EDDIE'S BOOKSHELF

The Last American President

A look at how strain on the presidency itself — not just one officeholder — could reshape or unravel American democracy.

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Regime Change

Patrick Deneen

A postliberal political theorist argues American conservatism needs a new elite willing to use state power for the common good.

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The Culting of America

An argument that cult-like thinking and manipulation have moved from fringe groups into mainstream politics and media.

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The Instability of Truth: Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper-Persuasion

Rebecca Lemov

A historian traces coercive-persuasion techniques from Cold War brainwashing programs to today's algorithmic manipulation.

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Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality

Renée DiResta

A disinformation researcher shows how a small set of online influencers manufacture consensus and bend reality at scale.

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American Fascists: The Christian Right & The War on America

Chris Hedges

A veteran war correspondent's early, controversial warning that the Christian right's politics carry genuinely fascist elements.

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On Disinformation: How to Fight for Truth and Protect Democracy

Lee McIntyre

A philosopher of science offers a short, practical field guide to recognizing and countering disinformation campaigns.

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American Fascism: How the GOP is Subverting Democracy

Brynn Tannehill

A case that the modern Republican Party has adopted tactics and rhetoric drawn from historical fascist movements.

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Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy

Katherine Stewart

An investigative reporter maps the funding networks and strategists behind Christian nationalist political power.

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They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent

Sarah Kendzior

A journalist argues that decades of unpunished elite wrongdoing have trained Americans to expect corruption and shrug.

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All or Nothing: How Trump Recaptured America

A political account of the strategy and coalition behind Donald Trump's return to the presidency.

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Beyond The Big Lie

An exploration of how the false claim of a stolen election metastasized into a durable political movement.

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Cuckooland: Where the Rich Own the Truth

A reporter's account of how wealthy interests shape the British and American press to protect their own image.

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Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful

David Enrich

A journalist investigates a coordinated legal effort to weaken press freedom by making reporting on the powerful too costly to pursue.

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The Echo Machine: How Right-Wing Extremism Created a Post-Truth America

A study of the media ecosystem that turned fringe conspiracy and extremism into mainstream political fact.

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Profiles in Ignorance: How America's Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber

Andy Borowitz

A satirist traces the decline of intellectual seriousness among American politicians over the past several decades.

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One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

Omar El Akkad

A journalist and novelist's essay on moral complicity, distance, and the ease of looking away from atrocity.

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This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality

Peter Pomerantsev

A journalist who grew up amid Soviet propaganda examines how information warfare now blurs truth everywhere.

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Beyond the Big Lie: The Epidemic of Political Liars, Why Republicans Do it More, and How It Could Burn Down Our Democracy

A pointed argument that political dishonesty has become asymmetric, systemic, and dangerous to democratic institutions.

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Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity

Sander van der Linden

A social psychologist explains the mechanics of misinformation and proposes 'psychological inoculation' against it.

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Means of Control: How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government Is Creating a New American Surveillance State

Byron Tau

An investigative reporter reveals how commercial data brokers quietly feed a vast, largely unregulated surveillance apparatus.

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The Death of Truth

Michiko Kakutani

A former chief book critic traces the intellectual roots of truth decay from postmodernism to Trump-era politics.

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Confronting Christofacism

A critique of the fusion of authoritarian politics and Christian nationalist identity in American public life.

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Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes

Leah Litman

A law professor argues the Court's recent conservative majority leans on ideology and grievance more than doctrine.

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Erasing History

Jason Stanley

A philosopher of fascism examines how authoritarian movements rewrite education and memory to control the present.

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Black Pill

Elle Reeve

A journalist who spent years embedded with online extremists traces how internet subcultures radicalize into real-world violence.

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Disciples Of White Jesus

An examination of how a racialized image of Jesus has been used to justify nationalist and supremacist politics.

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Separation of Church & Hate

A case that certain strains of organized religion have become vehicles for political hostility rather than faith.

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The False White Gospel

Jim Wallis

A theologian argues a distorted, nationalist version of Christianity is being used to justify authoritarian politics.

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Republic of Lies

Anna Merlan

A journalist tours America's conspiracy subcultures to understand why so many people distrust official explanations.

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The Cult of Ignorance

A critique of anti-intellectualism and its long, uneasy relationship with American democracy and politics.

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The Architecture of Modern Empire

An analysis of the institutions and mechanisms — economic, military, cultural — that sustain modern imperial power.

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To Catch a Fascist

Christopher Mathias

A HuffPost reporter's years-long investigation into the people and networks driving the modern radical right.

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The Rape of The Mind

Joost Meerloo

A classic Cold War-era study of brainwashing, coercion, and the psychological techniques of totalitarian control.

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Biological War: A Scenario

Annie Jacobsen

An investigative journalist war-games a plausible modern biological attack, minute by minute, using expert sourcing.

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■  Race & Justice (23)

Disposable: America's Contempt for the Underclass

Sarah Jones

A journalist argues the pandemic exposed how essential workers and the poor are treated as expendable in American life.

