Here are 100 books that Longpath fans have personally recommended if you like
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I am a cognitive scientist interested in how the human mind evolved and how it works. My research focuses on how people make decisions about the future, and in recent years I have become increasingly intent on understanding how to best harness our abilities for long-term thinking. Humans may be the most farsighted creatures that have ever existed on this planet. That also means we are uniquely equipped to tackle the big challenges ahead of us—to use our powers of foresight to create a future worth looking forward to. The books I have chosen below show us how we might do it.
We will need optimism to tackle the big challenges ahead of us. We should therefore understand some of the strengths and pitfalls of this mindset. I read Tali Sharot’sThe Optimism Biaswhile I was working on a research project about self-deception and the book made a big impression. Sharot is one of the world’s leading cognitive neuroscientists and in this book she offers more than a description of a decision-making bias. Instead, she provides a detailed, sweeping account of how optimism works in the brain, operates in cognition, and plays out in diverse areas of human life. One key lesson: optimism about the future should be embraced with an awareness of both its adaptive benefits and its potentially devastating costs.
Winner of the British Psychological Society Book Award for Popular Psychology
Psychologists have long been aware that most people tend to maintain an irrationally positive outlook on life. In fact, optimism may be crucial to our existence. Tali Sharot's original cognitive research demonstrates in surprising ways the biological basis for optimism. In this fascinating exploration, she takes an in-depth, clarifying look at how the brain generates hope and what happens when it fails; how the brains of optimists and pessimists differ; why we are terrible at predicting what will make us happy; how anticipation and dread affect us; and how…
Throughout my life, I have been fascinated by humanity’s place within deeper time. As a boy, I collected rocks and fossils, and at university studied geology. The long term has also been a theme running throughout my journalism career at New Scientist and the BBC, and it inspired my research during a recent fellowship at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US. I believe we need to embrace a deeper view of time if we are to navigate through this century’s grand challenges – and if we can, there’s hope, agency, and possibility to be discovered along the way.
The concept of the ‘good ancestor,’ originally coined by physician Jonas Salk, is the focus of Roman Krznaric’s excellent book about our relationship with future generations.
I’ve known Roman for a few years now: he spoke about long-term time on a panel I organised at the Hay Festival a few years ago, and he makes an appearance in my own book on a trip we both made to the House of Lords to watch a debate about future generation policy.
He is a crystal clear thinker and communicator, and I’ve learnt a lot from him. One of the most interesting (of many) ideas in his book is the idea that we are “colonising” the future: treating it as some distant no-man’s land where we can dump environmental degradation, malignant heirlooms, carbon emissions, and so on.
Of course, the future belongs to the people living there: our grandchildren. Roman makes a…
'This is the book our children's children will thank us for reading' - The Edge, U2
How can we be good ancestors?
From the first seeds sown thousands of years ago, to the construction of the cities we still inhabit, to the scientific discoveries that have ensured our survival, we are the inheritors of countless gifts from the past. Today, in an age driven by the tyranny of the now, with 24/7 news, the latest tweet, and the buy-now button commanding our attention, we rarely stop to consider how our actions will affect future generations. With such frenetic short-termism at…
I'm co-founder of a grassroots social justice, civic engagement, and service organization called ForwardCT, which I started with my friend and current state representative Eleni Kavros DeGraw with the intention of mobilizing community-centered action. Our work centers on these four pillars: Connect, Inform, Serve, and Lead. Those pillars guide my work as chair of my town’s Clean Energy Commission, as teacher and facilitator of workshops and events, and as an author of books for young people. I'm drawn to the powerful use of storytelling as a tool for starting conversations, stirring up “good trouble,” and inspiring activism. Read a book, approach your library or town to host a community conversation, leave with actionable takeaways, repeat!
As someone who hoarded toilet paper weeks before the 2020 shortage, I relate to the frustration of watching history repeat itself (or at least rhyme with itself) because people are often too distracted to focus on planning for looming crises.
Bina Venkataraman gets to the “why” of this often-fatal flaw as she explores the nature of human decision-making. This book provides tangible narratives as a springboard to answer these questions: How can we use wisdom from our ancestors to better inform our personal, professional, and policy decisions? How can we incentivize (or glitter bomb) long-term planning? And how can we see ourselves as future ancestors in order to be better stewards of the planet?
A perfect selection for corporate, government, and non-profit retreats and professional development conferences!
“How might we mitigate losses caused by shortsightedness? Bina Venkataraman, a former climate adviser to the Obama administration, brings a storyteller’s eye to this question. . . . She is also deeply informed about the relevant science.” —The New York Times Book Review
A trailblazing exploration of how we can plan better for the future: our own, our families’, and our society’s.
