The Best Big Ideas & New Perspectives Books of 2024

Relationships. We need them.  

Maybe that’s not a “big idea” or “new perspective,” per se. Deep down, we all know that we are better in community with one another. And yet, loneliness is one of the most pervasive societal issues today, with U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy estimating that one-third of adults suffer some level of loneliness. 

Experiencing social isolation can feel deeply personal; we may think we are lacking or flawed, unable to find a sense of belonging due to our shortcomings. There’s nothing wrong with striving for improvement on an individual level, and if you’re looking for books on personal development, my fellow awards juror Gabbi has some excellent ones to share. However, we must recognize that we’re also navigating an uneven playing field. There are systemic factors contributing to the division and isolation we experience, which is why, even when we’re not feeling so lonely, it can still feel like maintaining our relationships and our sense of connection is a struggle.  

Humans are social beings designed for connection. We miss out on a fundamental part of our existence when we lack this. Our workplaces, homes, and public spaces are all made better when we share a strong sense of belonging. These five books offer novel perspectives on the deeper layers of relationship building and how the institutions around us shape the connections we create with one another. By understanding all that can influence our relationships, we can better equip ourselves to build meaningful and lasting connections with one another, transforming our world into a much less lonely place. 

The Art of the Interesting: What We Miss in Our Pursuit of the Good Life and How to Cultivate It by Lorraine Besser, Balance  

Arguably the most famous line from the United States Declaration of Independence reads (emphasis mine): “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Happiness is set into the very foundation of our nation’s origin, instilled in us from a young age as something we should always chase after and possess. But does happiness alone make up a good life? 

“Happiness really isn’t that big of a deal,” writes philosophy professor Lorraine Besser in the early pages of her book, The Art of the Interesting. “It’s challenging to pursue a feeling that comes and goes.” Even the ideas of purpose and meaning as foundations of a good life felt incomplete to Besser. Alongside psychologist Shigehiro Oishi, Besser undertook a research project to better understand what the true foundation of “the Good Life” could be. Oishi hypothesized that greater attention should be given to psychological richness, a more crucial aspect of the Good Life than happiness or meaning. It was Besser’s task as the research team’s resident philosopher to demonstrate that psychological richness was distinct from other philosophical notions of the Good Life. 

A psychologically rich life is composed of complex, novel, and challenging experiences that stimulate and engage the mind, that evoke different emotions, and that leave you with a different perspective than you started with [...] The experiences that comprise psychological richness just don’t always contribute to happiness or meaning. Sometimes they do, but sometimes they don’t. We still think they are good.

Happiness and pleasure, Besser argues, shouldn’t be treated as the end results we strive for. They are fleeting sensations, and from a simple evolutionary standpoint, they must subside so that we can seek them out again through biologically necessary functions like eating, sleeping, and reproducing. Even the feeling of fulfillment is too unstable to rely on, as it relies on too many external factors that are hard to control and loses its luster quickly. Instead, Besser encourages readers to start keying into their boredom and paying attention to what experiences relieve it. The happy and pleasurable feelings that arise from those experiences are signs that we’re heading in the right direction toward a psychologically rich and interesting life.  

“The interesting is something that you can create,” Besser writes, “without struggle.” The process of building an interesting life is a self-guided one, as no two people will find the same experiences interesting. However, Besser notes that interesting experiences tend to share several key features, including how novel and complex the experience is and how much it impacts one’s emotions. Figuring out what’s worth pursuing can be as simple as reminiscing on the first time one experienced something—riding the subway, seeing the ocean, leaving home, for example—and examining what makes that moment stand out. “If it’s a memorable [experience],” Besser writes, “it’s likely an interesting one, and it’s one that impacted you.”

As I was working on this review, I hit a bit of a mental block, so I got up from my desk and decided to make some lunch—nothing too complicated but involved enough to keep my hands busy and give my brain a rest. I couldn’t help but wonder why I often turn to my kitchen when I’m feeling stuck. I grew up raised by two talented home cooks, and I’ve always been especially in awe of my dad’s uncanny ability to turn an assortment of seemingly disparate ingredients from the pantry into a delicious (albeit impossible to replicate) meal. There’s something endlessly fascinating to me about filling an empty vessel—whether a blank page or an empty pot—with something that didn’t exist before, something of my own making.  

And that’s when it hit me—I’d never stopped to think about any of this before, but I was doing so now because Besser’s guidance was rattling around in my head. The interesting was already at my fingertips; the Good Life was already here.  

It’s important to note that cultivating the interest involves a healthy dose of introspection, but it isn’t a solitary practice. We inherit the things we love from the people who raise us, and we hone the interesting in our lives through the relationships we build with one another. “Even if we look the same on paper,” Besser writes, “we are different people.” Embracing different perspectives helps us experience novelty and encourages us to evolve, all essential aspects of an interesting life. “When we bring the mindset of the interesting to our relationships, we invite others to spark and fuel us.” 

Besser’s book doesn’t ask us to turn our lives upside down and seek an unattainable ideal but to practice nurturing the things we already love and open ourselves up to the people around us. We don’t need to wait for something to change our lives; we have the agency to make them more beautiful right now. 

[The] interesting is always within our reach, because the interesting depends on only one thing: our minds. As long as we’re alive in any meaningful sense of the word, we’ve got the capacity to use our minds, so no matter what else is going on, and no matter how limited our lives may feel from the outside, we hold the power to make them good.

Rebels with a Cause: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves, and Our Culture by Niobe Way, Dutton  

In a scene from the film Women Talking, a group of Mennonite women on the verge of leaving behind their remote village and the men who have viciously abused them consult the local schoolteacher on whether they should include their teenage sons in their exodus. He reflects (emphasis mine): 

Boys of thirteen or fourteen are capable of causing great damage to girls and women. And to each other. It is a brash age. They are possessed of reckless urges, physical exuberance, intense curiosity that often results in injury. Unbridled emotion, including deep tenderness and empathy, and not quite enough experience or brain development to fully understand or appreciate the consequences of their words or actions [...] And I believe that with guidance, firm love, and patience, these boys are capable of relearning their roles as males in the colony. 

New York University professor of developmental psychology Niobe Way has spent nearly four decades studying the social and emotional development of teenage boys. In Rebels with a Cause, Way deconstructs the narratives surrounding “boy culture” and highlights the harm that arises when boys are confined to a narrow definition of their identity. 

Depression and anxiety are widespread in our society today, and approximately one in five adults in the U.S. report feeling lonely on a daily basis. Way notes that much of this can be attributed to how boys are expected to behave as they grow into adulthood. 

The mainstream definitions of manhood, maturity, and success are premised on the capacity for self-sufficiency and independence and don’t include the ability to be interdependent or to sustain mutually supportive relationships in which no one gets sacrificed over another person.

Just as writer Matthew Ferrence notes that “politics relies, like so much else, on a shared belief in stories,” Way argues that our current “boy culture” has taken hold through what she calls “thin stories” that have become entrenched in our cultural beliefs. A thin story is superficial: it often makes a sweeping claim about something (for example, that violence is inherent to boys’ biology) and asks that we don’t dig any deeper or try to find any nuance in the argument. “[We] think our thin stories about boys (and everyone else) are biological facts rather than cultural fiction,” Way writes, “and thus unchangeable.” Thin stories perpetuate a harmful cycle in which boys and men feel pressured to conform to narrow societal expectations that paint them as stoic and self-reliant. Without safe spaces to explore a broader range of emotions or engage in vulnerability, they become trapped within these stereotypes, which then get passed down to the next generation in an endless loop.  

When students ask me why we continue to tell thin stories that are hurting us and, in some cases, killing us, I respond by saying that we stopped listening to ourselves a long time ago and began to have fights about who is to blame, who should be at the top, and who is suffering more. While those questions have answers—mostly the people placed at the top; no one; the people placed at the bottom—the answer to the question of how we got here in the first place implicates all of us, but to different degrees depending on where we are in the hierarchy or the power structure.

Thick stories, conversely, are rich with nuance, context, data, and a wider variety of perspectives. They come from seeing the world analytically and listening with curiosity and empathy. Thick stories compel us to compare the thin stories we are told to the reality we experience and to explore the dissonance that arises.  

I grew up alongside three nephews and a niece, the oldest of whom is eleven years younger than me. When I left for college, even though I’d only be an hour away, he gave me a Pokémon Squirtle card so I wouldn’t feel homesick. (The card has long gone missing, but Squirtle remains my favorite Pokémon.) As he has grown older, he has become more reserved, often sharing his latest interests begrudgingly and with a sense of aloofness, as if expressing open enthusiasm about anything is uncool. The thin stories of boy culture would have us believe that this is the way things go, that tenderhearted boys must become strong, silent, unreachable men.  

