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Notable Non-Fiction June 2026 |
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Beneath the Shadow: Legacy and Longing in the Antarctic by Justin GardinerIn February 2010, with the help of a friend who works as a photographer with a National Geographic–sponsored cruise line, Justin Gardiner boarded a ship bound for Antarctica. A stowaway of sorts, Gardiner used his experiences on this voyage as the narrative backdrop for Beneath the Shadow, a compelling firsthand account that breathes new life into the nineteenth-century journals of Antarctic explorers such as Captain Robert Falcon Scott, Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton, and Captain Roald Amundsen. Beneath the Shadow is centered on journal excerpts by eight famous explorers, which Gardiner uses as touchstones for modern-day experiences of harsh seas, chance encounters, rugged terrain, and unspeakable beauty. With equal parts levity and lyricism, Gardiner navigates the distance between the historical and the contemporary, the artistic and the scientific, the heroic and the mundane. The bold and tragic tales of Antarctic explorers have long held our collective imagination―almost as much as the mythically remote land such explorers ventured to―and this book makes those voices come to life as few ever have.
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Parks and Rec: The Underdog TV Show That Lit'rally Inspired a Vision for a Better America by Jennifer Keishin ArmstrongMore than fifteen years after Parks and Recreation premiered, it has become a streaming staple. It’s beloved for its jokes, characters, and expressions—the show even created a now widely observed holiday, Galentine’s Day. How did it all happen and how did the show transform from a ratings disappointment into a cult classic? Pop culture historian Jennifer Keishin Armstrong reveals all this and more in the authoritative history of the show, which is as full of humor, optimism, and heart as Parks and Recreation itself. Through new and exclusive interviews, as well as deep insight and smart and entertaining pop culture analysis, Armstrong tells the story of how Parks and Recreation came to be: how it grew from The Office’s success and Obama-inspired optimism, how producers assembled one of TV’s most lovable casts but barely survived a mediocre first season, how the show found its voice by getting more political and more romantic, and how it became a cultural force despite middling ratings during its network run, going on to become a television savior of the Trump era and a modern classic. Lovingly told and deeply researched, Parks and Rec is the ultimate history of the show that taught us what’s important in life: friends, waffles, and work.
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I Am Not a Robot: My Year Using AI to Do (Almost) Everything by Joanna Stern You’ve heard the hype: AI will make us healthier, give every child a personalized tutor, run our businesses more efficiently, return hours of free time to our overworked brains, and make discoveries previously unimagined by humankind. The AI future is going to be unlike any other technological revolution. But what does that really mean? And will AI truly make life better? To find out, award-winning journalist Joanna Stern surrendered her life to artificial intelligence for one year. The results are both hilarious and unsettling. I Am Not a Robot is like a time machine trip to the very near future, where AI promises to be your doctor, chauffeur, teacher, masseuse, coworker, therapist, financial planner, chef, housekeeper, and even . . . romantic partner. Your colleague might be using ChatGPT to write emails at work, but Joanna used AI tools and robots to do household chores, to manage her health, and to transport her family on vacation. If there was a decision to make or a task to do, she let AI go first. Along the way, she conducted exclusive interviews with the tech leaders building this future, then reported back from the front lines as your funny, no-nonsense tour guide. Of course, tech’s sunny promises never tell the whole story, and that’s what Joanna is here to share. Filled with illustrations and photographs, this book offers less hype, more clarity, and as little jargon as humanly (or robotically) possible. It’s an AI guide for ordinary people—not the tech bros who tried to sell you a cruise to the metaverse or an NFT of a cartoon monkey. This book is not the definitive story, because we’re only a few years into the AI revolution. But after a year of living as a human lab rat, Joanna delivers one of the clearest—and funniest—pictures yet of what’s really happening and what it means for you.
