Overview
- Gates’ five picks are Remarkably Bright Creatures (Shelby Van Pelt), Clearing the Air (Hannah Ritchie), Who Knew (Barry Diller), When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows (Steven Pinker), and Abundance (Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson).
- He calls Hannah Ritchie’s data-driven climate overview one of the clearest explanations of the challenge and a hopeful, fact-based guide to solutions.
- On Shelby Van Pelt’s novel, Gates says it helped him reflect on aging and purpose, noting the long-running bestseller has a Netflix adaptation expected next year.
- Gates praises Barry Diller’s memoir as unusually candid, with coverage noting Diller publicly comes out as gay while recounting a career that reshaped media and the internet.
- He highlights Steven Pinker’s exploration of common knowledge in everyday communication and endorses Abundance as a sharp diagnosis of why the U.S. struggles to build and how to restart progress.