1. The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain by Annie Murphy Paul (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

“Use your head.” That cliché assumes that the brain is the sole source for thought, and in her revelatory book, Paul subverts the notion that the brain is “a cordoned-off space where cognition happens, much as the workings of my laptop are sealed inside its aluminum case.” In finding the “secret history of thinking outside the brain,” Paul weaves scientific research and evidence with storytelling and cultural history, ranging from how biographer Robert Caro plots his subjects’ lives on an extremely detailed wall-sized map to Nobel physicist Carl Wieman, who prompted his students to talk to one another so they could really think like scientists. She writes with a generous tone that makes her book a pleasure to read. The idea of the extended mind – the role of the body, place, and work with others in a form of “collective intelligence” – excited Paul, who has been writing about psychology and cognitive science for two decades, and she infuses these ideas with educated enthusiasm. “[I]t’s the stuff outside our heads that makes us smart – a proposition with enormous implications for what we do in education, in the workplace, and in our everyday lives,” she writes. Or, more simply: “What we need to do is think outside the brain.”

2. The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid by Lawrence Wright (Knopf)

Readers of Wright’s 2020 novel The End of October, which foreshadowed the coronavirus pandemic, may see some parallels – denial of infection, chaotic response – but The Plague Year shares more literary lineage with his magnificent Pulitzer Prize-winning The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. Wright’s expansive yet intimate new book features characters like Trump deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger, who had covered SARS as a journalist; former CDC director Robert Redfield; and former Ohio health director Amy Acton, who resigned after being attacked as a “medical dictator” in the state legislature and facing protesters at her home who were carrying bullhorns and guns, and shouting obscenities and anti-Semitic rhetoric. In his chapter “The Rose Garden Cluster” he writes about germophobic, maskless President Donald Trump, who was sicker than he would admit. Wright closes at the Lincoln Memorial with Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, who says, “To heal, we must remember.”

3. The Profession: A Memoir of Community, Race, and the Arc of Policing in America by Bill Bratton and Peter Knobler (Penguin Press)

Bratton served as commissioner of police in New York City (twice), Los Angeles, and Boston, where he began as a patrolman. In October 1970, just back from Vietnam, where he had served in the 212th Sentry Dog Company, Bratton joined the Police Department and came to understand the importance of evidence-based decision-making, and resolved “to change police culture, change the day-to-day work – change what cops do.” In illustrative stories and in clearly detailed recommendations, Bratton articulates a case for creating a modern policing commission: “The country’s daily safety is in the profession’s hands, and with the collaboration between cops and community … a willingness to root out both bias and the biased, and a refusal to tolerate either brutality or aggression, we can recognize each other’s humanity – we can see each other.”

4. Ethel Rosenberg: An American Tragedy by Anne Sebba (St. Martin’s Press)

E.L. Doctorow’s extraordinary The Book of Daniel, the fictional account of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed in 1953 for spying on behalf of the Soviet Union, has shaped the public impression of the couple, particularly of Ethel as a martyr. Making excellent use of Ethel’s prison letters and interviewing her sons and prison-mates, biographer Sebba rejects the dominant images of the wife and mother as a saint or a spy with a nuanced, illuminating portrait of Ethel Rosenberg and the nation’s descent into Cold War paranoia. Sebba argues persuasively that stubborn, determined Ethel – a committed Communist and ever loyal to her husband, who was undoubtedly a spy – was “betrayed by her own flesh and blood,” specifically her brother and his wife who had also been involved in espionage and turned on her to avoid the electric chair.

5. Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner (Knopf)

This rich, vibrant, candid, raw memoir hits the best-seller lists, reflecting its universal connection for mothers and daughters. Readers of The New Yorker will recall Zauner’s 2018 essay in which the Korean American musician recalls a visit to an Asian American supermarket with her mother, Chongmi, which forms the first chapter in Zauner’s polyphonic memoir. Zauner’s Korean mother met her white father in Seoul, and eventually they landed in Eugene, Oregon. Mother and daughter had a contentious relationship, arguing over Zauner’s musical ambitions, which she successfully fulfilled as founder of indie rock project Japanese Breakfast. They reconciled after Chongmi’s cancer diagnosis, which led Zauner to grieve and understand how together they were searching the supermarket for ingredients that would sustain and bind them.