Brockman, Inc. Hotlist Frankfurt Book Fair 2016 LitAg / Hall 6.3 - Tables 13A, 13B, 14A and 14B John Brockman Katinka Matson Russell Weinberger Max Brockman BALANCE OF POWER The Race Between State and Society By Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson [US — Penguin Press, UK — Viking, Germany — Fischer Verlag, Netherlands — Nieuw Amsterdam, Italy — Il Saggiatore, Spain — Duesto, Brazil — Intrinseca, Greece — Livanis, Korea — Sigongsa, Taiwan — Acropolis, Vietnam — Tre Publishing, Audio — Penguin RH; Proposal and sample chapter; 500 pages; Delivery: December 2018] Balance of Power is the important, groundbreaking new book by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, authors of Why Nations Fail, a widely acclaimed international bestseller that has sold close to half a million copies in English, and hundreds of thousands in translations around the world. "Balance of Power," Acemoglu and Robinson write, "develops an entirely original thesis about the diversity of the ways in which states function, resolve conflicts, provide public services and more broadly use their powers. It is the logical extension of a research agenda we have been developing together for twenty years, and we have a great deal to offer on this topic. We have demonstrated our ability not only to produce original, thought- provoking social science works but also to reach and explain our ideas to a broad audience." DARON ACEMOGLU is the Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was the recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal in 2005, awarded every two years to the best economist in the United States under the age of forty by the American Economic Association, and the Erwin Plein Nemmers prize, awarded every two years for work of lasting significance in economics. He holds Honorary Doctorates from the University of Utrecht, Bosporus University, and the University of Athens. JAMES A. ROBINSON is an economist and political scientist who is currently one of eight University Professors at the University of Chicago and one of only twenty-one people who have held such a position. He has conducted research in Bolivia, Botswana, Chile, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, Mauritius, Mexico, the Philippines, Sierra Leone, and South Africa. He was selected as one of Foreign Policy's "Top Global Thinkers of 2012" and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. _L t THE JANUS POINT A New Theory of Time's Arrows and The Big Bang By Julian Barbour [US — Basic Books, UK — Bodley Head; Proposal; 80,000 — 100,000 words; Delivery: November 2017] "The Janus Point," writes Julian Barbour, visiting professor at the University of Oxford and author of The End of Time, "proposes a novel and remarkably simple solution to one of the most fundamental problems in physics and cosmology. It concerns the experienced direction of time: Why is the past so different from the present and the future? This difference is encapsulated in the expression the arrow of time. It is problematic because all the known laws of nature have exactly the same form, whatever direction, in which time is supposed to flow. The Brockman, Inc. Frankfurt 2016 Hotlist -1- HOUSE OVERSIGHT 025147 technical expression for this is time-reversal symmetry. This basic property seems to be entirely at odds with the pronounced unidirectionality of experienced time. In fact, there are several arrows. "Until recent work by myself and my collaborators Tim Koslowski and Flavio Mercati, essentially only one proposal had been made—in well over a century—to explain why, despite the time-reversal symmetry of all the laws of nature, these pronounced arrows of time exist, and always have existed, throughout the observable universe. As I explain in The Janus Point, this sole explanation is a manifest stop gap and satisfies no serious scientist. "This has been dubbed the past hypothesis. However, it is not in any sense an explanation that follows from the structure of the law and does not lead to any new prediction. It is an admission of defeat: Modern science fails to explain the most profound aspects of our existence. "The Janus Point is clearly timely because it is about a set of very simple ideas and insights that have the potential to solve one of the deepest and longest-standing problems in physics. Everyone is interested in time and its numerous puzzling aspects. Proof of that is the success of my earlier book The End of Time, which is still selling more than sixteen years after its publication. Some of the ideas conjectured in that book are, in fact, realized in the model now proposed. "For readers, The Janus Point tells the fascinating story of one of the greatest mysteries in science and what looks to be its unexpected and, in principle, remarkably simple solution. More than most books in popular science, its subject resonates profoundly with the reader. Nothing touches us more intimately than the drama of birth, life and death." JULIAN BARBOUR, an independent researcher, is currently visiting professor at the University of Oxford. He has devoted significant time and effort to issues that lie at the foundations of science, above all the nature of time and motion. His first paper was published in Nature and attracted favorable editorial comment and most importantly led to six years of very valuable collaboration with the well-known Italian theorist Bruno Bertotti. It culminated in 1982 with a joint paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, which is now regarded as a seminal paper on the interconnection of local dynamics with the universe at large. Barbour made a big impact in the physics community with the publication of his book, The End of Time, in which, according to physicist Lee Smolin, he presented "a new theory of time that is the most interesting and provocative new idea about time to be proposed in many years." AMERICAN KINGPIN The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road By Nick Bilton [US — Portfolio, UK — Virgin Books, Audio — Penguin RH; Manuscript; 304 pages; Publication: May 2017] From New York Times-bestselling author Nick Bilton comes a true-life thriller about the rise and fall of Ross Ulbricht, aka the Dread Pirate Roberts, the founder of the online black market Silk Road. In American Kingpin Bilton turns his investigative journalism to the story of Ross Ulbricht, the notorious and enigmatic founder of a drug empire called Silk Road. This is a true-life thriller about ambition gone awry, spurred on by the defining clash of our time: the new world of libertarian-leaning, anonymous, decentralized web advocates and the old world of government control, order, and the rule of law. Bilton's dazzling rendering and gift for narrative make for an endlessly fascinating drama. In 2011, Ulbricht, a twenty-six-year-old libertarian idealist and former Boy Scout, launched "a website where people could buy anything anonymously, with no trail whatsoever that could lead back to them." He called it Silk Road, opened for business on the Dark Web, and christened himself the Dread Pirate Roberts (after the