Nature’s Top 10 Books of 2023

A Financial Times Book of the Year 2023

?A Waterstones Book of the Year for Politics 2023

Fake news. Alternative facts. Conspiracy theories. Misinformation is one of the defining problems of our age, and despite what we may think, we are all susceptible. So how and why does misinformation spread? And, more importantly, what can we do about it? Sander van der Linden, a Cambridge University professor and leading expert, takes us through the psychology of conspiratorial thinking and equips us with the tools needed to help stop the spread of misinformation once and for all.

‘It’s a shame that Pinkett Smith’s marriage has taken up so much attention because, as Worthy shows, it’s far from the most interesting thing about her’ Sunday Times Magazine

In a media driven landscape that crafts narratives for our celebrities, Smith recounts her story in an intimate conversation with readers. Along the way, she explores her path to accepting her power as a woman, and her discovery that a strong sense of self is every woman’s right and saving grace.

An impactful and rare memoir that engages and educates, Worthy is a courageous love song to self, to family, to life, and to the world.

From an unconventional upbringing in Baltimore, to an unconventional marriage to one of the most famous men in the world, adhering to the status quo has never been a familiar road for Jada Pinkett Smith. In Worthy, Smith strips herself of all the labels and stories crafted by others, and reclaims her narrative with radical self-love. Worthy teaches us who Jada is, and how to embrace our most authentic loveable souls.

For anyone who has lost their way in the online world, digital detox expert Tanya Goodin offers a tech-versus-life toolkit to deal with the escalating consequences of harmful habits.

This book examines 24 personal stories of people wrestling with common technology problems, from a little girl yearning for her mother to put down her phone, to a taxi driver concerned about his son’s gaming addiction.

Learn how to recognise and label dependent behaviours – both of yourself and others – and find simple, easy solutions in this book.

‘If you read just one book that makes you confront scary high-tech realities that we’ll soon have no choice but to address, make it this one.’ Washington Post

Corporations and government agencies around the world have for years been pouring billions into achieving AI’s Holy Grail – human-level intelligence. But once AI has attained it, scientists argue, it will have survival drives much like our own. We may be forced to compete with a rival more cunning, more powerful, and more alien than we can imagine.

First published ten years ago, Our Final Invention predicted much of the artificial ‘intelligence explosion’ that is now ripping through our culture, and was named by Elon Musk as one of five books everyone should read about the future. Now with an urgent new preface, James Barrat’s landmark work explores the ethics, history and future perils of the heedless pursuit of advanced AI. Until now, human intelligence has had no rival. Can we coexist with beings whose intelligence dwarfs our own? And will they allow us to?

Max Fisher is a leading New York Times technology reporter whose work has covered the way that social media sites – driven increasingly by artificial intelligence rather than human ingenuity – push users towards more and more extreme positions, deepening the divisions in society in pursuit of greater engagement and profit. With extraordinary access to the most powerful players in Silicon Valley, and with testimonies from around the world of the havoc being wreaked by our online selves, The Chaos Machine shows us how we got to this uniquely perilous moment – and how we might get out of it.

The Chaos Machine is “an essential book for our times” (Ezra Klein).

We all have a vague sense that social media is bad for our minds, for our children, and for our democracies. But the truth is that its reach and impact run far deeper than we have understood. Building on years of international reporting, Max Fisher tells the gripping and galling inside story of how Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social network preyed on psychological frailties to create the algorithms that drive everyday users to extreme opinions and, increasingly, extreme actions. As Fisher demonstrates, the companies’ founding tenets, combined with a blinkered focus on maximizing engagement, have led to a destabilized world for everyone.

Traversing the planet, Fisher tracks the ubiquity of hate speech and its spillover into violence, ills that first festered in far-off locales, to their dark culmination in America during the pandemic, the 2020 election, and the Capitol Insurrection. Through it all, the social-media giants refused to intervene in any meaningful way, claiming to champion free speech when in fact what they most prized were limitless profits. The result, as Fisher shows, is a cultural shift toward a world in which people are polarized not by beliefs based on facts, but by misinformation, outrage, and fear.

His narrative is about more than the villains, however. Fisher also weaves together the stories of the heroic outsiders and Silicon Valley defectors who raised the alarm and revealed what was happening behind the closed doors of Big Tech. Both panoramic and intimate, The Chaos Machine is the definitive account of the meteoric rise and troubled legacy of the tech titans, as well as a rousing and hopeful call to arrest the havoc wreaked on our minds and our world before it’s too late.

