"An exploration and manifesto investigating the power of reading--and our potential to become radically better readers in the world"--

A curated collection from the most readable economics blog in the universe. Over the past decade, Levitt and Dubner freely admit that most of their posts were rubbish. But now they've gone through and picked the best of the best. You'll discover what people lie about, and why; the best way to cut gun deaths; why it might be time for a sex tax; and, yes, when to rob a bank. (Short answer: never; the ROI is terrible.).

"We are only just beginning to reckon with our post-pandemic future. As political extremism intensifies, the great resignation affects businesses everywhere, and supply chain issues crush bottom lines, we're faced with daunting questions - is our democracy under threat? How will Big Tech change our lives? What does job security look like for me? America is on the brink of massive change - change that will disrupt the workings of our economy and drastically...

"While many books explain the how of bitcoin, The Internet of Money delves into the why of bitcoin. Acclaimed information-security expert and author of Mastering Bitcoin, Andreas M. Antonopoulos examines and contextualizes the significance of bitcoin through a series of essays spanning the exhilarating maturation of this technology. Bitcoin, a technological breakthrough quietly introduced to the world in 2008, is transforming much more than finance....

"Kid Confident explains the dynamic of social power, equal and unequal, in the context of friendships and with unfriendly peers"-- Do you know what "social power" is? You experience it every day, you share it with your friends and classmates, and when it's balanced and equal you feel awesome. But when it's unequal or out of whack, you feel all that drama. Zucker offers ways to deal with unbalanced social power situations. She offers appropriate and...

When Jean Tirole won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Economics, he suddenly found himself being stopped in the street by complete strangers and asked to comment on issues of the day, no matter how distant from his own areas of research. His transformation from academic economist to public intellectual prompted him to reflect further on the role economists and their discipline play in society. The result is Economics for the Common Good, a passionate manifesto...

"Why does a disease that killed only a handful of Americans like ebola provoke panic, but the flu--which kills tens of thousands each year--is dismissed with a yawn? Why is an unarmed young black woman who knocks on a stranger's front door to ask for help after her car breaks down perceived to be so threatening that the stranger shoots her dead? In Jumping at Shadows, Sasha Abramsky sets his sights on America's most dangerous epidemic: irrational...

Opening with the notorious bonfires of "un-German" and Jewish literature in 1933 that offered such a clear signal of Nazi intentions, Burning the Books takes us on a 3000-year journey through the destruction of knowledge and the fight against all the odds to preserve it. Richard Ovenden, director of the world-famous Bodleian Library, explains how attacks on libraries and archives have been a feature of history since ancient times but have increased...