Böcker utgivna av Norton & Company

A hack is any means of subverting a system's rules in unintended ways. The tax code isn't computer code, but a series of complex formulas. It has vulnerabilities; we call them "loopholes." We call exploits "tax avoidance strategies." And there is an entire industry of "black hat" hackers intent on finding exploitable loopholes in the tax code. We call them accountants and tax attorneys.In A Hacker's Mind, Bruce Schneier takes hacking out of the world of computing and uses it to analyse the systems that underpin our society: from tax laws to financial markets to politics. He reveals an array of powerful actors whose hacks bend our economic, political and legal systems to their advantage, at the expense of everyone else.Once you learn how to notice hacks, you'll start seeing them everywhere-and you'll never look at the world the same way again. Almost all systems have loopholes, and this is by design. Because if you can take advantage of them, the rules no longer apply to you.Unchecked, these hacks threaten to upend our financial markets, weaken our democracy and even affect the way we think. And when artificial intelligence starts thinking like a hacker-at inhuman speed and scale-the results could be catastrophic.But for those who would don the "white hat," we can understand the hacking mindset and rebuild our economic, political and legal systems to counter those who would exploit our society. And we can harness artificial intelligence to improve existing systems, predict and defend against hacks and realise a more equitable world.

The Flowers of Buffoonery opens in a seaside sanatorium where Yozo Oba-the narrator of No Longer Human at a younger age-is being kept after a failed suicide attempt. While he is convalescing, his friends and family visit him, and other patients and nurses drift in and out of his room. Against this dispiriting backdrop, everyone tries to maintain a light-hearted, even clownish atmosphere: playing cards, smoking cigarettes, vying for attention, cracking jokes and trying to make each other laugh.While No Longer Human delves into the darkest corners of human consciousness, The Flowers of Buffoonery pokes fun at these same emotions: the follies and hardships of youth, of love and of self-hatred and depression. A glimpse into the lives of a group of outsiders in pre-war Japan, The Flowers of Buffoonery is a darkly humorous and fresh addition to Osamu Dazai's masterful and intoxicating oeuvre.

Taken with a 35mm camera by Paul McCartney, these largely unseen photographs capture the explosive period, from the end of 1963 through early 1964, in which The Beatles became an international sensation and changed the course of music history. Featuring 275 images from the six cities-Liverpool, London, Paris, New York, Washington, D.C., and Miami-of these legendary months, 1964: Eyes of the Storm also includes:. A personal foreword in which McCartney recalls the pandemonium of British concert halls, followed by the hysteria that greeted the band on its first American visit. Candid recollections preceding each city portfolio that form an autobiographical account of the period McCartney remembers as the "Eyes of the Storm," plus a coda with subsequent events in 1964. "Beatleland," an essay by Harvard historian and New Yorker essayist Jill Lepore, describing how The Beatles became the first truly global mass culture phenomenonHandsomely designed, 1964: Eyes of the Storm creates an intensely dramatic record of The Beatles' first transatlantic trip, documenting the radical shift in youth culture that crystallized in 1964."You could hold your camera up to the world, in 1964. But what madness would you capture, what beauty, what joy, what fury?" -Jill Lepore

Finally in paperback and featuring seven new song commentaries, the #1 New York Times bestseller celebrates the creative life and unparalleled musical genius of Paul McCartney.Spanning sixty-four years-from his early days in Liverpool, through the historic decade of The Beatles, to Wings and his solo career-Paul McCartney's The Lyrics revolutionized the way artists write about music. An unprecedented "triumph" (Times UK), this handsomely designed volume pairs the definitive texts of over 160 songs with first-person commentaries on McCartney's life, revealing the diverse circumstances in which songs were written; how they ultimately came to be; and the remarkable, yet often delightfully ordinary, people and places that inspired them. The Lyrics also includes:· A personal foreword by McCartney· An unprecedented range of songs, from beloved standards like "Band on the Run" to new additions "Day Tripper" and "Magical Mystery Tour"· Over 160 images from McCartney's own archivesEdited and introduced by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon, The Lyrics is the definitive literary and visual record of one of the greatest songwriters of all time.

When Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey appeared in 2017-revealing the ancient poem in a contemporary idiom that was "fresh, unpretentious and lean" (Madeline Miller, Washington Post)-critics lauded it as "a revelation" (Susan Chira, New York Times) and "a cultural landmark" (Charlotte Higgins, Guardian) that would forever change how Homer is read in English. Now Wilson has returned with an equally revelatory translation of Homer's other great epic-the most revered war poem of all time.The Iliad roars with the clamor of arms, the bellowing boasts of victors, the fury and grief of loss, and the anguished cries of dying men. It sings, too, of the sublime magnitude of the world-the fierce beauty of nature and the gods' grand schemes beyond the ken of mortals. In Wilson's hands, this thrilling, magical, and often horrifying tale now gallops at a pace befitting its legendary battle scenes, in crisp but resonant language that evokes the poem's deep pathos and reveals palpably real, even "complicated," characters-both human and divine.The culmination of a decade of intense engagement with antiquity's most surpassingly beautiful and emotionally complex poetry, Wilson's Iliad now gives us a complete Homer for our generation.

The digital era is beset by distraction, and it feels like things are only getting worse. At times like these, the distant past beckons as a golden age of attention. We fantasise about escaping our screens. We dream of recapturing the quiet of a world with less noise. We imagine retreating into solitude and singlemindedness, almost like latter-day monks.But although we think of early monks as master concentrators, a life of mindfulness did not, in fact, come to them easily. As historian Jamie Kreiner demonstrates in The Wandering Mind, their attempts to stretch the mind out to God-to continuously contemplate the divine order and its ethical requirements-were all-consuming, and their battles against distraction were never-ending. Delving into the experiences of early Christian monks living in the Middle East, around the Mediterranean, and throughout Europe from 300 to 900 CE, Kreiner shows that these men and women were obsessed with distraction in ways that seem remarkably modern. At the same time, she suggests that our own obsession is remarkably medieval. Ancient Greek and Roman intellectuals had sometimes complained about distraction, but it was early Christian monks who waged an all-out war against it. The stakes could not have been higher: they saw distraction as a matter of life and death.Even though the world today is vastly different from the world of the early Middle Ages, we can still learn something about our own distractedness by looking closely at monks' strenuous efforts to concentrate. Drawing on a trove of sources that the monks left behind, Kreiner reconstructs the techniques they devised in their lifelong quest to master their minds-from regimented work schedules and elaborative metacognitive exercises to physical regimens for hygiene, sleep, sex and diet. She captures the fleeting moments of pure attentiveness that some monks managed to grasp, and the many times when monks struggled and failed and went back to the drawing board. Blending history and psychology, The Wandering Mind is a witty, illuminating account of human fallibility and ingenuity that bridges a distant era and our own.

The best investment guide money can buy, with more than 1.5 million copies sold, now fuly revised and updated.

In 1792, formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife, Patience, discover an island where they can make a life together. Over a century later, the Honeys' descendants and a diverse group of neighbors are desperately poor, isolated, and often hungry, but nevertheless protected from the hostility awaiting them on the mainland.During the tumultuous summer of 1912, Matthew Diamond, a retired, idealistic but prejudiced schoolteacher-turned-missionary, disrupts the community's fragile balance through his efforts to educate its children. His presence attracts the attention of authorities on the mainland who, under the influence of the eugenics-thinking popular among progressives of the day, decide to forcibly evacuate the island, institutionalize its residents, and develop the island as a vacation destination. Beginning with a hurricane flood reminiscent of the story of Noah's Ark, the novel ends with yet another Ark.In prose of breathtaking beauty and power, Paul Harding brings to life an unforgettable cast of characters: Iris and Violet McDermott, sisters raising three orphaned Penobscot children; Theophilus and Candace Larks and their brood of vagabond children; the prophetic Zachary Hand to God Proverbs, a Civil War veteran who lives in a hollow tree; and more. A spellbinding story of resistance and survival, This Other Eden is an enduring testament to the struggle to preserve human dignity in the face of intolerance and injustice.

Despite repeated warnings from the White House, Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 shocked the world. Why did Putin start the war-and why has it unfolded in previously unimaginable ways? Ukrainians have resisted a superior military; the West has united, while Russia grows increasingly isolated.Serhii Plokhy, a leading historian of Ukraine and the Cold War, offers a definitive account of this conflict, its origins, course, and the already apparent and possible future consequences. Though the current war began eight years before the all-out assault-on February 27, 2014, when Russian armed forces seized the building of the Crimean parliament-the roots of this conflict can be traced back even earlier, to post-Soviet tensions and imperial collapse in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Providing a broad historical context and an examination of Ukraine and Russia's ideas and cultures, as well as domestic and international politics, Plokhy reveals that while this new Cold War was not inevitable, it was predictable.Ukraine, Plokhy argues, has remained central to Russia's idea of itself even as Ukrainians have followed a radically different path. In a new international environment defined by the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the disintegration of the post-Cold War international order, and a resurgence of populist nationalism, Ukraine is now more than ever the most volatile fault line between authoritarianism and democratic Europe.

