Tong - The Reality Bubble

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR
THE REALITY BUBBLE

In a time of mounting global crisis, the kind of radical curiosity that fills this booka commitment to probing the unseen, unknowable, and unthinkablehas become essential to our survival. In Ziya Tongs hands, we learn that it can be joyous, too, with thrilling facts, questions, and juxtapositions on every page. A kaleidoscopic guide to everything were missing.

Naomi Klein, bestselling author of No Is Not Enough, The Shock Doctrine, and No Logo

This book will tear through your preconceptions like a meteor through space. Ziya Tong is a wonderfully erudite companion on a tour of reality, from the very smallest to the size of the universe and everything in between. Its an incredibly illuminating and challenging but ultimately empowering book, and reading it delivers a shock almost on the level as when Neo took the red pill in The Matrix. Prepare to have your bubble well and truly burst.

Rowan Hooper, New Scientist

Humans have a warped perception of reality. Ziya Tong pierces through this collective fog, using a scientific lens to show us our place in the world as it really is. With a journalists eye for drama, she uses examples from both the history of science and the latest research to expose uncomfortable truths about the shortsighted ways we produce food and energy and dispose of waste, which are jeopardizing life on Earth. Her arguments compel us to look sharpwe remain in this reality bubble at our own peril.

Kate Wong, Scientific American

Not only is this book a delightful tour of scientific wonders, but its also a profound meditation on why humans have such a hard time getting out of our bubbles and changing our ways. With grace and humor, Ziya Tong reveals our blind spotsboth literal and philosophicaland guides us toward a better future that we can face with both eyes open.

Annalee Newitz, founder of io9 and author of Scatter, Adapt, and Remember

A book this audacious, inventive, and soulful shouldnt also be so much fun to read. Ziya Tong scours the universe of human knowledge to reframe how we see the world and our place in it.

Elan Mastai, author of All Our Wrong Todays

The Reality Bubble has opened eyes I didnt even know I had. It is so hard to explain how we humans perceive the world, knowing that we cant tell if we all perceive it the same way. This is where Ziya is beyond brilliant: She breaks down how our individual constructions of reality are far more artificial than we realize, which will leave me trying to answer a whole lot of existential questions for some time to come.

Derek Mead, executive editor, global, VICE

The world we inhabit is not what it appears to our senses to be. In The Reality Bubble, Ziya Tong takes us on a fascinating, whirlwind tour through many unfamiliar aspects of the reality we thought we knew. It is both sobering and mind-blowing to realize how deeply immersed we are in previously hidden realms which science has revealed to us but which most of us ignore at our peril. Tong is an able guide, leading us through the maze of illusions, and helping us to shed our veils of delusion. She illuminates the unseen, and often dangerous, bubbles within which we live out our lives.

David Grinspoon, Senior Scientist at Planetary Science Institute and prize-winning author of Earth in Human Hands

Filled with entertaining, often surprising, information, The Reality Bubble reveals how science enables us to see beyond the constraints of our physical and psychic barriers and recognize the consequences. Ziya Tongs book should be required reading for all who care about what we are doing to the planet.

David Suzuki, broadcaster, geneticist, and author of The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering our Place in Nature

Ziya Tong takes readers on an important and entertaining scientific journey, as she breaks open all the hidden ways we interact with the natural world every day. Read this book to start seeingwith new eyeshow we can transform our relationship with the extraordinary planet we live on.

Dr. Jane Goodall, primatologist and conservationist

Ziya has been reading and thinking about our environments, large and small, for years, and reminds us again and again of the idea of shifting baselines. We accommodate too much of what we experience, moving from surprise to acceptance, recalibrating all the way. This book urges us to be vigilant against that.

Jay Ingram, television and radio host, and author of The Science of Why

Amid the screaming alarms of the Anthropocenespecies collapse, habitat loss, social pathologiesZiya Tong takes a sledgehammer to the bad ideas that brought us to the brink of apocalypse: unbridled capitalism, technological escapism, species-centrism. Equal parts disaster novel and postmodern cabinet of wonders (and terrors), The Reality Bubble makes a passionate, rationalist case for saving the planet before we back off historys cliff, selfie sticks in hand.

Mark Dery, author of I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-By Essays on American Dread, American Dreams

Human beings are built to detect short-range, near-term threats, and yet our social fabric (and maybe even our species itself) depends on learning to detect the stuff that never directly touches us. In The Reality Bubble, Ziya Tong delivers an energetic crash course in this mismatch between our evolutionary gifts and our circumstances. The blind spots she describes are the ones that keep us from internalizing the threat of climate change, the dangers of political manipulation via social networkseven the difficulty of saving for retirement. The physiological and cognitive basis of our reality bubble is something we have to learn about ourselves to get out in front of humanitys biggest problems, and Tong explains the subject, without judgement or derision, in a way that will benefit us all.

Jacob Ward, NBC News Technology Correspondent, host of the PBS series Hacking Your Mind, and former editor-in-chief of Popular Science

ALLEN LANE

an imprint of Penguin Canada,

a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited

Canada USA UK Ireland Australia New Zealand India South Africa China

First published 2019

Copyright 2019 by Ziya Tong

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Tong, Ziya, author

The reality bubble / Ziya Tong.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 9780735235564 (hardcover).ISBN 9780735235571 (electronic)

1. SciencePopular works. 2. ScienceMiscellanea. I. Title.

Q162.T66 2019500C2018-904283-4

C2018-904284-2

Cover and interior design: Lisa Jager

Cover images: (front) Mike Hill / Getty Images; (back) Xinhui Xu / Unsplash