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From the bestselling author of Chaos and The Information, a sweeping history of the instrument that created modern life. In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell spoke the words “Mr. Watson—come here—I want to see you” into a contraption he called the telephone, and for the first time a voice was...

From incomparable creative force David Byrne, a brilliant and inspiring reckoning with how breakthroughs across the arts and sciences get forgotten, and how they get rediscovered It’s nice to believe in a meritocracy of ideas—genius is always recognized, innovation always seized upon and...

Hot Type is the epic story of the magnificent 19th-century machine that rendered Gutenberg's movable type obsolete and opened the portal to the long century of mass media. The Linotype mechanized the 400-year-old process of setting type one laborious letter at a time, and thus ignited an explosion of newspaper, book, and magazine empires.

Brought to you by Penguin. The search for life in the Universe is one of the biggest questions for humanity. In this explosive book, Steven Benner argues we've been looking in the wrong place. In 1976, NASA landed two Viking missions on Mars specifically tasked with looking for current (or...

*Winner of the 2025 Utah Book Award in Memoir/Narrative* *A Globe and Mail Best Book of 2024* An immersive exploration of the nightly presence that has captured our imagination for the entirety of human history. In the luminously told Still As Bright, the story of the Moon traverses time and...

An urgent and profound history of vaccine skepticism, seeking to understand how our three most common fears about vaccines hardened into a lethal ideology—from a leading science writer “Brimming with righteous anger, this book should infuriate you for all the right reasons, and arm you to...

Jonathan Black shows that from Marie Curie to today's architects of AI, many of our greatest scientists have been guided by secret, mystical and 'higher' teachings towards an understanding of the universe familiar to the builders of the pyramids of Giza or the Temple at Jerusalem. He explores how these discoveries, foreshadowed and paralleled by geniuses including Carl Gustav Jung and Hilma af Klint, raise deep and urgent questions about our understanding of the universe. Is the material universe we perceive with our senses an illusion? Is a higher intelligence directing it?

We all like to think we're making decisions based on reality, but in fact, we're almost always working from incomplete information. And when 'you don't know what you don't know', it can be impossible to navigate successfully. In You Don't Know What You're Missing mathematician Kit Yates explores...

Tom Levenson's brilliant, short historical book exposes the refusal of the anti-vax movement to accept the reality of communicable diseases and how to prevent them. Vaccines in earlier times provoked fear of the new and seemed to limit the liberty of individuals, but we are now dealing with historical amnesia on a grand scale: the anti-vaxxers have forgotten, or never knew, how terrifying life was with diseases like polio and mumps.

Many believe that discoveries arise by chance or serendipity. The Engine of Scientific Discovery illustrates, for the first time, how we can actively speed up the pace of new breakthroughs by developing better methods and tools of discovery which enable us to see and think in entirely new ways. New tools are the lenses through which we discover what we often did not even know existed: improved microscopes uncovered microorganisms and viruses, x-ray methods exposed the structure of DNA, particle accelerators detected subatomic particles, and advanced telescopes revealed galaxies.

Vaccine hesitancy in America didn't begin with the uproar over the mRNA vaccines for Covid-19. The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries saw resistance to a wide variety of vaccines. In Unvaccinated Under God, Kira Ganga Kieffer shows that debates over vaccine safety and mandatory vaccination were about more than diseases or injections. Kieffer argues that vaccine hesitancy in the U.S. should be understood as religious expression—not as the product of scientific misinformation.

How learning to “listen” to the universe using radio waves has revolutionized our understanding of everything from gravity to little green men. “Passionate and witty” —Publishers Weekly, starred review In space, no one can hear you scream. But the universe is far from silent. It’s...

Brought to you by Penguin. If you met an alien, what might it be like? Ever since childhood, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has wanted to be abducted by aliens. Here, he draws upon a lifetime’s fascination to explore the science of alien life – and to offer a practical guide to your...

The first human organ transplant in 1950 at a suburban hospital is the focus of The Graft: How a Pioneering Operation Sparked the Modern Age of Organ Transplants. The book examines the controversies the operation generated and the progress medicine has made in organ transplantation.

America’s favorite astrophysicist has written the most entertaining and universally appealing book of his stellar career: a practical guide for dealing with Alien visitors, an exploration of how it might happen, and a cultural history of our fascination with extraterrestrials. “Ever since...

"A sweeping tour of the laws of physics, the scope of the universe, and the place of life within it." —Sean Carroll, New York Times bestselling author of The Biggest Ideas in the Universe An elegant exploration of humanity’s continuous search to find the hidden truths of the universe and...

In the now-classic Forensics, internationally bestselling and award-winning “queen of crime” (CrimeReads) Val McDermid picks up the scalpel to uncover the secrets of forensic science, from the crime scene to the courtroom In the course of researching her best-selling books, McDermid has...

A rollicking history of the life and work of an unheralded genius: Dr. Solomon Snyder, whose experiments with mind-altering drugs helped change the way we think about the causes and treatments of schizophrenia. This program is read by the author. In the 1950s, the field of psychiatry had nothing...

Planet Earth has been a familiar concept for a mere fraction of recorded history. Until about the mid-1600s, most humans thought of Earth as immobile, likely either dim or simply invisible from the Moon or anywhere else in the heavens, and not (like the planets) participating in what Galileo...

Across centuries, humanity has not abandoned wonder but translated it, replacing incantations with equations and rituals with methods, without dissolving the astonishment that once animated myth and faith. What appears today as advanced science often occupies the same psychological and cultural space once reserved for miracles.