"The average American spends ninety percent of their time indoors, and children are no exception. Today, kids can spend up to seven hours per day looking at screens. Not only does this phenomenon have consequences for our kids' physical and mental health, it calls into question their ability to understand and engage with anything beyond the built environment. We can talk about environmental stewardship, but until more people make meaningful contact...

Jon Stewart and the writers of The Daily Show embark on a mission to write a book that sums up the human race: What we looked like; what we accomplished; our achievements in society, government, religion, science and culture. Here is the definitive guide to our species--completely unburdened by objectivity, journalistic integrity, or even accuracy.

The author surveys the traces we will leave for peoples in the very distant future. He shows that modern civilization has created objects and landscapes with the potential to endure through deep time, including the plastic polluting the oceans, the nuclear waste entombed within the earth, and the thirty million miles of paved roads spanning the planet. This is his meditation on climate change and the Anthropocene, and an urgent search for fossils--industrial,...

This book attempts to provide a short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years. The question motivating the book is: Why did history unfold differently on different continents? In case this question immediately makes you shudder at the thought that you are about to read a racist treatise, you aren't as you will see, the answers to the question don't involve human racial differences at all. The book's emphasis is on the search for ultimate explanations,...

In the second "Sapiens" volume, Yuval Noah Harari tells the story of how we took over the world; how an unlikely marriage between a god and a bureaucrat created the first empires; and how war, famine, disease, and inequality became a part of the human condition. The origins of modern farming are introduced through Elizabethan tragedy, the changing fortunes of domesticated plants and animals are tracked in the columns of the Daily Business News, and...

Professor Jared Diamond provides evidence showing that inequalities exist in the world based on geography and access to guns, germs, and steel.

Explores the concept of land ownership and how it has shaped history, examining how people fight over, steward, and occasionally share land, and what humanity's proprietary relationship with land means for the future.

A chronicle of the planet's extinct megafauna profiles such creatures as passenger pigeons, moas, thylacines, and baiji to identify modern-world threats to extant species and how they can be saved.