The 2019
Book Awards

Ogilvy vice chairman Rory Sutherland’s gleeful case for magic over logic: why the irrational ideas are so often the ones that work.

New York Times TV critic James Poniewozik traces how television remade politics, and how one man learned to play the medium better than anyone.

Caroline Criado Perez documents the data gap at the heart of a world designed for men, from crash-test dummies to drug trials. One of the decade’s most important books.

John Hodgman’s wry meditation on fame, status and airline loyalty tiers. The funniest book ever written about being almost recognizable.

Physicist-entrepreneur Safi Bahcall explains why organizations kill their wildest ideas, and the structures that let loonshots survive long enough to change the world.

Philosopher Eleanor Gordon-Smith tests how persuasion really works through six true stories of people changing their minds, and shows how rarely reason has anything to do with it.

Frank Abagnale, the con artist behind Catch Me If You Can, turns his expertise to protecting readers from the scams targeting them right now.

David Epstein’s influential case that generalists, not specialists, are primed to excel in a complex world. The book that made sampling widely respectable again.

Cliff Kuang reveals the hidden history of user-centered design, and how the ideas behind easy-to-use machines quietly became the grammar of modern life.

Scott Young, who completed MIT’s computer science curriculum in a year on his own, shares the strategy of aggressive self-directed learning.