These are admittedly big questions, and this is a sweeping book. As he writes in his introduction: “What are today’s greatest challenges and most important changes? What should we pay attention to? What should we teach our kids?” It’s to know which things to worry about, and how much to worry about them. The trick for putting an end to our anxieties, he suggests, is not to stop worrying.

While his previous best sellers, Sapiens and Homo Deus, covered the past and future respectively, his new book is all about the present. In his fascinating new book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, the historian Yuval Noah Harari creates a useful framework for confronting these fears. Although most of us don’t need to lose too much sleep over bears these days, modern life does present plenty of other reasons for concern: terrorism, climate change, the rise of A.I., encroachments on our privacy, even the apparent decline of international cooperation. This is not necessarily a bad thing-after all, if a bear is stalking you, worrying about it may well save your life. Presenting complex contemporary challenges clearly and accessibly, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century is essential reading. When we are deluged with irrelevant information, clarity is power. Here he invites us to consider values, meaning, and personal engagement in a world full of noise and uncertainty. Harari's unique ability to make sense of where we have come from and where we are going has captured the imaginations of millions of readers. In twenty-one accessible chapters that are both provocative and profound, Harari builds on the ideas explored in his previous books, untangling political, technological, social, and existential issues and offering advice on how to prepare for a very different future from the world we now live in: How can we retain freedom of choice when Big Data is watching us? What will the future workforce look like, and how should we ready ourselves for it? How should we deal with the threat of terrorism? Why is liberal democracy in crisis?

As technology advances faster than our understanding of it, hacking becomes a tactic of war, and the world feels more polarized than ever, Harari addresses the challenge of navigating life in the face of constant and disorienting change and raises the important questions we need to ask ourselves in order to survive. Yuval Noah Harari's 21 Lessons for the 21st Century is a probing and visionary investigation into today's most urgent issues as we move into the uncharted territory of the future. How do computers and robots change the meaning of being human? How do we deal with the epidemic of fake news? Are nations and religions still relevant? What should we teach our children?

Now, one of the most innovative thinkers on the planet turns to the present to make sense of today's most pressing issues.

Yuval harari 21 lessons