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Body Electric: The Hidden Health Costs of the Digital Age and New Science to Reclaim Your Well-Being by Manoush ZomorodiIn today’s world, a perfectly normal day means sitting in front of a screen for eight to ten hours. Meeting after meeting. Task after task. Email after email. If we’re not chained to our chairs, we’re attached to our devices, looking down at our phones and plugging in headphones. And then we go home, sit down on the couch, and scroll some more before going to bed and doing it all over again. Even children are not exempt: Many hours of their social and academic lives are spent on a screen. We all know there has to be a better way―but what is it? In Body Electric, Manoush Zomorodi, host of NPR’s TED Radio Hour and the Body Electric podcast, draws on expert interviews, cutting-edge research, and real experiences from tens of thousands of everyday participants in her own citizen experiment to reveal the surprising physiological costs of our digital existences, from posture problems and dwindling eyesight to disrupted breathing and weight gain, and shares scientifically-backed, easy-to-manage tactics and solutions for better health and well-being. Along the way, she also debunks myths and misconceptions about what helps and hurts us, offers useful insights into the labs, offices, schools, and homes where small shifts are making big difference, culminating in an easy-to-apply protocol that will get us all moving.
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The Ultimate Shell Seeker's Guide: Building a Better Beachcombing Strategy by Ashley OliphantThe Ultimate Shell Seeker’s Guide is the book that beachcombers have been anxiously waiting for an expert to finally write. Join Dr. Ashley Oliphant as she reveals the secret calculus that the best beachcombers in the world are constantly working in their brains as they decide when and where to plan their next hunt. This is not just another identification guide that offers species names and descriptions. Instead, this book is a practical field manual that puts the reader on the beach with one of the most well-known beachcombers in the country. Oliphant reveals the insider knowledge that so many veteran collectors want to keep hidden from newcomers to the hobby, including where to hunt and how to read the tides, moon phases, wind directions, wave heights, and seasonal fluctuations that have such a dramatic impact on beachcombing success. The text delivers the foundational information that beginners need but then advances beyond those fundamentals to off er experienced hunters more complex strategies to help improve their game. Along the way, readers will be entertained by Oliphant’s unique personal stories and enthusiastic outlook―both of which have made her such a sought-after speaker on the national circuit.
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Lost Worlds: How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World by Patrick Wyman There’s a familiar story about us humans: we went from hunting and gathering to farming, wandering bands to villages and cities, clans and chieftains to states and kings. But Lost Worlds offers a new narrative of humanity’s deep history. Here beloved podcast host Patrick Wyman focuses on the 10,000-year span between the end of the Ice Age and the decline of the Bronze Age—the period when civilization as we understand it emerged, introducing social hierarchies, urbanism, complex political organizations, and the written word. In this nuanced retelling, human progress is no longer a straight march from caves to cities: Farming didn’t always replace foraging, villages didn’t automatically spark agriculture, and cities didn’t necessitate rigid hierarchies. For thousands of years, humans merely improvised. By the end of the Bronze Age, the world had become unrecognizable: mammoths and giant sloths replaced by cattle and sheep, scattered nomadic bands replaced by millions living in cities, and farming on nearly every continent. Wyman argues that the rise of states and steady food production wasn’t inevitable, but rather, the outcome of countless choices that reshaped the planet and made us who we are today.
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Jefferson's Wolf: A Founding Father's Troubling Answer to the Problem of Slavery by Christa DierksheideToward the end of his life, Thomas Jefferson made his most famous statement about American slavery: “We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.” Presenting abolition as both necessary and perilous, the remark has long been relied upon to explain an apparent paradox: despite publicly opposing slavery for four decades, Jefferson had made no progress toward Black freedom in his political career by the time he died in 1826. Nor had he done so in his expansive household, where he enslaved more than 600 people, including Sally Hemings and the four children he fathered with her. Christa Dierksheide and Nicholas Guyatt argue that the key to understanding Jefferson’s antislavery position is his commitment to racial exclusion. Jefferson believed that the principal reason to abolish slavery was the threat of a massive slave revolt, but he viewed the presence of free Black people in the new nation as no less dangerous. To avert racial violence, Jefferson argued, the gradual abolition of slavery had to be paired with Black exile. Even when challenged by white and Black contemporaries with more expansive views of American belonging, Jefferson held fast to his vision for a white republic. Neither an egalitarian antiracist nor a proslavery apologist, Jefferson became the most influential advocate for racial separation in the early United States. Charting the evolution of his thought across the nation’s formative decades, Jefferson’s Wolf is a surprising and provocative account of the problem of slavery in the founding era.
