Is there really such a thing as a “hot streak”—a prolonged span of consistent success? In his debut book, The Hot Hand: The Mystery and Science of Streaks, Wall Street Journal sports reporter Ben Cohen takes a deep dive into this fascinating, often misunderstood phenomenon. 

Cleverly crafted through stories, examples, personal experiences, research studies, expert opinion and theories, The Hot Hand relies heavily on Cohen’s sports reporting expertise, with entertaining illustrations taken from both the basketball court and baseball diamond. These include a high school basketball team that adopted a winning strategy of shooting the ball only when very close to the basket or very far away, the success of NBA star shooter Stephen Curry and the interplay between an unlikely MLB starting pitcher and batter on a sticky Texas evening. 

But this book isn’t just about sports. “[A hot streak] happens to different people in different professions for entirely different reasons,” says Cohen, providing illustrations from the farming industry, computer gaming, business, Shakespeare, the art world and even how the music streaming service Spotify got the kinks out of its shuffle algorithm. He also delves into the difference between the gambler’s fallacy (how we perceive outcomes that are beyond our control) and the hot-hand fallacy (how we perceive outcomes we feel we can control).

Along with real-life examples are pages of authoritative commentary about the psychological and evolutionary ramifications of hot streaks, including a fascinating interjection from a professor who relates hot streaks to cognitive adaptation, suggesting our ancestors relied on the hot hand to forage. Cohen also covers comparative advantage—betting against the hot hand as an effective business strategy.

The Hot Hand is an interesting and thought-provoking book on a topic that isn’t often discussed but that impacts many different interests, activities and industries. Cohen sums it up best: “The hot hand is not a random occurrence. It’s the collision of talent, circumstance, and even a little bit of luck.”

What if you entered a psychiatric hospital under false pretenses? What if the symptoms you presented—a voice that said the words thud, empty and hollow—were false? You’ve seen how easy it is to be diagnosed with a mental illness. From inside, you’ll be able to observe how medical staff interacts with patients. Once you convince the hospital to release you, you’ll share your findings with the professor who arranged the study.

But even then, what if it wasn’t all as it seemed?

Susannah Cahalan, the bestselling author of Brain on Fire, was enchanted by the work of psychologist and Stanford University professor David Rosenhan, who created just such an experiment. Cahalan could relate to the pseudo-patients in his study. As she recounts in her first book, Cahalan was misdiagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, a psychiatric illness, before doctors eventually identified that she was suffering from autoimmune encephalitis, an illness with a known physical cause. Such diseases are called “the great pretenders.”

In the people who participated in Rosenhan’s study, Cahalan found another collection of pretenders and a window into psychiatric treatment. A psychologist introduced her to “On Being Sane in Insane Places,” Rosenhan’s account of the pseudo-patient study, which became widely known after its January 1973 publication in the journal Science. (Half of all intro-to-psychology textbooks referenced it by 1976.) In her growing fascination, she studied how Rosenhan’s work affected modern psychiatry, including hospitals that were shut down as a result of the study and revisions that were made to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

But the deeper she dug, the more questions Cahalan had. The pseudo-patients were difficult to identify, even with access to the professor’s notes. In some cases, details didn’t match, and Cahalan questioned the study’s veracity.

The Great Pretender is an account of Cahalan’s own research. In addition to Rosenhan’s study, she weaves in glimpses of other similar experiments, such as Nellie Bly’s well-documented experience as a journalist going undercover in a psychiatric hospital. The book is a detailed examination of psychiatry in the decades since the publication of Rosenhan’s groundbreaking, if elusive, study.

“To my adorable future corpses,” reads the dedication to Caitlin Doughty’s Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? Big Questions From Tiny Mortals About Death. Doughty’s forthright but playful tone is apparent before you even get to the table of contents.

Written as an answer book to all the questions Doughty has fielded from young and inquiring minds during her career as a mortician, author and death activist (more on that later), Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? is perhaps the most enchanting little book ever to discuss such matters as whether or not one’s body might explode if one’s final meal before being loaded into the crematorium included popcorn.

Anyone with a child in their life will be unsurprised at the sorts of curious hypotheticals that are posed in this book, or at a hyper-focus on the ins and outs of the corpse. It is to her credit that Doughty not only answers those questions that would seem to fall easily within her area of expertise but dutifully chases down the science that might provide a plausible answer to the fate of an astronaut who slipped from this mortal coil while on a spacewalk.

However, this book is by no means solely for death-curious children. Most if not all of the answers provided alongside the charmingly gothic illustrations will be news to the average adult reader, as well. In her career, Doughty has worked to rehabilitate a Western culture that has become death-illiterate through an increased outsourcing of the caregiving and rituals surrounding death. And as Doughty orients death as sometimes sad but normal, she touches on subjects that are of interest to adult readers who may be planning for end of life care, or helping someone else do so, such as eco-friendly, natural burial.

Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? (which, yes, does include an answer to that question as well) provides answers to questions both humorous and moving, bringing tiny and full-sized mortals alike to a greater comfort with and understanding of the one transition that will happen to us all.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our interview with Caitlin Doughty, author of Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?

Although there has been coverage of Arab and Middle Eastern countries in Western media for decades, how often do we hear from women in these countries? In this groundbreaking collection of essays, Our Women on the Ground, Lebanese—British journalist Zahra Hankir assembles the writing of 19 different sahafiyat (female journalists) from across the Middle East, including Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Libya, Egypt and Palestine. In these powerful essays, journalists recount their harrowing, dangerous and sometimes painful experiences, both as women reporting on Middle Eastern conflicts and as people trying to survive along with everyone else, with their lives and spirits intact.

In one essay, Hannah Allam recounts the need to keep her sense of humor through the violence in Iraq. To her, Iraqis can be funnier than anyone, even when death is looming. She shares a local joke: “As the years stretched on without the restoration of power, a popular joke was that a distraught boy runs up to his mom and sobs that his father had touched a wire and been electrocuted. The mother replies: ‘Thank God! There’s electricity!’”

Although it may seem macabre, these very human moments signify the resilience and perseverance of a society attempting to keep itself together. In another essay, “Love and Loss in a Time of Revolution” by Nada Bakri, we read about the author’s emotional experience of living through the loss of her husband, Anthony Shadid, also a journalist, who died from something as routine as an asthma attack while reporting on the front lines in Syria.

Zaina Erhaim, a journalist from Syria, examines life as a feminist in a conservative country as she tries to exercise her independence and not wear a head covering. As time goes on, she relents for her own safety and begins to wear a hijab. Although she finds this practice constricting, it also gives her access to spaces with women, like hospitals, where men aren’t allowed. Through this, she recognizes the advantages of being able to move through locations other journalists cannot.

At times difficult to read, this essential essay collection will bring a more nuanced view of the Middle East from voices you probably haven’t heard, and the depths of experiences will force you to find the courage to understand and not look away.

The invention of the internet is a double-edged sword: The ease and instantaneous nature of advanced technology have guided the evolution of modern communication as much as they’ve given power to the predators lurking in the unsavory corners of the web. Nobody’s Victim: Fighting Psychos, Stalkers, Pervs, and Trolls is a timely work that combines the vulnerability of personal experience and the researched, fact-based reporting of nonfiction.

Goldberg, a victims’ rights attorney based in Brooklyn, doesn’t just empathize with the pain and trauma of her clients; she has firsthand understanding of the hell that a perpetrator can inflict on someone’s life. She writes, “Some people call me ‘a passionate advocate’ or a ‘social justice warrior.’ I’d rather be called a ruthless motherfucker.” Before founding her own law firm in 2014, she was battling a deranged ex-boyfriend who had made it his mission to make her “pay” for ending their relationship. His love and adoration seemed to quickly dissolve into the obsessive need for control. The breakup pulled back the curtain and revealed a man who had declared psychological war: spamming Goldberg’s inbox and phone with threatening and violent messages, filing a false police report and harassing her friends and family. The ex-boyfriend’s campaign of terror lasted for a year. And while it had been a harrowing period of time, Goldberg realized a new purpose: becoming an advocate for victims, the advocate she wished she’d had in her corner while dealing with her ex.

Goldberg’s writing is especially compelling when she focuses on specific clients she has helped. There is no such thing as a “standard” victim; the individuals mentioned in the book hail from different socioeconomic backgrounds, ages, geographical locations and genders. While these clients are certainly victims of the vindictive acts of offenders, whom Goldberg classifies as “psychos, pervs, assholes, and trolls,” she doesn’t frame their misfortunes as signs of character weakness or indicators of personal fault. When Macie, a 17-year-old girl, and her mother wanted to hire Goldberg following a schoolwide leak of the daughter’s intimate photos to her then-boyfriend, Goldberg didn’t shame her. On the contrary, Goldberg was truly angry—angry at the boyfriend for violating Macie’s privacy and trust and angry at the gender-biased judgment of the school administration, who decided to punish Macie and not the boy.

While her tone is more conversational than rigidly academic, Goldberg provides solid research to supplement her anecdotes. An important, harrowing look into the dark underbelly of the internet, this book sheds light on the mistreatment of victims and on the society and justice system that often fail them.