In response to the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the US Federal Reserve and central banks worldwide have deployed tools that past policymakers and economists might have considered radical. Programmes like large-scale securities purchases and a new policy framework remain a source of confusion for investors, journalists and ordinary citizens alike.Twenty-First Century Monetary Policy demystifies these opaque techniques to reveal how economic ideas, historical events and political forces have transformed the Fed's policies over several decades. From the stagflation of the 1970s to the Great Recession and the recent pandemic, Ben S. Bernanke masterfully examines how the Fed's policies-and the institution itself-may change as it grapples with persistently low interest rates, systemic financial risk, rapid technological change and polarised politics. With unparalleled depth of expertise and robust historical sweep, Twenty-First Century Monetary Policy is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding modern finance, investments or US economic policy.

What does it mean to create, not in "a room of one's own" but in a domestic space? Do children and genius rule each other out? In The Baby on the Fire Escape, award-winning biographer Julie Phillips traverses the shifting terrain where motherhood and creativity converge.With fierce empathy and vivid prose, Phillips evokes the intimate struggles of brilliant artists and writers, including Doris Lessing, who had to choose between her motherhood and herself; Ursula K. Le Guin, who found productive stability in family life; Audre Lorde, whose queer, polyamorous union allowed her to raise children on her own terms and Alice Neel, who once, to finish a painting, was said to have left her baby on the fire escape of her New York apartment. A meditation on maternal identity and artistic greatness, The Baby on the Fire Escape illuminates some of the most pressing conflicts in contemporary women's lives.

With Germany in the World, award-winning historian David Blackbourn radically revises conventional narratives of German history, demonstrating the existence of a distinctly German presence in the world centuries before its unification-and revealing a national identity far more complicated than previously imagined. Blackbourn traces Germany's evolution from the loosely bound Holy Roman Empire of 1500 to a sprawling colonial power to a twenty-first-century beacon of democracy. Viewed through a global lens, familiar landmarks of German history-the Reformation, the Revolution of 1848, the Nazi regime-are transformed, while others are unearthed and explored, as Blackbourn reveals Germany's leading role in creating modern universities and its sinister involvement in slave-trade economies. A global history for a global age, Germany in the World is a bold and original account that upends the idea that a nation's history should be written as though it took place entirely within that nation's borders.

In August 1989, a group of Hungarian activists organized a picnic on the border of Hungary and Austria. But this was not an ordinary picnic-it was located on the dangerous militarized frontier known as the Iron Curtain. Tacit permission from the highest state authorities could be revoked at any moment. On wisps of rumor, thousands of East German "vacationers" packed Hungarian campgrounds, awaiting an opportunity, fearing prison, surveilled by lurking Stasi agents. The Pan-European Picnic set the stage for the greatest border breach in Cold War history: hundreds crossed from the Communist East to the longed-for freedom of the West.Drawing on dozens of original interviews-including Hungarian activists and border guards, East German refugees, Stasi secret police, and the last Communist prime minister of Hungary-Matthew Longo tells a gripping and revelatory tale of the unraveling of the Iron Curtain and the birth of a new world order. Just a few months after the Picnic, the Berlin Wall fell, and the freedom for which the activists and refugees had abandoned their homes, risked imprisonment, sacrificed jobs, family, and friends, was suddenly available to everyone. But were they really free? And why, three decades since the Iron Curtain was torn down, have so many sought once again to build walls?Cinematically told, The Picnic recovers a time when it seemed possible for the world to change. With insight and panache, Longo explores the opportunities taken-and the opportunities we failed to take-in that pivotal moment.