But in the thick story, I can see how clearly that’s not true: my nephew, now in his early twenties, let me borrow his PlayStation 2 for a year so I could play and then discuss one of his favorite video games. He reminds me to drive safely whenever I depart from a visit. He is deeply protective and caring toward the cat his family adopted during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. In one of my favorite wedding photos, he can’t conceal a laugh while I’m sticking my tongue out at him. He isn’t entirely immune to boy culture, but he still embodies kindness and warmth in a way that quietly undermines the harmful standards society imposes on boys and men, and the world is a better place with him exactly as he is. Way writes: 

Our capacity for curiosity allows us to see our common humanity, as once we begin to ask questions of one another, we see that our stereotypes are not true and that humans are more similar than different in spite of the fact that the hierarchy of humanness means we also have a lot of different experiences depending on where we are situated in the hierarchy. Yet “boy” culture considers interpersonal curiosity and recognition of our common humanity as “soft” and thus relegates it to the bottom of the hierarchy of things to value and nourish in our children.

Way’s book builds a thick story about the possibility of boyhood and manhood. Boys who grow up feeling safe in their exploration of emotions and capable of maintaining meaningful friendships with one another become men who feel less depressed and lonely and who are less likely to engage in high-risk, harmful behavior. Boys are not exempt from the innate human desire to love and be loved, and everyone deserves a chance to find balance in the hard and soft aspects of themselves. If we can turn this conclusion into the prevailing narrative we pass down, our crisis of connection will surely abate. 

No humans, human qualities, or relationships should be sacrificed in the name of exhibiting maturity, becoming a man, or being successful. It is the sacrificing of one type of human, one type of relationship, and one side of ourselves over the other that leads to our crisis of connection. The solution to the crisis, therefore, is to create a culture that disrupts rather than flips the hierarchies that no one ends up at the top or the bottom, but all are seen as equally human, with both sides of their humanity equally valued.

Relationality: How Moving from Transactional to Transformational Relationships Can Reshape Our Lonely World by David Jay, North Atlantic Books 

In Relationality, David Jay writes: “We are not lonely because there is something wrong with us; we are lonely because the world around us does not value relationship in ways that need fixing.” He writes about relationships from a unique perspective, as he is both asexual and aromantic. While his school friends were exploring typical romantic relationships, Jay found that he was not pulled to people in the same way and thus had to find a new definition for what a relationship could be. 

I had friendships and was slowly learning to make them deeper, but I knew at my core that friendship, at least as it was defined in the culture around me, was not enough. Friends did not feel or express love in the way that romantic partners did. They were not expected to make the same kinds of sacrifices to stay in one another’s lives. They did not form families. [...] While serious commitment was something that occasionally happened between friends, it was not a thing I had a right to expect or language to ask for.

Seeking insights into his own experiences and others’ regarding asexuality, Jay turned to the emerging internet and eventually founded the Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN). Through his work cultivating this online space, he came up with the idea of the relational container, which he defines as “environments that are cocreated with the goal of facilitating connection.” 

Building meaningful relationships can be complex and uncertain; however, a good relational container provides a safe environment that fosters deeper connections and simplifies relationship-building. AVEN had clear guidelines for welcoming new members, upholding the group’s core values, resolving disputes, and advancing members into leadership roles. To understand if a relational container is working, Jay offers three questions to reflect upon:  

1. How does the container help participants explore?
2. How does the container help participants feel?
3. How does the container help participants commit?

When a physical or digital space allows individuals to discover their common ground, feel welcomed and curious, and commit to continuing their relationship, the likelihood of forming a lasting bond increases. 

Companies like Meta claim to be platforms that will help us strengthen our interpersonal connections. However, as Jay points out, these relational containers are failing because they concentrate on the wrong metrics and make faulty assumptions about the nature of relationships. The dopamine hit from seeing the number of followers or likes on a post go up is fleeting, and it doesn’t create much of a relationship beyond a simple, brief interaction between two people. Many of us have attached importance to these metrics and wondered why we still feel lonely despite the endless opportunities for connection the internet claims to provide. “We are lonely because the vast engines of cultural, economic, technical, and political power charged with building environments for connection have lost sight of what a relationship is,” Jay declares. 

Jay writes that there is often little investment in relationship-building efforts across various industries, including philanthropy. Community organizers and facilitators typically work with shoestring budgets and frequently burn out due to the intense emotional labor required to nurture these connections. Measuring the return on investment from fostering interpersonal relationships is challenging because relationships are intangible. Jay provides a toolkit essential for anyone aiming to drive change, enabling them to measure the impact of relationship building and change how the work is funded. 

