Bill Gates

What it would take to cut greenhouse gas emissions to zero, sector by sector.

A critical history of Bill Gates and the early Microsoft, from Lakeside School on.

Bill Gates from Harvard and Microsoft BASIC to the IBM deal that made Microsoft.

A biography of Bill Gates covering his reinvention after Microsoft.

A critique of the Gates Foundation and the rise of philanthrocapitalism.

An investigative case against the power of the Gates Foundation.

Insider account by a former Windows developer; hostile in tone.

Sequel to Hard Drive, on the browser wars and the road to antitrust.

Obama's memoir from his early politics through his first presidential term.

How the NeXT and Pixar years changed Steve Jobs into the leader who rebuilt Apple.

Buffett's life from Omaha and Graham's class to building Berkshire Hathaway.

Insider account: later memoir on social responsibility and politics.

Microsoft's chief executive on moving the company toward cloud and AI.

Leonardo's life read through his notebooks, where art and science were one pursuit.

Paul Farmer, the doctor who co-founded Partners In Health, treating the poor.

Running the Washington Post through the Pentagon Papers, Watergate and a strike.

Dell's founder on the buyout, the Icahn fight and VMware

How a running-shoe importer became Nike, surviving one cash crisis after another.

Steve Jobs's life and Apple's products, from forty interviews with him and many more.

How Lincoln brought his three rivals for the 1860 nomination into his cabinet.

A memoir of surviving Auschwitz and a psychologist's guide to healing from trauma.

Jeffrey Sachs's ambitious quest to end global poverty, followed on the ground.

The career of Norman Borlaug, the plant scientist who won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Running Disney and buying Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm and Fox to add creative talent.

A neurosurgeon diagnosed with lung cancer at 36 asks what makes life worth living.

Media executive's memoir spanning Paramount, Fox and IAC

A novel of an amnesiac astronaut sent to stop a microbe that is dimming the sun.

A novel of a sixteen-year-old's days alone in New York after his school expels him.

A novel of a rich man of unknown origin on Long Island and the woman he wants back.

In the post-apocalyptic nation of Panem, sixteen-year-old Katniss fights to survive.

A novel of an astronaut left alone on Mars who must survive until rescue.

A novel of nine people whose lives are bound up with trees and their defence.

A novel in which a scientist answers an alien warning and invites first contact.

End-of-life and hospice care, and why medicine should aim at well-being.

A neurosurgeon on how medical decisions and hospital incentives actually work

The history and revival of psychedelic research, and the author's own trips.

The science, myths and business of blood, from bloodletting to plasma sales.

Why key information failed to reach doctors in West Africa's Ebola epidemic.

The American fear of polio and the race for a cure, from the March of Dimes to Salk.

The main findings on disease-control priorities for developing countries.

How checklists stop experts in complex fields failing to apply what they know.

The gene from Mendel and Darwin to genome editing, beside a family's mental illness.

The 1918 flu: how it spread from a Kansas army camp and killed up to 100 million.

Data-driven look at emissions and what actually reduces them

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

Each shift from wood to coal to oil took 50 to 70 years; new ones will be slow too.

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

How Haber and Bosch's ammonia synthesis transformed world food production.

What it would take to cut greenhouse gas emissions to zero, sector by sector.

Data showing progress on environmental problems, enough to reach true sustainability.

The challenges of feeding the world by 2050 and the reasons for hope.

Meat in human evolution and modern farming, and the costs of heavy meat-eating.

Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich's wager on metal prices, and their fight over scarcity.

A computer model of exponential economic and population growth on finite resources.

The history of oil from the first Pennsylvania well to the Gulf War.

Energy from 1990 to 2011: Russian and Caspian oil, Iraq, climate policy, renewables.

Explains an action by tracing its causes back from neurons to hormones to evolution.

What brain science says about learning, sleep, stress, memory and multitasking.

How organisms, populations, machines, economies and civilisations grow, and stop.

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

Seventy-one short pieces that correct common impressions with plain arithmetic.

Why glass is clear and paperclips bend: the science of everyday materials.

Jennifer Doudna, co-developer of CRISPR gene editing, and what followed it.

Lectures on physics, mainly mechanics, radiation and heat.

Lectures on physics, mainly electromagnetism and matter.

Lectures on quantum mechanics.

How trivial-seeming questions lead to deeper insight into how science works.

Myths about the sun, night and earthquakes set against what science has found.

Why past societies from Easter Island to the Maya collapsed, and what that teaches.

Steven Pinker's 500-page empirical survey of progress across 15 dimensions: health, wealth, equality, safety, knowledge, quality of life. Explicitly frames market economies and Enlightenment liberalism as the institutional sources of that progress. Has been criticized for cherry-picking metrics and underweighting catastrophic risks; the data itself is worth engaging with regardless.

Diamond's central question — why did some civilizations come to dominate others over 10,000 years? — is precisely the kind of question that requires long-term thinking to even ask. The answer, rooted in geography and biology rather than culture or intelligence, is a model for how to reason about slow causes and fast effects.

Harari's concern — that humans may cede decision-making to opaque systems through preference rather than coercion — reframes the alignment problem as a cultural and political challenge, not only a technical one. Less rigorous than Bostrom or Russell, but more widely read, making it a useful lens for understanding public discourse.

