We Have a Deal

Big data knows where you've been and who your friends are. It knows what you like and what makes you angry. It can predict what you'll buy, where you'll be the victim of crime and when you'll have a heart attack. Big data knows you better than you know yourself, or so it claims. But how well do you know big data? You've probably seen the phrase in newspaper headlines, at work in a marketing meeting, or on a fitness-tracking gadget. But can you understand it without being a Silicon Valley nerd who writes computer programs for fun? Yes. Yes, you can.

Eleanor Morgan's first-person account of her own struggles with anxiety was published as part of The Vice Guide to Mental Health and was read by five million people across 15 countries within four days. Anxiety for Beginners will serve as a guide for those who live with anxiety disorders and those who live with them by proxy.

Michelle McGagh has been writing about money for over a decade. You'd think that would make her a whiz with her own cash, right? Wrong! Spending with abandon and ignoring bank statements were her modus operandi. Just because she wasn't in serious debt apart from her massive London mortgage, she thought she was in control. She wasn't. Something needed to be done ,but rather than cut back here and there, Michelle's approach was more radical.

For anyone who ever wondered what Marcel Proust had in mind when he wrote the one-and-a-quarter-million words of In Search of Lost Time (while bedridden no less), Alain de Botton has the answer. For, in this stylish, erudite and frequently hilarious book, de Botton dips deeply into Proust’s life and work - his fiction, letter, and conversations – and distils from them that rare self-help manual: one that is actually helpful.

David and Goliath is the dazzling and provocative new book from Malcolm Gladwell, best-selling author of The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers and What the Dog Saw. Why do underdogs succeed so much more than we expect? How do the weak outsmart the strong? In David and Goliath Malcolm Gladwell takes us on a scintillating and surprising journey through the hidden dynamics that shape the balance of power between the small and the mighty.

We are all storytellers - through stories, we make sense of our lives. But it is not enough to tell tales. There must be someone to listen. In his work as a psychoanalyst, Stephen Grosz has spent the last 25 years uncovering the hidden feelings behind our most baffling behaviour. The Examined Life distils over 50,000 hours of conversation into pure psychological insight, without the jargon. This extraordinary book is about one ordinary process: talking, listening, and understanding.

When it comes to health, there is one criminally overlooked element: sleep. Good sleep helps you shed fat for good, stave off disease, stay productive, and improve virtually every function of your mind and body. That's what Shawn Stevenson learned when a degenerative bone disease crushed his dream of becoming a professional athlete. Like many of us, he gave up on his health and his body...until he decided there must be a better way.

From identification cards to how we protect our property, public debate rages over what our basic human rights are and how they are to be protected. In this trenchant and provocative audiobook, Peter Hitchens sets out to show that popular views of these hotly contested issues - from crime and punishment to so-called 'soft drugs' - are based on mistaken beliefs, massaged figures, and cheap slogans. His powerful and counterintuitive conclusions make challenging listening for those on both the Left and the Right.

At some point today you will have to influence or persuade someone - perhaps ask a colleague a favour, negotiate with a contractor or get your spouse to put out the recycling. In The small BIG, three heavyweights from the world of persuasion, science and practice - Steve Martin, Noah Goldstein and Robert Cialdini - describe how, in today's information-overloaded world, it is now the smallest changes that lead to the biggest differences in results.

Since taking over TED in the early 2000s, Chris Anderson has shown how carefully crafted short talks can be the key to unlocking empathy, stirring excitement, spreading knowledge, and promoting a shared dream. Done right, a talk can electrify a room and transform an audience's worldview. Done right, a talk is more powerful than anything in written form.

In the age of information overload, traditional time management techniques simply don't cut it when it comes to overflowing inboxes, ever-expanding to-do lists and endless pointless meetings. Thankfully there is a better way: the way of the productivity ninja. Using techniques including ruthlessness, mindfulness, Zenlike calm and stealth and camouflage, you will get your inbox down to zero, make the most of your attention, beat procrastination and learn to work smarter, not harder.

Learn how to decode the private languages that are swapped around us every day - amongst cabbies and paramedics, soap stars and comedians, cricketers and barristers - in Susie Dent's unique and witty guide to Britain's modern tribes. Did you know that a soldier's biggest social blunder is called 'jack brew' - making yourself a cuppa without making one for anyone else? That twitchers have an expression for a bird that can't be identified - LBJ (the letters stand for little brown job)?

For many of us, being ‘good’ isn’t really good enough. We want to make the very best we can out of our lives - to achieve all we can achieve and be the best we can be. We want to be Brilliant. This book will give you tools to find out what point you are at now, understand where it is you want to get, and develop strategies and powerful methods to get you there - as quickly as possible and as economically as possible with as much fun as possible.

Based on Stanford University psychologist Kelly McGonigal's wildly popular course The Science of Willpower, The Willpower Instinct is the first book to explain the new science of self-control and how it can be harnessed to improve our health, happiness, and productivity. Informed by the latest research and combining cutting-edge insights from psychology, economics, neuroscience, and medicine, The Willpower Instinct explains exactly what willpower is, how it works, and why it matters.

Everyone knows that timing is everything. But we don't know much about timing itself. Our lives are a never-ending stream of 'when' decisions: when to start a business, schedule a class, get serious about a person. Yet we make those decisions based on intuition and guesswork. 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.