What's Your Pronoun? Baron Dennis W.W.Norton & Company

Tracing evolution over millions of years, Michael Graziano shows how neurons first allowed animals to develop simple forms of attention: taking in messages from the environment, prioritising them and responding as necessary. Then covert attention evolved a roving, mental focus separate from where the senses are pointed. To monitor and control covert attention, Graziano posits in his attention schema theory, the brain evolved a simplified model of it a cartoonish self-description depicting an internal essence with a capacity for knowledge and experience. In other words, consciousness. That self model gives us our intuitions about consciousness and makes us empathetic social beings as we attribute it to others. The theory implies that uploading the data structure of consciousness into machines will be possible and he discusses what artificial consciousness will mean for our evolutionary future

Pulitzer Prize finalist Lydia Millet's sublime new novel her first since the National Book Award-longlisted Sweet Lamb of Heaven follows a group of eerily mature children on a forced vacation with their parents at a lakeside mansion. Contemptuous of their elders, who pass their days in a hedonistic stupor, the children are driven out into a chaotic landscape after a great storm descends. The story's narrator, Eve, devotes herself to the safety of her beloved little brother as events around them begin to mimic scenes from his cherished picture Bible • Millet, praised as "unnervingly talented" (San Francisco Chronicle), has produced a heartbreaking story of the legacy of climate change denial. Her parable of the coming generational divide offers a lucid vision of what awaits us on the other side of Revelation

In "Nothing Is Wrong and Here Is Why", acclaimed The Washington Post satirist Alexandra Petri offers perfectly logical, reassuring reasons for everything that has happened in recent American politics and culture that will in no way unsettle your world view • In essays both new and adapted from her viral columns, Petri reports that the Trump administration is as competent as it is uncorrupted, white supremacy has never been less rampant and men have been silenced for too long. Q-Anon makes perfect sense! At the centre of the book is a virtuosic account of the past four years, a history as surreal and deranged as the Trump administration itself. This Panglossian venture into the swampy present will soothe and terrify readers

In June 2017, Travis Kalanick, the CEO of Uber, was ousted in a boardroom coup that capped a brutal year for the transportation giant. Uber had catapulted to the top of the tech world, yet for many came to symbolise everything wrong with Silicon Valley. In the tradition of Brad Stone's Everything Store and John Carreyrou's Bad Blood, award-winning investigative reporter Mike Isaac's Super Pumped delivers a gripping account of Uber's rapid rise, it's pitched battles with taxi unions and drivers, the company's toxic internal culture and the bare-knuckle tactics it devised to overcome obstacles in it's quest for dominance • Based on hundreds of interviews with current and former Uber employees, along with previously unpublished documents, "Super Pumped" is a page-turning story of ambition and deception, obscene wealth and bad behaviour, that explores how blistering technological and financial innovation culminated in one of the most catastrophic twelve month periods in American corporate history

March 1917 is a riveting history of the month that transformed the world's greatest nations, as Russia faced revolution and America entered World War I. Drawing on a wealth of contemporary Russian and American diaries, memoirs, oral histories, and newspaper accounts, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Will Englund creates a highly detailed and textured account of the month that transformed the world's greatest nations. March 1917 considers the dreams of that year's warriors, pacifists, activists, revolutionaries, and reactionaries, and demonstrates how their successes and failures constitute the origin story of our complex modern world. We are provincials no longer, declared Woodrow Wilson on March 5, 1917, at his second inauguration. In the face of chaos and turmoil in Europe, Wilson was determined to move America away from the isolationism that had defined the nation's foreign policy since its inception and to embrace an active role in shaping world affairs

In recent years, computers have learned to diagnose diseases, drive cars, write clean prose and win game shows. Advances like these have created unprecedented economic bounty but in their wake median income has stagnated and employment levels have fallen. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee reveal the technological forces driving this reinvention of the economy and chart a path towards future prosperity. Businesses and individuals, they argue, must learn to race with machines. Drawing on years of research, Brynjolfsson and McAfee identify the best strategies and policies for doing so. A fundamentally optimistic book, The Second Machine Age will radically alter how we think about issues of technological, societal and economic progress