Whether you're home for the holly-daze or wandering a hellish landscape of never-ending agony, you need a good tune to pass the time. The dire duo behind the best-selling The Necronomnomnom accordingly present a gruesome grimoire of 25 creepy carols and sinister songs. From "Do You Fear What I Fear?" to "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Mythos" and "Shoggoth the Formless Horror" to "Silent Knife," "Sunken Hells," and "The Twelve Days of Darkness," these puntastic parodies pay hellacious homage to the Lovecraftian cosmos. Shriek them bleakly into the vast abyss or brandish them at seasonal gatherings to revile your fellow revelers. This disquieting collection of chants and canticles features extraordinary illustrations and desperate strains from the throats and hands of those who have gone before. Its harmful harmonies and ruinous rhythms will engulf your mind for all the days of darkness to come. Make merry while you can.

As the great Austrian writer Stefan Zweig confided in his autobiography, written in exile, "I have a pretty thorough knowledge of history, but never, to my recollection, has it produced such madness in such gigantic proportions." He was referring to the situation in Germany in 1923. It was a "year of lunacy," defined by hyperinflation, a political system on the verge of collapse, and separatist movements that threatened Germany's territorial integrity. Most significantly, Adolf Hitler launched his infamous Beer Hall Putsch in Munich-a failed coup that nonetheless drew international attention and demonstrated the Nazis' ruthless determination to seize power.In Germany 1923, award-winning historian Volker Ullrich draws on letters, memoirs, newspaper articles, and other sources from the time to present a captivating new history of those explosive twelve months. The crisis began when the French invaded the Ruhr Valley in January to force Germany to pay the reparations it owed under the Treaty of Versailles, which had ended the Great War. For years, German leaders had embraced inflationary policies to finance the costs of defeat, and, as Ullrich demonstrates, the invasion utterly destroyed the value of the German mark. Before the war, the exchange rate was 4.2 marks to the dollar. By November 20, 1923, a dollar was worth an incomprehensible 4.2 trillion marks, and a loaf of bread cost 200 billion. Facing the abyss, many ordinary Germans called for a national messiah. Among the figures to vie for that role was Hitler, a thirty-four-year-old veteran who possessed a uniquely malevolent personal magnetism. Although the Nazi coup in November was put down and Hitler arrested, the putsch showed just how tenuous the first German democracy, the Weimar Republic, was at its core.As Ullrich's panoramic narrative reveals, other Germans responded to the successive crises by launching a cultural revolution: 1923 witnessed the emergence of a multitude of new movements, from Dada to Bauhaus, and of such iconoclasts as Bertolt Brecht, George Grosz, and Franz Kafka. Yet most observers were amazed that the Weimar Republic was able to survive, and the more astute realized that the feral undercurrents unleashed could lead to much worse. Publishing a century after that fateful year, Germany 1923 is a riveting chronicle of one of the most challenging times any modern democracy has faced, one with haunting parallels to our own political moment.

From "the great German-language writer of his generation" (Joshua Cohen) comes the second novel of Kracht's career narrated by an eponymous "Christian" (the first was his best-selling 1995 debut, Faserland). Eurotrash begins in Zurich, where Christian has arrived to care for his eighty-year-old mother after her discharge from a mental institution. Reckoning with his family's dark history-his long-dead grandfather was intimately associated with and unapologetically supportive of the Nazis-and struggling to navigate the emotionally wrenching terrain of his relationship with his mother, Christian sets off on a road-trip with her. As they traverse Switzerland in a hired cab, mother and son attempt to give away her vast fortune, which they're carrying in a large plastic bag, to random strangers. By turns disturbing, disorienting, hilarious, and poignant, Eurotrash tells an intensely personal and unsparingly critical story of contemporary culture; a story that shows us a writer at the pinnacle of his powers of insight and observation.

