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The future of work is increasingly on our minds. Now that AI is coming for our jobs, will we end up supervising or being supervised by it? One way of spending the time freed up by smart tech is to read Control Science, an economic history showing how work rules were established and have since come to dominate our lives. The book’s timeline covers the past 400 years, its settings ranging across the world from North America to Europe to Japan and back to the US. A historian of labour, Henry Snow dissects four entrenched ideas: that society is a mere collection of individuals; that they are solely driven by selfishness; that they are therefore incapable of self-administered planning; and that ‘everything is – and should be – a market’.

America possesses the most powerful military in history, but since 1945 it has not won a war against anyone other than Saddam Hussein. It appears not to understand why. In fact the only thing the US seems worse at than winning wars is learning lessons from its defeats. People such as the secretary of war Pete Hegseth think it’s all about woke. Lily-livered longhairs stateside stabbed the army in the back over Vietnam; then ‘stupid rules of engagement’ tied the military’s hands in Iraq and Afghanistan and caused the disasters there. The solution is to fight harder, if necessary even at the expense of ethics and the law. Another answer might be to get US forces fighting smarter.

In the not-too-distant future, if your T-shirt starts giving fashion advice or we’re all enslaved by a race of disease-resistant metahumans, then blame Martin Amis. More precisely, blame his obsession with Space Invaders. With a foreword by Steven Spielberg, Amis’s 1982 Invasion of the Space Invaders: An Addict’s Guide to Battle Tactics, Big Scores and the Best Machines gave intellectual heft to a pursuit – videogaming – that had hitherto been the preserve of glassy-eyed youths. His advocacy proved prescient. Over the next couple of decades, the best minds of a generation dedicated their lives to making pixellated worlds as compelling and realistic as possible.

Consciousness is thought by many to define what it is to be human. We know that animals are conscious to some extent, but they don’t have what we have in that department. So if we can explain how human self-awareness works it will be a Rosetta Stone to understanding what makes our species so odd, or, depending on your view, so special. Also: big brains love exercise. And the great thing about this topic is that it can be tackled by biologists, neurologists, philosophers, physicists and even novelists. It’s an interdisciplinary, no-holds-barred intellectual wrestling match. Michael Pollan, an American journalist and academic who works at both Harvard and Berkeley, comes from a literature background but is fluent in the relevant science.