ChiKeeper

Why is the Mona Lisa the most famous painting in the world? Why did Facebook succeed when other social networking sites failed? Did the surge in Iraq really lead to less violence? How much can CEO’s impact the performance of their companies? And does higher pay incentivize people to work hard? If you think the answers to these questions are a matter of common sense, think again.

We've come to misunderstand curiosity, mistaking diversive curiosity, our attraction to novel stimuli, as the real thing. This leaves us floundering in a world of Angry Birds, live tweeting, and fleeting, click-through distractions. Leslie shows how these distractions have led to a decline in deep, sustained quests for knowledge and understanding - what he calls epistemic curiosity - which relies on effort and persistence, and empathic curiosity, which leads us to wonder about the thoughts and feelings of others.

Ellenberg chases mathematical threads through a vast range of time and space, from the everyday to the cosmic, encountering, among other things, baseball, Reaganomics, daring lottery schemes, Voltaire, the replicability crisis in psychology, Italian Renaissance painting, artificial languages, the development of non-Euclidean geometry, the coming obesity apocalypse, Antonin Scalia's views on crime and punishment, the psychology of slime molds, what Facebook can and can't figure out about you, and the existence of God.