Nvidia is the darling of the age of artificial intelligence: the company’s chips are powering the generative-AI revolution, and demand is insatiable. For all the current interest and attention, however, Nvidia is not of our time. Founded more than three decades ago in a Denny’s in East San Jose, for years it was known primarily in the then-niche world of computer gaming. In fact, the company’s leather-jacketed leader, Jensen Huang, is the longest-serving CEO in an industry marked by near constant turmoil and failure.

The great secret of our time is that there are still uncharted frontiers to explore and new inventions to create. In Zero to One, legendary entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel shows how we can find singular ways to create those new things.

A vast and largely unseen transformation of how war is fought as profound as the invention of gunpowder or advent of the nuclear age is occurring. Flying cars that can land like helicopters, artificial intelligence-powered drones that can fly into buildings and map their interiors, microsatellites that can see through clouds and monitor rogue missile sites—all these and more are becoming part of America’s DIU-fast-tracked arsenal. Until recently, the Pentagon was known for its uncomfortable relationship with Silicon Valley and for slow-moving processes that acted as a brake on innovation.

To trace the history of the twenty-first century so far is to trace a history of unaffordability and shortage. After years of refusing to build sufficient housing, America has a national housing crisis. After years of limiting immigration, we don’t have enough workers. Despite decades of being warned about the consequences of climate change, we haven’t built anything close to the clean-energy infrastructure we need. Ambitious public projects are finished late and over budget—if they are ever finished at all.

Divided into four sections - Status, Spontaneity, Narrative Skills, and Masks and Trance - and arranged more or less in the order a group might approach them, the audiobook sets out the specific techniques and exercises which Johnstone has himself found most useful and most stimulating. The result is both an audiobook of ideas and a fascinating exploration of the nature of spontaneous creativity.

The question is no longer if electric vehicles will happen, or even when they'll happen, but how. Veteran automotive reporter Mike Colias takes you inside the transformation in this thoroughly reported profile of the hard pivot in the car business, a $2 trillion industry undergoing the biggest change in its 120-year history—a change that is already sending ripples across the entire global economy.

In The Optimist, the Wall Street Journal reporter Keach Hagey presents the most detailed account yet of Altman’s rise, from his precocious childhood in St. Louis to his first, failed startup experience; his time as legendary entrepreneur Paul Graham’s protégé and successor as head of Y Combinator, the start-up accelerator where Altman became the premier power broker in Silicon Valley; the founding of OpenAI and his recruitment of a small yet superior team; and his struggle to keep his company at the cutting edge while fending off determined rivals, including Elon Musk.

Three of the world’s most accomplished and deep thinkers come together to explore Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the way it is transforming human society - and what this technology means for us all.

As it absorbs data, gains agency, and intermediates between humans and reality, AI will help us to address enormous crises, from climate change to geopolitical conflicts to income inequality. It might well solve some of the greatest mysteries of our universe, revolutionize fields as diverse as medicine and architecture, and elevate the human spirit to unimaginable heights. But it will also pose challenges on a scale and of an intensity that we have never seen.

On the coast of southern China, an eccentric entrepreneur spent three decades steadily building an obscure telecom company into one of the world’s most powerful technological empires with hardly anyone noticing. This all changed in December 2018, when the detention of Meng Wanzhou, Huawei Technologies’ female scion, sparked an international hostage standoff, poured fuel on the US-China trade war, and suddenly thrust the mysterious company into the global spotlight.

Nothing in the universe is more complex than life. Throughout the skies, in oceans, and across lands, life is endlessly on the move. In its myriad forms—from cells to human beings, social structures, and ecosystems—life is open-ended, evolving, unpredictable, yet adaptive and self-sustaining. Complexity theory addresses the mysteries that animate science, philosophy, and metaphysics: how this teeming array of existence, from the infinitesimal to the infinite, is in fact a seamless living whole and what our place, as conscious beings, is within it.

We are approaching a critical threshold in the history of our species. Everything is about to change. Soon you will live surrounded by AIs. They will organize your life, operate your business, and run core government services. You will live in a world of DNA printers and quantum computers, engineered pathogens and autonomous weapons, robot assistants and abundant energy.

The War Below reveals the explosive brawl among industry titans, conservationists, community groups, policymakers, and many others over whether the habitats of rare plants, sensitive ecosystems, Indigenous holy sites, and other places should be dug up for their riches.

In June of 2024, thirty-one years after its founding in a Denny’s restaurant, Nvidia became the most valuable corporation on Earth. The Thinking Machine is the astonishing story of how a designer of video game equipment conquered the market for AI hardware, and in the process re-invented the computer. Essential to Nvidia’s meteoric success is its visionary CEO Jensen Huang, who more than a decade ago, on the basis of a few promising scientific results, bet his entire company on AI.

We are living through a revolution in machine learning-powered AI that shows no signs of slowing down. This technology is based on relatively simple mathematical ideas, some of which go back centuries, including linear algebra and calculus, the stuff of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mathematics. It took the birth and advancement of computer science and the kindling of 1990s computer chips designed for video games to ignite the explosion of AI that we see today. In this enlightening book, Anil Ananthaswamy explains the fundamental math behind machine learning.

