These Strange New Minds charts the evolution of intelligent talking machines and provides us with the tools to understand how they work and how we can use them. Ultimately, armed with an understanding of AI’s mysterious inner workings, we can begin to grapple with the existential question of our age: have we written ourselves out of history or is a technological utopia ahead?

On October 25, 2023, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” As an immigrant who came to the West, El Akkad has come to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie. That there will always be entire groups of human beings it has never intended to treat as fully human—not just Arabs or Muslims or immigrants, but whoever falls outside the boundaries of privilege.

In a reunified Korea of the near future, the sun beats down on a junkyard filled with abandoned robots, broken down for parts. Eleven-year-old Ruijie sifts through the scraps and finds a robot boy—so lifelike and strange, unlike anything she’s ever seen before. When siblings Jun and Morgan were children, their brother Yoyo disappeared suddenly, leaving behind only distant memories of his laughter and near-human warmth. Yoyo—an early prototype of a humanoid robot designed by their father—was always bound for something darker and more complex. Whether they like it or not, Ruijie’s discovery will thrust Jun and Morgan's family back together in ways they could have never imagined.

The Antidote opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing—not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the dust bowl drought but beneath its own violent histories. The Antidote follows a "Prairie Witch,” whose body serves as a bank vault for peoples’ memories and secrets; a Polish wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his orphan niece, a basketball star and witch’s apprentice in furious flight from her grief; a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both the town’s secrets and its fate.

Skyrocketing rents, low wages, and a lack of tenant rights have produced a startling phenomenon: People with full-time jobs cannot keep a roof over their head, especially in America’s booming cities, where rapid growth is leading to catastrophic displacement. In this gripping and deeply reported book, Brian Goldstone plunges readers into the lives of five Atlanta families struggling to remain housed in a gentrifying, increasingly unequal city. Each of them aspires to provide a decent life for their children—and each of them, one by one, joins the ranks of the nation’s working homeless. Goldstone reveals the human cost of this crisis, following parents and their kids as they go to sleep in cars, or in squalid extended-stay hotel rooms, and head out to their jobs and schools the next morning. 
 

On February 1, 1910, the vivacious, diamond-adorned music hall performer Belle Elmore suddenly vanished from her home, causing alarm among her friends, the entertainers of the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild. Their demands for an investigation would lead to the unearthing of a gruesome secret and trigger a fevered international manhunt for Belle’s husband, medical fraudster Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen. Ethel Le Neve, Crippen’s typist and lover, who fled with Crippen in disguise, has always hidden in the shadows of this tale--was she really just "an innocent young girl" in thrall to a powerful older man? 
 

After over two hundred years, immortal ghost hunter Peter Shaughnessy is ready to die and give up the hunt. Thanks to a youthful encounter with one o' them folk in his native Ireland, he's cursed to wander eternally far from home, with the ability to see ghosts and talk to plants. Immortality means Peter has lost everyone he's ever loved. And so he centers his life on the dead--until his wandering brings him to Harrington, Ohio. As he searches for a vengeful spirit, Peter's drawn into the townsfolk's lives, homes and troubles. As Harrington buckles under the weight of the supernatural, the ghost hunt pits Peter's well-being against that of his new friends and the man he's falling for.

Jenny Greenteeth has never spoken to a human before, but when a witch is thrown into her lake, something makes Jenny decide she's worth saving. Temperance doesn't know why her village has suddenly turned against her, only that it has something to do with the malevolent new pastor. Though they have nothing in common, these two must band together on a magical quest to defeat the evil that threatens Jenny's lake and Temperance's family, as well as the very soul of Britain.
 

We all feel it—the distraction, the loss of focus, the addictive focus on the wrong things for too long. For most of human history, the boundary between public and private has been clear. Hayes argues that we are in the midst of an epoch-defining transition whose only parallel is what happened to labor in the nineteenth century: attention has become a commodified resource extracted from us, and from which we are increasingly alienated. The Sirens’ Call is the big-picture vision we urgently need to offer clarity and guidance.
 

Calling In is at once a handbook, a manifesto, and a memoir—because the power of Loretta Ross’s message comes from who she is and what she’s lived through. She’s a Black woman who’s deprogrammed white supremacists, a survivor who’s taught convicted rapists the principles of feminism. With stories from her five remarkable decades in activism, she vividly illustrates why calling people in—inviting them into conversation instead of conflict by focusing on your shared values over a desire for punishment—is the more strategic choice if you want to make real change.

Structured around these nine childlike drawings, each holding a disturbing clue, Uketsu invites readers to piece together the mystery behind each and the over-arching backstory that connects them all. Strange Pictures is the internationally bestselling debut from mystery horror YouTube sensation Uketsu--an enigmatic masked figure who has become one of Japan's most talked about contemporary authors.

Lilian Estrada seemingly has it all: an ob-gyn star on the rise, a master at balancing work with whirlwind romances and part of a family of fiercely loyal and exceptional women, all bound together by an extraordinary secret. Lily shines with the rare gift to manipulate memories, but a harrowing event at the hospital sends her powers and confidence spiraling out of control. Lily retreats to her family's ancestral home in Mexico, only to find herself face-to-face with a ghost from her past--Sam, the first love she never forgot. Lily must navigate the mysteries of their shared history and the depths of her own heart if she hopes to control her unpredictable magic.

Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA’s algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days. The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes. With every deviation from the strict and ever-shifting rules of the facility, their stay is extended. Then one day, a new resident arrives, disrupting the order of the facility and leading Sara on a collision course with the very companies that have deprived her of her freedom.
 

Based on the true story of a famous trial, this novel is Law and Order: 1800, as Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr investigate the shocking murder of a young woman who everyone--and no one--seemed to know. Just before Christmas 1799, Elma Sands slips out of her Quaker cousin's boarding house--and doesn't come home. Has she eloped Run away No one knows--until her body appears in the Manhattan Well. Handbills circulate around the city accusing a carpenter named Levi Weeks of seducing and murdering Elma. As the trial and the election draw near, Burr and Hamilton race against time to save a man's life--and destroy each other.

Veteran technology and gaming journalist Nathan Grayson takes us inside the triumphs and tribulations of Twitch with exclusive access to its biggest content creators who helped make the platform into a billion-dollar global business. From Twitch’s early days of rapid growth to acquisition by Amazon to the defection of creators and rival platforms, Grayson makes the radical argument that many social technology companies are far more dependent on their creators than the creators are on their platforms. Rivetingly told through nine exceptional Twitch creators whose on-screen personalities helped the company grow into a powerhouse, this is the explosive story of when entertainment meets the internet in the era of social and video content domination.