Archives de catégorie : Psychology

THE PARATHA PROJECT de Priya Krishna

A memoir and also a rallying cry and how-to for having difficult conversations with your parents by New York Times bestselling author and NYT food reporter, former restaurant critic and video host.

THE PARATHA PROJECT:
A Radical Experiment in Talking to My Parents
by Priya Krishna
Little, Brown, Spring 2028
(via the David Black Agency)

In her highly-anticipated debut narrative nonfiction book, Emmy-nominated New York Times journalist and bestselling author of Indian-ish, Priya’s Kitchen Adventures, and Cooking at Home (with David Chang), Priya Krishna turns her incisive eye and her reporter’s mic to the untold story of her own parents. Despite all of the public-facing closeness, a family crisis made Priya realize she never really knew her parents at all. She will do what for many of us would feel impossible and even radical: ask the uncomfortable questions to get to the real answer. In The Paratha Project, Priya challenges every assumption she ever made about her parents’ story—one she always believed was a straightforward trajectory of hardworking immigrants coming to the States, finding professional success, and achieving the American Dream. Question by question, a more complex and revealing history emerges.

As Priya reexamines her family’s past, the book engages deeply universal themes of intergenerational misunderstanding, parental expectation, grief, and the search for belonging. It speaks to anyone who has ever felt both close to and distant from their family. Through explorations of legacy, assimilation, and, of course, food, Priya’s search for truth about her parents becomes a search for truth about herself.

Both a deeply personal narrative and a rallying cry, The Paratha Project invites readers to initiate paradigm-shifting conversations with their own parents before it’s too late. With humor, insight, and emotional clarity—and an addendum of 22 Questions To Ask Your Parents designed to spark expansive, surprising dialogue—the book offers a compelling story and a practical framework for forging deeper intergenerational connection.

Priya Krishna is a food reporter, former restaurant critic, and video host for the New York Times. She is also the New York Times bestselling author of three cookbooks, Priya’s Kitchen Adventures, Cooking at Home (with David Chang), and Indian-ish, the latter of which has sold over 145,000 copies. Prior to working at the Times, Priya was a popular member of the Bon Appetit test kitchen and played a pivotal role in the reckoning on racial injustice at the magazine in 2020. Her work has been nominated for a James Beard Award and an IACP award, and her reported essays have been included in the 2019 and 2021 versions of The Best American Food Writing. She has been nominated for an Emmy for her work hosting the NYT video series “On the Job,” which spotlights the unseen labor of the food industry. Through speaking engagements across the country, her built-in platform of the NYT, and her 500k social media followers, Priya is a definitive voice on food, culture, and identity. 

PEOPLE SKILLS de Lily Scherlis

A razor-sharp nonfiction book that dissects the failures of the bloated self-help industrial complex to improve our lives, while also unearthing what real change could look like.

PEOPLE SKILLS:
The Impossible Task of Personal Growth–and Why Change is the Answer
by Lily Scherlis
Liveright / Norton (US) / Hutchinson Heinemann (UK), publication date TBC
(via The Gernert Company)

Psychology is rife with metaphors, and today’s self-help movement is no different: you can “optimize” your routine, as if you are designing an app; you can set better boundaries, as if you are a lawn; you can say when you’re “at capacity,” as if you are a battery; or you can “invest” in self-care, as if you are a stockbroker on the trading floor of the soul. From a pragmatist’s perspective, borrowing the language of the times to instill psychological insights makes perfect sense, and when self-help advice sounds so intuitive, it’s easy to buy in. But problems arise when we mistake metaphors forged in the crucible of our hyper-individualized neoliberal culture for a true metaphysics of the mind. You may indeed have a 401k, but you are neither a lawn nor a battery. 

In PEOPLE SKILLS, Lily Scherlis places the concepts so many of us cling to for sanity as we navigate an increasingly uncertain world–think attachment styles, emotional intelligence, and even the idea of people skills itself–in sociopolitical context, from cold war ideological panic to anxieties unleashed by globalization. Many of these ideas have their origins in legitimate psychological insights and research, and some of them can be helpful, some of the time. But when they are warped, watered down, and overapplied, they give rise to a curious paradox: As inadequate institutions crumble and we are forced deeper into financial and emotional dependence upon one another, our primary yardstick for measuring our own well-being is the ability to perform independence. In a society that values economic growth at all costs, the only way to avoid being left behind is to keep growing yourself; in a world getting worse, the only solution is to be better. 