Instant gratification is the norm today—in our lives, our culture, our economy, and our politics. Many of us have forgotten (if we ever learned) how to make smart decisions for…
Typically, climate journalists share stories of disastrous extreme weather events made more extreme by climate change. But over the past decade, I’ve discovered that every sector of the economy and every country on the planet that I’ve had the privilege to explore has people working on climate solutions. Crucially, in many places, these are now working at scale.
This is the one book that explains why humans have become poor at understanding the passage of time and how we can change fast to plan for a shared future.
“Living in the age we do, we have never before had such leverage to shape the trajectory of the future, with so little collective recognition of that fact,” writes Richard Fisher.
'A beautifully turned, calmly persuasive but urgent book' IAN MCEWAN
'A landmark book that could help to build a much brighter future' DAVID ROBSON
A wide-ranging and thought-provoking exploration of the importance of long-term thinking.
Humans are unique in our ability to understand time, able to comprehend the past and future like no other species. Yet modern-day technology and capitalism have supercharged our short-termist tendencies and trapped us in the present, at the mercy of reactive politics, quarterly business targets and 24-hour news cycles.
It wasn't always so. In medieval times, craftsmen worked on cathedrals that would be unfinished in…
I am a professor of philosophy at Wake Forest University, with a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. I teach courses in the philosophy of space and time, the history of philosophy, and the philosophy of science. In addition to several authored and edited books on the philosophy of time, I have published many scholarly articles on time, perception, knowledge, and the history of the philosophy of time. I have always been attracted to the philosophy of time because time is quite simply at the root of everything: through the study of time we confront and illuminate the deepest possible questions both as to the nature of the physical world and as to the nature of human existence.
What is our ‘sense of time’, and why does it vary so much depending on circumstances and our state of mind? Cognitive psychologist Marc Wittmann explores the relationship between consciousness and the sense of being an embodied agent persisting through time. Drawing on cognitive science and neuroscience, he investigates the many factors that affect our experience of time, such as occupation, impulsivity, and mindfulness.
An expert explores the riddle of subjective time, from why time speeds up as we grow older to the connection between time and consciousness.
We have widely varying perceptions of time. Children have trouble waiting for anything. (“Are we there yet?”) Boredom is often connected to our sense of time passing (or not passing). As people grow older, time seems to speed up, the years flitting by without a pause. How does our sense of time come about? In Felt Time, Marc Wittmann explores the riddle of subjective time, explaining our perception of time—whether moment by moment, or in terms…
Throughout my life, I have been fascinated by humanity’s place within deeper time. As a boy, I collected rocks and fossils, and at university studied geology. The long term has also been a theme running throughout my journalism career at New Scientist and the BBC, and it inspired my research during a recent fellowship at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US. I believe we need to embrace a deeper view of time if we are to navigate through this century’s grand challenges – and if we can, there’s hope, agency, and possibility to be discovered along the way.
I first met Suddendorf – one of the three co-authors of this book – in Australia back in 2016.
He is a German professor living in Queensland (with an accent untroubled by antipodean influence), and is best known for studying the skill of “mental time travel”. From him I learnt that this is one of the foundational abilities of humanity, which may well have steered our entire evolution.
We can project our minds across the past, present, and future at will - unlike pretty much any other animal. Therefore it’s crucial as a skill if we want to take the long view, and we shouldn’t take it for granted. However, as Suddendorf and colleagues write in this terrific book, it’s also a “Promethean” talent, and is far from perfect.
If we want to take a longer view, understanding our cognitive faculties is key – this book serves as a…
Our ability to think about the future is one of the most powerful tools at our disposal. In The Invention of Tomorrow, cognitive scientists Thomas Suddendorf, Jonathan Redshaw, and Adam Bulley argue that its emergence transformed humans from unremarkable primates to creatures that hold the destiny of the planet in their hands. Drawing on their own cutting-edge research, the authors break down the science of foresight, showing us where it comes from, how it works, and how it made our world. Journeying through biology, psychology, history, and culture, they show that thinking ahead is at the heart of human nature-even…
I am an astronomer and educator (Ph.D. Astrophysics, University of Colorado), and I’ve now been teaching about global warming for more than 40 years (in courses on astronomy, astrobiology, and mathematics). While it’s frustrating to see how little progress we’ve made in combatting the ongoing warming during this time, my background as an astronomer gives me a “cosmic perspective” that reminds me that decades are not really so long, and that we still have time to act and to build a “post-global warming future.” I hope my work can help inspire all of us to act while we still can for the benefit of all.
