AN INSTANT #1
NEW YORK TIMES
BESTSELLER
“How To
will make you laugh as you learn…With
How To
, you can't help but appreciate the glorious complexity of our universe and the amazing breadth of humanity's effort to comprehend it. If you want some lightweight edification, you won't go wrong with
.”
—
CNET
“[
] has science and jokes in it, so 10/10 can recommend.”
—Simone Giertz
The world's most entertaining and useless self-help guide from the brilliant mind behind the wildly popular webcomic xkcd, the bestsellers
What If?
and
Thing Explainer
, and
What If? 2,
coming September 13, 2022
For any task you might want to do, there's a right way, a wrong way, and a way so monumentally complex, excessive, and inadvisable that no one would ever try it.
is a guide to the third kind of approach. It's full of highly impractical advice for everything from landing a plane to digging a hole.
Bestselling author and cartoonist Randall Munroe explains how to predict the weather by analyzing the pixels of your Facebook photos. He teaches you how to tell if you're a baby boomer or a 90's kid by measuring the radioactivity of your teeth. He offers tips for taking a selfie with a telescope, crossing a river by boiling it, and powering your house by destroying the fabric of space-time. And if you want to get rid of the book once you're done with it, he walks you through your options for proper disposal, including dissolving it in the ocean, converting it to a vapor, using tectonic plates to subduct it into the Earth's mantle, or launching it into the Sun.
By exploring the most complicated ways to do simple tasks, Munroe doesn't just make things difficult for himself and his readers. As he did so brilliantly in
, Munroe invites us to explore the most absurd reaches of the possible. Full of clever infographics and fun illustrations,
is a delightfully mind-bending way to better understand the science and technology underlying the things we do every day.