The Order of Time

The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts is the first book in The Great Mental Models series designed to upgrade your thinking with the best, most useful and powerful tools so you always have the right one on hand. This volume details nine of the most versatile all-purpose mental models you can use right away to improve your decision making, your productivity, and how clearly you see the world.

Why can some birds sleep with only half of their brain? What really happens during REM sleep? Why do our sleep patterns change across a lifetime? Sleep is one of the most important but least understood aspects of our life, health and longevity. Until very recently, science had no answer to the question of why we sleep or what good it serves or why we suffer such devastating health consequences when it is absent. In this book, neuroscientist and sleep expert Matthew Walker charts 20 years of cutting-edge research.

Benedict Cumberbatch reads the enduring classic of Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis. Gregor Samsa wakes to discover that he has turned into a large, monstrous insect-like creature. He attempts to adjust to his new condition as he deals with being burdensome to his parents and sister, who are repelled by the horrible creature he has become. First published in 1915, Kafka's darkly comic novella explores concepts such as the absurdity of life, alienation and the disconnect between mind and body.

A Short History of Nearly Everything is Bill Bryson's fascinating and humorous quest to understand everything that has happened from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization. He takes subjects that normally bore the pants off most of us, like geology, chemistry, and particle physics, and aims to render them comprehensible to people who have never thought they could be interested in science. In the company of some extraordinary scientists, Bill Bryson reveals the world in a way most of us have never seen it before.

What is the nature of space and time? How do we fit within the universe? How does the universe fit within us? There's no better guide through these mind-expanding questions than acclaimed astrophysicist and best-selling author Neil deGrasse Tyson. But today, few of us have time to contemplate the cosmos. So Tyson brings the universe down to Earth succinctly and clearly, with sparkling wit, in digestible chapters consumable anytime and anywhere in your busy day.

The object of this book is to provide a simple introduction to the Indian systems of philosophy. Each one of these systems has had a vast and varied development. Attempt has been made to introduce the listener to the spirit and outlook of Indian philosophy and help him to grasp thoroughly the central ideas rather than acquaint him with minute details. Modern students of philosophy feel many difficulties in understanding the Indian problems and theories. 

When Lenina and Bernard visit a savage reservation, we experience how Utopia can destroy humanity.

Cloning, feel-good drugs, anti-aging programs, and total social control through politics, programming, and media: has Aldous Huxley accurately predicted our future? With a storyteller's genius, he weaves these ethical controversies in a compelling narrative that dawns in the year 632 A.F. (After Ford, the deity). When Lenina and Bernard visit a savage reservation, we experience how Utopia can destroy humanity.

In his provocative new book, Dr. Kai-Fu Lee - one of the world’s most respected experts on artificial intelligence - reveals that China has suddenly caught up to the US, the leader in AI, at an astonishingly rapid pace. Building upon his longstanding US-Sino technology career (working at Apple, Microsoft, and Google) and his much-heralded New York Times Op-Ed from June 2017, Dr. Lee predicts that Chinese and American AI will have a stunning impact on not just traditional blue-collar industries but will also have a devastating effect on white-collar professions.

The full inside story of the breathtaking rise and shocking collapse of a multibillion-dollar start-up, by the prize-winning journalist who first broke the story and pursued it to the end. In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the female Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose start-up ‘unicorn’ promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a machine that would make blood tests significantly faster and easier. 

In flow, everyday experience becomes a moment by moment opportunity for joy and self-fulfillment. Flow is the brain-child of a fascinating psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a renowned social scientist who has devoted his life's work to the study of what makes people truly happy, satisfied and fulfilled. While much of the study of psychology investigates disorders of the human mind, Dr. Csikszentmihalyi takes a different route.

In The Four Agreements, don Miguel Ruiz reveals the source of self-limiting beliefs that rob us of joy and create needless suffering. Based on ancient Toltec wisdom, the The Four Agreements offer a powerful code of conduct that can rapidly transform our lives to a new experience of freedom, true happiness, and love.

Welcome to the age of the algorithm, the story of a not-too-distant future where machines rule supreme, making important decisions - in health care, transport, finance, security, what we watch, where we go, even whom we send to prison. So how much should we rely on them? What kind of future do we want? Hannah Fry takes us on a tour of the good, the bad and the downright ugly of the algorithms that surround us. In Hello World she lifts the lid on their inner workings, demonstrates their power, exposes their limitations and examines whether they really are an improvement on the humans they are replacing.

The Art of Learning takes listeners through Waitzkin's unique journey to excellence. He explains in clear detail how a well-thought-out, principled approach to learning is what separates success from failure. Waitzkin believes that achievement, even at the championship level, is a function of a lifestyle that fuels a creative, resilient growth process.

In 2009, with the dust yet to settle on the financial crisis, a baby-faced, seemingly mild-mannered Wharton grad began setting in motion a fraud of unprecedented gall and magnitude - one that would come to symbolize the next great threat to the global financial system. His name is Jho Low, a man whose behavior was so preposterous he might seem made up. An epic true tale of hubris and greed, Billion Dollar Whale reveals how this young social climber pulled off one of the biggest heists in history.

In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of "outliers" - the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high achievers different? His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing.