Popular Science Bucket List

Carl Sagan's thirteen-part tour of the universe from 1980; "billions and billions".

Snap judgement: the art historians who saw a fake kouros in two seconds, and the police shooting that shows when two seconds are not enough.

Gladwell reopens his own 2000 book with darker cases: Miami bank fraud, a Los Angeles cheetah enclosure and the opioid epidemic.

Why underdogs win more often than the odds allow, from a girls' basketball full-court press to dyslexic chief executives.

Hofstadter on self-reference in logic, art and music, and where minds come from; the Pulitzer nobody finishes.

Jennifer Doudna and CRISPR; Isaacson on the gene-editing race.

Simon Singh on the 358-year problem and Andrew Wiles's seven secret years solving it.

James Gleick on the butterfly effect and the scientists who found order in disorder.

John Harrison's clocks solve the problem that sank ships; Dava Sobel's short classic.

Harari's human story redrawn as a comic; the same argument in pictures.

Sagan's book of the series: the pale blue dot before the photo and the cosmic calendar.

Matthew Walker on what eight hours do and what six hours cost.

System 1 and System 2, and every bias you have; Kahneman's Nobel work for readers.

What humans will want once famine, plague and war are solved; Harari's sequel.

Why drug dealers live with their mothers and what sumo wrestlers and teachers have in common.

Hawking on black holes and the beginning of time with one equation; the most unread bestseller.

Atul Gawande on what medicine gets wrong about dying, and what a good end looks like.

How small things become epidemics; Gladwell's connectors, mavens and salesmen.

A biography of cancer from ancient Egypt to gene therapy; Mukherjee's Pulitzer.

Ten thousand hours, Canadian hockey birthdays and why the Beatles were good; Gladwell on success.

A German forester on how trees talk, share and remember.

Bill Bryson explains the universe, the atom and the dinosaurs as if to a friend in a pub.

Mukherjee's intimate history of heredity, from Mendel's peas to CRISPR.

Why Eurasia conquered the rest: geography, crops and animals rather than people; Diamond's Pulitzer.

Evolution from the gene's point of view, and the word meme; Dawkins' 1976 classic.

The woman whose cells, taken without consent in 1951, are still alive in every lab.