Jonathan Todd Ross

Could there be a civilization on a mote of dust? How much of your fate have you made? Who cleans the universe? Through more than fifty Koans - pleasingly paradoxical vignettes following the ancient Zen tradition - leading physicist Anthony Aguirre takes the reader across the world from Japan to Italy, and through ideas spanning the age, breadth and depth of the Universe. 

Playful and enlightening, Cosmological Koans explores the strange hinterland between the deep structure of the physical world and our personal experience of it, giving us what Einstein himself called "the most beautiful and deepest experience" anyone can have: a sense of the mysterious.

Eating Animals is the most original and urgent book on the subject of food written this century. It will change the way you think, and change the way you eat. For good. Whether you're flirting with veganuary, trying to cut back on animal consumption, or a lifelong meat-eater, you need to read this book.

It's a signal paradox of our times that we live in an information society but do not know how it works. And without understanding how our information is stored, used and protected, we are vulnerable to having it exploited. In Fancy Bear Goes Phishing, Scott Shapiro exposes the secrets of the digital age. With lucidity and wit, he establishes that cybercrime has less to do with defective programming than with the faulty wiring of our psyches and society. And because hacking is a human story, he tells the fascinating tales of perpetrators including Robert Morris Jr, the graduate student who accidentally crashed the internet in the 1980s, and the Bulgarian 'Dark Avenger' who invented the first mutating computer-virus engine.

We also meet a sixteen-year-old from South Boston who took control of Paris Hilton's cell phone and the Russian intelligence officers who sought to take control of a US election, among others. In telling their stories, Shapiro exposes the hackers' tool kits and gives fresh answers to vital questions: why is the internet so vulnerable? What can we do in response? The result is a lively and original account of the future of hacking, espionage and war, and of how to live in an era of cybercrime.

In our cities, we stand in silent buses and tube carriages, barely acknowledging one another. Online, we retreat into silos and carefully curate who we interact with. But while we often fear strangers, or blame them for the ills of society, history and science show us that they are actually our solution. Throughout human history, our attitude to the stranger has determined the fate and wellbeing of both nations and individuals. A raft of new science confirms that the more we open ourselves up to encounters with those we don't know, the healthier we are.