Things I Like

A “self-help book for societies”: Urban introduces a ladder of thinking, from curious, truth-seeking reasoning down to tribal, identity-driven reasoning, and uses it to explain political polarization and why discourse in the US has broken down.

Sapiens is a sweeping history of humankind, from the cognitive revolution through agriculture, empire, and science, built around the idea that shared fictions let humans cooperate at scale. Homo Deus turns to the future: what humans might pursue once famine, plague, and war recede, and what happens when data and algorithms start to know us better than we know ourselves.

Essays that review facets of our human-centered planet on a five-star scale, from Canada geese and the QWERTY keyboard to sunsets and the Lascaux cave paintings, mixing history, science, and memoir.

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Illustrated essays, drawn in deliberately crude MS Paint style, about childhood, two very strange dogs, and the author's experience with depression.

The xkcd creator gives serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions, like what would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light, worked out with real physics and stick-figure comics.

A collection of short prose essays by the Taiwanese writer Lin Ching-hsuan, known for quiet, Buddhist-tinged reflections that find meaning in small, everyday moments.

A Pulitzer-winning exploration of how meaning, self-reference, and consciousness can arise from formal systems, weaving together Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, Escher’s drawings, and Bach’s fugues, with playful dialogues between Achilles and the Tortoise between chapters.

The first book of the Kingkiller Chronicle: a fantasy told mostly in the first person by Kvothe, now an innkeeper in hiding, recounting how he grew from a gifted orphan into a legendary figure, with much of it set at a university of magic.