Smart Cities
Anthony Townsend
Townsend unpicks the digital nervous system pulsing invisibly through our cities and urges us to view ourselves as its empowered collaborators rather than its victims.
Curve
Nicholas Lovell
From the commercial vortex of the internet, Lovell has neatly forged The Curve, a comprehensive consumer-buyer model any business can lucratively exploit.
Minecraft: The Unlikely Tale of Markus "Notch" Persson and the Game that Changed Everything
Daniel Goldberg, Linus Larsson and Jennifer Hawkins
An insight into the life of the fedora-toting enigma.
The Drugs Don't Work: A Global Threat
Professor Dame Sally C Davies
As we anaesthetise our immune systems with capsules, argues Davies, a future of incurable illnesses inches closer.
Brave Genius
Sean P Carroll
Caroll traces the French Resistance campaigns of Nobel prize winners Albert Camus and molecular biologist Jacques Monod and makes the case for an osmotic rapport between them.
The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
Brad Stone
"We're never going to have sofas, we're never going to have lattes," Bezos told Business Week. Stone investigates the mogul's ethic in this biography.
Love and Math
Edward Frenkel
Reasoning that some of us are unwilling to engage with maths because we cannot see it, Professor Frenkel relates it tirelessly to things we can. A colourful paean to numbers.
Social: Why Our Brains are Wired to Connect
Matthew D Lieberman
Lieberman animates our grey matter as a frenziedly active kernel looking for ways to synchronize our reflexes with others.
Sharks and People
Thomas P Peschak
A haunting collection of photographs depicting our uneasy relationship with the ocean's most-feared inhabitant, from depictions of shark-fin trade brutality to moments of serene co-operation.
Five Billion Years of Solitude
Lee Billings
A meditation on the search for life beyond ourselves as both a scientific quest and an attempt to soothe the ache of modern loneliness.
