Gifty is a sixth-year PhD candidate in neuroscience at the Stanford University School of Medicine studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction. Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after an ankle injury left him hooked on OxyContin. Her suicidal mother is living in her bed. Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all around her.

One in five people in the United States lives with a disability. Some disabilities are visible, others less apparent - but all are underrepresented in media and popular culture. Now, just in time for the 30th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, activist Alice Wong brings together this urgent, galvanizing collection of contemporary essays by disabled people.

As science advances, we are finding that the universe is far larger and more complex than we ever imagined, and mysterious beings like our visitors, which we dismissed as imaginary, are turning out to be real. This is calling to all of us to find a new life - a new world - in which they play a part.

“As Albert Einstein almost certainly never said, everyone is a genius—but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” So begins Katie Spalding’s spunky takedown of the Western canon, and how genius may not be as irrefutably great as we commonly understand. While most of us may never become Einstein, it may surprise you to learn that there’s probably a bunch of stuff you can do that Einstein couldn’t. And, as Spalding shows, the famous prodigies she explores here were quite odd by any definition.

Jane Goodall candidly shares her life, as well as the Gombe chimpanzees she introduced to the world nearly 40 years ago. She gives convincing reasons why we can and must open ourselves to the saints within each of us. At one with nature and challenged by the man-made dangers of environmental destruction, inequality, materialism, and genocide, Dr. Goodall offers her perceptions of these threats and celebrates the people who are working for Earth's renewal. Here, indeed, is Reason for Hope.

Soon after his 50th birthday, Steven Petrow began assembling a list of "things I won't do when I get old" - mostly a catalog of all the things he thought his then 70-something-year-old parents were doing wrong. That list became the basis of this rousing collection of dos and don'ts, wills and won'ts that is equal parts hilarious, honest, and practical.

Actor Jim Beaver (Supernatural, Deadwood, Justified) and his wife Cecily Adams (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's Moogie) were at the peaks of their careers and happily raising a beautiful two-year old daughter, Madeline. Then tragedy struck, not once, but twice. What followed was laid down by Jim in a moving, poignant, and uplifting journal of the following year, a year filled with heartbreak as well as enormous gifts and invaluable lessons, not just for Jim and his family but for listeners who traveled along with him on his journey.

Written by renowned surgeon and expert on the art of aging, Dr. M.E. Hecht, with her friend Whoopi Goldberg lending her unique point of view, Two Old Broads is laugh-out-loud funny and tells it like it is for all of us who left middle age in the dust and want to be present, positive, and as extraordinary as ever in our golden years. Whoopi joins Dr. Hecht in a lively conversation about growing older with no apologies. Dr. Hecht, who passed away a few short months prior to publication, shares her 93 years of wisdom with Whoopi and their fellow “broads.”

David Starr Jordan was a taxonomist, a man possessed with bringing order to the natural world. In time, he would be credited with discovering nearly a fifth of the fish known to humans in his day. When his specimen collections were demolished by lightning, by fire, and eventually by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, many might have given up, given in to despair. But Jordan? He surveyed the wreckage at his feet, found the first fish that he recognized, and confidently began to rebuild his collection. And this time, he introduced one clever innovation.

Christian Cooper is a self-described “Blerd” (Black nerd), an avid comics fan and expert birder who devotes every spring to gazing upon the migratory birds that stop to rest in Central Park, just a subway ride away from where he lives in New York City. While in the park one morning in May 2020, Cooper was engaged in the birdwatching ritual that had been a part of his life since he was ten years old when what might have been a routine encounter with a dog walker exploded age-oldracial tensions. Cooper’s viral video of the incident would send shock waves through the nation.

The Anthropocene is the current geologic age, in which humans have profoundly reshaped the planet and its biodiversity. In this remarkable symphony of essays adapted and expanded from his groundbreaking podcast, best-selling author John Green reviews different facets of the human-centered planet on a five-star scale - from the QWERTY keyboard and sunsets to Canada geese and Penguins of Madagascar.

Matt Gutman can tell you the precise moment that his life was upended, even if he can’t quite remember it. Reporting live in January 2020, Gutman found himself in the throes of an on-air panic attack—and not for the first time. But Gutman’s January 2020 broadcast was noteworthy for all the wrong reasons. Mid-panic he would misstate the facts of a story, a blunder that led to a month-long suspension. It was a wake-up call. Gutman’s panic attacks were too much for him to bear in secret. He needed help. So begins the author's personal journey into the science and treatment of panic attacks.

A few years ago, Kris Carr’s world was falling apart. Her father was dying, she had to pivot her business because of the pandemic, and she was on the verge of reaching her twenty-year milestone of living with an incurable Stage IV cancer diagnosis. While sitting in a CVS parking lot, she broke down, finally allowing herself to feel the massive stress and sadness she had been suppressing in order to seem strong for those around her, and for herself.

Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don's work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado, where their 12 children perfectly spanned the baby boom: the oldest born in 1945, the youngest in 1965. In those years, there was an established script for a family like the Galvins—aspiration, hard work, upward mobility, domestic harmony. But behind the scenes was a different story: psychological breakdown, sudden shocking violence, hidden abuse. By the mid-1970s, six of the 10 Galvin boys, one after another, were diagnosed as schizophrenic.

Dr. Jamison is one of the foremost authorities on manic-depressive (bipolar) illness; she has also experienced it firsthand. For even while she was pursuing her career in academic medicine, Jamison found herself succumbing to the same exhilarating highs and catastrophic depressions that afflicted many of her patients, as her disorder launched her into ruinous spending sprees, episodes of violence, and an attempted suicide.