“Time” is the most commonly used noun in the English language; we all live in it and organize ourselves around it. But what is time exactly?

WHY TIME FLIES:
A MOSTLY SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION
by Alan Burdick
Simon & Schuster, January 2017

In this witty, graceful, and intimate exploration, award-winning author Alan Burdick takes readers along on a quest to understand the clocks that tick inside us all. For the better part of a decade, Burdick, a New Yorker staff writer and National Book Award finalist, journeyed among scientists studying the most vexing questions about our perceptions of time. Along the way he visits the most accurate clock in the world—which exists only on paper; he discovers that “now” actually happened a split-second ago; he lived in the Arctic, in a bid to lose all sense of time; and, for one fleeting moment in a neuroscientist’s lab, he even made time go backward. The result is an instant classic, a vivid and deeply moving examination of the stuff that makes us human.

Alan Burdick is a senior editor at The New Yorker and a contributing editor for OnEarth, where he writes the Synthesist column about technology and nature. His first nonfiction book, “Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion”, was a National Book Award finalist and won the Overseas Press Club Award for environmental reporting.

Rights sold: Germany (Campus Verlag)