Brockman, Inc. Frankfurt 2016 Hotlist -2- HOUSE OVERSIGHT 025148 Princess Bride character). The site grew at a tremendous pace, quickly becoming a $1.2 billion enterprise where you could buy or sell drugs, hacking software, forged passports, counterfeit cash, guns, grenades, and poisons. The Silk Road soon caught the attention of the Feds, who embarked on an epic two-year manhunt for the site's proprietor. Ulbricht, in the meantime, struggled to maintain control of his double life and his marketplace, which he originally started to prove that legalizing drugs could make society safer. He gradually abandoned his libertarian ideals to rule Silk Road with increasingly authoritarian force. At one point, he engaged the services of hired hit men to take out employees he felt had wronged him. Soon, some of the Federal agents who were supposed to be hunting for Ulbricht were lured into the dark world and switched sides to join him. NICK BELTON is a special correspondent for Vanity Fair, where he writes about technology, business, and culture, and a contributor at CNBC. He is the bestselling author of Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal (The Wall Street Journal Reader's Choice "Best Book of 2013"), which has been optioned by Lionsgate and is currently being turned into a television series. He was a columnist for the New York Times for almost a decade. YOUR BRAIN IS A TIME MACHINE The Neuroscience and Physics of Time By Dean Buonomano [World English — W. W. Norton, China— Huazhang, Audio — Audible; Manuscript; Pub Date: April 2017; 304 pages] Pioneering neuroscientist Dean Buonomano examines how the brain tells time, predicts the future, and understands the past in a book that straddles the fields of physics, psychology and neuroscience. Few questions are as perplexing and profound as those that relate to time. Philosophers ponder what time is. Physicists grapple with why time appears to be a one-way street, and debate whether it is a single lonely point or a full-blown dimension. Neuroscientists and psychologists struggle to understand what it means to "feel" the passage of time and how the brain tells it. Time is also key to the question of free will: is the future an open path, or is it preordained by the past? The brain, argues Buonomano, is at its core a time machine. It is the brain's ability to anticipate the actions of prey, predators, and mates, and to predict when events will occur in a dynamically changing world, that ultimately translate into the evolutionary currency of survival and reproduction. The ability of animals to predict the future culminated with Homo sapiens' capacity to grasp the concept of time. Only then were we able to craft a blade for future use, or plant a seed to quench projected hunger. Your Brain is a Time Machine explains that, in the end, our intuitions and theories about time reveal as much about the architecture and limitations of our brains as they do about the true nature of time. DEAN BUONOMANO is a professor in the Departments of Neurobiology and Psychology at UCLA, and an investigator in the Integrative Center for Learning and Memory. He is the author of Brain Bugs: How the Brain's Flaws Shape Our Lives, which was a Wall Street Journal bestseller, and his research has been highlighted in many national and international magazines and newspapers, including Discover, Newsweek, Scientific American, Zeit, Cosmos, Horzu Wissen, and the New Yorker. Brockman, Inc. Frankfurt 2016 Hotlist -3- HOUSE OVERSIGHT 025149 SCIENCE IN THE SOUL Selected Shorter Writings By Richard Dawkins, Edited by Gillian Somerscales [UK — Transworld; Manuscript; Pub Date: June 2017; 110,000 words] A new book from Richard Dawkins, internationally bestselling author and one of the greatest scientists of our age. As much as his full length books such as The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, and The God Delusion, have changed our perceptions of both science and the world it opens, his essays and articles are potent, pithy, thought provoking and revealing windows into the world as he, himself, perceives it. Science in the Soul is a collection of some of Dawkins' best writing: articles and lectures, reflections and polemics, reviews, forewords, tributes or eulogies, both published and unpublished. From the introduction, by Gillian Somerscales: "Richard Dawkins has always defied categorization. One eminent biologist of mathematical bent reviewing The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype was startled to find a scientific work apparently free of logical errors and yet containing not a single line of mathematics; he could come to no other conclusion than that, incomprehensible as it seemed to him, 'Dawkins . . . apparently thinks in prose.' "If readers of what follows here come to appreciate not only the writer's clarity of thought and facility of expression, the fearlessness with which he confronts very large elephants in very small rooms, the energy with which he devotes himself to explication of the complex and the beautiful in science, but also some of the generosity, kindness and courtesy that have characterized all my dealings with Richard over the years since that first collaboration, then the present volume will have achieved one of its aims. "It will have achieved another if it embodies a condition felicitously described in one of the essays reproduced here, where 'harmonious parts flourish in the presence of each other, and the illusion of a harmonious whole emerges.' Indeed, it is my belief that the harmony resounding from this collection is no illusion, but the echo of one of the most vibrant, and vital, voices of our times." RICHARD DAWKINS is the former Charles Simonyi Professor For The Understanding Of Science at Oxford University; Fellow of New College; author of The Selfish Gene, The Extended Phenotype, The Blind Watchmaker, River out of Eden (ScienceMasters Series), Climbing Mount Improbable, Unweaving the Rainbow, The Devil's Chaplain, The Ancestor's Tale, The God Delusion, The Greatest Show on Earth and The Magic of Reality. He is founder of The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. FROM BACTERIA TO BACH AND BACK The Evolution of Minds By Daniel C. Dennett [US — W. W. Norton, UK — Penguin UK, Italy — Raffaello Cortina Editore, Holland — Atlas Contact, China — Cheers, Audio — Recorded Books; Manuscript; Pub Date: February 2017; 448 pages] One of the world's foremost philosophers offers a major new account of the origins of the conscious mind. What is human consciousness and how is it possible? This question fascinates people from poets and painters to physicists, psychologists, and philosophers. From Bacteria to Bach and Back is Daniel C. Dennett's brilliant answer, extending perspectives from his earlier work in surprising directions, exploring the deep interactions of evolution, brains, and human culture. Part philosophical whodunit, part bold scientific conjecture, this landmark work enlarges themes that have sustained Dennett's legendary career at the forefront of philosophical thought. In his inimitable style—laced Brockman, Inc. Frankfurt 