The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win

by Maria Konnikova

In 1979, Carl Sagan wrote about the awe of the universe in his notebooks, as a counterpoint to the irrationality of superstition and false belief. “We live in a universe where atoms are made in the stars; where life is sparked by sunlight and lightning in the airs and waters of youthful planets; where the raw material for biological evolution is sometimes made by the explosion of a star halfway across the Galaxy,” Sagan reflects. “How pallid by comparison are the pretensions of superstition and pseudoscience; how important it is for us to pursue and understand science, that characteristically human endeavor—imperfect and incomplete surely, but the best means to understand the world that we know.”