**Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award** The definitive history of nuclear weapons— from the turn-of-the-century discovery of nuclear energy to J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project—this epic work details the science, the people, and the sociopolitical realities that led to the development of the atomic bomb. This sweeping account begins in the 19th century, with the discovery of nuclear fission, and continues to World War Two and the Americans’ race to beat Hitler’s Nazis. That competition launched the Manhattan Project and the nearly overnight construction of a vast military-industrial complex that culminated in the fateful dropping of the first bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Reading like a character-driven suspense novel, the book introduces the players in this saga of physics, politics, and human psychology—from FDR and Einstein to the visionary scientists who pioneered quantum theory and the application of thermonuclear fission, including Planck, Szilard, Bohr, Oppenheimer, Fermi, Teller, Meitner, von Neumann, and Lawrence. From nuclear power’s earliest foreshadowing in the work of H.G. Wells to the bright glare of Trinity at Alamogordo and the arms race of the Cold War, this dread invention forever changed the course of human history, and The Making of The Atomic Bom b provides a panoramic backdrop for that story. Richard Rhodes’s ability to craft compelling biographical portraits is matched only by his rigorous scholarship. Told in rich human, political, and scientific detail that any reader can follow, The Making of the Atomic Bomb is a thought-provoking and masterful work.

Recommended on 4 episodes:

MAHA Is a Bad Answer to a Good Question

“Make America Healthy Again” is a great idea — somebody should try it. A lot of the concerns animating the MAHA movement — chronic disease, the unhealthiness of the American diet, how profits warp our health care system — are serious issues. But Robert F. Kennedy Jr. hasn’t taken major actions to address them. Instead he’s gutted funding for scientific research, including nearly $500 million dedicated to mRNA vaccine development, throwing a huge amount of possibly lifesaving research in limbo. How did we get here? What are the politics that allowed Donald Trump to preside over Operation Warp Speed, the single most successful pandemic mitigation policy, and then turn around a few years later to appoint Kennedy to undo it all? My colleague David Wallace-Wells has done incredible reporting on how pandemic policies have shaped our politics, culture and society. Rachael Bedard is a physician and a writer who has been thinking deeply about what MAHA represents and where the movement could find common ground with its critics.

Books recommended:

• 📕  The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition by Richard Rhodes
• 📘  Doppelganger by Naomi Klein
• 📗  The End Doesn't Happen All at Once : A Pandemic Memoir by Chi Rainer Bornfree, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan
• 📙  Plagues Upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) by Kyle Harper
• 📕  Calling the Shots: Why Parents Reject Vaccines by Jennifer A. Reich
• 📘  Wave: A Memoir by Sonali Deraniyagala

David Wallace-Wells , Rachael Bedard Aug. 22, 2025 6 books recommended

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Nate Silver on How Kamala Harris Changed the Odds

Risk has been on my mind this year. For Democrats, the question of whether Joe Biden should drop out was really a question about risk – the risk of keeping him on the ticket versus the risk of the unknown. And it’s hard to think through those kinds of questions when you have incomplete information and so much you can’t predict. After all, few election models forecast that Kamala Harris would have the kind of momentum we’ve seen the last few weeks. Nate Silver’s new book, “On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything,” is all about thinking through risk, and the people who do it professionally, from gamblers to venture capitalists. (Silver is a poker player himself.) And so I wanted to talk to him about how that kind of thinking could help in our politics – and its limits. We discuss how Harris is performing in Silver’s election model; what he means when he talks about “the village” and “the river”; what Silver observed profiling Peter Thiel and Sam Bankman-Fried, two notorious risk-takers, for the book; the trade-offs of Harris’s decision to choose Tim Walz over Josh Shapiro as a running mate; and more. This episode contains strong language.

Books recommended:

• 📗  Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas by Natasha Dow Schüll
• 📙  The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition by Richard Rhodes
• 📕  The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: How Risk Taking Transforms Us, Body and Mind by John Coates

Nate Silver Aug. 13, 2024 3 books recommended

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Freaked Out? We Really Can Prepare for A.I.

OpenAI last week released its most powerful language model yet: GPT-4, which vastly outperforms its predecessor, GPT-3.5, on a variety of tasks. GPT-4 can pass the bar exam in the 90th percentile, while the previous model struggled around in the 10th percentile. GPT-4 scored in the 88th percentile on the LSAT, up from GPT-3.5’s 40th percentile. And on the advanced sommelier theory test, GPT-4 performed better than 77 percent of test-takers. (It’s predecessor hovered around 46 percent.) These are stunning results — not just what the model can do, but the rapid pace of progress. And Open AI’s ChatGPT and other chat bots are just one example of what recent A.I. systems can achieve. Kelsey Piper is a senior writer at Vox, where she’s been ahead of the curve covering advanced A.I., its world-changing possibilities, and the people creating it. Her work is informed by her deep knowledge of the handful of companies that arguably have the most influence over the future of A.I. We discuss whether artificial intelligence has coherent “goals” — and whether that matters; whether the disasters ahead in A.I. will be small enough to learn from or “truly catastrophic”; the challenge of building “social technology” fast enough to withstand malicious uses of A.I.; whether we should focus on slowing down A.I. progress — and the specific oversight and regulation that could help us do it; why Piper is more optimistic this year that regulators can be “on the ball’ with A.I.; how competition between the U.S. and China shapes A.I. policy; and more. This episode contains strong language.

Books recommended:

• 📘  The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition by Richard Rhodes
• 📗  The Silmarillion: Illustrated by J.R.R. Tolkien (Tolkien Editions) (Tolkien Illustrated Editions) by J. R. R. Tolkien

Kelsey Piper March 21, 2023 2 books recommended

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What happens when human beings take control of their own evolution?

Books recommended:

• 📙  The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition by Richard Rhodes
• 📕  The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA by James D. Watson Ph.D.
• 📘  Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

Oct. 16, 2017 3 books recommended

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