2016 Hotlist -4- HOUSE OVERSIGHT 025150 with wit and arresting thought experiments—Dennett shows how culture enables reflection by installing a bounty of thinking tools, or memes, in our brains. Language, itself composed of memes, turbocharged this interplay. The result, a mind that can comprehend the questions it poses, emerges from a process of cultural evolution. An agenda-setting book for a new generation of philosophers and other researchers, From Bacteria to Bach and Back will delight and entertain anyone who hopes to understand human creativity in all its wondrous applications. DANIEL C. DENNETT is the author of Intuition Pumps, Breaking the Spell, Freedom Evolves, and Consciousness Explained. He is the University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. A CRACK IN CREATION Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution By Jennifer A. Doudna and Samuel H. Sternberg [US — Houghton Mifflin, UK — Bodley Head, China — Hunan Science, Audio — Audible; Manuscript; Pub Date: June 2017; 320 pages] In the tradition of The Double Helix, A Crack in Creation is an insider's account of the biggest scientific discovery of our era: a cheap, easy way of rewriting genetic code, with nearly limitless promise and peril. Not since the atomic bomb has a technology so alarmed its inventors that they warned the world against its use. Not, that is, until the spring of 2015, when biologist Jennifer Doudna called for a worldwide moratorium on the use of the new gene-editing tool CRISPR to make heritable changes in human embryos. The cheapest, simplest, most effective way of manipulating DNA ever known, CRISPR may well give us the cure to HIV, genetic diseases, and some cancers, and will help address the world's hunger crisis. Yet even the tiniest changes to DNA could have myriad, unforeseeable consequences—to say nothing of the ethical and societal repercussions of intentionally mutating embryos to create "better" humans. Writing with fellow researcher Samuel Sternberg, Doudna shares the thrilling story of her discovery, and passionately argues that enormous responsibility comes with the ability to rewrite the code of life. With CRISPR, she shows, we have effectively taken control of evolution. What will we do with this unfathomable power? JENNIFER A. DOUDNA is a professor in the Chemistry and the Molecular and Cell Biology Departments at the University of California, Berkeley, investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and researcher in the Physical Biosciences Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She is internationally recognized as a leading expert on RNA-protein structure and function, CRISPR biology, and genome engineering. SAMUEL H. STERNBERG received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2014, and has been a member of Jennifer Doudna's laboratory since 2010. He was a lead researcher and author of numerous high-profile publications on the CRISPR technology. He has been awarded the RNA Society's Scaringe Award and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center's Harold M. Weintraub Graduate Student Award, among other honors. Brockman, Inc. Frankfurt 2016 Hotlist -5- HOUSE OVERSIGHT 025151 ENDURANCE A Natural History of Exercise and Health By Daniel Lieberman [Proposal; Delivery: April 2019; 120,000 words] Endurance is the new book from Daniel Lieberman, Chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard, and author of The Story of the Human Body, a New York Times bestseller. Lieberman is well known for his unique and unusually integrative approach to research, which combines paleontology, anatomy, physiology and experimental biomechanics. "Endurance," Lieberman writes, "argues that we need to rethink how we think about exercise using the dual lenses of anthropology and evolutionary biology. As the modern word 'exercise' itself implies, people today generally think of physical activity as a pastime or a form of medicine. Most of us spend the majority of the day sitting and then we briefly exercise in our spare time, sometimes for fun, but increasingly to ward off ill health. Yet, until very recently, physical activity was a paradoxically fundamental part of being human: utterly necessary but instinctively avoided. Put simply, we evolved to be reluctant endurance athletes. "This legacy underlies and points to urgently needed solutions for today's exercise dilemma. Everyone knows that exercise is vital for good health, yet the vast majority of Americans and others in the developed world are unable to exercise enough. Our species endured because we had no choice but to be athletes, and if we wish our health to endure as individuals, then we still need to make exercise indispensable today. Rather than thinking of exercise as a 'magic pill' for good health, it is the absence of physical activity, primarily endurance exercise, that accelerates aging and hastens death. Endurance points to a new way of understanding and solving this global problem. "Endurance is the product of a long journey, part intellectual, part physical. Over the last decade I have traversed the globe to observe, often as a participant, how humans are physically active in different traditional cultures from Africa to Greenland to India. Among other experiences, I've run barefoot and carried water on my head in Kenya, tracked muskoxen and kudu with indigenous hunters in Greenland and Tanzania, participated in the ancient Tarahumara ballgame under the stars in Mexico, dug millet fields in Rwanda, played barefoot cricket in rural India, and raced on foot against horses in the mountains of Arizona. Back in my lab at Harvard, my students and I have intensively studied the evolution, biomechanics and physiology of key human physical activities, including how we walk, run, throw, dig, climb and even chew. "Endurance weaves together these experiences, perspectives and insights into the form of a highly personal natural history of first rest, then strength, and finally endurance." DANIEL LIEBERMAN is a professor and chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard. A leader in the field of human evolutionary biology, Lieberman's research asks how and why evolution made the human body the way it is. He is the author of The Story of the Human Body (Pantheon, 2013) and has been published in such journals as Nature, Science, and The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, among others. Lieberman has been interviewed by PBS, The History Channel, NPR, BBC, Horizon, and elsewhere. His research and discoveries have been highlighted in the New York Times, Discover, National Geographic, Runners World, Running Times, and numerous other journals and newspapers. Brockman, Inc. Frankfurt 2016 Hotlist -6- HOUSE OVERSIGHT 025152 IMPROBABLE DESTINIES Predicting the Future of Evolution By Jonathan Losos [US — Riverhead, UK — Allen Lane, German — Hanser, Audio — Penguin RH; Manuscript; Pub Date: June 2017; 110,000 words] Evolutionary biologist and Harvard professor Jonathan Losos is widely known for his unique approach to studying evolution in realtime and using experimental means. As