There is every reason to believe that our civilization’s downward spiral toward loneliness will continue. The root cause of our loneliness is deeply entrenched in our most powerful institutions, in the way that our economy operates and the way that we are taught to make meaning in the world [...] But the culture of loneliness can be transformed. 

We often consider loneliness as something to be solved at an individual level, but Jay demonstrates that the answer may be found at the environmental level, instead. “To create a relationship,” Jay writes, “we must create the conditions for a relationship, and those conditions can only be created by human minds working in collaboration.

Slow Burn: The Hidden Costs of a Warming World by R. Jisung Park, Princeton University Press  

What do you think of when you think of climate change? Right now, I’m thinking about the wildfires raging in Southern California and how abnormal weather patterns like erratic Santa Ana winds have exacerbated them. Maybe your mind goes to other alarming phenomena, like melting ice sheets, rising sea levels, and intense heat waves. Some of that might be tangible to you, but some of it might feel too far away to comprehend fully. 

Jisung Park takes a different—though no less stress-inducing—view on global warming in Slow Burn. Drawing from a wide range of recent studies, Park argues that the effects of global warming are not just on the horizon; they are already present and impacting our daily lives in subtle yet significant ways.

Slow Burn is encyclopedic in its breadth of topics covered—one could easily read any book from our awards longlist and then cross-reference it with a chapter from this book to see what effects global warming might have on a given subject. This book effectively connects with the four other books in this category by analyzing research on the link between global warming and temperament.  

Park notes that temperature has always influenced human interactions; we are more likely to go outside and engage with others during warmer, pleasant weather and tend to stay indoors with fewer social interactions when it’s cold. However, rising global temperatures also appear to impact the quality of our interactions negatively. In a 1986 study on road range, for example, researchers found a strong correlation between hotter outside temperatures and the frequency of horn honking at a researcher intentionally stopped at a green light. Although Park identifies some flaws in the study’s methodology, it’s difficult to overlook that rising temperatures could make us more irritable. In a more recent study, economist Patrick Baylis, using natural language processing algorithms, analyzed over one billion Tweets to determine if temperature influenced the emotions expressed by Twitter users. Like the increased road rage in the earlier study, Baylis found that days when the temperature exceeded 102°F included a 3-4% rise in the use of profanity in Tweets. 

These and other studies suggest that elevated temperatures affect our temperament for the worse across a range of settings. One implication is that, as the world warms, our relationships with others may be just that more likely to tip into conflict, verbal or physical.

Increasing temperatures may even have a detrimental effect on our mental health. Economists Jamie Mullins and Corey white found that an increase of just 1°F in mean monthly temperatures increased monthly ER visits by 0.4% and monthly suicide rates by 0.3% in the United States. There’s also the growing prevalence of climate anxiety, an overall sense of dread spreading among young people worldwide who are justifiably worried and angry about the increasingly bleak prospects for our planet’s habitability. 

A deeper understanding of climate change requires us to ask what we might not yet know about the human consequences of a hotter climate, full stop—to perhaps pay closer attention to the hidden handicaps associated with a hotter climate irrespective of whether the added severity can be attributed to anthropogenic emissions or not.

Park notes that there are no silver bullet solutions around climate change—much of it will require sweeping policy changes from governments and corporations worldwide. However, Park emphasizes that small, collaborative actions at the local level can still make a positive impact on our global health. That is to say, our relationships may yet save us all. 

If the doomsday climate narrative invokes fear and fatalism, the non-catastrophic slow burn perspective invites us to view climate change with sober resolve, compassion for the most vulnerable, and a sense of active hope.

Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World’s Most Powerful Religion, and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation by Greg Epstein, MIT Press

A recent Gallup survey shows that most Americans identify with a religious faith, even as church membership and attendance are declining. In the United States, these identities are usually tied back to Christianity, followed by Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and so on. 

But what if there were a new global religion uniting people of various faiths under one roof? This, in essence, is the argument that humanist chaplain Greg Epstein makes in Tech Agnostic: we have all become dutiful followers of tech. 

Why might we think about our relationship with tech through the lens of religion? “Like traditional religions once did,” writes humanist chaplain Greg Epstein, “technology is shaping our thoughts, feelings, hopes, fears, relationships, and future.” Just as people have believed in the omnipresence of otherworldly deities, tech is everywhere: in our homes, workplaces, all the spaces in between, and the modes of transportation that get us there. Whether we realize it or not, we have built rituals around our tech, checking our phones as soon as we wake up and in the final moments before we fall asleep.  