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American Poison: How Racial Hostility Destroyed Our Promise

Eduardo Porter

An economics writer argues racial resentment is the hidden reason America never built a durable social safety net.

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White Malice: The CIA and the Covert Recolonization of Africa

Susan Williams

A historian details covert U.S. operations that undermined African independence movements during the Cold War.

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Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own

Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

A scholar reads James Baldwin's late, disillusioned writing as a guide for confronting American racial reckoning today.

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Unequal: A Story of America

A narrative account of structural inequality and how it has shaped opportunity across American history.

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A Peculiar Indifference: The Neglected Toll of Violence on Black America

Elliott Currie

A criminologist argues that violence against Black Americans has been persistently under-addressed as a public health crisis.

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Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

Dorothy Roberts

A legal scholar's landmark study of how U.S. policy has policed and punished Black women's reproductive lives.

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Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism

Eve L. Ewing

A sociologist argues American schooling was built to enforce racial hierarchy, not overcome it.

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Dark Carnivals: Modern Horror and the Origins of American Empire

W. Scott Poole

A cultural historian reads American horror film and fiction as a coded reckoning with the violence of empire.

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When Affirmative Action Was White

Ira Katznelson

A historian shows how New Deal and postwar programs built the white middle class while largely excluding Black Americans.

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The Way We Never Were

Stephanie Coontz

A historian dismantles the myth of a stable, self-sufficient traditional American family that never actually existed.

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Tears We Cannot Stop

Michael Eric Dyson

A scholar's urgent, sermon-like address to white America on race, grief, and the work of repair.

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Entertaining Race

Michael Eric Dyson

A scholar examines how American popular culture and entertainment shape — and distort — ideas about race.

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Erased

An account of a history or community deliberately written out of the official record, and the effort to recover it.

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Black Genius

A celebration of Black intellectual and creative achievement across American history and culture.

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From Here to Equality

William Darity Jr. & A. Kirsten Mullen

Economists lay out a detailed, data-driven case and policy roadmap for Black reparations in the United States.

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The Crime Without a Name

An account of a form of cultural or communal destruction so systematic it long lacked a name of its own.

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The Accomplices Wore Robes

An investigation into how judges and legal institutions enabled injustice rather than checking it.

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The Nazi Mind

Laurence Rees

A historian draws on decades of interviews to explain the psychology that allowed ordinary people to participate in Nazi atrocity.

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The Viral Underclass

Steven Thrasher

A journalist argues inequality determines who gets infected, blamed, and criminalized during epidemics — not biology.

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Black AF History

Michael Harriot

A satirist and writer retells American history centering the Black experience left out of the standard textbook version.

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America, USA

Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

A scholar's reckoning with the gap between America's founding ideals and its lived racial history.

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Malcolm in the Desert

An account of a pivotal, lesser-known chapter in Malcolm X's spiritual and political transformation.

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■  Mind & Spirit (26)

Living Buddha, Living Christ

Thich Nhat Hanh

A Buddhist monk's gentle, influential case for the shared ground between Buddhist and Christian spiritual practice.

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On Mysticism: The Experience of Ecstasy

Simon Critchley

A philosopher turns to mystics and ecstatic experience as a way past the limits of purely rational thought.

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Your Unconscious is Showing

A look at the hidden biases and automatic patterns running beneath conscious thought, and what they reveal about us.

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Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God

Catherine Nixey

A classicist explores the many rival religious movements that existed alongside — and shaped — early Christianity.

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McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality

Ronald Purser

A critique of how corporate wellness culture stripped mindfulness of its ethical roots and repurposed it for productivity.

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Cultish

Amanda Montell

A linguist dissects the specific language techniques that cults, MLMs, and fitness fads use to build devotion.

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Unacknowledged: An Expose of the World's Greatest Secret

Steven Greer

A controversial claim of a decades-long, high-level cover-up of evidence for advanced non-human technology.

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Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything

Barbara Ehrenreich

A lifelong atheist confronts an unexplained mystical experience from her youth and tries to account for it rationally.

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The Midnight Kingdom

A meditation on darkness, myth, and the search for meaning at the edges of ordinary experience.

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Free Your Mind

A guide to recognizing coercive control and undue influence, and reclaiming independent thought after leaving it.

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Soul Boom: Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution

Rainn Wilson

An actor makes a personal, wide-ranging case that modern life needs more spiritual seriousness, not less.

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The Book of Secrets

Deepak Chopra

A spiritual teacher's exploration of the hidden dimensions of everyday life, from love to death to identity.

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The Case for God

Karen Armstrong

A religious historian traces how the idea of God has changed across traditions, arguing modern debates misunderstand it.

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Legacy

A reflection on what we inherit, what we pass on, and what obligations that creates across generations.

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Don't Believe Everything You Think

Joseph Nguyen

A short, popular guide arguing that most suffering comes from believing our own thoughts rather than events themselves.

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Buddha, Socrates, and Us

A comparison of Eastern and Western philosophical traditions and what they each offer for living well.

