Two Years and Twenty Minutes Inside Biosphere 2
Jane Poynter
The controversial creation of Biosphere 2 still lives on today. This radical experiment to have eight people live in a sealed environment for two years was the brainchild of ecologist John Allen, and funded by billionaire Ed Bass. Based on …
Amanda Montell
Cults, like porn and art, are something we feel we’ll know when we see. There is no agreed upon definition and the line of cult-land is nebulous. Montell, a linguist, suggests the core of a cult is driven by language. A vocabulary of inclusion (the way WE talk) …
Ron Johnson
Author Johnson, is best known for his book The Men Who Stare at Goats, later a Hollywood movie. His other books are no less far afield and equally fascinating, including The Psychopath Test. So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, published 2015, is the book of the …
Jon Ronson
There is something utterly gripping and fascinating about psychopaths. The idea that someone is without morals or compassion, no internal brakes, repels and intrigues us. What if we didn’t have that little voice in our head telling us not to do something? What if we could do whatever …
What Saints, Spies and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success
Kevin Dutton
Dutton’s book on his research into psychopaths is a fast, easy read with little academic jargon to bog the reader down. Clearly aimed for the armchair lookie-loo (hello!), Dutton amused and horrifies readers with stories of his …
Joshua Foer
Journalist Joshua Foer had no idea he’d being going down the rabbit hole himself when he first covered the U.S. Memory Championships. The contest, not one to draw large headlines or ecstatic crowds, is still an intense competition. Participants must memorize the order of a random decks of …
Kent Kiehl, Ph.D.
Kiehl’s strikes an excellent balance in his book on psychopath research. Packed with stories of his encounters with the psychopaths he studied in prisons and hospitals, he also explains the science and reasoning in his research. His findings are incredible. Kiehl is clearly fascinated and dedicated …
David Bayles & Ted Orland
This is the book that should be given to every freshman art major, to anyone who wants to start making art but can’t seem to get started and to every artist who is stuck. While it may seem deceptively short, the content packs a wallop. …
Dr. Randy Frost
Despite not watching tv, I have managed to become addicted to A&E’s show Hoarders. Being a popular reality show, the surface of this bizarre illness is barely scratched. Dr. Frost goes much deeper into the overwhelming desire some people have to save and hoard things, often to …
Don Lattin
What we now associate with Timothy Leary – LSD, Grateful Dead concerts, hippies, tuning in and dropping out, first started out as psychological experiments at Harvard University. Leary, a charismatic and well-liked professor, hoped to help inmates rehabilitate by giving them mystical experiences via LSD. His early partners, …
Daniel Gilbert
…As long as your brain’s guess about the next word turns out to be right, turning black squiggles into ideas, scenes, characters, and concepts, blissfully unaware that your nexting brain is predicting the future of the sentence at a fantastic rate. It is only when your brain predicts
Oliver Sacks
Neurologist Oliver Sacks is probably best known for his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. With a focus on rare neurological diseases and maladies, Sacks was deeply interested to hear about the Island of Pingelap. Nearly 10% of the population is achromatopic – …