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Walk: Rediscover the Most Natural Way to Boost Your Health and Longevity--One Step at a Time by Courtney Conley Did you know… - Your risk of falls and overall longevity can be measured by your foot health
- Your walking speed can predict your overall health status and risk of early death
- Increasing your walking cadence has been shown to help reduce knee, hip, and lower back pain
- The number of daily optimal steps is not 10,000 (spoiler alert: it’s fewer!)
What James Nestor did for breathing, Christopher McDougall and Mark Cucuzzella did for running, and Kelly and Juliet Starrett have done for mobility, founder of Gait Happens Dr. Courtney Conley and Dr. Milica McDowell do for walking. Walking is as important to our health and longevity as sleep and proper breathing; it is the 6th vital sign. And yet we’ve almost engineered it out of our lives. Walk is an expert-driven, science-backed guide that not only underscores the power of movement to just about every aspect of our life, it restores walking to its rightful spot as one of the key pillars of health. With the most up-to-date research, self-assessments, tips on choosing the best shoes for foot health, as well as easy movement snacks to help with low back pain and foot pain, and customizable programs to develop or enhance your own fitness, Walk is *the* definitive guide to optimizing wellness.
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Screen People: How We Entertained Ourselves Into a State of Emergency by Megan Garber Whether it’s our reality-television-star President or our expertly curated Instagram feeds, the line between fact and fiction—between what’s real and what’s fabricated for entertainment—has never been more blurred. Screen People explores what happens when we cede our reality to spectacle. Megan Garber explains how today’s internet-inflected culture conditions us to see one another not as people but as characters in an ongoing show, and how some of our most chronic and harmful social conditions—loneliness, depression, mistrust, misinformation, cynicism—stem from our demand for diversion. In ten chapters, each themed around an element of entertainment—from “The Producers,” who edit our reality, to “The Extras,” the strangers we turn into objects of our amusement, to “the Haters,” the worshipful Qanon-types who expect the prophecies of their anonymous leader to play out on live television—Garber argues that this comedy of our daily lives is quickly becoming tragedy. And we can’t understand our politics without first understanding our culture. Like The Anxious Generation but about our media diet, Screen People shows why Megan Garber is one of the most respected and widely-read journalists of our day. It is an urgent, page-turning, and dazzling look at how we entertained ourselves into our current predicament, and how we might find our way out of the maze of misinformation and chaos.
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The Elusive Body: Patients, Doctors, and the Diagnosis Crisis by Alexandra SifferlinMillions of Americans live with conditions that elude diagnosis, often navigating a healthcare system that fails to recognize or effectively address their suffering. Journalist Alexandra Sifferlin has spent years investigating the diagnosis crisis in America—what it means to live without an accurate diagnosis and how both medical and patient communities are working to improve the diagnostic process. The National Institutes of Health’s Undiagnosed Diseases Network, a series of clinics of last resort where physicians and researchers work tirelessly to solve some of medicine’s most confounding cases, is at the forefront of change, showing what’s possible when healthcare providers and scientists are freed from the bureaucracy of a system beholden to insurance companies, and encouraged to work together with the aim of solving some of medicine’s most perplexing mysteries. A correct diagnosis is more than a label; it’s a lifeline that opens doors to treatment options, financial support, and an understanding community. Weaving the profound, maddening, and uplifting stories of patients seeking answers to unexplainable symptoms, the doctors trying to help them, and the latest research on diagnosis, The Elusive Body illuminates the diagnostic journey, revealing why diagnoses matter and how they have the power to transform lives, the medical system, and even society, one case at a time.
