Staff Picks
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Staff Picks
The Power of Strangers: The Benefits of Connecting in a Suspicious World
By Dylan Schleicher
Talking to people you don’t know is one of the best ways to get the most out of every day and to form lifelong bonds of friendship and understanding.
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Staff Picks
"I Have Nothing to Hide": And 20 Other Myths about Surveillance and Privacy
By Dylan Schleicher
The so-called “frictionlessness” of online life and commerce is being lubricated by us ceding our right to privacy, and it’s an increasingly slippery slope.
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Staff Picks
This is Your Mind on Plants
By Emily Porter
In his new book, Michael Pollan focuses in on three substances that alter human consciousness—opium, caffeine, mescaline—and takes us on a whirlwind exploration through his research on the plants that contain them.
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Staff Picks
Vessel: A Memoir
By Gabbi Cisneros
Through non-linear storytelling, Cai Chongda recalls his youth to young adulthood in 1980s China: his family, their homes, struggles with poverty and illness, his work and education, and the waves of Western influence on the village.
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Staff Picks
Across the Airless Wilds: The Lunar Rover and the Triumph of the Final Moon Landings
By Dylan Schleicher
The rocket scientists who figured out how to break us free from Earth’s gravity and get us to the moon usually get all the glory. Earl Swift tells their story, too, but goes beyond them to tell the tale of the engineers who made the final leg of the last three missions to the moon—aboard lunar rovers—possible.
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Staff Picks
Praying with Jane Eyre: Reflections on Reading as a Sacred Practice
By Gabbi Cisneros
If Vanessa Zoltan can make such thoughtful, universal, contemporary, and personal connections with a nineteenth-century gothic Romance novel, I think that there are endless possibilities for what we can learn from the abundance of diverse authors and stories that exist today.
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Staff Picks
Objects of Desire: Stories
By Emily Porter
Clare Sestanovich gives us a peek into the desires of modern life, lives that are figuring out the everyday, and writes lovely short stories that give us snippets of all these lives that tie together.
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Staff Picks
Fair Pay: How to Get a Raise, Close the Wage Gap, and Build Stronger Businesses
By Dylan Schleicher
David Buckmaster takes on issues as personal as how to advocate for better pay for yourself, and as broad as how to change the system to rid it of its persistent racial and gender disparities and finally provide equal pay for equal work.
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Staff Picks
The Sea We Swim In: How Stories Work in a Data-Driven World
By Dylan Schleicher
We must be deliberate about choosing what stories we tell, and what stories we believe, because they are the waters we swim in—the way we construct our own realities.
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Staff Picks
Thanks for Waiting: The Joy (& Weirdness) of Being a Late Bloomer
By Gabbi Cisneros
Doree Shafrir’s compassion for herself as a late bloomer will inspire readers to treat themselves with as much self-respect and patience, too,
Porchlight is a company filled with voracious readers—talented, creative individuals who know books, and who excel at moving them. Whenever we can, we like to do that by telling you about the books we’re reading.