Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most

A book about the art and science of life’s most difficult choices. If you’ve enjoyed some of the cross-disciplinary storytelling in my previous books, there is a lot in that vein to enjoy in Farsighted. It features stories drawn from critical decisions in urban planning — New York’s decision to bury Collect Pond in the early 1800s, and to build the High Line in the early 2000s — alongside stories of hard choices drawn from military history, most notably the decision process that led to the raid on Osama Bin Laden’s compound in 2011. There are insights drawn from cognitive science, behavioral psychology, and sociology—but also from novels like Middlemarch. My hope is that you will come out of reading the book with a practice for making hard choices in your own life, whether those choices are personal, professional, or civic ones.