A fascinating new book on language and social relations by Katherine Kinzler | How You Say It: Why You Talk the Way You Do―And What It Says About You

I've learned a lot from Daniel Chirot's books on autocrats, genocide, & the Enlightenment. His new book on radical revolution is especially timely. He discusses it here w @michaelshermer

Fascinating, important new book by friend & former colleague.

When it came out 10 years ago I said it was the best book either of us had ever written. Authors are always proudest of their latest, but this remains a masterpiece: Thirty-Six Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction by Rebecca Goldstein.

Gregg Easterbrook's new book "It's Better Than it Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear" is a different and complementary take on progress. I'm learning a lot from it and recommend it highly.

My (other) favorite book of the year: @MichaelShermer 's Heavens on Earth - a deep, poignant, & often hilarious look at the secular quest for immortality. Michael Shermer.

Excellent book on an intellectual foundation of Bannonism- The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege by Damon Linker.

Excellent book by Adam Lankford: The Myth of Martyrdom: What Really Drives Suicide Bombers, Rampage Shooters.

An interesting new book on the evolution of language: Speaking Our Minds | Thom Scott-Phillips

The Language Hoax: John McWhorter- Excellent book on the popular but misguided idea that language determines thought.

Hubel wrote a gorgeous & crystal-clear book on vision: Also one w/ collaborator Torsten Wiesel.

Enjoyable book about kayaking adventures by Jim Payne (author of the excellent A History of Force)

This chronicle of history’s hundred deadliest wars and massacres, including death tolls, is a good way to settle bets (who was worse, Genghis Khan or Hitler?), brush up your history, and marvel at the cruelty and stupidity of our species.

This 21st-century statement of the ideals of the Enlightenment offers fresh insight on a vast number of topics, including the workings of human cognition, the ways of science, and the drivers of progress.

Perhaps the best analysis of writing style.

Children of the 1970s will appreciate the title, an allusion to the author's groundbreaking 'Whole Earth Catalog,' which merged technology with the counterculture and encouraged global consciousness with the breathtaking earthrise photograph on the cover.

A grandmother from New Jersey uses genetics, ethnography, and child psychology to refute the dogma that parents shape their children's intelligence and personality.

With a new preface by the author, this reissue of Thomas Sowell's classic study of decision making updates his seminal work in the context of The Vision of the Annointed, Sowell, one of America's most celebrated public intellectuals, describes in concrete detail how knowledge is shared and disseminated throughout modern society. He warns that society suffers from an ever-widening gap between firsthand knowledge and decision making—a gap that threatens not only our economic and political efficiency, but our very freedom because actual knowledge gets replaced by assumptions based on an abstract and elitist social vision f what ought to be.Knowledge and Decisions, a winner of the 1980 Law and Economics Center Prize, was heralded as a ”landmark work” and selected for this prize ”because of its cogent contribution to our understanding of the differences between the market process and the process of government.” In announcing the award, the center acclaimed Sowell, whose ”contribution to our understanding of the process of regulation alone would make the book important, but in reemphasizing the diversity and efficiency that the market makes possible, [his] work goes deeper and becomes even more significant.”

This text entertains and enlightens readers about the relations between words, languages, thought, and the human brain.

A delightful introduction to number theory, Einstein’s theory of relativity, higher dimensions, and other mathematical and scientific topics

About a holocaust survivor who ends up with three wives. Every scene is a goldmine of insight about human nature.

A series of closely interrelated essays on game theory, this book deals with an area in which progress has been least satisfactory—the situations where there is a common interest as well as conflict between adversaries: negotiations, war and threats of war, criminal deterrence, extortion, tacit bargaining. It proposes enlightening similarities between, for instance, maneuvering in limited war and in a traffic jam; deterring the Russians and one’s own children; the modern strategy of terror and the ancient institution of hostages.

The founding document of evolutionary psychology, filled with insights about sex and the sexes, and more relevant than ever with #metoo