Human Culture

Evolutionary theory has long established that humans are animals: Modern Homo sapiens are primates who share an ancestor with monkeys and other great apes. Our genome is 98 percent identical to a chimpanzee's. And yet we think of ourselves as exceptional. Are we? In this original and entertaining tour of life on Earth, Adam Rutherford explores the profound paradox of the "human animal".

Finalist in the Business Book of the Year 2024 awards! The Chief People Officer role has finally taken its rightful place on the Executive Committee and human resource management is recognised as a true differentiator of success for modern organisations. However, CPOs face a challenge. In a world of increasing regulation and litigation, and with greater expectations than ever of how organisations should support their people, the HR role risks being overwhelmed. Managers are drowning under the weight of people-related tasks, while staff demand ever more from their workplace. CEOs and Boards ...

In an age when digital worlds are no longer fantasies but emerging realities, the question is no longer whether simulations will host conscious life — but whether humanity is prepared for the moral weight of creating it. The Ethics of Simulated Worlds confronts this new frontier with philosophical clarity and unflinching honesty.

From the world’s most influential psychologist and bestselling author of Flourish, a landmark work spanning ancient Greece to the age of AI that identifies agency—the fusion of efficacy, optimism, and imagination—as the hidden engine of human progress, and shows how we can unleash it to...

What if the sacred texts you thought you knew were only part of the story? For centuries, scripture has been presented as timeless and unchanging. But hidden beneath the familiar pages lies a world of lost gospels, suppressed voices, and forgotten manuscripts—words erased, altered, or buried in the sands of history. The Hidden Codex pulls back the curtain on this untold story, revealing how power, politics, and chance shaped the very foundations of faith. What you’re about to discover isn’t dry scholarship—it’s a journey through secret caves, imperial courts, monastic scriptoria, ...

Although we usually think of technology as something unique to modern times, our ancestors began to create the first technologies millions of years ago in the form of prehistoric tools and weapons. Over time, eight key technologies gradually freed us from the limitations of our animal origins.

For too long, business leaders have operated under the assumption that maximizing profit requires minimizing humanity. The result is widespread employee disengagement, toxic workplace cultures, and organizations that drain rather than energize their people. A Human Business challenges this paradigm with a proven alternative. Drawing from forty years building SnapCab from a small cabinet shop to an international manufacturing company, Glenn Bostock demonstrates how modeling your organization after the human body creates communities where people thrive.

The first all-encompassing biography of Elliott Smith, offering an intimate portrait of his life and musical legacy with brand-new interviews, lyrics, and correspondence from the people closest to him, many speaking for the first time Nobody Broke Your Heart is a tender, nuanced narrative of...

Scholars of US and transatlantic slavery have largely ignored or dismissed accusations that Black Americans were cannibalized. Vincent Woodard takes the enslaved person's claims of human consumption seriously, focusing on both the starvation of the slave and the tropes of cannibalism on the part...

The story of human civilization can be read most deeply in the materials we have found or created, used or abused. They have dictated how we build, eat, communicate, wage war, create art, travel, and worship. Some, such as stone, iron, and bronze, lend their names to the ages. Others, such as gold, silver, and diamond, contributed to the rise and fall of great empires.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER | The New Yorker's Best Books of 2025 | The Guardian's Best Books of 2025 | A 2025 Booklist Editors' Choice Pick The scramble to create superhuman AI has put us on the path to extinction—but it’s not too late to change course, as two of the field’s...

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence and labor-saving technologies like self-checkouts and automated factories, the future of work has never been more uncertain, and even jobs requiring high levels of human interaction are no longer safe. The Last Human Job explores the human connections that underlie our work, arguing that what people do for each other in these settings is valuable and worth preserving.

In Jezebel Unhinged Tamura Lomax traces the use of the jezebel trope in the Black church and in Black popular culture, showing how it is pivotal to reinforcing men's cultural and institutional power to discipline and define Black girlhood and womanhood. Drawing on writing by medieval thinkers and travelers, Enlightenment theories of race, the commodification of women's bodies under slavery, and the work of Tyler Perry and Bishop T. D. Jakes, Lomax shows how Black women are written into religious and cultural history as sites of sexual deviation.

Generations of dogs have been labeled training lemons for requiring actual motivation when all along they were perfectly normal. Numerous other completely and utterly normal dogs have been branded as canine misfits simply because they grew up to act like dogs. Barking, chewing, sniffing, licking, jumping up, and occasionally (just like people) having arguments are as normal and natural for dogs as wagging tails and burying bones.

Plants That Healed the World is a global, story-driven exploration of the medicinal plants that shaped human survival, culture, and connection across civilizations. This book follows healing plants as they traveled through ancient trade routes, indigenous traditions, monasteries, households, and early medical systems, revealing how deeply plant knowledge is woven into human history. Rather than focusing on how plants are used medicinally, the book tells the human stories behind the plants—how cultures understood them, revered them, protected them, and passed knowledge across generations. ...

From the bestselling author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, the co-author of Nudge, and the author of You Are About to Make a Terrible Mistake! comes Noise, a revolutionary exploration of why people make bad judgments, and how to control both noise and cognitive bias.​ Imagine that two doctors in...

Transform Your Life and Leadership Applying the five transformative principles of the Human Operating System is so much more effective than hacking through the forest of leadership trade books, workshops, and management techniques. Many of these tools can be helpful, but they often function more like apps or accessories rather than a deeper operating system that can offer meaning, direction, and coherence to everything you might do as a leader. Jack Nicholson and Rob Murray have been developing the Human Operating System over many years of work with executive leaders, teams, and ...

Johann Gottfried von Herder Explained: Culture, Language, National Identity, Folk Traditions, and Human Diversity introduces a thinker who changed how modern readers understand language, culture, history, and collective identity. Herder rejected abstract accounts of human beings detached from place, memory, and inherited ways of life. He argued that people become who they are within languages, communities, and historical settings. This book presents those arguments in plain terms and shows why they still matter for readers trying to make sense of nationalism, cultural difference, historical...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER MORE THAN 1 MILLION COPIES SOLD WORLDWIDE The oldest cultures in the world have mastered the art of raising happy, well-adjusted children. What can we learn from them? “Hunt, Gather, Parent is full of smart ideas that I immediately wanted to force on my own kids...

Humanity in the age of AI How will we be changed by the rise of artificial intelligence? In this scintillating essay, Anna Goldsworthy argues that AI is a rupture that makes us confront what it is to be human – what we do, and want. As it learns human ways, AI raises big questions about work, leisure and education. It brings new existential, social and ethical risks. Above all, it invites us to consider what is irreplaceable in us, starting with the body and the friction of others. The God We Made is a brilliant inquiry into identity and a transformed future.