By 1930, no place in the world was less well explored than Greenland. The native Inuit had occupied the relatively accessible west coast for centuries. The east coast, however, was another story. In August 1930, Henry George Watkins (nicknamed "Gino"), a twenty-three-year-old British explorer, led thirteen scientists and explorers on an ambitious expedition to the east coast of Greenland and into its vast and forbidding interior to set up a permanent meteorological base on the icecap, 8,200 feet above sea level. The Ice Cap Station was to be the anchor of a transpolar route of air travel from Europe to North America.The weather on the ice cap was appalling. Fierce storms. Temperatures plunging lower than -50° Fahrenheit in the winter. Watkins's scheme called for rotating teams of two men each to monitor the station for two months at a time. No one had ever tried to winter over in that hostile landscape, let alone manage a weather station through twelve continuous months. Watkins was younger than anyone under his command. But he had several daring trips to the Arctic under his belt and no one doubted his judgement.The first crisis came in the fall when a snowstorm stranded a resupply mission halfway to the top for many weeks. When they arrived at the ice cap, there were not enough provisions and fuel for another two-man shift, so the station would have to be abandoned. Then team member August Courtauld made an astonishing offer. To enable the mission to go forward, he would monitor the station solo through the winter. When a team went up in March to relieve Courtauld, after weeks of brutal effort to make the 130-mile journey, they could find no trace of him or the station. By the end of March, Courtauld's situation was desperate. He was buried under an immovable load of frozen snow and was disastrously short on supplies. On April 21, four months after Courtauld began his solitary vigil, Gino Watkins set out inland with two companions to find and rescue him.David Roberts, "veteran mountain climber and chronicler of adventures" (Washington Post), draws on firsthand accounts and archival materials to tell the story of this daring expedition and of the epic survival ordeal that ensued.

A daring CIA operation threatens chaos in the Kremlin. But can Langley trust the Russian at its center?

In this dazzling, illustrated edition of the instant classic that has sold more than a million copies, award-winning illustrator Levi Pinfold brings Neil Gaiman's bravura rendition of the Norse gods and their world to life.Bursting off the page with breathtaking, full-color art are tales of fierce battles with giants, storied quests for knowledge, and the gods in Asgard: Odin, the highest of the high, wise, daring, and cunning; Thor, Odin's son, incredibly strong, yet not the wisest of gods; and Loki-son of a giant-blood brother to Odin and a trickster and unsurpassable manipulator.Gaiman fashions these primeval stories into a novelistic arc that takes us from the genesis of the legendary nine worlds to Ragnorak, the twilight of the gods and the rebirth of a new time. Through his epic storytelling and Pinfold's enthralling images, these gods emerge with their fiercely competitive natures, their susceptibility to being duped and to duping others, and their tendency to let passion ignite their actions, breathing vivid life into these long-ago myths."Who else but Neil Gaiman could become an accomplice of the gods, using the sorcery of words to make their stories new?" -Maria Tatar, translator and editor of The Annotated Brothers Grimm"Gaiman brings rakish mischief and severe glamour to the Norse canon." -The New Yorker"Remarkable. . . . Gaiman has provided an enchanting contemporary interpretation of the Viking ethos." -Lisa L. Hannett, Atlantic"A lively, funny and very human rendition of Thor the thunder god, his father Odin and the dark-hearted trickster Loki (plus countless other gods and monsters)." -Petra Mayer, NP

Bears have always held a central place in our collective memory, from Indigenous folklore and Greek mythology to nineteenth-century fairytales and the modern toy shop. But as humans and bears come into ever-closer contact, our relationship nears a tipping point. Today, most of the eight remaining bear species are threatened with extinction. Some, such as the panda bear and the polar bear, are icons of the natural world; others, such as the spectacled bear and the sloth bear, are far less known.In Eight Bears, journalist Gloria Dickie embarks on a globe-trotting journey to explore each bear's story, whisking readers from the cloud forests of the Andes to the ice floes of the Arctic; from the jungles of India to the backwoods of the Rocky Mountain West. She meets with key figures on the frontlines of modern conservation efforts-the head of a rescue center for sun and moon bears freed from bile farms, a biologist known as Papa Panda, who has led China's panda-breeding efforts for almost four decades, a conservationist retraining a military radar system to detect and track polar bears near towns-to reveal the unparalleled challenges bears face as they contend with a rapidly changing climate and encroaching human populations.Weaving together ecology, history, mythology, and a captivating account of her travels and observations, Dickie offers a closer look at our volatile relationship with these magnificent mammals. Engrossing and deeply reported, Eight Bears delivers a clear warning for what we risk losing if we don't learn to live alongside the animals that have shaped our cultures, geographies, and stories.

