In 'On the Edge,' Nate Silver analyzes professional risk-takers

Have you ever felt frustrated or puzzled by the way your coworkers behave? In Surrounded by Idiots, communication expert, business consultant, and author Thomas Erikson offers a framework for understanding the people who perplex us the most.

Erikson’s framework includes four personality types, and each has a unique way of thinking, behaving, and communicating. He shows you how to navigate conflicts, sharpen your communication, and improve your relationships with your boss and colleagues—all by recognizing their personality types as well as your own.

Throughout the guide, we’ll compare Erikson’s ideas about personality to those of other personality-typing models, and we’ll add perspectives from psychologists that support or challenge his assertions. By the end, you’ll be able to more effectively communicate and collaborate with the bosses, employees, and colleagues you thought you’d never understand.

When neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor suffered a stroke on the left side of her brain, her life as she knew it dissolved as she lost access to basic cognitive functions. With only her right brain hemisphere functioning, she experienced a period of cosmic bliss, unburdened by her ego and past traumas. Later, when she regained her left-brain cognitive functions, she also retained a connection to the right side of her brain that brought her profound inner peace.

Taylor’s key insight from her experience is that we can choose to access different parts of our brains and interrupt automatic thought processes and emotional reactions that don’t serve us. She links four areas of the brain to the “four characters within us”—each with their own ways of perceiving and navigating the world. In this guide, we’ll explore how the four characters show up in our lives and how to achieve emotional well-being by getting to know our four characters better. We’ll also compare Taylor’s ideas to other experts’ mindfulness techniques.

Even though we’re all human, most of us don’t understand what drives people (including ourselves) to feel and behave the way we do. In The Laws of Human Nature, author Robert Greene looks at several laws that explain, among other things, why we self-sabotage, behave differently in groups, and want the wrong things.

Armed with the knowledge of these fundamentals of human nature, you can manage toxic people, become more empathetic, make people like you, and control your own nature.

The early 21st century has already seen numerous catastrophic failures of prediction: From terrorist attacks to financial crises to natural disasters to political upheaval, we routinely seem unable to predict the events that change the world. In The Signal and the Noise, statistician, analyst, and FiveThirtyEight.com founder Nate Silver sets out to explain why—and how we can do better.

Silver argues that our predictions falter because of mental mistakes such as incorrect assumptions, overconfidence, bias, and warped incentives. However, he also suggests that we can mitigate these thinking errors (and thus improve our forecasts) with the help of a method called Bayesian inference. In this guide, we’ll explain how fields ranging from politics to poker to meteorology can teach you how to make better predictions and avoid costly mistakes in judgment. Along the way, we’ll update Silver’s examples with the latest research and place his arguments in conversation with other experts on prediction such as Philip E. Tetlock and Daniel Kahneman.

If you’ve ever noticed that history seems to repeat itself over the course of centuries, you may be wondering what causes that pattern—and how it may play out in the future. In The Fourth Turning, historian William Strauss and consultant Neil Howe explain how Anglo-American history follows a pattern of four 15 to 25-year periods, called Turnings, and how the behaviors of different generations define these Turnings.

In our guide, we’ll explore the authors’ theories on the Four Turnings, as well as the generational archetypes and their respective roles in the Turnings. We’ll also discuss the authors’ descriptions of the past three Turnings and their predictions for the Fourth. Finally, we’ll examine the authors’ theories in the context of history and modern society, as well as how their predictions about the Fourth Turning have played out in the years since the book’s publication in 1997.

This book answers the simple but essential question: Why can’t we all get along?

Moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt explains why people around the world, including liberals and conservatives in the United States, have different moral frameworks. He argues that moral judgments are emotional, not logical—they are based on stories rather than reason. Consequently, liberals and conservatives lack a common language, and reason-based arguments about morality are ineffective. This leads to political polarization.

The Righteous Mind explores how our divergent moralities evolved, why morality is about more than just fairness, and how we can counter our natural self-righteousness to decrease political divides.

These days, the world is moving faster than ever. Every day new scientific discoveries are announced, conflict breaks out somewhere in the world, and nature and the climate behave unexpectedly. If you feel overwhelmed or destabilized by this, you’re not alone—no period in the history of humanity has ever been subject to such quickly changing conditions as today.

In Thank You For Being Late, author, journalist, and columnist Thomas Friedman explains how these conditions arose—the three forces that shape the world, technology, globalization, and climate change, all accelerated at once—and how we can adapt to them.