The ancient Greeks invented democracy, theater, rational science, and philosophy. They built the Parthenon and the Library of Alexandria. Yet this accomplished people never formed a single unified social or political identity. In Introducing the Ancient Greeks, acclaimed classics scholar Edith Hall offers a bold synthesis of the full 2,000 years of Hellenic history to show how the ancient Greeks were the right people, at the right time, to take up the baton of human progress. Hall portrays a uniquely rebellious, inquisitive, individualistic people whose ideas and creations continue to enthrall thinkers centuries after the Greek world was conquered by Rome. These are the Greeks as you've never seen them before

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is the quintessential American fairy tale. Michael Patrick Hearn, the world's leading Oz scholar, now provides a fascinating new annotation that not only reacquaints readers with the Tin Woodman, Scarecrow, and Cowardly Lion, but also illuminates the colorful background of this treasured American classic. This edition explores numerous contemporary references, provides character sources, and explains the actual meaning of the word "Oz". A facsimile of the rare 1900 first edition appears with the original drawings by W.W. Denslow, as well as 25 previously unpublished illustrations. There is a bibliography of L. Frank Baum's published work, every notable "Oz" edition, and the stage and cinematic productions from 1939's The Wizard of Oz, to the 1974 Broadway hit, The Wiz

In recent decades, an exciting new art movement has emerged in which artists illuminate the latest advances in science. Some of their provocative creations a live rabbit implanted with the fluorescent gene of a jellyfish, a gigantic glass and chrome sculpture of the Big Bang itself can be seen in traditional art museums and magazines, while others are being made by leading designers at Pixar, Google's Creative Lab, and the MIT Media Lab. The author of Einstein, Picasso and other celebrated books on popular science and creativity, Arthur I. Miller takes readers on a wild journey to explore this new frontier. From the movement's origins a century ago when Einstein shaped Cubism and X-rays affected fine photography to the latest discoveries of biotechnology, cosmology, and quantum physics, Miller shows how today's artists and designers are producing work at the cutting edge of science

One of the most vexing human rights issues of our time has been how to protect the rights of individuals and communities worldwide in an age of globalization and multinational business. Indeed, from Indonesian sweatshops to oil-based violence in Nigeria, the challenges of regulating harmful corporate practices in some of the world's most difficult regions long seemed insurmountable. Human rights groups and businesses were locked in a stalemate, unable to find common ground. In 2005, the United Nations appointed John Gerard Ruggie to the modest task of clarifying the main issues. Six years later, he had accomplished much more than that. Ruggie had developed his now-famous "Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights", which provided a road map for ensuring responsible global corporate practices

We've been "saving the planet" for decades now and the crises have only got worse. Many of us-environmentalists included-continue to live deeply unsustainable lives. At home, affluent citizens "buy green"; while at work, they maximise profits with dirty energy and toxic industries that are poisoning poorer communities • With brevity, humour and plenty of attitude, Jenny Price tracks "save the planet" enthusiasm through strategies that range from ridiculously ineffective (Prius-buying and carbon trading) to flat-out counterproductive (greenwashing and public subsidies to greenwash). We need to imagine far better ways to use and inhabit environments. Why aren't we cleaning up the messes we've already made? And why do so many people hate environmentalists? Price offers trailblazing answers, along with powerful ideas for how to divest from self-destruction and invest in mutual survival

Edgar Allan Poe was an oddity: his life, literature, and legacy are all, well, odd. In Poe-Land, J. W. Ocker explores the physical aspects of Poe s legacy across the East Coast and beyond, touring Poe s homes, examining artifacts from his life locks of his hair, pieces of his coffin, original manuscripts, his boyhood bed and visiting the many memorials dedicated to him. Along the way, Ocker meets people from a range of backgrounds and professions actors, museum managers, collectors, historians who have dedicated some part of their lives to Poe and his legacy. Poe-Land is a unique travelogue of the afterlife of the poet who invented detective fiction, advanced the emerging genre of science fiction, and elevated the horror genre with a mastery over the macabre that is arguably still unrivaled today