Feynman Thinking Out Loud In 1964, Richard Feynman delivered seven lectures at Cornell University as part of a BBC Messenger Lecture series. He was 46, had recently won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on quantum electrodynamics, and was at the height of his powers as both a physicist and a communicator. The…
The Most Important Book in the History of Science Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection on November 24, 1859. The entire first printing of 1,250 copies sold out on the day of publication. It remains one of the most consequential books ever written – not just in the…
A Book Unlike Any Other Douglas Hofstadter was a graduate student in physics at the University of Oregon when he began writing Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. He had become obsessed with a set of connections – between Kurt Godel’s incompleteness theorems, M.C. Escher’s self-referential drawings, and J.S. Bach’s recursive musical structures –…
The Most Controversial Science Memoir Ever Written James Watson published The Double Helix in 1968, fifteen years after he and Francis Crick built the model of DNA that explained how genetic information is stored and copied. The book was controversial before it was published – Francis Crick tried to stop it, the original publisher Harvard…
A Revolution in How We Think About Life When Richard Dawkins published The Selfish Gene in 1976, he was a young Oxford zoologist trying to explain to general readers what he took to be the most important conceptual advance in evolutionary biology since Darwin. The gene-centered view of evolution – the idea that the fundamental…
A Personal Voyage That Became a Cultural Touchstone Carl Sagan published Cosmos in 1980 as a companion to his thirteen-part PBS television series of the same name, and the book has never gone out of print. That longevity is not accidental. While many science books date quickly as knowledge advances, Cosmos endures because its deepest…
The Book That Made Physics Personal When Stephen Hawking published A Brief History of Time in 1988, the received wisdom was that every equation in a popular science book would cut sales in half. Hawking ignored this warning and included one – E = mc2 – and watched the book spend 237 weeks on the…
The Body Remade Kayleb Rae Candrilli’s Water I Won’t Touch is a collection about the trans body – about what it means to inhabit a body that is in the process of becoming what it should be, to live through the long difficult work of transition while also living through addiction recovery, grief, and the…
A Memoir That Refuses Its Own Form Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House defies easy categorization, which is perhaps why it appears here alongside poetry collections – it has the compression and the formal self-consciousness of the best poetry, even though it is, strictly speaking, a memoir. Published by Graywolf Press in 2019, it…
A Poet Most People Forgot to Notice Ursula K. Le Guin was known to the world primarily as a novelist – the author of the Hainish Cycle, the Earthsea novels, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed. What was less widely known outside the literary poetry community was that she had been writing and publishing…
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