Books

A Perfect House. A Perfect Plan. A Record That Never Lies.

The Spur End Estate was built to be the most secure home in the Wood River Valley. Designed by tech visionary Layla Rowan, the house is governed by NILA, a sophisticated smart-home system that logs every heartbeat, every door latch, and every kilowatt of energy drawn from the grid. In...

The date on your food isn’t a scientific fact. It’s a business decision.

Every year, Americans throw away hundreds of millions of pounds of perfectly safe food because a date on a package told them to. That date wasn’t reviewed by the FDA. It wasn’t required by federal law. It was set by a manufacturer, using internal methodology no regulator...

Your brain was built to believe first. Evidence is optional.

You are a smart, rational person. You check facts. You distrust conspiracy theories. You would never ignore evidence just because it contradicts what you already think.

You would also like to believe that.

If It’s Irrational, Why Can’t I Stop? is a guided tour through the cognitive...

The most consequential things in history were all aimed somewhere else

Johannes Gutenberg built a machine to print indulgences. He destroyed the Catholic Church’s monopoly on religious authority. A chemistry student named William Perkin tried to synthesize quinine to cure malaria. He failed, named the failure mauve, and accidentally founded the...

The wine you drink. The pills you take. The painting on the wall. The study your doctor cited last Tuesday.

Standing in a grocery store in Ketchum, Idaho, holding a fourteen-dollar bottle of imported olive oil, writer A.M. Neel had a problem. He had just read a UC Davis study finding that roughly 69 percent of olive oils labeled “extra virgin”...

You spend a third of your life unconscious, paralyzed, and hallucinating. Nobody knows why.

We call it sleep, and after 5,000 years of trying to understand it, the honest scientific answer to “what is sleep for?” is still “we’re working on it.” In the meantime, we’ve built a $700 billion global industry around the inability to do something that...

What if the entire foundation of modern civilization—every bridge, every smartphone, and every dose of medicine—was built on a measurement that was technically wrong?

In Close Enough, author A.M. Neel takes readers on a witty, irreverent, and deeply researched journey through the 5,000-year history of human measurement. From the days when a “...

In 1936, a railroad heir needed a ski resort. He found a dying sheep town in Idaho with good snow and a convenient mountain, saved it without quite meaning to, and set in motion ninety years of consequences that the people living those consequences did not choose and could not have anticipated.

One Road In begins with a three-word telegram and...

THE FEAR FACTORY: The 149 Year History of America’s Immigration Fear Machine

Phoenix, Arizona. August 2016. Donald Trump tells a rally crowd that immigrants are “flooding in” and “taking your jobs.” The speech feels unprecedented—until you read a transcript from Denis Kearney’s sandlot rallies in 1877 San Francisco. Swap “Chinese” for “Mexican”...

The Finns rank #1 in life satisfaction by sitting at home in their underwear not trying to be happy. Americans rank 15th-20th while constantly pursuing happiness through optimization and self-improvement. This suggests something important about whether trying harder actually works.

After decades of happiness research, here’s what science has...

Everything you think you know about intelligence is wrong.

Growth mindset? Effect sizes near zero. Grit? Just conscientiousness with better PR. The Mozart Effect? Your kid got no smarter from those CDs. IQ tests? Created to help struggling students, weaponized to sterilize 70,000 Americans.

For 120 years, intelligence research has followed the...