Arun Batchu

Last week I counted the tabs open on my laptop and got to twenty-three. Each one was a yes I had said to myself at some point — an article I meant to read, a tool I meant to try, a person I meant to get back to. Not one of them was bad, and that was the whole trouble. None of them was bad enough to close, so all twenty-three stayed open, glowing, each one quietly asking for a piece of me. Greg McKeown has six words for the way out of that, and I have never been able to shake them: less, but...

You already know the kidney heist story, even if you've never heard it called that. A traveler meets someone attractive at a bar, wakes up in a bathtub full of ice with a phone taped to the wall and a note telling him to call 911 immediately, and discovers a surgical scar where one of his kidneys used to be. It is not true. It has never been true. Chip and Dan Heath open Made to Stick with it anyway, because the story has spread across the world for decades on nothing but word of mouth, and...

Look at the cover before you open the book. Three hand-drawn stick figures: one cradling a heart, one with a star on its chest, one holding a star out toward you. It looks like something a kid taped to a refrigerator, and that is the point. Glenn Bostock spent forty years building SnapCab from a one-man cabinet shop into an international manufacturer that makes elevator interiors and the modular privacy pods you have probably stepped into at some open-plan office. He could have put a glass...