Do You Teach Chemistry?

From the farmland of East Texas to Houston’s Fifth Ward to New Orleans at the dawn of the civil rights movement, Ruth J. Simmons depicts an era long gone but whose legacies of inequality we still live with today. Written in clear and timeless prose, Up Home is both an origin story set in the segregated

July 1962. A Mi’kmaq family from Nova Scotia arrives in Maine to pick blueberries for the summer. Weeks later, four-year-old Ruthie, the family’s youngest child, vanishes. The mystery of her disappearance will haunt the survivors, unravel a family, cast a shadow of trauma over the community, and demonstrate the persistence of love across time in

The Mohawk phrase for depression can be roughly translated to “a mind spread out on the ground.” In this visceral memoir, Alicia Elliott explores how apt a description that is for the ongoing effects of personal, intergenerational, and colonial traumas she and so many Native people have experienced. Elliott’s deeply personal writing details a life

Part memoir, part manifesto, Chamorro climate activist Julian Aguon’s No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies is a collection of essays on resistance, resilience, and collective power in the age of climate disaster; and a call for justice—for everyone, but in particular, for Indigenous peoples.   IN GUAM, even the dead are dying. As I write this, the US

Material World is a celebration of the humans and human networks, the miraculous processes and little-known companies, that combine to turn  raw materials into things of wonder. This is the story of human civilization from an entirely new perspective: from the ground up.   1 Homo Faber This story begins with a bang. An explosion

Dr. Joy Buolamwini, the self-described “Poet of Code,” goes beyond the news headlines about racism, colorism, and sexism in Big Tech to tell the remarkable story of how she uncovered what she calls “the coded gaze”—evidence of racial and gender bias in tech—and galvanized the movement to prevent AI harms by founding the Algorithmic Justice

In this myth-busting, eye-opening landmark account of how humans evolved, Cat Bohannon offers a paradigm shift in our thinking about what the female body is, how it came to be, and how this evolution still shapes all our lives today.   Chapter 1 Milk No sooner had the notion of the Flood subsided, Than a

Women physicists and astronomers from around the world have transformed science and society, but the critical roles they played in their fields are not always well-sung. Her Space, Her Time, authored by award-winning quantum physicist Shohini Ghose, brings together the stories of these remarkable women to celebrate their indelible scientific contributions.   Have you ever

From the authors of How Democracies Die, Tyranny of the Minority is a call to reform our antiquated political institutions before it’s too late. It’s a daunting task, but we have remade our country before—most notably, after the Civil War and during the Progressive Era. And now we are at a crossroads: America will either become

A quarter of a century after her memoir, Thinking in Pictures, forever changed how the world understood autism, Temple Grandin transforms our awareness of the different ways our brains are wired. In Visual Thinking, she proposes new approaches to educating, parenting, employing, and collaborating with visual thinkers.   One What Is Visual Thinking? When I

Todd Rogers and Jessica Lasky-Fink offer the most valuable practical writing advice today. Building on their own research in behavioral science, they outline cognitive facts about how people actually read and distill them into six principles that will transform the power of one’s writing: Less is more Make reading easy Design for easy navigation Use

After his father’s death, Esau McCaulley went back through his family history, seeking to understand the community that shaped him: someone who, through hard work, faith, and determination, overcame childhood poverty, anti-Black racism, and an absent father to earn a job as a university professor and a life in the middle class. With profound honesty