E.O. Wilson writes, Losos is a "world leader in research and theory of the overlapping fields of herpetology, biodiversity, and species formation." "In the last few years," Losos writes, "evolutionary biologists have come to realize that evolution can occur much more rapidly than Darwin and a century of subsequent biologists ever expected—fast enough, in fact, to observe as it occurs, even during the span of a single research grant! Now that we know that evolution can proceed rapidly, experimental studies in natural systems have begun." Losos' work on lizards has been at the forefront of the experimental evolution movement. Using small Bahamian islands as test tubes, he and his team have altered conditions and made predictions about how populations should evolve in response. And the results are resoundingly consistent: evolution is extremely predictable. Improbable Destinies is not only about what we know about evolution, but how we know what we know. Not just the technology and theories of science, but where the ideas come from—how researchers think them up, how they are honed by experiences in the field, and how much of science is the serendipitous juxtaposition of disparate ideas brought together by unexpected observations. JONATHAN LOSOS is the Monique and Philip Lehner Professor for the Study of Latin America and professor of organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard University. He is the recipient of a number of awards, including the Theodosius Dobzhansky Prize from the Society for the Study of Evolution and the David Starr Jordan Prize from the American Society of Naturalists. DISEMPOWERED (working title) By Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt [Proposal; Delivery: 9-12 months from signing contract; 60,000 — 80,000 words] Disempowered is an expansion to book-length of the cover story by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt that appeared in the September 2015 issue of The Atlantic: "The Coddling of The American Mind" (CAM). It became the Atlantic's second most-read cover story of all time and has been referenced in hundreds of articles in a wide variety of publications, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, National Review, Newsweek, Los Angeles Times, Bloomberg, the Guardian, The Korea Herald, and the Irish Times; and it even drew the attention of President Obama. "A full-length book is necessary for several reasons," writes Lukianoff. "First, even with the article's generous word limit, we could not present the full scope of the intersection of harmful psychological theories and political correctness. We could only do a cursory explanation of the new reality on campus and how terms like 'trigger warnings,' microaggressions,' and `disinvitations' suddenly rose from obscurity to become part of higher education's and the nation's vocabulary. A full-length book allows us to cover a host of new hot topics, including so-called 'safe spaces' and how a warped idea of safety is used to justify campus censorship, as well as campus 'bias response teams' (BRTs)—Orwellian programs that police the language students use in their private lives Brockman, Inc. Frankfurt 2016 Hotlist -7- HOUSE OVERSIGHT 025153 and professors use in the classroom. It is worth noting that this past spring a professor was actually investigated by one of these BRTs for assigning CAM as class reading! "Second, since the article was published, the situation on campus has only worsened. Within a few months after the article's release, student demands for censorship had broken out across the country. "Third, and possibly most importantly, we want to reactivate and deepen the discussion that we started in CAM about the science of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) as a useful lens for looking at any number of modern problems. CBT is a remarkably simple, successful treatment that helps patients overcome their anxiety and depression by teaching them how to identify and combat 'cognitive distortions,' the wild mental exaggerations in which the anxious and depressed overindulge. To our knowledge, CAM was the first and only major article to propose that we should not only use CBT to examine our own inner thoughts, but also the world around us. "The issue of free speech on campus is extremely hot, and will continue to be for years to come, but virtually no one besides us is offering a solution that gets to the heart of the problem and can actually help students rather than simply ridiculing them. "Regarding the market, when CAM came out, it seemed that this was a uniquely American problem. But just in the last year, it has spread throughout the UK, and is beginning to appear in Australia. In fact, there has been major interest in CAM in the UK and European countries. In Europe, I was recently interviewed by Siiddeutsche Zeitung, Germany's biggest daily newspaper, and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung also ran a major article. When I recently spoke in Denmark, the president of the University of Oslo chastised me for not knowing that all the students had read CAM and had been discussing it all year." GREG LUKIAN01-1-, is an attorney and the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). He is the author of Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate and Freedom From Speech. He has been published in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, TIME, the Boston Globe, Forbes, U.S. News & World Report, the Stanford Technology Law Review, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and numerous other publications. JONATHAN HAIDT, a social psychologist, is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University's Stern School of Business. His academic specialization is morality and the moral emotions. Haidt is the author of two books: The Happiness Hypothesis (2006) and The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012), which became a New York Times bestseller. He was named one of the "top global thinkers" by Foreign Policy magazine, and one of the "top world thinkers" by Prospect magazine. His three TED talks have been viewed more than 4 million times. He is the founder of HeterodoxAcademy.org, a collaboration of professors who advocate for increasing viewpoint diversity in universities throughout the English-speaking world. VIGILANCE Who We Trust, What We Believe, and Why (working title) by Hugo Mercier [Proposal; Delivery: 18 months from signed contract; 100,000 words] "What leads voters to support policies and politicians that make them worse off?" writes cognitive scientist Hugo Mercier. "How could terrorists believe that blowing themselves up will lead to an eternity of bliss? Why do Dalits —untouchables —endorse a worldview that confines them to the lower echelons of society? Why do crowd members drive each other into rampaging fury? The common wisdom in psychology and in the social Brockman, Inc. Frankfurt 2016 Hotlist -8- HOUSE OVERSIGHT 025154 sciences: people are easy to influence, they are too trusting, and they tend to place their trust in the wrong people. This is the answer of most social