I love the way this book brings perspective to modern issues by emphasizing the idea of “deep time” – that we are part of a long history that makes our current existence possible.
By thinking in this way, we also realize that our current predicament is one that we have the tools to address, and that by doing so, we would be honoring the miracles of nature that lie behind everything we are and do. Along the way, this book also helped me understand – and teach about – a variety of important geological processes.
Why an awareness of Earth's temporal rhythms is critical to our planetary survival
Few of us have any conception of the enormous timescales of our planet's long history, and this narrow perspective underlies many of the environmental problems we are creating. The lifespan of Earth can seem unfathomable compared to the brevity of human existence, but this view of time denies our deep roots in Earth's history-and the magnitude of our effects on the planet. Timefulness reveals how knowing the rhythms of Earth's deep past and conceiving of time as a geologist does can give us the perspective we need…
I am a philosopher of science who has an obsession with time. People think this interest is a case of patronymic destiny, that it’s due to my last name being Callender. But the origins of “Callender” have nothing to do with time. Instead, I’m fascinated by time because it is one of the last fundamental mysteries, right up there with consciousness. Like consciousness, time is connected to our place in the universe (our sense of freedom, identity, meaning). Yet we don’t really understand it because there remains a gulf between our experience of time and the science of time. Saint Augustine really put his finger on the problem in the fifth century when he pointed out that it is both the most familiar and unfamiliar thing.
When I moved to San Diego I began to get interested in time perception as well as the physics of time. My colleague Patrica Churchland kindly gave me this book to read. It’s a popular, accessible book on cognitive science and time perception. I couldn’t put it down. For sure it changed my academic path. I knew the mind plays all kinds of tricks on us, but the way it creates our inner sense of time experience still amazes me.
In 2014 I finally came to the realization that I had become the most negative person I knew. I couldn't stand being that whiney, unhappy person anymore. So even though I didn't know how I was going to do it, I made a no-turning-back decision to kill off Negative Past Mel and become Positive Future Mel. The first step in my how was a book that taught me how to create a morning routine. That book saved me and set me on a path of personal growth and development and helped me take my first steps forward to becoming a version of Future Mel I actually enjoy being!
The most important thing I learned from this book is that “winners take breaks!” I was the kind of person who kept pushing and pushing and pushing myself because I thought that was how I would get ahead. I never understood the scientifically proven benefits of taking breaks. There’s a lot of other great stuff in here, but even that small tidbit permanently changed how I work.
Timing is everything. But we don't know much about timing itself. Timing, it's often assumed, is an art; in When, Pink shows that timing is in fact a science.
Drawing on a rich trove of research from psychology, biology and economics, Pink reveals how best to live, work and succeed. How can we use the hidden patterns of the day to build the ideal schedule? Why do certain breaks dramatically improve student test scores? How can we turn a stumbling beginning into a fresh start? When should you have your first coffee of the day? Why is singing in time…
I'm a writer of humorous fiction living in Austin, Texas. I enjoy writing novels about unusual friendships and the healing power that comes when people just shut up and listen to each other. Many of my stories have the odd-couple dynamic on full display and I love to explore what would happen if people with very different backgrounds and opinions are forced to deal with each other. I do have a couple of novels that wouldn’t seem to be humorous on the surface, but there is an element of humor or comedy that runs through all of my work. My next novel, The Codger and the Sparrow, will be published by TCU Press in 2024.
Named one of Kirkus Reviews' Best Books of 2018, this indie novel proposes that a beer-guzzling car enthusiast can also be a philosopher about time and Einstein’s incorrect (!!!) theory of relativity. Main character Selraybob (also the author of this fictitious novel) is left astray by his wife. When she walks out the door, he notices two clocks that are off by seven minutes. He has an epiphany: time is simply a count! Beer is consumed, the nature of time is pondered, and a picaresque adventure begins, one that will have you laughing until the end.
Mark Twain meets Vonnegut in this witty and uplifting redemption romp that Kirkus Reviews (starred review) called "funny, wise and poignant”. BlueInk Review (starred review) called it “quirky and picaresque” and said “Selraybob is lovable and easy-to-root-for.”
Ne’er-do-well Selraybob is beaten down and uninspired. He spends his days on his lounger, drinking quarts of beer and talking to his buddy on the phone. Until, during his fed-up wife’s long overdue kiss-off speech, Selraybob notices two clocks. They’re seven minutes off. And he has an epiphany. Time, he decides, is a count. It’s only a count.
