My Books
Thirteen and counting…
Extra Life
If a newspaper came out once every hundred years, what would the banner headline be? Extra Life argues it would be the doubling of global life expectancy, from roughly 35 years at the end of the Great Influenza, to more than 70 today. With this book—and the companion PBS series—I wanted both to celebrate that extraordinary achievement, but also understand and document the main factors that made it possible. It’s a love song in many ways to the unsung heroes of public health—more urgent than ever in the age of COVID.
Amazon | Bookshop.org
Enemy of All Mankind
A return to the narrative style of The Ghost Map, Enemy tells the true story of the 18th-century pirate Henry Every, who pulls off one of the largest heists in the history of crime, and triggers the world’s first global manhunt. It’s a nautical thriller that’s also story about the birth of modern capitalism and tabloid media. “Thoroughly engrossing,” according to The Wall Street Journal. “A spirited, suspenseful, economically told tale whose significance is manifest and whose pace never flags.”
Amazon | Bookshop.org
Farsighted: How We Make The Decisions That Matter The Most
A book about the art and science of life’s most difficult choices. If you’ve enjoyed some of the cross-disciplinary storytelling in my previous books, there is a lot in that vein to enjoy in Farsighted. It features stories drawn from critical decisions in urban planning — New York’s decision to bury Collect Pond in the early 1800s, and to build the High Line in the early 2000s — alongside stories of hard choices drawn from military history, most notably the decision process that led to the raid on Osama Bin Laden’s compound in 2011. There are insights drawn from cognitive science, behavioral psychology, and sociology—but also from novels like Middlemarch. My hope is that you will come out of reading the book with a practice for making hard choices in your own life, whether those choices are personal, professional, or civic ones.
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Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World
A look at the world-changing innovations we made while keeping ourselves entertained. A sequel of sorts to How We Got to Now, Wonderland examines the many ways in which serious advances in science, technology and society have been propelled by games, fashion, music, illusion, food — and people just trying to have fun. (And there’s a podcast!)
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How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World
A history of innovation and a new look at the power and legacy of great ideas. Accompanied by the six-part television series on PBS, How We Got to Now is the story of collaborative networks building the modern world, tracing facets of modern life (refrigeration, clocks, and eyeglass lenses, to name a few) from their creation by hobbyists, amateurs, and entrepreneurs to their unintended historical consequences.
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Future Perfect: The Case For Progress In A Networked Age
My first book-length attempt to organize my writings about emergence and networks into something resembling a political philosophy, which I called Peer Progressivism. It’s a book of political theory that’s anchored in a series of stories: from the “Miracle on the Hudson” to the planning of the French railway system; from the battle against malnutrition in Vietnam to a mysterious outbreak of strange smells in downtown Manhattan; from underground music video artists to the invention of the Internet itself.
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Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation
The printing press, the pencil, the flush toilet, the battery — these are all great ideas. But where do they come from? What kind of environment breeds them? This book was an exploration of environments that lead to breakthrough innovation, in science, technology, business, and the arts. I conceived it as the closing book in a trilogy on innovative thinking, after Ghost Map and Invention Of Air. But in a way, it completes an investigation that runs through all the books, and laid the groundwork for How We Got To Now.
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The Invention of Air
The amazing story of Joseph Priestley — scientist and theologian, protégé of Benjamin Franklin, friend of Thomas Jefferson — an eighteenth-century radical thinker who played pivotal roles in the invention of ecosystem science, the discovery of oxygen, the uses of oxygen, scientific experimentation, the founding of the Unitarian Church, and the intellectual development of the United States. My version of a founding fathers book, and a reminder that most of the Enlightenment was driven by open source ideals.
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The Ghost Map
The story of a terrifying outbreak of cholera in 1854 London that ended up changing the world. An idea book wrapped around a page-turner, with the amazing Victorian doctor John Snow as a kind of medical detective. I like to think of it as a sequel to Emergence if Emergence had been a disease thriller. Probably the most fun book of all of them to write.
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Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter
The title says it all. This one sparked a slightly insane international conversation about the state of pop culture — and particularly games. There were more than a few dissenters, but the response was more positive than I had expected. It laid the groundwork for the historical argument about play and innovation that I make in Wonderland. And it got me on The Daily Show, which made it all worthwhile.
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Mind Wide Open : Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life
How do we “read” other people? What is the neurochemistry behind love and sex? What does it mean that the brain is teeming with powerful chemicals closely related to recreational drugs? Why does music move us to tears? This was my first best-seller, and the only book I’ve written in which I appear as a recurring character, subjecting myself to a battery of humiliating brain scans. The last chapter on Freud and the neuroscientific model of the mind is one of my personal favorites.
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Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software
The story of bottom-up intelligence, from slime mold to Slashdot, explaining why the whole is sometimes smarter than the sum of its parts. With surprising examples of feedback, self-organization, and adaptive learning, Emergence has influenced an eclectic mix of fields: political campaigns, web business models, urban planning, the war on terror, and more. I think of this as the first book where I really settled on a non-fiction voice for myself, and the first one where I thought of myself as a science writer.
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Interface Culture : How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate
My first. The book I wrote instead of finishing my dissertation, predicting the growing cultural significance of interface and information design. Drawing on my own expertise in the humanities and on the web, this book demonstrates how user interfaces influence our daily lives, and tracks their roots back to Victorian novels, early cinema, and even medieval urban planning. Still relevant I think, though sadly, the only one of the ten that is out of print.
Amazon
Those are the main ten, but there’s also….
The Innovator’s Cookbook
This is a collection I edited of essays and interviews about innovation, following up on the themes from Where Good Ideas Come From, with insights from leading lights like Twitter’s Biz Stone, musician and artist Brian Eno, and Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s former Chief Software Architect.
