Reads

We’ve been inspired by books and articles that help us understand the big picture perspectives on health and well-being, behavior, technology, design and society. We’re sharing a curated list here and welcome suggestions. If you have a book or article you’d recommend, please let us know.

Books

THE BLUE ZONES

Dan Buettner

Buettner, on assignment for National Geographic, visited five parts of the world that have unusually high numbers of centenarians, and profiles each. He focuses on the environments, culture and behaviors of each of these regions, leading to a broader understanding of what makes people healthy.

The Hacking of the American Mind

Robert Lustig

A leader in nutrition science and neuroscience argues that our brains are being hijacked by our worst impulses – for profit.

Why We Sleep

Matthew Walker

Walker gives a tour through the research on sleep -- its functions and its connections to multiple aspects of health -- physical, mental and cognitive. He argues that we are, as a society, getting far too little sleep and offers both individual and societal prescriptions for remedying the problem. 

The Nature Fix

Florence Williams

Williams travels around the world, exploring new research and innovative practices linking exposure to the outdoors and to nature with improved health. 

The Circadian Code

Satchin Panda

Satchin Panda, a professor at the Salk Institute and a researcher on circadian rhythms reviews the many ways that our circadian rhythms (and the ways that they are disrupted by modern life) influence our health — ranging from sleep, weight gain, cognition, and mental health all the way to our immune systems. While a bit more focused on self help than most books we recommend, Panda’s insights about our exposures to light (during the day and at night) and the timing of daily activities raise important questions about how environmental conditions can be designed for better health.

TOGETHER

Vivek Murthy

Former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy explores the growing phenomenon of loneliness. He explicates the related but different concepts of loneliness, social isolation and solitude, explains the underlying science and puts current trends in context of how our society has changed over time — noting the contrast between our evolutionary need for social connection and how modern life challenges our ability to fulfill that need.

I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life 

Ed Yong

Ed Yong explores the world of microbes and the relationships among the microbial world, the environments that surround us and our own bodies. The book highlights the promise of an ecological, more nuanced understanding of these relationships  and also underscores how much we still have to discover.  

The Design of Everyday Things

Don Norman

Norman’s classic treatise creates frameworks and a language for how to think about the interactions between people and the products that are designed for them.

Change by Design

Tim Brown

Tim Brown, the longtime leader of IDEO, lays out the ideas and the practices behind design thinking and how it can be applied across the spectrum from product design to large societal problems.

User Friendly

Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant

Kuang and Fabricant cover the history of product and service design, identify significant examples where design choices have had outsize societal implications. They key in on the shift where designers began to see the limits of humans as factors to be addressed in the design itself, rather than believing users can simply be trained.

Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir

Applying insights from behavioral economics and psychology, Mullainathan and Shafir explain how scarcity -- in time or in money -- can affect cognition and decision making, often rendering ineffective well-intentioned efforts to persuade people to make better behavioral choices.

Syntax & Sage

Sep Kamvar

Syntax & Sage is a series of bite-sized essays on software and nature by computer scientist Sep Kamvar. It offers a vision of humans, technology and nature in balance.

Upstream

Dan Heath

Dan Heath delves into upstream work, i.e. preventing problems before they happen rather than fixing the consequences of those problems, which is the essence of what we’re doing at Building H. He identifies three traditional barriers to upstream work and a set of key questions and considerations for leaders of upstream efforts.

Articles & Reports

Public Health 3.0: A Call to Action for Public Health to Meet the Challenges of the 21st Century

Karen DeSalvo et al

Public health can do big things, and in this report DeSalvo and her colleagues call for a new approach to solving our biggest problems.

How America Lost Dinner

Amanda Mull

In this piece for The Atlantic, Amanda Mull discusses the forces, including changes in family structure and the role of women, longer commute times and the rise of fast food and fast casual options, that have led to the decline of the traditional family dinner cooked at home.

The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food

Michael Moss

This is the article that brought the “bliss point” — the optimal balance of sugar, salt and fat to maximize craving of a food — into the vernacular. Moss uses internal food industry documents and whistleblowers to report on what he describes as a conscious effort to get people hooked on foods that are convenient and inexpensive

The New ‘Dream Home’ Should be a Condo

Allison Arieff

Taking off from the announcement of the National Association of Home Builders “New American Home” of 2019, Arieff throws shade on the idea of an isolated mansion being the “dream home,” arguing instead that we should be aspiring to homes more like an LA condo that sits in a walkable community, uses less resources and leads to a healthier lifestyle.

The Cognition Crisis

Adam Gazzaley

In this post for Medium, neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley ties together the research on attention and cognition, painting a dark picture of humans who are not evolved to handle the information overload we face.

Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?

Jean Twenge

The science on the links among smartphones, social media and adolescent health is far from settled, but Twenge’s 2017 Atlantic article raises many provocative questions about unsettling trends among teenagers and their association with the rise in smartphone use.

How Social Isolation Is Killing Us

Dhruv Khullar

In this piece for The Upshot in the New York Times, Dhruv Khullar recounts his own experience as a clinician and bridges it to the trends in social isolation and loneliness and the research on the effects that either can have on our health. 

Why Are Autoimmune Diseases on the Rise?

Tessa Love

Love explores the rise of autoimmune diseases -- both as a defined category of disease and in terms of their increasing prevalence -- and their potential causes, which include genetic susceptibility and a variety of factors generally associated with modernization of society.