Before the First World War, enthusiasm for a borderless world reached its height. International travel, migration, trade and progressive projects on matters ranging from women's rights to world peace reached a crescendo. Yet in the same breath, an undercurrent of reaction was growing, one that would surge ahead with the outbreak of war and its aftermath.In Against the World, a sweeping and ambitious work of history, acclaimed scholar Tara Zahra examines how nationalism, rather than internationalism, came to ensnare world politics in the early twentieth century. The air went out of the globalist balloon with the First World War as quotas were put on immigration and tariffs on trade, not only in the United States but across Europe, where war and disease led to mass societal upheaval. The "Spanish flu" heightened anxieties about porous national boundaries. The global impact of the 1929 economic crash and the Great Depression amplified a quest for food security in Europe and economic autonomy worldwide. Demands for relief from the instability and inequality linked to globalisation forged democracies and dictatorships alike, from Gandhi's India to America's New Deal and Hitler's Third Reich. Immigration restrictions, racially constituted notions of citizenship, anti-Semitism and violent outbursts of hatred of the "other" became the norm-coming to genocidal fruition in the Second World War.Millions across the political spectrum sought refuge from the imagined and real threats of the global economy in ways strikingly reminiscent of our contemporary political moment: new movements emerged focused on homegrown and local foods, domestically produced Hardbacking and other goods, and back-to-the-land communities. Rich with astonishing detail gleaned from Zahra's unparalleled archival research in five languages, Against the World is a poignant and thorough exhumation of the popular sources of resistance to globalisation. With anti-globalism a major tenet of today's extremist agendas, Zahra's arrestingly clearsighted and wide-angled account is essential reading to grapple with our divided present.

Kathryn Kellogg is taking her accessible tips for a zero-waste lifestyle and focusing on the heart of the house. Our kitchens can produce a shocking amount of waste and, even though food scraps may seem harmless, they can't properly decompose in a landfill. What's more: wasting food can strain your wallet. The average American family of four will lose $1,500 annually on food waste. It's time to turn things around!101 Tips for a Zero Waste Kitchen is your guide to reducing waste in your kitchen. Kathryn will teach you how to buy in bulk, avoid unnecessary packaging, upcycle jars, and more. Plus, she'll give you recipes that make use of your scraps: preserve your lemon peels for extra flavor, create simple syrup from strawberry tops, and revive shriveled mushrooms. With a little work and Kathryn in your corner, you'll have the tools you need to reach the ultimate goal: no produce left behind!

Long hailed as a masterwork of modern German literature, The Book of Hours (1905) marks the origin of Rainer Maria Rilke's distinctive voice and vision-where clarity of diction meets unexpected imagery, where first-person poetry discovers its full lyric possibility. In these audacious poems, a devout but intimately candid speaker addresses an ultimately unknowable deity. "What will you do, God, when I die?" Rilke's speaker asks, passing through love, fear, guilt, anger, bewilderment, loneliness, tenderness, and exaltation in his search for meaning.In this dual-language edition, Edward Snow, "the most trustworthy and exhilarating of Rilke's contemporary translators" (Michael Dirda, Washington Post), makes Rilke's achievement accessible as never before in English. Snow combines striking fidelity to the German text with an uncanny ability to convey not just its tones and cadences but the captivating psychological presence that animates Rilke's best poems. Mystical and moving, The Book of Hours retains its power to astonish.

With a rare blend of scientific insight and writing as graceful as the theories it so deftly explains, The Elegant Universe remains the unrivaled account of the modern search for the deepest laws of nature: "a standard that will be hard to beat" (George Johnson, New York Times Book Review). In this new 25th anniversary edition, renowned physicist and author Brian Greene-"the single best explainer of abstruse concepts in the world today" (Washington Post)-updates his classic work with a new preface and epilogue summarizing the significant theoretical and experimental developments over the past quarter-century. From established science, including relativity and quantum mechanics, to the cutting edge of thinking on black holes, string theory, and quantum gravity, The Elegant Universe makes some of the most sophisticated concepts ever contemplated thoroughly accessible and entertaining, bringing us closer than ever to comprehending how the universe works.

Over the last half century, a quiet revolution has taken place. In a series of breathtaking discoveries, biochemist Thomas Cech and a diverse cast of brilliant scientists have revealed RNA at the center of biology's greatest mysteries, from how life began to what makes us human to why we age. At last, The Catalyst pulls back the curtain to show how RNA-long sidelined as the passive servant of DNA-defines life from its very origins to our future in the twenty-first century. Recounting his own paradigm-shifting discovery that RNA can catalyse biochemical reactions, as well as his work on the "fountain of youth" telomerase, Cech unfolds how RNA holds the key to the intricate machinery of our cells, the critical processes of ageing and disease and the spectacular powers of breakthrough therapies from CRISPR to mRNA vaccines. From one of our foremost scientists, The Catalyst is a must-read guide to the present and future of biology and medicine.