The author of The Seven Storey Mountain explores the mysticism of Saint John of the Cross. The only thing that can save the world from complete moral collapse is a spiritual revolution. . . . The desire for unworldliness, detachment, and union with God is the most fundamental expression of this revolutionary spirit. In Ascent to Truth, author and Trappist Monk Thomas Merton makes an impassioned case for the importance of contemplation. Drawing on a range of thinkers—from Carl Jung to Pope Pius XII—Merton defines the nature of contemplative experience and shows how the Christian mysticism of sixteenth-century Spanish Carmelite Saint John of the Cross offers essential answers to our disquieting and troubling times. “For any who have the desire to look into meditation and contemplation . . . this is the book for which they have waited.” —New York Herald Tribune Book Review “For those who may be curious about mysticism, and for those who may be called to a life of contemplation, this is an excellent book.” —Catholic World

The author of The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible explores the history and potential future of civilization, tracing the converging crises of our age to the illusion of the separate self Our disconnection from one another and the natural world has mislaid the foundations of science, religion, money, technology, economics, medicine, and education as we know them. It has fired our near-pathological pursuit of technological Utopias even as we push ourselves and our planet to the brink of collapse. Fortunately, an Age of Reunion is emerging out of the birth pangs of an earth in crisis. Our journey of separation hasn't been a terrible mistake but an evolutionary process and an adventure in self-discovery. Even in our darkest hour, Eisenstein sees the possibility of a more beautiful world—not through the extension of millennia-old methods of management and control but by fundamentally reimagining ourselves and our systems. We must shift away from our Babelian efforts to build ever-higher towers to heaven and instead turn out attention to creating a new kind of civilization—one designed for beauty rather than height.

In a startling look at the classic Annapurna—the most famous book about mountaineering—David Roberts discloses what really happened on the legendary expedition to the Himalayan peak. In June 1950, a team of mountaineers was the first to conquer an 8,000-meter peak. Maurice Herzog, the leader of the expedition, became a national hero in France, and Annapurna, his account of the historic ascent, has long been regarded as the ultimate tale of courage and cooperation under the harshest of conditions. In True Summit, David Roberts presents a fascinating revision of this classic tale. Using newly available documents and information gleaned from a rare interview with Herzog (the only climber on the team still living), Roberts shows that the expedition was torn by dissent. As he re-creates the actual events, Roberts lays bare Herzog's self-serving determination and bestows long-delayed credit to the most accomplished and unsung heroes. These new revelations will inspire young adventurers and change forever the way we think about this victory in the mountains and the climbers who achieved it.

“Full of fascinating insights drawn from an impressive range of disciplines, The Ascent of Information casts the familiar and the foreign in a dramatic new light.” —Brian Greene, author of The Elegant Universe Your information has a life of its own, and it’s using you to get what it wants. One of the most peculiar and possibly unique features of humans is the vast amount of information we carry outside our biological selves. But in our rush to build the infrastructure for the 20 quintillion bits we create every day, we’ve failed to ask exactly why we’re expending ever-increasing amounts of energy, resources, and human effort to maintain all this data. Drawing on deep ideas and frontier thinking in evolutionary biology, computer science, information theory, and astrobiology, Caleb Scharf argues that information is, in a very real sense, alive. All the data we create—all of our emails, tweets, selfies, A.I.-generated text and funny cat videos—amounts to an aggregate lifeform. It has goals and needs. It can control our behavior and influence our well-being. And it’s an organism that has evolved right alongside us. This symbiotic relationship with information offers a startling new lens for looking at the world. Data isn’t just something we produce; it’s the reason we exist. This powerful idea has the potential to upend the way we think about our technology, our role as humans, and the fundamental nature of life. The Ascent of Information offers a humbling vision of a universe built of and for information. Scharf explores how our relationship with data will affect our ongoing evolution as a species. Understanding this relationship will be crucial to preventing our data from becoming more of a burden than an asset, and to preserving the possibility of a human future.

Former executive editor of The New York Times and one of our most eminent journalists Jill Abramson provides a “valuable and insightful” (The Boston Globe) report on the disruption of the news media over the last decade, as shown via two legacy (The New York Times and The Washington Post) and two upstart (BuzzFeed and VICE) companies as they plow through a revolution that pits old vs. new media. “A marvelous book” (The New York Times Book Review), Merchants of Truth is the groundbreaking and gripping story of the precarious state of the news business. The new digital reality nearly kills two venerable newspapers with an aging readership while creating two media behemoths with a ballooning and fickle audience of millennials. “Abramson provides this deeply reported insider account of an industry fighting for survival. With a keen eye for detail and a willingness to interrogate her own profession, Abramson takes readers into the newsrooms and boardrooms of the legacy newspapers and the digital upstarts that seek to challenge their dominance” (Vanity Fair). We get to know the defenders of the legacy presses as well as the outsized characters who are creating the new speed-driven media competitors. The players include Jeff Bezos and Marty Baron (The Washington Post), Arthur Sulzberger and Dean Baquet (The New York Times), Jonah Peretti (BuzzFeed), and Shane Smith (VICE) as well as their reporters and anxious readers. Merchants of Truth raises crucial questions that concern the well-being of our society. We are facing a crisis in trust that threatens the free press. “One of the best takes yet on journalism’s changing fortunes” (Publishers Weekly, starred review), Abramson’s book points us to the future.