But this is an impossible task: In the never-ending quest for self-improvement, the goal is always just out of reach–which is exactly how the $1.5 billion self-help industry wants it. Lily gives us permission to step off the hamster wheel of personal growth and think about other ways of addressing our problems—and to question whether they’re really problems at all. We are intrinsically interdependent beings, she reminds us, whose obligations to ourselves are never really divorced from our obligations to one another, and when we retreat to our own private spheres in order to self-actualize, we merely atomize our troubles, disappoint ourselves, and reinforce the status quo. In encouraging us to flex new psychic muscles instead of reaching for the same canned jargon, PEOPLE SKILLS ends up being its own kind of self-help, ironically. For Lily, the goal is not growth but change–for ourselves, and for our world. Neither can happen without the other.

Lily Scherlis is a writer and artist, and a PhD candidate in English and Theater and Performance Studies at the University of Chicago. Her writing has appeared in n+1, Harper’s, The Guardian, Parapraxis, The Baffler, The Drift, and Cabinet, among other venues. She lives in Brooklyn.

WHAT’S GOING RIGHT de Paul Conti

Based on the wildly popular four-part series on Andrew Huberman’s podcast, this affirming book from world-renowned and celebrity-endorsed psychiatrist, Dr. Paul Conti, offers a paradigm-shifting approach to optimizing mental health — offering readers a proven way towards a joyful life.

WHAT’S GOING RIGHT:
A Powerful New Method for Optimizing Your Mental Health
by Paul Conti
Balance, May 2026
(via Park, Fine & Brower)

More than one in five US adults are living with a mental illness. Since 2010, adults ages eighteen to twenty-five have experienced a 139 percent increase in anxiety. For all of the increasing and well-intended mental health resources at our immediate disposal, we could easily ask where we are going wrong. Yet, Dr. Paul Conti wants to know, “what’s going right?”

Backed by celebrities and esteemed colleagues such as Lady GaGa, Peter Attia, and Kim Kardashian, Dr. Conti poses that the best place to start addressing our mental health isn’t in focusing on what’s going wrong, but rather what’s going right. And the key to embracing this new narrative is tapping into our often ignored and long over-looked generative drive, the primary factor that’s already going right in each of us. The generative drive helps you get things done, solve problems creatively, help others and feel connected to something larger than yourself. When activated, it brings you peace, contentment, and delight.

With Dr. Conti’s notorious straightforward sincerity, he shares the exact method he uses on his patients and celebrity clients to help them tap into their generative drives including:

  • The 5 Part Structure of Self: When you alter your structure you alter its function

  • Cultivating a daily self-inquiry practice

  • Learning compassionate curiosity

  • Progressive muscle relaxation

  • Rewiring Life Narratives

  • Detect, Respond, Return and how to manage our stress response

WHAT’S GOING RIGHT offers readers a proven offramp from the toxic pursuits that keep them stuck and an onramp toward a joyful life. 

Paul Conti, MD is a celebrity-endorsed psychiatrist, renowned author and President of Pacific Premier Group PC, a comprehensive mental health clinic that provides therapy, coaching, and consulting services to individuals, families, and businesses in the United States and abroad. He has been featured on top podcasts with industry-leading hosts such as Peter Attia, Tim Ferriss, Andrew Huberman, Mel Robbins, Lex Fridman, Whitney Cummings, Tom Bilyeu, Rich Roll, Danica Patrick, and others.

DARK FACTOR de Benjamin E. Hilbig, Morten Moshagen & Ingo Zettler

Gripping insights into the dark side of human nature.

DARK FACTOR
by Benjamin E. Hilbig, Morten Moshagen & Ingo Zettler
Artiston/PRH Germany, October 2025

What do people with a tendency to steal, incite hatred, bully and lie have in common? Studies conducted over the past 10 years by international teams of researchers suggests that what they all share is a quality called ‘the dark factor’. It exists in each of us to a greater or lesser degree, and can actually be measured. For the first time ever, DARK FACTOR provides comprehensive answers to some key questions, based on data obtained from more than 2 million people.

