The follow up to the international bestseller, The Molecule of More, here’s a step-by-step guide that converts the brain science of The Molecule of More into practical steps to making your life better, right now.
TAMING THE MOLECULE OF MORE
by Michael E. Long
Benbella, Spring 2025
(via Harvey Klinger Literary Agency)
Here’s how to: stop being held captive to the lure of social media; avoid the pitfalls that plague dating life; keep yourself from getting “bored” with the love you already have; better limit compulsive shopping; lengthen a brief attention span; engage your creativity when you need it most; step back from an unhealthy obsession with work.
The result: better relationships, more satisfaction in your career, and greater peace of mind every day. The secret? Taming the Molecule of More.
Trained as a physicist, Michael E. Long is an award-winning speechwriter, screenwriter, and playwright. As a playwright, more than 20 of his shows have been produced, most on New York stages. As a screenwriter, his honors include finalist for the grand prize in screenwriting at the Slamdance Film Festival. As a speechwriter, Mr. Long has written for members of Congress, U.S. cabinet secretaries, governors, diplomats, business executives, and presidential candidates. A popular speaker and educator, Mr. Long has addressed audiences around the world, including in a keynote at Oxford University. He teaches writing at Georgetown University, where he is a former director of writing. Mr. Long pursued undergraduate studies at Murray State University and graduate studies at Vanderbilt University.
THE UMBRELLA MAKER’S SON follows the remarkable odyssey of 17 year old Reuven Berkowitz at the outset of World War II, whose family is sent into turmoil with the fall of Nazi bombs on their Jewish neighborhood of Kazmiereze. It is only a matter of time before the family’s umbrella making business, their apartment, their wealth and their dignity are destroyed by the Nazis. After a nighttime confrontation with an SS officer goes dangerously wrong, Reuven makes a harrowing escape from besieged Krakow to the countryside where he is taken in by a sympathetic Christian farmer and his demanding and antisemitic wife. From there, Reuven eventually journeys back to the horrors of the Nazi ghetto that Krakow has become in search of the young woman he has loved since childhood.
It is the early 1980s and for twenty years Father Joe Kreitzer has been dutifully serving the Lakota community on the Windy Creek Reservation in South Dakota. And in all this time he has carried memories of Veronica; their parting propelled him into the church. Now she has reached out, wanting to rekindle what they had turned their back on so many years ago. While grappling with this resurgence from his past, Joe’s dear friend Alice Nighthawk comes to him with news of her son Little Bear’s arrest for attempted murder. In his efforts to help exonerate Bear, Joe uncovers long buried evidence of a church cover up of abuse at a Catholic school on the reservation, forcing him to confront the choices he’s made and the secrets he keeps. What unfolds is an intimately layered story of love, and a search for answers.
For the past four years before Covid hit, Eliot Stein has been traveling all around the planet profiling remarkable people who are producing or preserving a distinct cultural wonder that exists nowhere else for a column he created for BBC Travel called Custom Made. In Italy, Eliot learned the secrets of the world’s rarest pasta from one of only three women alive who knows how to make it. In Taiwan, he shadowed the island’s last film poster painter, a man who’s now partially blind but still hangs his giant brushstroke canvases on the theater marquee. In Sardinia, Eliot meets a 24th generation diver who is the only person left on Earth who still knows how to harvest and embroider an incredibly rare fiber known as sea silk, into elaborate patterns that glisten like gold. 
Five years ago, Nora Wilder disappeared. The oldest of her two daughters, Zadie, should have seen it coming, because she can literally see things coming. But not even her psychic abilities were able to prevent their mother from vanishing one morning, never to return.