psychologists. "They take the famous Asch conformity experiments, in which participants believe a group over the evidence of their own eyes; and Milgram obedience experiments, in which participants agree to electrocute one another at the experimenter's request to show that people are sheep. "Psychologist Daniel Gilbert, a strong proponent of the view that humans are gullible, has even claimed that people couldn't help but believe (at first at least) everything they read! Tim Levine, a leading researcher working on lie detection, thinks that people rely on others to be trustworthy most of the time, and that as a result they can afford to be so bad at detecting deception. Paul Ekman, the famous emotion researcher, claims that when we see someone express an emotion, we can't help but mimic it. No surprise then that crowds and their emotional members drive each other mad! Robert Boyd, Peter Richerson, and Joseph Henrich, proponents of the dominant mode of cultural evolution, postulate that people are easily influenced by prestigious individuals —wherever their prestige comes from—and consensual opinions—whatever their value. "This is also the answer of dominant figures in anthropology and sociology, explaining the persistence of culture by our tendency to suck in whatever ideas surround us without a second thought; in political science since the ancient Greeks, explaining the success of demagogues by how easily people follow charismatic leaders, even toxic ones; and in much social commentary, consider Manufacturing Consent by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky as an example. "In Vigilance, I argue that they are wrong." HUGO MERCIER is a cognitive scientist working for the French National Center for Scientific Research in Lyon. Previously, he did a postdoc in the Philosophy, Politics and Economics program at the University of Pennsylvania, and another one at the University of Neuchatel. He has published numerous scholarly articles on the topic of the book, and has taught some of its contents in Europe and America. He has also made his work more widely accessible through newspaper articles, blog posts, interviews, and public lectures. The Enigma of Reason, a co-authored book with Dan Sperber concerning their research on "The Argumentative Theory of Reasoning," is scheduled for publication in late May (US: Harvard University Press; UK: Allen Lane), with several planned translations. GENETIC RESCUE Saving Wildlife the Way Evolution Does By Ryan Phelan, Introduction & Epilogue by Stewart Brand [Proposal; Delivery: 12-18 months from signed contract; 70,000 — 80,000 words] Genetic Rescue is "the first book to present a critically important and new scientific field emerging through the synthesis of molecular biology and conservation biology. At the heart of this intersection is the development of a new tool kit for 21st Century conservation. Advances in comparative genomics, cloning, germ cell transmission, ancient genome assembly, de-extinction, synthetic DNA, and genome engineering with CRISPR and gene drives are now being applied to help solve seemingly intractable conservation problems." Genetic Rescue makes the compelling case for human intervention in situations where the natural evolutionary process is compromised. It is replete with specific examples of wildlife on the brink (from the black-footed ferret to the northern white rhino) and the impact of wildlife diseases (amphibians with Chytrid disease and bats with white-nose syndrome)." "Genetic Rescue also presents a provocative new vision for conservation—the development of a 21st Century Brockman, Inc. Frankfurt 2016 Hotlist -9- HOUSE OVERSIGHT 025155 tool kit that can help prevent extinction. And more importantly, it helps frame the issues that need to be thoughtfully considered before these new technologies can be responsibly deployed. It is the first book written on this subject, and more importantly, it is written by an insider who is helping shape and define the field for conservation." RYAN PHELAN is the Executive Director of "Revive & Restore", whose mission is to increase biodiversity — specifically through genetic rescue, helping species that are either on the brink or are already extinct. The Introduction and the Epilogue are by cultural icon Stewart Brand, creator of The Whole Earth Catlog, and author of The Media Lab, How Buildings Learn, and Whole Earth Discipline among many other landmark books and projects. Brand is cofounder of "Revive And Restore" and founder of the parent organization, "The Long Now Foundation". THE EVOLUTION OF BEAUTY How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World — and Us By Richard 0. Prum [US — Doubleday, Audio — Penguin RH; Manuscript; Pub Date: May 2017; 480 pages] A major reimagining of how evolutionary forces work, revealing how mating preferences—what Darwin termed "the taste for the beautiful" —create the extraordinary range of ornament in the animal world. In the great halls of science, dogma holds that Darwin's theory of natural selection explains every branch on the tree of life: which species thrive, which wither away to extinction, and what features each evolves. But can adaptation by natural selection really account for everything we see in nature? Yale University ornithologist Richard Prum —reviving Darwin's own views—thinks not. Deep in tropical jungles around the world are birds with a dizzying array of appearances and mating displays: Club-winged Manakins who sing with their wings, Great Argus Pheasants who dazzle prospective mates with a four-foot- wide cone of feathers covered in golden 3D spheres, Red-capped Manakins who moonwalk. In thirty years of fieldwork, Prum has seen numerous display traits that seem disconnected from, if not outright contrary to, selection for individual survival. To explain this, he dusts off Darwin's long-neglected theory of sexual selection in which the act of choosing a mate for purely aesthetic reasons—for the mere pleasure of it—is an independent engine of evolutionary change. Mate choice can drive ornamental traits from the constraints of adaptive evolution, allowing them to grow ever more elaborate. It also sets the stakes for sexual conflict, in which the sexual autonomy of the female evolves in response to male sexual control. Most crucially, this framework provides important insights into the evolution of human sexuality, particularly the ways in which female preferences have changed male bodies, and even maleness itself, through evolutionary time. The Evolution of Beauty presents a unique scientific vision for how nature's splendor contributes to a more complete understanding of evolution and of ourselves. RICHARD 0. PRUM is the William Robertson Coe Professor of Ornithology at Yale University. A lifelong bird fanatic, Prum has published more than 100 scientific articles on diverse topics including the evolution, behavior, song, anatomy, developmental biology, phylogenetics, paleontology, optical physics, and pigmentary chemistry of birds. He has made ground-breaking scientific contributions to our understanding the evolutionary origin of