Every day we make decisions based on what we believe in: values that define the ambitions we set, the choices we make, and the relationships we choose. In The Values Compass, Dr. Mandeep Rai shows how the countries of the world epitomize the power of values, provide an ideal guide to help us understand our own, and teach us important lessons about success.

Drawing in part on his own experiences, including with policymakers and world leaders, Kenneth Rogoff animates the remarkable postwar run of the dollar—how it beat out the Japanese yen, the Soviet ruble, and the euro—and the challenges it faces today from crypto and the Chinese yuan, the end of reliably low inflation and interest rates, political instability, and the fracturing of the dollar bloc.

Elite networks are informal social networks between politicians in power and top executives of politically connected firms where personal ties and long-term interactions build trust and loyalty between involved actors. Both groups draw benefits from these interactions; politicians stay in power, and corporate executives extract rents for their firms. Firms reward connected executives with higher salaries thus widening the dispersion of earnings in society. In Elite Networks, Vuk Vukovic offers a different perspective on the long-run origins of inequality.

The great secret of our time is that there are still uncharted frontiers to explore and new inventions to create. In Zero to One, legendary entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel shows how we can find singular ways to create those new things.

The question is no longer if electric vehicles will happen, or even when they'll happen, but how. Veteran automotive reporter Mike Colias takes you inside the transformation in this thoroughly reported profile of the hard pivot in the car business, a $2 trillion industry undergoing the biggest change in its 120-year history—a change that is already sending ripples across the entire global economy.

Nvidia is the darling of the age of artificial intelligence: the company’s chips are powering the generative-AI revolution, and demand is insatiable. For all the current interest and attention, however, Nvidia is not of our time. Founded more than three decades ago in a Denny’s in East San Jose, for years it was known primarily in the then-niche world of computer gaming. In fact, the company’s leather-jacketed leader, Jensen Huang, is the longest-serving CEO in an industry marked by near constant turmoil and failure.

We are approaching a critical threshold in the history of our species. Everything is about to change. Soon you will live surrounded by AIs. They will organize your life, operate your business, and run core government services. You will live in a world of DNA printers and quantum computers, engineered pathogens and autonomous weapons, robot assistants and abundant energy.

In one of the most important books of our time, Allan Bloom, a professor of social thought at the University of Chicago and a noted translator of Plato and Rousseau, argues that the social and political crisis of 20th-century America is really an intellectual crisis.

Superagency offers a roadmap for using AI inclusively and adaptively to improve our lives and create positive change. While acknowledging challenges like disinformation and potential job changes, the book focuses on AI’s immense potential to increase individual agency and create better outcomes for society as a whole. Imagine AI tutors personalizing education for each child, researchers rapidly discovering cures for diseases like Alzheimer's and cancer, and AI advisors empowering people to navigate complex systems and achieve their goals.

In June of 2024, thirty-one years after its founding in a Denny’s restaurant, Nvidia became the most valuable corporation on Earth. The Thinking Machine is the astonishing story of how a designer of video game equipment conquered the market for AI hardware, and in the process re-invented the computer. Essential to Nvidia’s meteoric success is its visionary CEO Jensen Huang, who more than a decade ago, on the basis of a few promising scientific results, bet his entire company on AI.

America was once a country that did big things—we built the world’s greatest rail network, a vast electrical grid, interstate highways, abundant housing, the Social Security system, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and more. But today, even while facing a host of pressing challenges—a housing shortage, a climate crisis, a dilapidated infrastructure—we feel stuck, unable to move the needle. Why?

Lawrence’s accomplishments are nearly impossible to comprehend. After breaking two Guinness World Records, he shattered possibilities in 2015 by completing 50 full-distance triathlons in 50 states in 50 consecutive days. Yes, THE IRONMAN®, “the single most difficult day in sports”—a 2.4-mile swim, 112 miles on a bike, then a 26.2-mile run, all completed in under 17 hours. It is a race so intense that less than .01% of the population have completed one.

In November 2022, a webpage was posted online with a simple text box. It was ChatGPT, and was unlike any app people had used before. It was more human than a customer service agent, more convenient than a Google search. Behind the scenes, battles for control and prestige between the world’s two leading AI firms, OpenAI and DeepMind, who now steers Google's AI efforts, has remained elusive—until now.

For many people, a good life is a stable life, a comfortable life that follows a well-trodden path. This is the case for Shigehiro Oishi's father, who has lived in a small mountain town in Japan for his entire life, putting his family's needs above his own, like his father and grandfather before him. But is a happy life, or even a meaningful life, the only path to a good life? In Life in Three Dimensions, Shige Oishi enters into a debate that has animated psychology since 1984, when Ed Diener (Oishi's mentor) published a paper that launched happiness studies.

In this illuminating debut, Yoni Appelbaum, historian and journalist for The Atlantic, shows us that this idea has been under attack since reformers first developed zoning laws to ghettoize Chinese Americans in nineteenth-century Modesto, California. The century of legal segregation that ensued—from the zoning laws enacted to force Jewish workers back into New York’s Lower East Side to the private-sector discrimination and racist public policy that trapped Black families in Flint, Michigan to Jane Jacobs’ efforts to protect her vision of the West Village.