COGNITIVE EXTINCTION de Nita Farahany

A sobering look at how digital life is eroding our thinking, our freedom, and what it means to be human―and how to reclaim what we’ve lost.

COGNITIVE EXTINCTION:
Saving Human Thought While We Still Can
by Nita Farahany
St. Martin’s Press, March 2027

Something is disappearing from human life: our ability to think freely, engage meaningfully with others, and be present in our own lives. Can we adapt to the modern world without losing the qualities that make us human?

In COGNITIVE EXTINCTION, Nita Farahany, one of the world’s foremost scholars on the ethical, legal, and societal implications of emerging technologies, names what is happening: we are losing our cognitive liberty, the ability to trust our perceptions and govern ourselves. We can sense this intuitively, but we don’t recognize that these struggles present a dire threat to our institutions and the common ground beneath us all―the cognitive commonwealth itself.

After years of questioning these alarming trends, she found answers when she least expected it: through her own grief. When her daughter, Callista, passed away, Farahany’s cognitive world collapsed. As she tried to make sense of what was happening, she discovered that the mental capacities she had lost mirrored those being hollowed out across society through digital immersion.

What has been degraded, Farahany argues, can still be rebuilt. That begins with each of us. We must resist the temptation to sleepwalk into cognitive extinction and collectively recognize that our mental freedom is at stake. Only then can we reclaim a world in which humans find meaning and flourish.

Deeply felt and rigorously researched, COGNITIVE EXTINCTION is a clarion call for all of us to pay attention to what we’re losing―while we can still feel ourselves losing it.

“This may be the most important book written about technology, human flourishing, and what we need to protect to become fully ourselves.” ―Lori Gottlieb, bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

Nita Farahany is a legal scholar and philosopher who studies the societal implications of emerging technologies. She is the Robinson O. Everett Distinguished Professor of Law and Philosophy at Duke University and the founding director of Duke Science & Society. She is a frequent speaker at events including TED, the Aspen Ideas Festival, and the World Economic Forum. Her previous book, The Battle for Your Brain, has shaped global conversations on cognitive liberty and mental privacy.

DIE UNVERSCHÄMTE FRAU de Miriam Stein

A both personal and socio-critical examination of toxic shame – over our sexuality, our bodies, our origins – and how to free ourselves from it.

DIE UNVERSCHÄMTE FRAU
[The Shameless Woman]
by Miriam Stein
Goldmann/PRH Germany, September 2026

Being able to feel shame is key to our survival as a social animal. It’s a clever little mechanism that ensures we follow social norms. But whereas men usually seem capable of dealing with it relatively well, women often overdo it. It’s a powerful emotion, and from childhood onwards it’s like a toxic friend in your ear, controlling your decisions, keeping you in line, and telling you that you aren’t empathetic / confident / slim / feminine / smooth / natural enough. No matter how emancipated a woman you are, thousands of years of patriarchy aren’t something you can shake off just like that.

Bestselling author and journalist Miriam Stein has known all about shame ever since she was a little girl. In fact, she was practically born with it: in 1977, someone left newborn Miriam on a South Korean street corner in a shoe box, wrapped in newspaper. Was her mother not allowed to keep her? Was she ashamed of her pregnancy? Meanwhile, Miriam has gone through puberty, experienced her own pregnancy, survived career setbacks and relationship crises, and even seen off perimenopause – the female ‘shame supernova’ par excellence. In « The Shameless Woman », she sets out to expose the many false narratives that darken so many women’s lives, and to forge a path towards liberation.

• For fans of Miranda July, Glennon Doyle and Gillian Anderson

Miriam Yung Min Stein was born in South Korea in 1977 and subsequently adopted by a German family. She has performed on stage with Christoph Schlingensief and Rimini Protokoll, and is an acclaimed culture journalist. Her bestselling Die gereizte Frau (‘The irritated woman’), about the menopause, turned what was largely a taboo topic into one openly discussed in public. In her most recent book, Weise Frauen (‘Wise women’), she went in search of female wisdom. She lives with her family in Berlin.

THREAT ACTORS de Mitch Moxley et Johnny Liesman

A quarter-billion-dollar crypto heist, a violent kidnapping, a network of teenage cybercriminals, and the rise of the Gen Z Mafia.

THREAT ACTORS
by Mitch Moxley & Johnny Liesman
Random House, Fall 2028
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Not too long ago, responsible adults worried that adolescents who spent hours playing video games like Grand Theft Auto were being indoctrinated into a world numbed to violence and misogyny. What flew under the radar were the late-night sessions on less violent multiplayer games like Minecraft and Roblox that primed kids for something just as unsettling. There, kids could learn to cheat, hack, and steal in online marketplaces selling “rare” usernames and game add-ons, earning an “education” that seamlessly propelled them into the higherstakes cryptocurrency world and hijacking digital wallets—sometimes in a matter of seconds. Threat Actors follows one such group of young men as they graduate from scripted phone scams into threats and beatings, and from “small” seven-figure thefts to the heist of a quarter billion dollars from an unsuspecting middle-aged investor. They are members of “the Com,” or “the Community,” a fast-growing online collective of young criminals trained at home and emerging as a brutal and organized 21st-century Mafia.