feathers, the physics of structural coloration, dinosaur feathers, fossil coloration, and the phylogenetic evolution of behavior. Over the past thirty years, Prum has developed a unique scientific perspective on evolution, and he has documented this view with major scientific discoveries. Brockman, Inc. Frankfurt 2016 Hotlist -10- HOUSE OVERSIGHT 025156 THE INTERACTIVE BRAIN (working title) By V.S. Ramachandran [US — Penguin Press, Audio — Penguin RH; Proposal; Delivery: 24 months from signed contract; 60,000 — 70,000 words] A new book by neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran, author most recently of The Tell-Tale Brain. "The Interactive Brain," writes Ramachandran, "is a tour of some of the most cherished yet elusive qualities of our minds. The book argues that recent advances in neurosciences have contributed to a revolutionary new model of the brain, in which brain function is controlled, not by highly specialized, hierarchical modules, mainly hard-wired, as once thought, but rather by highly interactive modules that can shift their roles in a matter of days or even hours The implications are not merely theoretical but have practical applications in medicine, offering solutions for everyone from stroke patients to those with obsessive compulsive disorder. "There are many neurological syndromes I'll discuss throughout the book. For example, a patient who was otherwise smart and level-headed but kept insisting that his reflection in the mirror was the 'real David,' and that the David viewing the mirror was a clone. He wiped off a tear from his eye and asked 'Dad, if the real David returns will you disown me?' Even the axiomatic foundation of our selfhood—the notion that I'm a single person in one body—is called into question when we encounter patients like him. "Not only can we change our own brains, but we can change the brains of others because of the implications of mirror neurons. The Interactive Brain incorporates case studies, such as David's, and my own research on topics ranging through Capgras Syndrome, chronic pain, calendar synesthesia, gender incongruity, mirror visual feedback, and obsessive-compulsive disorder, the majority of which I have not considered in detail in my previous books. "I conclude by visiting some of the most prized but elusive aspects of our minds considered unapproachable by science, such as math, music, and metaphor, and suggest that these quintessentially human abilities are best elucidated by combining an evolutionary approach with old-fashioned neurology." V.S. RAMACHANDRAN is the director of the Center for Brain and Cognition and a professor with the Psychology Department and Neurosciences Program at the University of California, San Diego. He is author of Phantoms in the Brain, which has been translated into fourteen languages and formed the basis of a two part series on Channel Four TV (UK) and a 1 hour PBS special in the USA, and more recently The Tell-Tale Brain which was a New York Times best-seller. t BEHAVE The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst By Robert M. Sapolsky [US — Penguin Press, UK — Bodley Head, Germany — Hanser, Holland — Ambo/Anthos, Brazil — Companhia Das Letras, Korea — Munhakdogne, Israel — Kinneret, Audio — Penguin RH; Manuscript; 496 pages; Publication: April 2017] "Robert Sapolsky is one of the best scientist-writers of our time, able to deal with the weightiest topics both authoritatively and wittily, with so light a touch they become accessible to all." —Oliver Sacks, M.D. The first major book from celebrated Stanford neurobiologist and author Robert Sapolsky in over a decade, Behave answers the most basic question about human behavior: "What made you do that?" Substitute "me" or Brockman, Inc. Frankfurt 2016 Hotlist -11- HOUSE OVERSIGHT 025157 "us" or "they" and it's a question asked millions of times a day in all the languages of the world in response to all manner of human behavior, good and bad. What brings out the best in us? What brings out the worst? For every complex problem, there's a solution that's simple, appealing, and wrong, H. L. Mencken famously said, and there are certainly many simple and wrong answers to this most important of questions, the question at the root of the way we parent, the way we educate, the way we manage, and the way we punish. The simple yet correct response, of course, is that it's complicated. The longer answer? For that, the great neuroscientist and primatologist Robert Sapolsky needed ten years, and this book. Behave is an epic achievement. In order to make sense of all the sources that conspire to affect human behavior, it begins in the very moment of action, when we commit the decisive deed in question. What is happening in our brain and body at the very moment, and in the minutes that preceded it? The book then pulls back to look how the behavior is conditioned by what the body is exposed to in the days, weeks and months leading up to that behavior. It then goes back to childhood and adolescence, at how the bending of the bough effects how the tree grows. And so on, from neurobiology, endocrinology and the interaction of our senses with the environment to a lifetime's most primal shaping influences, and from there back to our genetic makeup and the very sticky wicket of how genes and environment interact (and how they don't). Finally, Sapolsky expands the view to take in factors that push us past any single person's inheritance and experience: namely culture, in the present tense and back hundreds, even thousands of years, and then back millions of years, to the first humans and the evolution of behavior. The result is surely among the most dazzling tours d 'horizon of the science of human behavior ever attempted, a majestic synthesis of cutting-edge research, some of it the author's own, across a range of disciplines to provide a subtle and necessary reckoning with the roots of our most troubling and inspiring behaviors, relating to racism, tribalism, and xenophobia; tolerance and altruism; hierarchy and competition; morality and free will; and war and peace. Wise, learned, funny, and fearless, Behave is a great scientist's towering achievement, a book that takes both the angel and the devil off of our shoulders and into our hands. ROBERT SAPOLSKY is the John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn Professor at Stanford University, holding joint appointments in several departments, including Biological Sciences, Neurology & Neurological Sciences, and Neurosurgery. He is the author of more than 400 technical papers published in biomedical journals. He also writes extensively for non-scientists in magazines such as Discover, Natural History and the New Yorker. Sapolsky's books include Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, A Primate's Memoir, The Trouble With Testosterone, and Monkeyluv. TAMING INFINITY The Surprising Story of Calculus and the Geniuses Behind It (working title) By Steven Strogatz [US — Eamon Dolan Books; Proposal; 80,000 words; Delivery: Spring 2018] A fascinating new book from Steven Strogatz, award-winning mathematician and