Hello, friends!

A virus of some sort has taken me down this week, so instead of regular programming, here are five books that made me go “what?!”, “no way?!!”, or “whoooooa…” the most in 2026:

1. Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, by Cat Bohannon: A divinely rich account of human history that centres the female body, bidding the reader to think again about what drove the development of nice things like language, tools, and cities. In less skilled hands, this subject matter could have been depressing as hell. With Bohannon, it’s often very funny.

+ From the book: “Sartre’s Nausea? Paltry. A bored Frenchman. Try a pregnant woman who’s puked twice in one morning, nibbling saltines from a plastic sandwich bag on the subway from Brooklyn to midtown. She can smell every single dead thing that’s ever been in that car.”

2. Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future, by Ed Conway: In a world where we deal in 1s and 0s, it’s easy to forget how utterly dependent we are on stuff that comes out of the ground. Conway whisks us around the world to where that stuff (specifically, six materials: sand, salt, iron, oil, copper, lithium) comes from, the often dirty business of getting it, and how it’s shaped modern life.

+ From the book: “‘Here’s something scary,’ says one veteran of the sector. ‘If you flew over the two [high-quality quartz] mines in Spruce Pine with a crop duster loaded with a very particular powder, you could end the world’s production of semiconductors and solar panels within six months.”

3. Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today (and other lessons from history about living through an information crisis), by Naomi Alderman: As the world fires more information at us than we can possibly deal with, Alderman provides some much-needed context and guidance for living through interesting times. *Everyone* should read this book.

+ From the book: “Writing, then printing, then the internet make us need the contents of everyone’s brains less. So it encourages us to respect each other less, talk deeply to each other less, trust each other less.”

4. Me, But Better: The Science and Promise of Personality Change, by Olga Khazan: Is it possible to change your personality? Khazan tests for wiggle room in the five axes of personality (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism), finding there’s always going to be a tussle between the desire to change, and the desire to be your “authentic” self.

+ From the book: “Openness often involves separating from your younger self. It requires saying, ‘yeah, I am the kind of person who does that,’ even if you suspect that you are not.”

5. This Way Up: When Maps Go Wrong (and Why it Matters), by Mark Cooper-Jones and Jay Foreman: The Map Men (Map Men Map Map Map Men Men) of YouTubeland bring their irreverent brand of storytelling to print and lose nothing in transit. (5% spoiler: Special mention for the chapter that reads like an insufferable podcast.)

+ From the book: “In the worst-case scenario, if computers take over navigation completely, human agency itself could atrophy. We’d be passengers in our own lives, vulnerable to whoever controls the tech. A malicious actor could manipulate maps to trap people, reroute resources or sow confusion, and no one would notice until it’s too late.”

Hopefully things will be back to normal next week. In the meantime, please send me your book recommendations! I’d love to receive them ☺️