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The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, Deepmind, and the Quest for Superintelligence by Sebastian MallabyEven by the standard of a tech industry stacked with so-called geniuses, Demis Hassabis is a special case. Born poor in North London to immigrant parents, a chess prodigy by age five and wizard coder in his teens, he turned down a seven figure offer before turning 18 to feed his insatiable scientific curiosity at Cambridge. Later, he added a neuroscience PhD to his computer science skills to pursue the dream of artificial general intelligence, the ultimate goal being to unravel the mysteries of biology and theoretical physics and to usher in super-abundance. Alongside a small group of fellow travelers, that is the path he is still on, leading the AI research at Google, winning a Nobel Prize along the way, and imagining machines that will compound, or possibly supplant, the human understanding of the universe. Hassabis has given Sebastian Mallaby a great deal of his time, sitting for over thirty hours of conversation. But Mallaby has also drawn from Hassabis's detractors, such as his estranged cofounder Mustafa Suleyman; from his rivals, such as OpenAI's leading scientist Ilya Sutskever; and from academic pioneers who now fear for human survival, such as Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton. The result is a revelatory account of a singular figure and his company and a profound reckoning with this protean field as it leaps from the periphery to the center of our consciousness. No one questions Hassabis’s brilliance. There are those who, like Elon Musk, have at times regarded him as an "evil genius." He is in a game where the stakes are matched only by the exorbitant costs — for talent, and for compute. Celebrated scientists pursue the technology because they cannot resist the sweetness of discovery. Others pursue it for money or power. The inventors believe they control their technology, but often, the technology controls them. Despite Hassabis’s pivotal role inside Google’s engine room, this is not a Silicon Valley story. Hassabis deals with the Valley and takes its money, but remains outside and furiously critical of it, lambasting its leaders in conversation with Mallaby. The end of this race cannot be known, but as this great book shows us, Hassabis's quest to will a new form of cognition into the world is a defining story for our era.
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A Time to Gather: How Ritual Created the World--And How It Can Save Us by Bruce FeilerSince time immemorial, humans have turned to ritual to connect us in periods of change. Until today. Birth rituals and coming-of-age rituals have plummeted; fewer than half of Americans are married; only one in three is buried. “It took us ten thousand years to establish cultural norms around how we mark collective life transitions,” writes Bruce Feiler. “It took us fifty years to dismantle them.” Can this threat to society be reversed? To find out, Feiler went on a round-the-world ritual road trip, attending—and participating in—life rituals in sixteen countries on six continents. These spectacles, some rarely seen, include a mass baptism in the Vatican, a tribal bride price negotiation in South Africa, an adolescent tooth filing in Bali, six weddings in Las Vegas, and ten funerals in Ireland. Beyond the decline in traditional rituals, Feiler discovered that we are in the midst of a ritual renaissance that is pushing back against apathy, loneliness, and digital saturation. Fed up with top-down scripts, everyday people, from boomers to Gen Z, are reimagining collective rituals at a remarkable pace, inventing fresh ways to gather around life, love, health, and family—and forging thriving communities in the process. As he did with Life Is in the Transitions, Feiler also collected stories of a hundred ritual designers and built a first-of-its kind database of ideas to make gatherings more effective—from creating sacred space to mediating conflict to generating “wows” that guests will talk about forever. From a master storyteller uncovering a thrilling phenomenon hiding in plain sight, A Time to Gather is both a stirring adventure and practical manual. It’s a landmark guide to modern ritual; a tool kit for turning everyday moments into unforgettable celebrations; and an invitation to reconnect and rejoice—together.
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