author, who brings the story of calculus to life in a single narrative that spans continents, centuries, and disciplines to a dramatic climax. Writes Strogatz, "The quest to tame infinity, and to harness it toward our ends, is a narrative that runs through the whole 2,500-year story of calculus. Yet this saga is an untold story, as far as today's general audience is concerned. Taming Infinity will tell it for the first time. Brockman, Inc. Frankfurt 2016 Hotlist -12- HOUSE OVERSIGHT 025158 "Calculus is one of the greatest ideas that anyone has ever had and certainly the greatest idea in all of mathematics. The scientific and technological importance of calculus is one reason why we require all budding scientists and engineers to learn the subject. Taming Infinity is the human side of calculus: the gripping story of how it was discovered, and lost, and then rediscovered a thousand years later, or how it perplexed many of the geniuses who struggled to invent it, and in a few tragic cases, drove them insane. In a very real sense, this humanistic side of calculus is just as fascinating and important as its scientific side as it, too, has changed the world. "Central to the story is the mathematicians' quest to tame infinity, which begins with the philosopher Zeno of Elea (about 450 BC, before Socrates) who raised paradoxes about infinity, continuity, time, space, and motion that confounded his contemporaries and provoked no less than Aristotle to banish infinity from Greek philosophy and mathematics from then on. Fast-forward more than 2,500 years, and we're still wrestling with infinity and the paradoxes it raises. In between, the inventors of calculus, starting with Archimedes around 250 BC and culminating with Newton and Leibniz in the mid-1600s, tried to domesticate infinity to make what we now regard as integral and differential calculus. And to a large extent, they succeeded. The carefully controlled use of infinity is the secret to calculus, the source of its enormous predictive power. "But like Frankenstein's monster or the golem in Jewish folklore, infinity was never quite under control. As in any tale of hubris, the monster inevitably turned on its creator. Soon after the work of Newton and Leibniz, disturbing paradoxes emerged in the 1700s and early 1800s. Calculations came out wrong. Calculus seemed unreliable. These difficulties provoked another wave of philosophical and logical handwringing, much as Zeno's had two millennia earlier. These conundrums were resolved over the next century by the mathematicians who called themselves 'analysts.' The name was apt. They put calculus on the couch, and probed it, trying to root out every last trace of pathology. They succeeded for calculus, but not for infinity itself. There the pathology ran deeper. The riddles of infinity are still challenging logicians, mathematicians, and philosophers today." STEVEN STROGATZ is the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Applied Mathematics at Cornell University. He is the bestselling author of The Joy Of X, The Calculus Of Friendship, and Sync. His research has been featured in Nature, Science, Scientific American, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and broadcast on BBC Radio, National Public Radio, CBS News, among others. In 2010, he wrote a 15-part series about the elements of math for the New York Times, and a second series, Me, Myself and Math, appeared in 2012. Strogatz has spoken at TED and the Aspen Ideas Festival and has been a frequent guest on Radiolab and Science Friday. He has received numerous awards for his research, teaching, and public communication, including, most recently, the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science (2015). THE POWER OF HUMAN By Adam Waytz [US — W.W. Norton; Proposal; 70,000 words; Delivery: February 2018] Adam Waytz is a rising star in the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, whose research uses methods from social psychology and cognitive neuroscience to study how people think about minds. Waytz is the first person to receive twice the Theoretical Innovation Prize from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. He is also the winner of the SAGE Young Scholar Award and the International Social Cognition Network's Early Career Award. Waytz writes: "Everyday life is increasingly human-free. Robotic technology has begun replacing human jobs and will replace millions more over the next five years. In domains such as manufacturing and agriculture, robotic employees are already a reality. Tasks like getting directions from another human or consulting with a bank teller to deposit money have become obsolete. These advances contribute to well-documented declines in social interaction. Not only has interaction with human beings diminished, but existing human interaction has Brockman, Inc. Frankfurt 2016 Hotlist -13- HOUSE OVERSIGHT 025159 declined in quality. People feel less trusting of others than in previous decades, face-to-face communication is less frequent, and people's social networks have become more fragmented, producing smaller social clusters rather than expansive, civic community groups. Empathy with other humans, considering others' wants, feelings, needs, and motivations (the essence of what makes us human), has diminished considerably. Rises in income inequality and political polarization also mean that our diversity of social experiences—encountering people unlike 'us' —is diminishing as well, enabling little consideration of humans dissimilar to ourselves. "The Power of Human represents a call to action. This book details the psychological cost of losing our humanity and elucidates scientifically supported strategies to counteract this trend, many of which are already underway. Although scholars have bemoaned declines in social interaction, their concerns often erroneously center on people's deteriorating social skills, communication abilities, and intelligence (for which evidence is decidedly mixed). Meanwhile, the real costs of this decline on moral behavior, employee productivity, mobilizing social movements, and finding meaning in life have gone overlooked. This book elucidates how we often overlook how psychologically powerful humans are, and provides strategies to rejuvenate efforts to recognize others' humanity. "The Power of Human is unique in providing solutions to this problem that will help businesses retain customers and employees, help charities raise more money, help people experience greater significance from simple everyday activities, help technologists design better robots, help reduce conflict between different political and religious sects, and increase happiness in relationships with friends and spouses." ADAM WAYTZ is an associate professor of management and organizations in the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. His research has been published in leading journals such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and Psychological Review. Waytz received the 2008 and 2013 Theoretical Innovation Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the SAGE Foundation