THREAT ACTORS (a term used by law enforcement and investigators to describe this growing class of cybercriminals) follows the group’s most notorious crime down every rabbit hole, revealing who the “threat actors” behind the senseless usernames are, examining how an anonymous young investigator on X helped the FBI unravel the mystery of their identities, and asking who’s really to blame for the conditions that guided them down the path to crime.

Mitch Moxley is a writer who has contributed to The New York Times Magazine, GQ, Esquire, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, and other publications. He is the co-creator, writer, and host of the podcast Over My Dead Body: Operation Sideswipe (Audible Originals, October 2026), and author of the memoir Apologies to My Censor, about the six years he lived in China.

Johnny Liesman is a New York-based investigative journalist and producer who codeveloped and reported the Audible Originals series Over My Dead Body: Operation Sideswipe and is producing an upcoming podcast hosted by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ronan Farrow. He’s spent countless late nights in the Telegram channels of the Com—and grew up in the same online world as many of the book’s subjects.

THE MOUSE d’Amy Talley

A comedic thriller about an office worker who’s determined to kill her insufferable coworker, only to discover he might be an infamous murderer himself.

THE MOUSE
by Amy Talley
Minotaur Books/St. Martin’s, January 2028

Margaret Ingraham is an introverted, hyper-meticulous thirty-year-old administrative assistant who wants nothing more than to be left in peace. But when the office golden boy, Patrick McMahon, targets her job for AI replacement, then steals her apple slice, something inside Margaret snaps. She makes a calculated decision: Patrick must die.

Margaret’s initial murder attempts—such as leaving a peanut butter muffin on her desk for the allegedly-allergic Patrick to find—are unsuccessful, but as she zeroes in on her target, she begins to notice some suspicious behavior. Soon, she realizes that, beyond being a public nuisance, Patrick might just be the Silver Lake Strangler, a serial killer who has been menacing local women.

Unfortunately, Margaret can’t go to the police. With a past tainted by a mother who cried wolf and Margaret’s own failed homicide attempts, she’s anything but a reliable witness. Instead, she engages Patrick in a dangerous game of cat and mouse, using anonymity and her underestimated persona to out-maneuver a killer. Margaret must risk her safety, her sanity, and the emotional stability she’s fought so hard for to stop the murderer and maybe, for the first time in her life, become the hero of her own story.

“Deftly plotted and deliciously unpredictable, THE MOUSE is everything you want in a thriller. This one is a wild ride from start to finish!”—Ashley Elston, #1 New York Times bestselling author of First Lie Wins

Amy Talley is a USA Today bestselling author of over thirty novels (under the name Liz Talley). She has been nominated for both RWA’s Golden Heart and Rita awards. She has had three novels in the Amazon First Reads program and two Amazon “Best Books of the Month” in Romance. Amy is a member of The Author’s Guild, Novelists Inc, and Your Book Escape.

SPLIT SECOND de Janet Evanovich

Stephanie Plum’s life is never boring, not even for a split second, in the adrenaline-fueled new novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author Janet Evanovich.

SPLIT SECOND: THIRTY-TWO SWITCHEROO
(Stephanie Plum Book 32)
by Janet Evanovich
Atria Books, November 2026
(via Park, Fine & Brower)

In a now-or-never moment, Stephanie Plum made the decision of a lifetime. But some lifetimes are shorter than others and Stephanie will be lucky if she makes it to the end of the week.

Over the years, Trenton’s best-known bounty hunter has acquired a long list of enemies. It’s an occupational hazard as a bond enforcement agent. The problem is that she now has a mysterious enemy whose name isn’t on any list. Disturbing packages, threatening notes, and near misses are keeping Stephanie in the dark and her anonymous tormentor, who wants her dead, in the shadows.

Bond jumper Greb Tusi also wouldn’t mind getting rid of Stephanie. He’s wanted for going on a three-hour rampage—one that he swears “wasn’t his fault”—that included mugging an old lady and stealing a hearse.

And if adjusting to being newly married isn’t enough to take a few years off Stephanie’s life, working for her ex-fiancé and mentor, Ranger, might do the trick. Ranger has taken a security job for a powerful political figure, and Stephanie is in charge of babysitting one of the figure’s family members.

The clock is ticking for Stephanie to find bail-jumper Greb Tusi and the invisible stalker who is sending her increasingly menacing messages. If she lets her guard down for even a split second, her time will be up.

Janet Evanovich has written a staggering forty-seven New York Times bestsellers over the last thirty years. In addition to her #1 New York Times bestselling Stephanie Plum novels and many other popular books, Janet is the author of the New York Times bestselling Recovery Agent series, Lizzy and Diesel series, Fox and O’Hare series, Knight and Moon series, the Alexandra Barnaby novels, and the graphic novel Troublemaker (with her daughter, Alex Evanovich).