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A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

An exploration of consciousness and perception, and what science and contemplative traditions each get right about it.

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When We Are Seen: How to Come Into Your Power--and Empower Others Along the Way

A guide to authentic visibility and personal power, and to helping others step into their own.

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Sensuous Knowledge

Minna Salami

A Black feminist writer argues for forms of knowing — embodied, intuitive, communal — that Western thought has dismissed.

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The Source

An exploration of belief, willpower, and the psychological roots of change and self-transformation.

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The Awakened Brain

Lisa Miller

A psychologist presents research on the neuroscience of spirituality and its measurable benefits for mental health.

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You Are Therefore I Am

Satish Kumar

An activist and former monk makes the case for interdependence — with each other and the natural world — over individualism.

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Rumi's Little Book of Life

A curated collection of the 13th-century Sufi poet's verses on love, the soul, and spiritual awakening.

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How to Have a Beautiful Mind

Edward de Bono

A thinking-skills pioneer offers techniques for having more interesting, generous conversations and sharper thoughts.

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How to Hold a Cockroach

A short, unconventional meditation on fear, disgust, and freeing the mind from what it instinctively recoils from.

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Outwitting the Devil

Napoleon Hill

A long-suppressed sequel to Think and Grow Rich, framed as a dialogue with the Devil about fear and self-limitation.

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■  Tech & Capital (22)

Rich White Men

Garrett Neiman

An examination of how a small, mostly white male elite entrenches its advantages — and what it would take to open the club.

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More Everything Forever

Adam Becker

A science journalist skewers Silicon Valley's techno-utopian visions — AI superintelligence, Mars colonies, digital immortality — as ideology dressed as inevitability.

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American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World's Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History

Casey Michel

A reporter traces how the U.S. became a premier destination for hiding the world's dirty money.

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Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity

Yoni Appelbaum

A historian argues Americans' declining ability to move — geographically and economically — is choking off opportunity.

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World Eaters: How Venture Capital is Cannibalizing the Economy

A critique of venture capital's outsized influence, arguing it optimizes for extraction over durable value.

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Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

Yuval Noah Harari

A sweeping history of how information networks — from myth and scripture to algorithms — have organized human societies.

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Unmasking AI

Joy Buolamwini

A computer scientist recounts discovering racial and gender bias in facial recognition — and the fight that followed.

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The Hidden Half: The Unseen Forces That Influence Everything

An argument that unmeasured, invisible factors quietly drive outcomes that we usually attribute to skill or merit.

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The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World

Max Fisher

A reporter traces how platform algorithms designed for engagement ended up fueling real-world radicalization and violence.

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Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

Malcolm Gladwell

Gladwell revisits his own 'tipping point' thesis to examine how social epidemics are now deliberately engineered.

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Vulture Capitalism

Grace Blakeley

An economics journalist argues 'free market' capitalism actually runs on constant state intervention favoring the powerful.

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Crack-Up Capitalism

Quinn Slobodian

A historian traces the movement to carve out zones — free ports, special jurisdictions — exempt from democratic government.

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Fooled by Randomness

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

A former trader's classic argument that luck, not skill, explains far more success and failure than we admit.

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Fluke

Brian Klaas

A political scientist argues history and our own lives are shaped far more by chance and chaos than by grand design.

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The Tech Coup

Marietje Schaake

A former European lawmaker argues tech companies have quietly amassed governing power that rivals the state's.

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The Divide

Matt Taibbi

A journalist contrasts how the justice system punishes the poor harshly while treating elite financial crime with leniency.

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Enshittification

Cory Doctorow

A technologist coins and diagnoses the pattern by which online platforms decay from useful to extractive over time.

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Hubris Maximus

A critical look at outsized ambition and overreach among the powerful, and the wreckage it tends to leave behind.

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Bootstrapped

Alissa Quart

A journalist argues the American myth of self-reliance obscures how much everyone actually depends on others.

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Move Fast and Break Things

Jonathan Taplin

A media scholar argues Google, Facebook, and Amazon undermined the creative economy on the way to becoming monopolies.

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Chain of Ideas

A history of how great ideas build on one another across generations of thinkers and disciplines.

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The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI

A practical guide to thinking clearly about artificial intelligence's real risks and uses before making big decisions.

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■  Body & Self (5)

The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet

Jeff Goodell

A journalist examines what extreme heat actually does to the human body — and to the places unprepared for it.

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Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer

Barbara Ehrenreich

A sharp-eyed critique of the wellness and self-optimization industries, and our futile war against mortality.

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Weathering

An exploration of how chronic stress, environment, and inequality accumulate in the body over a lifetime.

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I Eat The Stars

Sarah Wilson

A memoir-essay on illness, mortality, and finding wonder in a body and world that don't cooperate.

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Body Electric

Manoush Zomorodi

A journalist examines the hidden physical costs of digital life and the emerging science for reclaiming well-being.

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The Stimulated Brain 

Amazon links open a search for the title so you can find the right edition. Spotify links point to the original audiobook or playlist where available. Cover art is generated, not the publisher's original artwork.