Kory Stamper spent decades writing dictionaries at Merriam-Webster, and she kept getting stuck on the color entries in Webster’s Third, which are gloriously nuts. Begonia is defined as a deep pink that’s bluer than fiesta and stronger than sweet william.…
Cory Doctorow
Doctorow coined the word “enshittification” in 2022 and it spread fast enough that the American Dialect Society made it word of the year in 2023. This is the long version of his argument: Platforms start good — cheap, useful, generous…
Merlin Sheldrake
Fungi are having a moment. Research shows psychedelics can be a powerful tool to treat mental health issues, and local, state, and federal governments are open to decriminalizing shrooms or exploring medical applications. But, as Merlin Sheldrake enthusiastically shows, fungi…
Motohisa Yamakage
Yamakage was a Shinto priest in a lineage going back generations, and this is an insider’s explanation for outsiders: Kami as presence rather than deity. Purification as the central practice and why it matters more than belief. Ceremonies through the…
Franziska Gänsler
Iris runs a hotel in Bad Heim, a German spa town six hours from Berlin that used to draw tourists. Now fires burn across the river every summer, the smoke never clears, people wear masks outside, and the bookings have…
Paul Yoon
The narrator is a dog. Etna is a working military dog in an unnamed country, and after years at war he walks away from the men he fought beside one night and heads for the place he was taken from…
Jeremy Collins
Jer Collins is a climber and an illustrator and somebody asked him to bring his sketchbook down the Amazon and draw the people living along it. That trip opened the door to mixed-media storytelling, and he kept going — the…
Thomas Hornbein
Hornbein and Willi Unsoeld were on the 1963 American expedition, the one that put the first Americans on top by the regular route. The two of them wanted the West Ridge instead, which nobody had climbed and nobody knew if…
Philip L. Fradkin
In November 1934, a twenty-year-old kid from Los Angeles rode two burros into Davis Gulch on the Escalante and never came out. The burros were found penned in the canyon. He wasn’t. He’d been wandering the Southwest since he was…
Rivka Galchen
Katharina Kepler was a widow in her seventies in a small German town, illiterate, sharp-tongued, in the business of mixing herbal remedies, and the mother of Johannes Kepler, who by then had worked out how the planets move. In 1615,…
Janice Hallett
Hallett builds novels out of documents, and this one is a mixed-media master’s course file: Six students, their emails, group chat, forum posts, submitted essays, and the tutor’s marking notes, all bundled and handed to an external examiner months after…
George Hlavacs
Hlavics argues that sketching is a set of decisions, not a talent. He breaks it into a small number of things you’re actually choosing — line weight, edge, value, what to include — and shows how varying just those changes…
Emily St. John Mandel
Los Angeles, 2031, the first spring after the United States comes apart. Peacekeepers are pulling out, the curfew just lifted, the jacarandas are blooming, and everybody in the city is going to a party. Ari Waker walks across Silver Lake…
Huw Lewis-Jones; Kari Herbert
Before cameras, if you wanted to bring back what you saw, you drew it. Married couple Lewis-Jones and Herbert — he’s a polar guide and historian, she’s the daughter of the explorer Wally Herbert — pulled together seventy sketchbooks kept…
Huw Lewis-Jones
Polar explorer, historian, professor, and writer Huw Lewis-Jones is so prolific you will be forgiven for thinking there are two of him. In 2010, he published this book, an admiring sweep of ocean pioneers, along with a similar, companion book…
Rebecca Giggs
Rebecca Giggs helped push a beached humpback back into the water off a Perth beach. It came back and she stood with the crowd while it died. What stayed with her was the question, what happens to a whale that…
Rebecca Solnit
Solnit built this out of nine essays circling a single idea, which she takes from a line she found in Plato’s Meno dialogue: How do you go looking for something when you don’t know what it is? Four of the…
Alex Patterson
Alex Patterson flew P-51s in the war, spent a career at IBM, retired, then went back to school and made himself an anthropologist. This came out of that second life, in 1992, and it’s still the standard — seventeen printings,…
Michael R. Canfield
Anyone who’s contemplated keeping a nature journal knows the paralysis of structuring a blank book. Here, a dozen field scientists open their notebooks and give you a peek. There are George Schaller’s pages from the Serengeti lions and the pandas…
Anna Brones; Johanna Kindvall
Fika started as slang — Swedes flipped the syllables of kaffe and got fika. It’s a coffee break, but that undersells it. It happens once or twice a day, everywhere, at every workplace, and it’s a verb: You fika with…
Craig Childs
Craigs Childs walks canyons and leaves what he finds where it lies. That’s his position going in, and this book is him spending four years having it argued out of him. He sits with private collectors who have Mimbres bowls…
David Roberts
Roberts came at Ruess for thirty years, and this book is him inside the story instead of outside it. The first half is the life: the letters, the woodblock prints, the burros, five years of a kid in his teens…
Ashley Elston
Evie Porter is a con artist, and Evie Porter isn’t her name. She works for a man she’s never met who calls himself Mr. Smith. He hands her a town, an identity with a manufactured past that holds up to…
David Szalay
István is fifteen, new in town, living with his mother in a flat on a Hungarian housing estate, and he doesn’t know how to talk to anybody. The married woman across the hall, closer to his mother’s age than his,…
Antoine de Sainte-Exupery
Saint-Exupéry flew reconnaissance during the collapse of France in May 1940, and this is one flight — low over Arras, through flak, to photograph German positions in a sector already lost. Everybody in the squadron knows the mission is pointless.…