Young Scholar Award, and the International Social Cognition Network's Early Career Award. In 2015, Poets and Quants named him one of the "Best 40 Business School Professors Under the Age of 40." He has written articles for the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Scientific American, and Slate. SCALE The Search for Simplicity and Unity in the Complexity of Life, from Cells to Cities, Companies to Ecosystems, Milliseconds to Millennia By Geoffrey West [US — Penguin Press, UK — Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Holland — Het Spectrum, Finland — Terra Cognita, Brazil — Das Letras; Japan — Hayakawa; Korea — Gimm Young; Taiwan — Locus; China — CITIC; Russia — Atticus; Audio — Penguin RH; Manuscript; 400 pages; Publication: May 2017] The former head of the Sante Fe Institute, visionary physicist Geoffrey West is a pioneer in the field of complexity science, the science of emergent systems and networks. The term "complexity" can be misleading, however, because what makes West's discoveries so beautiful is that he has found an underlying simplicity that unites the seemingly complex and diverse phenomena of living systems, including our bodies, our cities and our businesses. Fascinated by issues of aging and mortality, West applied the rigor of a physicist to the biological question of why we live as long as we do and no longer. The result was astonishing and changed science, creating a new understanding of energy use and metabolism: West found that despite the riotous diversity in the sizes of mammals, they are all, to a large degree, scaled versions of each other. If you know the size of a mammal, you can use scaling laws to learn everything from how much food it eats per day, what its heart-rate is, how long it will take to mature, its lifespan, and so on. Furthermore, the efficiency of the mammal's circulatory systems Brockman, Inc. Frankfurt 2016 Hotlist -14- HOUSE OVERSIGHT 025160 scales up precisely based on weight: If you compare a mouse, a human and an elephant on a logarithmic graph, you find with every doubling of average weight, a species gets 25% more efficient—and lives 25% longer. This speaks to everything from how long we can expect to live to how many hours of sleep we need. Fundamentally, he has proven, the issue has to do with the fractal geometry of the networks that supply energy and remove waste from the organism's body. West's work has been game-changing for biologists, but then he made the even bolder move of exploring his work's applicability to cities. Cities, too, are constellations of networks and laws of scalability relate with eerie precision to them. For every doubling in a city's size, the city needs 15% less road, electrical wire, and gas stations to support the same population. More amazingly, for every doubling in size, cities produce 15% more patents and more wealth, as well as 15% more crime and disease. This broad pattern lays the groundwork for a new science of cities. Recently, West has applied his revolutionary work on cities and biological life to the business world. This investigation has led to powerful insights into why some companies thrive while others fail. The implications of these discoveries are far-reaching, and are just beginning to be explored. Scale is a thrilling scientific adventure story about the elemental natural laws that bind us together in simple but profound ways. Through the brilliant mind of Geoffrey West, we can envision how cities, companies and biological life alike are dancing to the same simple, powerful tune, however diverse and unrelated they are to each other. GEOFFREY WEST, a theoretical physicist, is distinguished professor and past president at Santa Fe Institute. His primary interests have been in fundamental questions in physics and biology. West is a Senior Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory and a distinguished professor at the Sante Fe Institute, where he served as the president from 2005-2009. He has been featured in many publications world-wide including the New York Times, Nature, Science, the Financial Times, Wired and Scientific American, and has participated in television productions including Nova, the National Geographic and the BBC. His work on cities and companies was selected as a breakthrough idea of 2007 by Harvard Business Review, and in 2006 he was selected for Time Magazine's list of "100 Most Influential People in the World." FUNDAMENTALS (working title) By Frank Wilczek Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics, MIT Recipient, 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics [US — Penguin Press, UK — Allen Lane, Audio — Penguin RH; Proposal; 50,000 words; Delivery: March 2019] An exciting new book by Frank Wilczek, one of the world's most eminent theoretical physicists and the most important of his generation. His scientific work provides the basis for the LHC experiments at CERN. He has received many prizes for his work in physics, including the Nobel Prize (2004) for work he did as a graduate student at Princeton University, when he was twenty-one years old, and the King Faisal Prize in 2005. Writes Wilczek: "The premise of the book is simple: I formulated ten basic propositions, which together convey the core of what every thinking person should know about science. In Fundamentals, the ten basic propositions support a series of interesting and connected chapters, which give historical and cultural context, outline the evidence, and draw out the implications. I want the marketing of this book to be based on the following slogan: "If you read just one book about science, this should be the one." Here are three examples of the ten basic propositions: Brockman, Inc. Frankfurt 2016 Hotlist -15- HOUSE OVERSIGHT 025161 1. The World Is Very Big Our neighborhood (Earth, Solar System, Milky Way). The accessible universe. How we measure large distances. Consistency checks. The multitudes within. 2. The World Is Very Old The nature of time. How we measure the age of objects on Earth. What we mean by the age of the universe, and how we measure it. Consistency checks. 3. Matter Is Built From A Small Menu Of Ingredients, Which Exist In Vast Quantities Microscopy and its modern refinements. Matter from the bottom up—building from electrons, photons, nuclei (protons and neutrons) to everyday materials. How we analyze the chemistry of distant objects, like stars, and establish that they're made of the same stuff. Extraordinary objects. Fundamentals is a short, sophisticated book that the explains fundamentals of science. FRANK WILCZEK won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004 for work he did as a graduate student. His 1989 book, Longing for the Harmonies, was a New York Times notable book of the year. Wilczek is a regular contributor to Nature and Physics Today and his work has also been anthologized in Best American Science Writing and the Norton Anthology of Light Verse. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he is the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Brockman, Inc. Frankfurt 2016 Hotlist -16- HOUSE OVERSIGHT 025162