Updates

  1. Person pages list letters, writing, profiles and links as sortable tables with filters, and show each person's companies as links; Fund letters show each letter's description in its own column.
  2. Experts show a checked job title and a short description of each person; 30 more people have photographs.
  3. Every company, fund, university and publication the experts work for has a page listing the people there.
  4. Fund letters show each letter's thesis and filter by it; 225 person pages list the essays, columns and newsletter issues the person wrote.
  5. Person pages list every essay and newsletter issue a person wrote, and their own books as a table in List view.
  6. Recommends shows the five largest kinds of book and the rest under More; browse pictures load sooner.
  7. Podcasts and talks link the original episode, filter by Audio and video or Press, and list each publisher once.
  8. Pages are wider, Recommends has List and Grid, and a filter clicked again turns off.
  9. Book cards sit in a ruled grid with Open Library and Goodreads links and each book's one-line note.
  10. Funds is now Investors; each investor's styles are buttons that filter the table.
  11. Podcasts and talks on a person's page filter by year and publisher and show as a list or a grid of pictures.
  12. Quotes show only people's own words: 472 summaries written by list sites are gone.
  13. Country pages open from Browse again, and every link on the shelf lands on a page.
  14. Subject and person pages show their sections as tabs, and each book appears once on a person's page.
  15. Book cards show the quote, who said it and the source; grids show five cards to a row.
  16. On a phone, a menu holds the sections, search, Updates, Feedback and dark mode.
  17. Feedback takes a screenshot of the page with no browser prompt, opens a screenshot full size when you click it, and clears itself once sent.
  18. Book cards are centred, search names the topic each book sits in, and any text cut short shows whole on hover.
  19. Search groups its results by kind: people, companies, geographies, subjects, topics, books, funds, fund letters and papers.
  20. The Books table lists who recommended each book by name, and the browser tab names the section you are in.
  21. Feedback can take a screenshot of the page, or one you paste or choose, and opens in the corner beside Updates.
  22. Each rail button reopens its section where you left it, and Browse, Table and People show on every book and subject page.
  23. Filters grey out choices that hold nothing instead of hiding them, and Books › People filters by authors or recommenders.
  24. Feedback takes a subject line and up to three screenshots.
  25. Biographies are grouped by the person they are about: 41 new pages, from Abraham Lincoln to Lee Kuan Yew.
  26. Sport splits into 23 sports, and Religion into one topic per faith.
  27. Book lists show as cards: the cover, one recommendation quote and every recommender by name.
  28. Seventeen subjects that had two or three pages under different names now have one page each.
  29. Every page lists its Experts as authors and recommenders, with a link to them on the Experts tab.
  30. Economics, Financial history, Financial panics and Accounting are subjects of their own, with one page per financial crisis.
  31. Book, person and subject pages open inside the app, so the tabs stay in view.
  32. 996 more book covers, and photographs or logos for 227 more people and companies.
  33. Books › Browse shows every subject as cards, and the rail holds Fund letters, Papers, Experts, Books and Funds.
  34. Every topic over 150 books splits into narrower topics, each with a page of its own.

Send feedback

What is it?
Screenshots, up to 3 (optional)
or paste one with Ctrl+V

We use your email only to reply to you.
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

Elizabeth Kolbert
2014
T3 352 pages · about 5h 52m to read Open Librarygoodreads

Kolbert spent years reporting alongside biologists watching species disappear in real time. The book's argument is that we are in the middle of a sixth mass extinction — and it makes that claim through fieldwork, not abstraction. The best entry point into climate science for readers who trust narrative over data.

Who recommended it 1 · 1 direct

Bill GatesdirectSource

Similar books 6

Chosen by shared topics, the entries that hold them, and the people who recommended both.

Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the WisFinding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest
T3 Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest
Suzanne Simard
Goodreads

A novel, not nonfiction, but Powers does something none of the other books here accomplish: he makes the timescale of trees felt as an emotional experience. The result is that you finish it reading the other books differently — with a less human-centric sense of what time and loss mean.

Recommended by: Barack Obama

Silent SpringSilent Spring
T3 Silent Spring
Rachel Carson
Goodreads

Carson's 1962 account of pesticide contamination is the founding text of environmental science writing. It matters here not only as history but as methodology: a demonstration that making an invisible industrial threat visible and specific can, in fact, change policy. Every climate communicator is still working in her shadow.

Recommended by: Stewart Brand

Clearing the Air
T3 Clearing the Air
Hannah Ritchie · 2025
Open LibraryGoodreads

Data-driven look at emissions and what actually reduces them

Recommended by: Bill Gates

Energy: A Beginner's GuideEnergy: A Beginner's Guide
T1 Energy: A Beginner's Guide
Vaclav Smil · 2006
Open LibraryGoodreads

A short primer on energy: its forms, units and role in nature and economies.

Recommended by: Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg

Energy and CivilizationEnergy and Civilization
T1 Energy and Civilization
Vaclav Smil · 2017
Open LibraryGoodreads

History told through energy, from muscle and fire to coal, oil and electricity.

Recommended by: Balaji S. Srinivasan, Bill Gates and 1 other

How the World Really WorksHow the World Really Works
T1 How the World Really Works
Vaclav Smil · 2022
Open LibraryGoodreads

The physical basics of modern life: energy, food, materials and globalisation.

Recommended by: Bill Gates

Where it sits in the reference 1

Energy Transition and Decarbonisation
Secular themes

Topics

Environment and EnergyNature, conservation and Earth science