When level-headed Francie arrives in Roswell, New Mexico, for her college roommate’s UFO-themed wedding—complete with a true-believer bridegroom—she can’t help but roll her eyes at all the wide-eyed talk of aliens, which obviously don’t exist. Imagine her surprise, then, when she is abducted by one. Odder still, her abductor is far from what the popular media have led her to expect, with a body like a tumbleweed and a mass of lightning-fast tentacles. Nor is Francie the only victim of the alien’s abduction spree.

The year is 1087, and a pox is sweeping through the Italian city of Bari. When a lowly monk is visited by Saint Nicholas in his dreams, he interprets the vision as a call to serve the sick. But his superiors, and the power brokers they serve, have different plans for the tender-hearted Brother Nicephorus. Enter Tyun, a charismatic treasure hunter renowned for “liberating” holy relics from their tombs. The seven-hundred-year-old bones of Saint Nicholas are rumored to weep a mysterious liquid that can heal the sick, Tyun says.

An innovative new take on the travel guide, Rice, Noodle, Fish decodes Japan's extraordinary food culture through a mix of in-depth narrative and insider advice. In this 5,000-mile journey through the noodle shops, tempura temples, and teahouses of Japan, Matt Goulding, cocreator of the enormously popular Eat This, Not That! book series, navigates the intersection between food, history, and culture, creating one of the most ambitious and complete books ever written about Japanese culinary culture from the Western perspective.

AI is coming fast and will affect every part of a business, including the role of the leader. And up until now, leaders have largely ceded their role in the transformation-pushing determination of strategy out to tech teams and leaving investment decisions with groups that don't have a full view of the organization. Just when responsible leadership is more imperative than ever, leaders are not stepping up to understand and execute in the new world of human-machine collaboration. A generation of AI transformation failures awaits if leaders don't connect their use of AI to their strategies.

Eight light years away, a star has died, creating a supernova event that showers Earth in deadly levels of radiation. Within a year, everyone over the age of 13 will die. And so the countdown begins. Parents apprentice their children and try to pass on the knowledge needed to keep the world running. But when the world is theirs, the last generation may not want to continue the legacy left to them. And in shaping the future however they want, will the children usher in an era of bright beginnings or final mistakes?