Big Brother. Room 101. Doublethink. Newspeak. In 1949, Orwell invented a vocabulary for totalitarianism so precise that we still use it to describe the present. He wrote it dying, on a Scottish island in the rain, knowing he probably wouldn't live to s...
In the 1990s, every prediction pointed toward the same disaster: the United States was heading straight into an unprecedented crime wave. Experts, politicians, criminologists — everyone agreed. Violent youth was going to tear American cities apart. The...
What do cheating schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers who throw matches have in common? According to economist Steven Levitt, exactly the same thing: badly designed incentives. Freakonomics applies economic thinking to questions nobody thought economics c...
Stephen Hawking's editor warned him that every equation in the book would cut sales in half. He kept exactly one — E=mc². The result sold ten million copies and made a wheelchair-bound theoretical physicist communicating through a voice synthesizer int...
When Stephen Hawking wrote A Brief History of Time in 1988, his editor warned him that every equation he included would cut sales in half. Hawking took that to heart and left in just one: E=mc². The result was a book that sold over ten million copies a...
For 761 days, eight people hid in a concealed annex above a spice warehouse in Amsterdam. Outside, the Nazis were occupying Holland. Inside, a thirteen-year-old girl was writing everything down — her fears, her arguments with her mother, her first crus...
A thirteen-year-old girl gets a diary for her birthday. The first thing she does is give it a name: she calls it Kitty. And over the next two years, locked away in a hiding place with seven other people, she's going to tell it everything. Absolutely ev...
A fifty-three-year-old attorney who had everything suffers a heart attack in the middle of a courtroom and disappears. Three years later he reappears completely transformed, fresh from living with monks in the Himalayas, and he has a message for the wo...
Daniel Kahneman is a psychologist who won the Nobel Prize in Economics — not because he studies money, but because he discovered that human beings make economic decisions in deeply irrational ways. Thinking, Fast and Slow maps the two systems that gove...