What makes us do bad things? What do our negative personality traits – such as narcissism, psychopathy and sadism – have in common? How do gender, age and level of education affect the dark factor, and how does it, in turn, shape our relationships, career choices and political views? Does it lead to success and happiness, or is it more likely to make you lonely, or even ill? And can its levels change, or is it a case of ‘once bad, always bad’?

The D-Factor: The general tendency to maximize one’s individual utility – disregarding, accepting, or malevolently provoking disutility for others –, accompanied by beliefs that serve as justifications

An analysis of the nine classic personality traits: egoism, malice, Machiavellianism, moral disengagement, narcissism, psychopathy, sadism, self-centeredness and excessive entitlement.

Prof. Benjamin E. Hilbig, PhD, has a degree in psychology and obtained his PhD in 2009. He then joined the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods before moving to an assistant professor role at the University of Mannheim, where he specialised in judgement and decision-making. In 2014, he joined the University of Kaiserslautern-Landau, where he heads up the experimental psychology and personality research group. He specialises in ethical and social decision-making, personality traits and research methods.

Prof. Dr. Morten Moshagen has a PhD in psychology. Following a postdoc at the University of Mannheim, he became professor of psychology at the University of Kassel in 2014, specialising in research methods. After a spell at the University of Copenhagen as visiting researcher, he joined the University of Ulm in 2016. He now heads up Ulm’s Department of Research Methods in Psychology, specialising in mathematical modelling and socially problematic personality traits.

Prof. Dr. Ingo Zettler is professor of personality and behaviour at the University of Copenhagen’s Institute of Psychology and Center for Social Data Science (SODAS). Before moving to Denmark, he did a degree in psychology, and after graduating worked at the RWTH in Aachen (obtaining his PhD there) and at the University of Tübingen. He is part of a research team specialising in personality traits and their significance in different contexts, including anti-social, pro-social, workplace and environment-related behaviour.

HOW WE GROW UP de Matt Richtel

Building off his award-winning New York Times series on the contemporary teen mental-health crisis, the Pulitzer Prize–winning science reporter delivers a groundbreaking investigation into adolescence, the pivotal life stage undergoing profound—and often confounding—transformation.

HOW WE GROW UP:
Understanding Adolescence
by Matt Richtel
Mariner Books/HarperCollins, July 2025

The transition from childhood to adulthood is a natural, evolution-honed cycle that now faces radical change and challenge. The adolescent brain, sculpted for this transition over eons of evolution, confronts a modern world that creates so much social pressure as to regularly exceed the capacities of the evolving mind. The problem comes as a bombardment of screen-based information pelts the brain just as adolescence is undergoing a second key change: puberty is hitting earlier. The result is a neurological mismatch between an ultra-potent environment and a still-maturing brain that can lead to anxiety, depression, and other mental health challenges. It is a crisis that is part of modern life but can only be truly grasped through a broad, grounded lens of the biology of adolescence itself. Through this lens, Richtel shows us how adolescents can understand themselves, and parents and educators can better help.

For decades, this transition to adulthood has been defined by hormonal shifts that trigger the onset of puberty. But Richtel takes us where science now understands so much of the action is: the brain. A growing body of research that looks for the first time into budding adult neurobiology explains with untold clarity the emergence of the “social brain,” a craving for peer connection, and how the behaviors that follow pave the way for economic and social survival. This period necessarily involves testing—as the adolescent brain is programmed from birth to take risks and explore themselves and their environment—so that they may be able to thrive as they leave the insulated care of childhood.

Richtel, diving deeply into new research and gripping personal stories, offers accessible, scientifically grounded answers to the most pressing questions about generational change. What explains adolescent behaviors, risk-taking, reward-seeking, and the ongoing mental health crisis? How does adolescence shape the future of the species? What is the nature of adolescence itself?

Matt Richtel is a reporter at the New York Times. He received the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for a series of articles about distracted driving that he expanded into his first nonfiction book, A Deadly Wandering, a New York Times bestseller. His second nonfiction book, An Elegant Defense, on the human immune system, was a national bestseller and chosen by Bill Gates for his annual Summer Reading List. Richtel has appeared on NPR’s Fresh Air, CBS This Morning, PBS NewsHour, and other major media outlets. He lives in San Francisco, California.