Interoception is one of our most important — and most mysterious — senses. It’s how our bodies tell our brains what we’re feeling: when we’re hungry, when we’re cold, how we should respond to stress and panic. In Inner Sense, science communicator Caroline Williams explains that some people are so insensitive to internal cues that they struggle to recognize basic needs like hunger or fatigue, while others only notice their body’s signals when they become overwhelming. This disconnect between the brain’s predictions and the body’s sensations can lead to mental and physical health challenges, from chronic fatigue, to anxiety, to eating disorders.

Inner Sense delves into this fascinating field, speaking with doctors, scientists, and researchers about how our internal sensations influence our thoughts and actions — and how we can harness interoceptive awareness to improve health, relationships, and society as a whole. Williams explores cutting-edge interventions like mindfulness, biofeedback, targeted exercise, and even psychedelic therapy, which hold the potential to help us regulate emotions, reduce stress, and live better lives. Caroline Williams is a highly regarded science journalist and the author of Move, which was a New Scientist Book of the Year, and My Plastic Brain.

Radically Condensed Instructions for Being Just as You Are is perfect for anyone who is curious about nonduality’s impact on life as it is lived every day. How can the philosophy of nonduality change how we experience our lives? The book helps us integrate nonduality’s core theory — that nothing truly exists outside of the here and now — with the practice of present-moment awareness.

When we thoroughly understand that present-moment awareness is all there is, we are able to be here now with renewed appreciation and clarity. We can make an uncompromising commitment to the present moment without the distractions of distorted thinking, artificial comparisons, and impossible ideals. J. Jennifer Matthews studied philosophy and theology at the University of Louvain, Belgium, and the Episcopal Divinity School, Cambridge. She works as a counselor and meditation instructor in Boston.

In the face of ecological crisis, economic injustice, and political violence, the moral demands of being a good person are almost too much to bear. In Unbecoming Persons, Ladelle McWhorter argues that this strain is by design. Our ideas about personhood, she shows, emerged to sustain centuries of colonialism, slavery, and environmental destruction. We must look elsewhere to find our way out.

This history raises a hard question: Should we be persons at all, or might we live a good life without the constraints of individualism or the illusion of autonomy? In seeking an answer, McWhorter pushes back on the notion of our own personhood—our obsession with identity, self-improvement, and salvation—in search of a better way to live together in this world. Although she finds no easy answers, McWhorter ultimately proposes a new ethics that rejects both self-interest and self-sacrifice and embraces perpetual dependence, community, and the Earth

MacArthur Fellow and National Humanities Medalist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author of Plato at the Googleplexand The Mind-Body Problem, returns with a revelatory book about the primal drive that in our species alone has been transformed into one of our most persistent and universal motivations: the longing to matter. Drawing on biology, psychology, and philosophy, Goldstein argues that this need to matter, and the many “mattering projects” it inspires, lies at the heart of both our greatest achievements and our deepest conflicts. It is the very crux of the human experience.

Goldstein brings this profound idea to life through unforgettable stories of famous and not-so-famous people pursuing their own mattering projects, from ragtime genius Scott Joplin and his devotion to the overlooked masterpiece Treemonisha, to pioneering psychologist William James, who overcame early depression to become a foundational theorist of mattering. Deeply insightful and decades in the making, The Mattering Instinct is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand why we yearn to matter to ourselves and others, and how this powerful longing might help us finally understand one another.