Eating fast food unites almost all Americans and, increasingly, many millions more throughout the world. From fast food’s modest origins in the early decades of the 20th century to the huge industry it has become today, we can trace the history of the United States through the development of this popular American institution. With the ability to adapt to changing tastes and trends, to meet the public’s need for something to eat that’s generally inexpensive, quick and the same every time you order it, fast food has become a permanent part of American culture. 

In his enlightening and fun-to-read Drive-Thru Dreams: A Journey Through the Heart of America’s Fast-Food Kingdom, Adam Chandler explores the complex industry that sprang from fry cook Walt Anderson’s “invention” of the hamburger in Wichita, Kansas, in 1916. Anderson’s partnership with real estate developer Billy Ingram led to the establishment of White Castle restaurants, which continue to thrive today and even celebrate their most loyal fans in their Cravers Hall of Fame.

The founders of many fast-food companies came from modest backgrounds, but through sheer determination, hard work and good luck, they achieved success. Colonel Harland Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken is the most representative of the American dream in this regard. Despite setbacks that would discourage most people, his secret recipe, colorful personality and keen marketing skills propelled him to succeed.

Ray Kroc was so impressed by the hamburger stand created by Dick and Mac McDonald in California that he bought it from them, and McDonald’s eventually became the greatest fast-food success story of all. Kroc, a former sales representative of paper cups and milkshake machines, was “exacting, fastidious, and cruel” and took pride in saying he made more millionaires than anyone else in the United States.

There is much more here about customer loyalty and fast-food restaurants as meeting places. Based on interviews and careful research, this is a book to savor, especially if you’re a fast-food fan. 

May 23, 2015, started out as a particularly good day for Travis Rieder. He enjoyed the early morning hours with his toddler daughter while his wife slept, then set out for a motorcycle tour in the mountains. Less than three blocks into his ride, however, disaster struck when a van pulled out of an intersection and broadsided Rieder, traumatically injuring his left foot. While doctors were able to salvage the limb, he was left with an open wound for a month and faced multiple surgeries, years of recovery and the news that he was unlikely to ever walk unaided.

Sadly, there was even more to this nightmare. Those first months of seemingly endless, searing pain left Rieder addicted to opioids, with no medical professionals willing or able to help him withdraw from his medications, despite his and his wife’s desperate pleas for help. “I thought I would die—either from the withdrawal itself or by my own hand,” Rieder writes in his powerful, informative memoir, In Pain: A Bioethicist’s Personal Struggle With Opioids.

A research scholar at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, Rieder is uniquely equipped to narrate not only his own story but also a broader look at America’s opioid problem. His prose is clear and compelling, whether he’s describing a torturous night spent writhing on the bathroom floor, not sure he can survive until morning, or examining the science and history of addiction and the changes needed in our health care system and society’s approach to the issue. Never pedantic, Rieder eloquently explains that addiction is “a health problem rather than a criminal justice problem” that needs to be addressed “with evidence-based therapies rather than punishment.”

Rieder was lucky. His unyielding determination allowed him to kick his opioid habit and learn to walk without assistance. Realizing that he was hardly alone in his addiction struggle, he listened to the advice of his colleagues: “Tell the story. Shine a light. Don’t let the suffering of people . . . exist in darkness anymore.”

The result is an important book that goes hand in hand with Beth Macy’s Dopesick. Readers of both will not only be enlightened but likely find their attitudes about this devastating crisis transformed.

There are few literary voices today who explore the intricacies of human migration better than Suketu Mehta. It’s a subject he knows well—as a journalist, but also as an immigrant in the U.S. who has lived in cities all over the world and descends from a family of “mercantile wanderers.” To him, migration is just life.

But today, intense deliberation over immigration is a prevailing concern. All across the globe—but especially in Western countries, from Spain to the U.S. to the U.K.—countries are closing their borders to all refugees and immigrants, with devastating results. In his new book, This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto, Mehta delivers an emotional, timely polemic railing against this trend of fear, discrimination and hatred that has gripped so many countries, especially ours.

In a heroic effort to dispel racist, destructive myths surrounding immigration, Mehta travels from city to city speaking to people at places like Friendship Park at the Mexican-American border. He also visits other countries like Morocco and the United Arab Emirates to hear the heartbreaking stories of regular people trying to migrate for a better life.

With humanity and keen insight, Mehta explores why people are migrating with higher frequency and explains why immigrants throughout history have always elicited reactionary views and backlash. But most importantly, he explains why we should stop falling for the same hateful rhetoric over and over again. Drawing from the history of racism and colonialism, he makes a case for why refugees and migrants have a positive influence on society instead of a negative one. His simple answer to anyone who asks why immigrants are coming here is: We are here because you were there. 

Pulling from history, personal experiences and intimate profiles, Mehta examines the backlash to immigration, what’s behind it and why we have good reasons to be hopeful about the future.