This is not a romance, but it is about love.

‘A must-read’ NEIL DRUCKMANN, creator of The Last of Us

Sam and Sadie meet in a hospital in 1987. Sadie is visiting her sister, Sam is recovering from a car crash. The days and months are long there, but playing together brings joy, escape, fierce competition — and a special friendship. Then all too soon that time is over, and they must return to their normal lives.

When the pair spot each other eight years later in a crowded train station, they are catapulted back to that moment. The spark is immediate, and together they get to work on what they love – creating virtual worlds to delight, challenge and immerse, finding an intimacy in the digital realm that eludes them in their real lives. Their collaborations make them superstars.

This is the story of the perfect worlds Sadie and Sam build, the imperfect world they live in, and of everything that comes after success: Money. Fame. Duplicity. Tragedy.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow takes us on a dazzling imaginative quest, examining identity, creativity and our need to connect.

‘One of the best books I’ve ever read’ JOHN GREEN
‘A book that spawns great conversations’ MAGGIE SHIPSTEAD, Guardian
‘Brilliant’ KAREN JOY FOWLER, Guardian

Desmet’s work on mass formation theory was brought to the world’s attention on The Joe Rogan Experience and in major alternative news outlets around the globe. Read this book to get beyond the sound bites!

Totalitarianism is not a coincidence and does not form in a vacuum. It arises from a collective psychosis that has followed a predictable script throughout history, its formation gaining strength and speed with each generation-from the Jacobins to the Nazis and Stalinists-as technology advances. Governments, mass media, and other mechanized forces use fear, loneliness, and isolation to demoralize populations and exert control, persuading large groups of people to act against their own interests, always with destructive results.

In The Psychology of Totalitarianism, world-renowned Professor of Clinical Psychology Mattias Desmet deconstructs the societal conditions that allow this collective psychosis to take hold. By looking at our current situation and identifying the phenomenon of “mass formation”-a type of collective hypnosis-he clearly illustrates how close we are to surrendering to totalitarian regimes.

With detailed analyses, examples, and results from years of research, Desmet lays out the steps that lead toward mass formation, including:

• An overall sense of loneliness and lack of social connections and bonds
• A lack of meaning-unsatisfying “bullsh*t jobs” that don’t offer purpose
• Free-floating anxiety and discontent that arise from loneliness and lack of meaning
• Manifestation of frustration and aggression from anxiety
• Emergence of a consistent narrative from government officials, mass media, etc., that exploits and channels frustration and anxiety  

In addition to clear psychological analysis-and building on Hannah Arendt’s essential work on totalitarianism, The Origins of Totalitarianism-Desmet offers a sharp critique of the cultural “groupthink” that existed prior to the pandemic and advanced during the COVID crisis. He cautions against the dangers of our current societal landscape, media consumption, and reliance on manipulative technologies and then offers simple solutions-both individual and collective-to prevent the willing sacrifice of our freedoms.

“We can honor the right to freedom of expression and the right to self-determination without feeling threatened by each other,” Desmet writes. “But there is a point where we must stop losing ourselves in the crowd to experience meaning and connection. That is the point where the winter of totalitarianism gives way to a spring of life.”

“Desmet has an . . . important take on everything that’s happening in the world right now.”-Aubrey Marcus, podcast host

“[Desmet] is waking a lot of people up to the dangerous place we are now with a brilliant distillation of how we ended up here.”-Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

“One of the most important books I’ve ever read.”-Ivor Cummins, The Fat Emperor Podcast

“This is an amazing book . . . [Desmet is] one of the true geniuses I’ve spoken to . . . This book has really changed my view on a lot.”-Tucker Carlson, speaking on The Will Cain Podcast  

When we look in the mirror, so many of us see a ‘before’ picture: the miserable person in the side-by-side shot waiting for the ‘glow-up’ (read: weight loss) that will bring true happiness. But it’s not our fault that we see our bodies as projects in need of constant work: this is just one of the beliefs that has been ingrained in us by diet culture. We have been taught to view ourselves as a collection of ‘problem’ areas for which the billion-dollar diet industry holds the solutions.

Step-by-step, You Are Not A Before Picture provides a framework for changing the way we view ourselves and the world around us. Working with experts in the fields of psychotherapy, fitness and nutrition, Alex empowers readers to interrogate their underlying beliefs, challenge the external and internal forces that are holding us back, and finally find freedom in our bodies, for good.

Alex Light was a number 4 Sunday Times Non Fiction bestseller in the w/e June 19th 2022