Coming Soon

The Knifemaker asks searching questions about the morality of science via the biography of Werhner Von Braun, whose life embodies the contradiction at the heart of many landmark advancements of the twentieth century: between the romance of new scientific frontiers and the human cost of reaching them.

To his admirers, Luis W. Alvarez was the most accomplished, inventive, and versatile experimental physicist of his generation.

When Derek Yu released Spelunky for free in 2008, his roguelike-inspired platformer took the indie game community by storm with its combination of classic platform mechanics, extreme difficulty, and random level generation. Four years later, Spelunky's HD remake went on to become PC Gamer's Game of the Year and earn perfect scores from Polygon and Eurogamer. But how is a "perfect" game made?

" Je n'étais pas fait pour réussir. Né d'une mère immigrée d'origine bulgare et d'un père inconnu, j'ai grandi sans histoires dans le quartier de Beaugrenelle à Paris. Jusqu'au jour où ma mère se fait escroquer, tombe dans la dépression, l'alcoolisme, et perd tout ce qu'elle a. Y compris moi, son seul et unique fils. Pris en charge par l'Aide sociale à l'enfance, ballotté de familles d'accueil en foyers, mon monde bascule.

In 1831, Charles Darwin set out on an expedition to South America, brought along as a gentleman companion for Captain Robert FitzRoy. Initially conceived as a Christian mission, the voyage would change drastically as the Beagle sailed through the Pacific, with Darwin’s observations becoming the building blocks of his revolutionary theory of evolution. This theory put the rational, scientific Darwin at odds with the deeply religious FitzRoy, who would go on to publicly denigrate Darwin and his heretic ideas.

In The Optimist, the Wall Street Journal reporter Keach Hagey presents the most detailed account yet of Altman’s rise, from his precocious childhood in St. Louis to his first, failed startup experience; his time as legendary entrepreneur Paul Graham’s protégé and successor as head of Y Combinator, the start-up accelerator where Altman became the premier power broker in Silicon Valley; the founding of OpenAI and his recruitment of a small yet superior team; and his struggle to keep his company at the cutting edge while fending off determined rivals, including Elon Musk.

As a child, Lulu Miller's scientist father taught her that chaos will come for us all. There is no cosmic destiny, no plan. Enter David Starr Jordan, 19th-century taxonomist and believer in order. A fish specialist devoted to mapping out the great tree of life, who spent his days pinning down unruly fins, studying shimmering scales and sealing new discoveries into jars of ethanol.

What began as a utopian environment, where mice had sumptuous accommodations, had all the food and water they could want, and were free from disease and predators, turned into a mouse hell. Science writer and animal behaviorist Lee Alan Dugatkin introduces listeners to the work of rodent researcher John Bumpass Calhoun. Dugatkin shows how an ecologist-turned-psychologist-turned-futurist became a science rock star embedded in the culture of the 1960s and 1970s.

From workers being fired by algorithms, to online forums dedicated to revenge porn and encouraging suicide, to censorship of marginalised voices and the turbulent impacts of AI, Logging Off reveals that our digital world is currently fuelling crises that only empathy, agency and humanity can resolve. This book is a call for a radical reclamation of our digital world, for a more humane future that empowers us all.

Mount Everest is known to everyone—but what of the person after whom it was named? This book traces the life and profession of that person, George Everest. In particular, it covers his life dedicated to surveying in India during the first half of the nineteenth century. George Everest went to India at the tender age of sixteen but within a few years was leading survey parties into the remotest areas of the subcontinent. His particular passion was geodesy—the determination of the size and shape of the earth—and he soon became Superintendent of the Great Trigonometrical Survey.

The Contrarians is a critical history of the scientific community, past and present, as Matt Kaplan shows how scientific breakthroughs often occur in spite of, rather than because of, the scientific community. Alternating between the past and the present, the book is anchored by the story of Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis, who helped discover germ theory by realizing Puerperal fever—a devastating infection that most often strikes women who have recently given birth—was spread by doctors not washing their hands.

Traversal by Maria Popova is a forthcoming title from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Set against a dramatic backdrop of war, spies, and nuclear bombs, An Atomic Love Story unveils a vivid new view of a tumultuous era and one of its most important figures. In the early decades of the twentieth century, three highly ambitious women found their way to the West Coast, where each was destined to collide with J. Robert Oppenheimer, the enigmatic physicist whose work in creating the atomic bomb would forever impact modern history.

Francis Crick was a restless, relentless thinker, as fascinated by Beat poetry and psychedelics as the genetic meaning of life and the inner workings of the brain. Yet for all his drive, he was driven by collaboration: with Jim Watson on DNA, with artists in Cambridge and California, and with his wife Odile, who drew the figure of the double helix that illuminated his most famous discovery. It was his debates and conflicts with these collaborators that powered a mind in motion.

After the first Trump administration launched the Artemis program, NASA created a historic competition that pit Elon Musk's SpaceX against Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin, flanked far away by Russia and China. At stake: billions of dollars, national prestige, and a place in the history books. In this gripping work, veteran reporter Christian Davenport chronicles the mad scramble to shape humanity's off-planet future.

From the acclaimed biographer of explorers Magellan, Columbus, and Francis Drake comes a unique exploration of life and influence of Jules Verne, the novelist whose mind spun the greatest adventures ever told and whose daring and prescient imagination sparked a lasting transformation of modern society and technology, inspiring everyone from J.R.R. Tolkien to Kurt Vonnegut to Jeff Bezos.