Instead of prostration for prayer on a carpet five times a day, we genuflect hundreds of times a day, always reminding ourselves of the importance of these technologies in our lives and how difficult it would be to imagine our lives without them—even for a few minutes.

Epstein argues that we have increasingly turned to tech for reasons not unlike why humans have sought out religion throughout history: the world can be challenging to navigate, and there is hope in the belief of a forthcoming salvation. Tech purports to offer this salvation. Social media promises to connect us with anyone, anywhere, at any time, a seemingly obvious solution to our epidemic of loneliness. Tech founders and investors form a sort of priestly class who shape and interpret the complexities of tech and pass them down to the rest of the congregation. We are even surrounded by prophetic figures like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, who offer promises of transporting humanity to the stars and vanquishing death itself.  

But are we better off? Although many of us have turned to social media to alleviate our loneliness, we also know that it doesn’t reduce our loneliness as much as it offers a temporary distraction. “When we click on a notification as a comforting, addictive ritual to momentarily ease our anxiety at the expense of emotional awareness,” Epstein writes, “that is a feature, not a bug.” Our possible messiahs display altruism on one hand while causing harm on the other: for instance, Jeff Bezos announced plans to establish a $10 billion fund to combat climate change, which amounts to just 8% of his net worth, Epstein notes. However, this announcement coincided with the company’s deployment of more than twenty thousand new diesel delivery vans. And although technology often claims to be democratic and egalitarian, its leadership predominantly consists of white men, resulting in a narrow-minded internet. 

[Companies] like Google and Meta have gained unprecedented reach by cultivating an aura of impartiality and objectivity while failing or refusing to moderate hateful content that, when inevitably perceived as impartial and objective, lead to division, hate, violence, destruction, and worse.

Epstein is not opposed to tech, nor does he suggest anyone attempt to avoid it altogether, as that is nearly impossible today. Instead, he encourages readers to dedicate more time to creating spaces where we can genuinely invest in our communities and establish meaningful connections with one another. “In environments in which I feel genuinely connected with other people,” Epstein writes, “my tech is not such a big deal. I can take it or leave it. The problem is that these environments can be few and far between.”

Epstein points to research demonstrating that when we lack the interpersonal connection we crave, we find something else to fill the void, and tech has sprung up to give us the dopamine hits we seek. But, as Lorraine Besser notes in The Art of the Interesting, the brief moments of pleasure we get from our apps and devices will always subside, leaving us trapped in a continuous cycle of seeking rewards that ultimately leads to nowhere. On the other hand, Epstein notes: “Social connection disrupts the feedback loop of artificial reward systems like those in slot machines or Twitter feeds.” 

Of course, being human is a messy thing. We’re unpredictable and emotional creatures. We don’t always agree with the people we love, nor do we always want to confront our feelings of awkwardness, anger, boredom, or sadness when they arise. We’ve turned to tech because it offers the illusion of allowing us to avoid the ups and downs of life, even if it ultimately makes our lives worse in the long run. But if we’re going to break free from this cycle, we must accept that life won’t always be comfortable; however, our lives will become far richer and more meaningful as a result.

Epstein, then, calls upon us to become tech agnostic: “in this new religious world, the work to focus, to be mindful enough to endure discomfort, and to pursue ideals of compassion and justice, too, can and must become a ritual.”

While reading Tech Agnostic, I kept thinking about my close group of friends, which includes my now-husband. We all met years ago while doing improv comedy. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit and we could no longer meet in person, a Facebook Messenger group chat that we initially used to coordinate logistics suddenly became a lifeline. We used it to organize weekly remote movie nights, spending our Friday evenings on Zoom while watching movies on various streaming platforms together.  

It wasn’t the technology that transformed our relationships, but rather how we interacted within these platforms. The more we saw each other, the more we grew comfortable being vulnerable with each other; we shared in each other’s ups and downs, and we even learned how to disagree and forgive one another easily. Despite being locked away in our respective homes, we found comfort in our bonds. Today, we still communicate daily through a dedicated Discord server, but our happiest moments are still those when we’re together in person. My life is better, richer, and more interesting because I have them by my side.  

The books in this category have helped me appreciate the communities I’m part of. They’ve helped me understand not only how we can continue to cultivate and strengthen these bonds but also why it’s so important that we do so.

"Together," Epstein writes, "we can create a reformation—in our technology, but more importantly, in our common humanity—that might just flower into a renaissance. May it be so."

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