The whole of history, from the big bang through the present and into the far future.

How presidents from Madison to Lyndon Johnson took America to war and gained power.

How shared fictions such as money, nations and gods let humans cooperate at scale.

Evidence that violence of nearly every kind has declined over history, and why.

How the shipping container cut freight costs and remade global trade.

The building of the Panama Canal, from France's failed attempt to US completion.

Churchill's first year as prime minister, from Dunkirk through the Blitz.

Tests the popular comparison of America with ancient Rome and finds deep differences.

The long-run dynamics of wealth and inequality, and why capital concentrates.

Why some Asian nations grew rich: land reform, export-led industry, directed credit.

Ghana's 2010 GDP rebasing is the central case; read before trusting any African macro series.

Sequel applying incentive analysis to climate, crime and altruism

Prosperity grows as trade and specialisation let ideas meet and combine.

Why the inventions of 1870 to 1970 raised living standards as nothing since has.

Ten forces around 2000 that let anyone, anywhere compete in the global economy.

Nations prosper under inclusive institutions and stagnate under extractive ones.

How parents can stop worrying about their children's future and help them prepare.

How schools and districts can save money while still serving students well.

Twenty-one essays on today's challenges, from technology and politics to truth.

Eight Milwaukee families and two landlords through repeated evictions, 2008-09.

Hans Rosling was a global health professor, not an economist, which gives his data-driven case for human progress particular credibility. He shows, in meticulous detail, that almost every quantitative measure of human welfare has improved dramatically over the past century. He attributes this to global trade and economic development without being a polemicist.

How the internet can spread generosity and make giving a force for good.

Common knowledge, where everyone knows that everyone knows, and what it does.

The case that fast-improving technology will make scarce resources cheap.

How inventions of 1867 to 1914, from electricity to cars, made the modern world.

How much steel, cement and plastic the world uses, and whether growth needs less.

How the diesel engine and the gas turbine made modern global trade possible.

Computing as a run of collaborations, from Ada Lovelace and Babbage to Google.

Insider account by Microsoft's president on tech policy and regulation.

Why America lost the ability to build housing, energy and infrastructure.

Cognitive psychology applied to how leaders misperceive each other in foreign policy.

How America is failing four challenges, from globalization to its chronic deficits.

People who think ability grows with effort learn more than those who think it fixed.

A journalist learns memory techniques and wins the US Memory Championship.

How timing, culture and accumulated advantage explain exceptional success.

Early specialisation works only where rules are stable; elsewhere breadth wins.

Kahneman's synthesis of behavioral economics is the cognitive science underpinning every negotiation tactic. Anchoring, loss aversion, framing effects, and the planning fallacy — understanding why these biases operate, not just that they exist, makes you harder to exploit and more honest about your own irrationality.

Seven patterns, such as the adjacent possible, in the settings that produce ideas.

Twelve New Yorker stories of business, from the Edsel's failure to the 1962 crash.

Objectives and key results, the goal system Grove built at Intel and Google adopted.

Decision rules from building Bridgewater: radical truth and radical transparency.

The 1929 Wall Street crash: the greed and folly behind America's greatest collapse.

How Jho Low diverted billions from Malaysia's 1MDB fund into parties and politics.

The Federal Reserve under Bernanke in the 2008 crisis, August 2007 to spring 2009.

The 2008 crisis and its aftermath, from inside the New York Fed and the Treasury.

Eight centuries of defaults and banking crises show the same patterns recurring.

Inside the meetings of bankers and regulators during the 2008 financial crisis.

A tennis champion's life story, built around the fact that he hated tennis.

Performing under pressure by quieting the self-interference that spoils play.

How AI could change crime, war, justice, jobs and what it means to be human.

Why AI and synthetic biology will spread fast and cheaply, and how to contain them.

A physicist's stories, from fixing radios as a boy to Los Alamos and beyond.

Shockley and the accidental seeding of Silicon Valley.

Einstein's life and science, from the Bern patent office to relativity.

The search for the periodic table; reasoning from the elements upward

When and how to put speed before efficiency to capture a market before rivals.

Why organisations kill breakthrough projects, and how structure can protect them.

Lessons in 'unreasonable thinking' from building companies and giving away wealth.

Rakuten's founder and his economist father debate how Japan can compete again.

How biased samples, chosen averages and cut-off chart axes make numbers mislead.

How the science of cause and effect moved past 'correlation is not causation'.

Why some forecasts succeed and most fail, from weather to earthquakes and economics.

Speeches making the case for a latticework of mental models from many fields.

Fortune's articles by and about Buffett from 1966 to 2012, with commentary.

How Theranos reached a $9 billion value with blood tests that never worked.

Rare, unforeseen, high-impact events drive history, explained only after the fact.

Science-inspired cooking techniques of modern gastronomy, across six volumes.

How lack of sleep damages nearly every system in the body, and what sleep does.

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.

Raising self-confident children by pairing empathy with the consequences they face.

A biography of cancer, by a physician and oncologist.

How GE fell from the world's most valuable company to a conglomerate split in three.