Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, by Yuval Noah Harari, Random House, 528 pages, $35
Early in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, the book that made him a globally renowned intellectual, the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari stresses that human beings are storytellers. We use fictions—religions, nations, laws, currencies—to bind ourselves together and cooperate. The stories are largely made up, but they grip our minds. Often they help us; sometimes they lead us astray.
