From the award-winning journalist and NPR TED Radio Hour host comes a timely investigation into how screens and sitting are reshaping our bodies—and how a simple shift can change everything. In today’s world, a normal day means sitting in front of a screen for eight to ten hours. Meeting after meeting. Email after email. We leave our desks drained, overstimulated and unfocused, only to go home, sit down again, and scroll some more. The result? Headaches, back pain, restless sleep, and rising rates of preventable disease. We know technology is breaking us down—so why can’t we break away? It’s a question that Manoush Zomorodi has always wanted to answer. As the host of the NPR's TED Radio Hour and Body Electric podcast, she has interviewed experts, conducted citizen experiments, and sought out research about how our digital lives are changing the way we think, learn, and feel. Now, in Body Electric, she presents an eye-opening investigation into the impact technology and sedentary living has had on our bodies and brains, from breath and eyesight to blood pressure, posture, and productivity, and shares what science (and tens of thousands of participants in a groundbreaking study with Columbia University Medical Center) have taught her—it’s the small shifts, not the digital detoxes, that will make us healthier. And all we need is five minutes. Filled with perspective-shifting data and real-life applications and tools, Body Electric is the next must-read for fans of Four Thousand Weeks and The Anxious Generation, and anyone else feeling trapped by their technology.

In the vein of Happiness Falls and Family Lore, a gripping story of family history and political upheaval centered around a Chinese family-owned restaurant in Brownsville, Brooklyn and its impact on the neighborhood’s Jewish and Black residents over the course of a century. In 1978, two tenements on Livonia Avenue in Brownsville burn to the ground, killing one resident and displacing dozens of others. It remains unclear who set the buildings ablaze, but the survivors are convinced the culprit is Mr. Wong. Who exactly is Mr. Wong, and what allegedly drove him to this extraordinary act of violence, is the question that consumes this novel as it plunges into four generations of Wong family history. First is Koon Lai, an immigrant who runs a Chinese restaurant on Livonia Avenue; second, his son Richard, a man desperate for his own chance at the American Dream; and third, Jason, a poet who seeks his escape in the bohemian counterculture of the 1970s, but finds himself an unwitting participant in Brooklyn’s gentrification. In the 21st century, Jason’s daughter Sadie returns to Brownsville as a journalist, determined to unravel the mystery of what happened decades earlier on the night the buildings blazed. Joining together the present and the past is the community organizer Lina Rodriguez Armstrong, who was also displaced by that fire and who has spent the intervening years fighting for the rights of Brownsville’s residents and organizing a Livonia Avenue community land trust. A stunning debut from a new talent, Livonia Chow Mein contemplates how the American pursuit of freedom relies on a collective amnesia and challenges us to consider what it would take for us to truly live in harmony.