Leading astrophysicist Liam Jackson is participating in a scientist exchange program in Germany when a curveball of universal proportions is thrown at him. Planes fall from the sky, cars explode, and strange particles rain down from the heavens as monsters appear out of thin air. The laws of physics have changed in the world. The fundamental forces of the universe are behaving differently, and Liam needs to understand them if he wants to survive.

Meet Laszlo, eight-hundred-year-old demon and Hell’s least productive Curse Keeper. From his office beneath Midtown, he oversees the Drakeford Curse, which involves a pathetic family upstate and a mysterious black monolith. It’s a sexy enough assignment—colonial origins, mutating victims, et cetera—but Laszlo has no interest in maximizing the curse’s potential; he’d rather sunbathe in Ibiza, quaff martinis, and hustle the hustlers on Manhattan’s subway.

For decades in America, car racing meant NASCAR, and to a lesser extent IndyCar, with Formula 1—the wealthiest racing league in the world—a distant third. Fast forward to 2023, and F1 has emerged at the front of the pack powered by a passionate yet nascent American fanbase. The F1 juggernaut has arrived, but this checkered flag was far from inevitable.

Ever wonder why onions make you cry? Or why lizards do pushups? Or why leaves change color in the fall? Don't worry, you're not alone. Acclaimed science writer and broadcaster Jay Ingram wonders the same things. After a long career of asking important questions (does time speed up as we age? How much Neanderthal is in me? Why do some animals throw their feces?), he's here to put our scientific quandaries to rest.

Not only can we not currently explain the origin of the universe, it is questionable we will ever be able to explain it. The notion that there are universes within particles, or that particles are conscious, is ascientific, as is the hypothesis that our universe is a computer simulation. On the other hand, the idea that the universe itself is conscious is difficult to rule out entirely.

We live in a “post-truth” world, we’re told. But was there ever really a golden age of truth-telling? Or have people been lying, fibbing, and just plain bullsh*tting since the beginning of time? Tom Phillips, editor of a leading independent fact-checking organization, deals with this question every day. In Truth, he tells the story of how we humans have spent history lying to each other - and ourselves - about everything from business to politics to plain old geography.

Modern humans have come a long way in the 70,000 years they’ve walked the earth. Art, science, culture, trade - on the evolutionary food chain, we’re true winners. But it hasn’t always been smooth sailing, and sometimes - just occasionally - we’ve managed to truly f--k things up.

Sean Carroll, theoretical physicist and one of this world’s most celebrated writers on science, rewrites the history of 20th-century physics. Already hailed as a masterpiece, Something Deeply Hidden shows for the first time that facing up to the essential puzzle of quantum mechanics utterly transforms how we think about space and time. His reconciling of quantum mechanics with Einstein’s theory of relativity changes, well, everything. Most physicists haven’t even recognized the uncomfortable truth: Physics has been in crisis since 1927.

It’s estimated that each year between eighty and ninety million children around the globe are given a box of LEGO, while up to ten million adults buy sets for themselves. Yet LEGO is much more than a dizzying number of plastic bricks that can be put together and combined in countless ways. LEGO is also a vision of the significance of what play can mean for humanity.

When Newton discovered the law of gravity, he unified the rules governing the heavens and the Earth. Since then, physicists have been placing new forces into ever-grander theories. But perhaps the ultimate challenge is achieving a monumental synthesis of the two remaining theories—relativity and the quantum theory. This would be the crowning achievement of science, a profound merging of all the forces of nature into one beautiful, magnificent equation to unlock the deepest mysteries in science: What happened before the Big Bang?