04 2025 November
The Non-Obvious Book of the Week: The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson
In a world where multiverses are real, there’s just one catch … no one can visit a world where they already have a living counterpart....
Read Now28 2025 October
The Non-Obvious Book of the Week: Toxic Positivity by Whitney Goodman
If you’re an optimistic person, it’s possible that you’re part of the problem. We often feel like being positive and having the right mindset is...
Read Now21 2025 October
The Non-Obvious Book of the Week: CAPS LOCK by Ruben Pater
This isn’t like any other book on your bookshelf. That’s perhaps the greatest compliment I can offer this stealthy 552-page paperback exploration of the intersection...
Read Now14 2025 October
The Non-Obvious Book of the Week: A Kids Book About Diwali by Chhavi Arya Bhargava
It’s Diwali season and the holiday is getting continued attention from many groups outside the South Asian community, so I wanted to come back and...
Read Now07 2025 October
The Non-Obvious Book of the Week: Soundbite by Sara Harberson
As you might expect, when I started digging into what makes a great college application essay, I started by skimming or reading dozens of books....
Read Now30 2025 September
The Non-Obvious Book of the Week: So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson
Some of the stories in this book are hard to read. And you’ll probably be glad that you’re not facing any of the situations that...
Read Now23 2025 September
The Non-Obvious Book of the Week: Design for a Radically Changing World by Diane Hoskins and Andy Cohen
The offices (or coffee shops) we work in, bridges we drive across, and temples we pray in were all imagined, designed, and built by architects....
Read Now16 2025 September
The Non-Obvious Book of the Week: The Shape of Wonder by Alan Lightman and Martin Rees
A book like this shouldn’t really be necessary. If we all had a shared understanding of why science matters, what it is and all the...
Read Now09 2025 September
The Non-Obvious Book of the Week: Religion of Sports by Gotham Chopra
Last Thursday was the opening of the NFL season and a big deal in my house, as well as across America. After twenty years of...
Read Now04 2025 September
The Death of Articulate Criticism
No one cares what you hate on social media. Or at least they shouldn’t. But as the anonymity of the Internet offers up permission to...
Read Now02 2025 September
The Non-Obvious Book of the Week: Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams
If you thought, like I did, that many of the negative impacts that Facebook has had on our culture from failing to curb the spread...
Read Now29 2025 July
The Non-Obvious Book of the Week: Up the Organization by Robert Townsend
Up the Organization was published in the mid-seventies, which technically makes it just about as old as I am. The lessons, though, are actually timeless and...
Read Now22 2025 July
The Non-Obvious Book of the Week: The Age of Magical Overthinking by Amanda Montell
Broadly, magical thinking describes the belief that one’s internal thoughts can affect external events. Mythologizing the world as an attempt to “make sense” of it...
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