Science & Nature

Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point (2000) is an interdisciplinary work of popular sociology and psychology that explores the concept of the tipping point, a moment of sudden change that occurs in social epidemics. Gladwell explores how social epidemics work and offers many case studies and illustrative research to bolster his novel arguments about how epidemics “tip.” The book began as an article for The New Yorker. This guide refers to the first edition of the... Read The Tipping Point Summary

Published in 1968, the essay “The Tragedy of the Commons,” by ecologist Garrett James Hardin, argues that human overpopulation will stress ecosystems beyond their limits and cause a resource catastrophe. The essay has greatly influenced environmentalists. Hardin was a politically controversial, award-winning science writer who taught ecology at the University of California at Santa Barbara for over 30 years. Critics on both sides of the political spectrum have resented not only some of his proposed... Read The Tragedy of the Commons Summary

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A powerful dichotomy lies at the heart of The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds (2016), Michael Lewis’s account of how the friendship between two Israeli psychologists—Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky—essentially created the field of behavioral economics and shifted paradigms about human decision making. This dichotomy is the tension between intuition and algorithms, between gut feelings and empirical data. In the Introduction, Lewis explains that The Undoing Project exists largely as a complement... Read The Undoing Project Summary

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming is a 2019 non-fiction book by the American journalist David Wallace-Wells. Subtitled Life After Warming, the book explores the projected meteorological, sociological, and psychological consequences of climate change over the course of the 21st century. A New York Times bestseller, The Uninhabitable Earth appeared on numerous best books of the year lists, including those of The Economist, Time, and NPR. It is adapted from Wallace-Wells’s 2017 New York magazine... Read The Uninhabitable Earth Summary

The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Nature (1902) by William James is a philosophical examination of how religious revelations function in individuals’ lives and minds. This renowned work applies James’s theoretical framework of pragmatism to the study of the functionality of religion. James utilizes radical empiricism to examine both the subjective and objective experiences of religion. James argues that individual experiences, not major religious institutions, form the spiritual shape of the world. He... Read The Varieties of Religious Experience Summary

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The War of the Worlds is a landmark science fiction novel published in 1897 by English author H. G. Wells. Its nameless narrator provides a firsthand account of the arrival of Martians in the area surrounding London and their subsequent devastation of central England. Vastly outmatched by Martian technology, human civilization is brought entirely to its knees in a matter of days, although the Martians are totally eradicated by terrestrial bacteria before they can expand... Read The War of the Worlds Summary

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This study guide refers to the 2009 House of Anansi Press edition of Wade Davis’s The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World. The Wayfinders collects a series of five Massey Lectures that Davis delivered in Canada in 2009. Davis is a Colombian-Canadian anthropologist and ethnobotanist, and the Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society. This position, as well as his long anthropological career, has allowed Davis to spend time with many of the... Read The Wayfinders Summary

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The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century is a nonfiction book by Thomas L. Friedman. It was first published in 2005 and was updated with two new editions in 2006 and 2007. The book is a wide-ranging examination of globalization at the turn of the 21st century and its impact on the United States. The book is divided into sections that explain the origin, impact, and meaning of a “flat world.”... Read The World Is Flat Summary

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The Worst Hard Time, written by New York Times journalist Timothy Egan, won the National Book Award for Nonfiction (2006) and the Washington State Book Award (2006). Egan chronicles the history of the Dust Bowl from the late 1800s to 1939, unfolding the tragedy of errors that led to the environmental and economic disasters of the 1930s. Readers experience historical events through stories of survivors: farmers, cowboys, ranchers, merchants, investors and professionals. Egan chooses survivors... Read The Worst Hard Time Summary

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